Atlantic Britain (11 page)

I would not have put up with it for long, but I also saw, in miniature, we were acting out all the traditional sea dramas. We had rival authorities, which is always a mistake on a boat. He knew how to work things; I knew what I wanted to happen. He was, in a way, less certain than me; I was far less certain than him at sea. I was closely involved with making the TV programmes, George felt marginal to them, and when the TV crews came aboard he needed to impose his authority on them. Sometimes the world of the
Auk
felt bleak.

There were moments; of course there were more than moments. I will never forget the early summer morning he woke me, after sailing north all night from the Arans. We were in sight of the rocky, ironbound cliffs of High Island, the monastery island that once belonged to the Irish poet Richard Murphy, a place, as I had told George weeks before, I had long wanted to see. He had sailed five hours from midnight to bring us there. We were making towards it now in the dawn, over a swell that came and went, giving and withdrawing, the boat alive on the motion, as Murphy had written in ‘Sailing to an Island’:

In the early light, George took us deep into the lee of High Island’s cliffs, so near that I could actually touch them from the deck of the
Auk.
But the walls were sheer and there was no way up on that side. ‘High Island can never be possessed,’ Murphy has written, ‘because it will always remain in the possession of the sea.’ So it was with us. We could not land and instead went on and on through the unforgettable morning that followed. George and Ben both lay below asleep and I sailed the boat, crossing the big sunlit bay between Inishbofin and Achill Island, filled with gratitude and -I will not shrink from this word - love for the two people asleep below, the sun over the mountains to the east of me, the headlands before me, a lovely big buffeting southeasterly blowing hard on my right cheek, a flat sea, all sails up, their canvas lit by the sun, shearwaters cruising past, the big, breaking sea my home.

On and on we strode northwards, past the Inishkeas, into the night, through Tory Island Sound, turning east there, making for Scotland, finding Islay coming up over the dawn horizon, sliding in along the wild and empty southern shore of Mull, finally coming in the evening into the Sound of Mull, where Sarah and the girls were waiting for us in a house on the shore. That is another all-life memorable moment. We had come three hundred miles nonstop - a night, a day, a night and a day - and George and I and Ben, all exhausted, all happy with the strength and sureness of the
Auk,
slid her towards the bay where Sarah was waiting. Stillness gathered on the grey waters and I remembered Auden’s invocation of Evening, the calm, Athene-like goddess who hovers above our lives. ‘Evening, grave, immense, and clear,’ he calls,

Molly and Rosie, my daughters, were standing in the shallows, the water up to their shins, the dogs further out, swimming out to us, the streams running down
from the moorlands over the beach, the trees behind them, the lights in the house as yellow as apricots. It was an icon of home, of resolution and relief. In all of us, I realize, beneath the tensions and anxieties of life at sea, is that longing for home.

At heart, for George and me, there was little of home or homeliness in our sea relationship. The sadness of it was that, as we sailed on through the islands, we could both feel the other wishing for more, but could scarcely find a way through to it. I withdrew from the boat and its unresolvable tensions. A gap and something of a silence opened up between us. I made myself a passenger and allowed the boat to become George’s place and George’s world.

The most hidden recesses of the Hebrides became the most beautiful to me. I went abseiling down some cliffs one day with an Edinburgh botanist, William Milliken, looking for the big-leaved sorrel, the scurvy grass, and the wild carrots that grew there. We hung together in the shade of the cliff, a dank, lush place, with the sunlit Minch stretched out blue three hundred feet below us, a place, maybe, that no one had ever been before, and it felt like a kind of perfection, suspended between two worlds.

I went diving one morning in the kelp beds for the big pink sea urchins whose roe we ate for supper. In the small inflatable dinghy I fished for pollock and coaly in the tide riffles off the headlands and lowered creels for lobsters into the depths at the mouths of caves. These half-hidden corners felt like the real thing at the time, the places that resolved the enigma of arrival. But I see them now, in retrospect, as boltholes, away from the tensions I couldn’t face.

One day out at St Kilda, away from the stamping mayhem of the ex-army camp there, its bar, the
Puff Inn,
and its busy people monitoring wild sheep or the missiles fired from the range on Benbecula, we went round to the other, ocean, side. The Atlantic-besieged cliffs of the St Kildan islands, visibly smashed and storm-swept up to two hundred feet above the surface of the sea, provide as enormous and powerful a meeting of rock and ocean as you ever find in Britain. In the looming, poised mass of the great sea-stacks, Stac an Armin and Stac Lee, and the bird-thick air around them, as dense with life in three dimensions as a field packed with corn, you feel nothing but the grandeur of the world.

The swell was pouring into the cave and breaking
among the big boulders in the hollow at the back. It was as if a beach had been buried deep in the socket of an eye. I rolled over the side of the boat and in, under, and down. The surge was there in the cave, swooping your body up towards the beach and back, a rocking, cradling motion, and I watched the surf from thirty feet below. Bubbles of air broke into the blue-grey world of stone and water, noiseless, the smoky opaqueness of underwater disturbed every few seconds by a sudden infusion of air, as if a gas cylinder was being released from above. We went down, three of us, forty or fifty feet into the depths of the cave. Secret St Kildan wonders! There was little kelp, only the vast, bare monumental walls of the underwater landscape, as big as Roman architecture, a drowned place, an Ice Age shore submerged by the Atlantic rising 10,000 years ago.

The surge of the sea animated it. The vertical cave walls, fifty yards long, sheer to sixty feet, were coated in clustered crowds of jewel anemones, purple, green, and silver. The crabs sat among them, alert and claws raised, hanging there poised, armed and Homeric, each one a toy Achilles with his spear and helmet set among the display cabinets in Cartier’s or Tiffany’s.

High above me, the glittery, silvered undersurface of the sea shifted in the swell. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Looking to one side, I saw a seal I hadn’t noticed before, a sudden mammalian presence beside me in this exclusively mineral world, his hands wafting to and fro in front of his big liquid body. He approached to within a few feet. I saw the little dimples where his whiskers met his lip and his eyes looked straight and inquiring into mine. We gazed at each other. The air trapped in the pockets of his fur gave his whole bulk a blue, shimmery sheen as if encased in a singer’s dress. He was sequinned from head to toe. His body was so full and rounded and so exoti-cally liquid, and the dress so tight on his wonderfully moving, slow-dancing curves, that it seemed for a moment we were in the murky blue half-light of a nightclub somewhere and I was swimming with Shirley Bassey or Nina Simone, but in silence, all eyes and curiosity, a deep, careful ‘Who are you?’ emerging from those eyes. From us divers, little streams of bubbles rose to the surface as if from champagne. We had entered the seal’s world. Two others came out from the shadows among the rocks and the three of them swam around us, a little frightening, because
they might bite us, but at the same time mesmeric, so capable, turning in such perfect head-twisting curves, until at once they moved off together towards the shoal of pollock. But, because there is nowhere to hide in the sea, fish are quick and the pollock swam away in front of the seals, and we were left with nothing but the surge, the rocks, the wary, armoured crabs, and our own bespectacled, rubber-suited bodies, with our lumpen scuba gear and the bubbles coasting towards the air. I wished George had been down there too, but he was on the
Auk,
anchored in Village Bay.

It was like a marriage. We had arguments and apologies, long attempts to explain what each of us thought and deliberate, careful conversations to find out why the tension and gap existed between us. The difficulty kept recurring, particularly when I would turn up with the film crew and say ‘Instant performance, please’, at which George was expected to jump to it like a marionette, or when, just as suddenly, the circus would move off and leave him feeling abandoned. If ever, in some tiny way, he failed to deliver when required or made a demand when not required, it was as if he had stepped miles out of line.

At supper at the Indian restaurant in Stornoway one night, all of us deeply tired, George said that, for good sailing reasons, it would be better to go straight from the Hebrides to the Faeroes and then come back to Orkney, as the weather inevitably worsened towards the end of the year. In the prevailing winds, it would be a much more sensible way of doing it, wind on the port quarter up to the Faeroes, wind on the starboard beam back to Orkney. He knew of course that the film people wanted to do the journey in its real sequence, risking the difficulties of the end of the year, because ‘exposure’ was what, in the end, they wanted this to be about. ‘None of you know what you are talking about,’ George said. ‘Do you have any idea what the North Atlantic is going to be like, or might be like, if it gets really bad?’

Will Anderson, the director, was all smiling deflection. He talked to Andrew Palmer, the executive producer, on the phone. Andrew was adamant that we should do things in the order in which they would appear on film: i.e. Orkney first, Faeroes second. I told George it was Andrew’s call.

‘No, no, no, no,’ George said. ‘You can’t do it like that.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said, ‘don’t go and get high-horsy about this.’

‘Do try and humour me, Adam,’ George said slowly. ‘I am paid to put in my pennyworth, my thruppence worth, and I simply ask it to be received with some courtesy.’

The formality was ominous. A crack had opened between us and everybody looked at their poppadoms.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you have just to accept this as a normal, prosaic reality. We go from here to Orkney and from there to the Faeroes.’

‘What do you mean “a normal, prosaic reality”? I don’t know what those words mean. I don’t understand what you are saying,’ George said. So I repeated it in exactly the same, exaggeratedly plain words. George listened without response.

‘I think you owe it to me to listen,’ he said.

‘I’ve listened to you,’ I said, ‘and we are going to do the journey in its natural sequence.’

‘I think you’d have some trouble finding many professional skippers who would sit here and take this,’ he said. That was undeniable, but it was the predicament we were in.

There may have been no answer to this. Perhaps
we were all simply edgy, unwilling to give ourselves over to each other, to any shared idea. Exhaustion may also have played its part. Or it may simply have been the problem of reconciling two divergent, equally demanding, and complex systems - the world of the boat and the world of the film - each with their fiercely insistent advocates, which could not, even with the patience of martyrs, have been easily reconciled. I belonged in both camps and felt treacherous to them both.

For whatever reason, the story is not neat, nor did it find a neat resolution. Things got better. We sang songs and got drunk. George and I reached a point where with scarcely a word we could indeed tack and wear the boat, bring her into harbour or away from a leeward quay, pick up moorings, trim the sails, be coherent in a difficult environment and sit there, at the end, below, warmly together, silent, no need for talk, a crew. How did that come about? I am not sure, but I do associate the easing of the tension with something that happened to us in Orkney, an event involving George, me, the
Auk
and a momentary sense of total and devastating relief, which was mysterious, disturbing, and entirely unexpected.

We had been for a few days on Stronsay. George had been staying on the boat and I had been living in one of the cells attached to a very strict, very conservative, and largely silent monastery on Papa Stronsay, a small island offshore. We had taken Orkney to heart: a sudden northern clarity after the damp, thick, peaty darkness of the Hebrides. It felt cleaner, lighter, harder and drier here. The air that September was like mountain air, as pure and as sharp. We’d had a wonderful day, streaming in on a southerly wind and an unruffled, slowly stirring sea, sailing over from Storno-way, past Cape Wrath, with the ice-scoured hills of Sutherland standing back away from the cape, the big lit swells coming up behind us like sofas on the move, and the long headlanded stretch of the north coast of Scotland lining out to the east, the seas breaking and creaming on to its empty shores.

At night, I would travel in my mind along the continuous thread of the
Auk’s
glittering path, dotted with my mistakes and muddles, our adventures and ecstasies, trailed out all the way around the rocky headlands, past the beaches and the green, cliffed islands, over the rolling widths of the sea, to what felt like the far, far distant south, a plane ride away
but another world - a world before the
Auk
had entered it.

Something by D. H. Lawrence, which I read one night in that monastery, struck me. It was part of his book on America and American literature, but it came at me with force that night. ‘Men are free,’ Lawrence wrote,