Debatable Land (3 page)

Suppose he were casting the play of his own life. Logan, the wooden but powerful rich man, would have to be his father, the fishmonger. Elspeth, who seemed to Alec alternately garrulous and blank, and with something insincere lying in her, was unlike his mother in every way he could think of. It was not possible to think of her saving milk-bottle tops in a heavy silver ball or taking the washing to the steamie in a pram. Neither the stern rectitude of saving, nor its dignified rewards, he thought, could ever have struck so pampered a character as Elspeth.

Nonetheless she was a diligent housekeeper, if that was what you called a woman who cleaned a boat inside as though the polish and rubbing would cause the thing to grow roots off its keel, flip upright, sprout a chimney and turn into a house. Could Elspeth have undiagnosed hydrophobia? He would try her, perhaps, later.

Alec’s mother rose at four-thirty to clean the house and his own and her selves. The water she heated up in grey pans you could boil a sheep in, on the old Raeburn fed with coke from a metal scuttle. The noise she made pouring the coke was the noise of steeply dragged shingle under surf. She riddled it with a rod that glowed like a tiger’s tail. Soda crystals fizzed as they went into the water, down the lavatory pan, down the bends of the double sink. He heard her flushing out the house’s dirty secrets, before she came to get started on his own.

Alec being a landlubber and a bohemian prude took Sandro and Gabriel to be lovers. He was that bit older than they were so that he suspected all young people of falling on one another when he was not looking. He thought that they, having so much he feared to have lost, must have everything he had not. He could not see that they were fleeing, often, from the trivial shape of their own thoughts and might wonder what he might have to tell them. Their handsome appearance and physical ease with the ropes and the wheel made Alec feel weighty and exposed if new sails were hoisted when the wind changed. At home he had sailed in small boats; the scale of this one made him afraid of accidents. He was the last to join this company and already he was wondering behind what false exterior to shelter. He had not yet properly left the land.

For the present, he thought it best to hang like a mackerel does in the water, not visible from below because its silver belly is only a floating mote against the paleness of the sky, not visible from above because its black-mapped blue back is incorporated with the contoured surface of the blue-black sea.

He continued to cast the central characters in his life from the people he was confined with on
Ardent Spirit
. If he had met almost no one, he thought, as spoilt as Logan and Elspeth Urquhart, he had met almost no one as unspoilt as Nick Pedersen. For a man as secretive as Alec to share any room with another person might have been unbearable. Like many secretive people, he was inquisitive, and had been through Nick’s belongings one afternoon when Nick was sorting out the inert gas system on the second refrigerator, in the saloon. The other was in the galley and held large items such as joints of meat.

It was not possible to think of his mother, whose life had after all been damaged and sustained in different ways by the sea, understanding the point of this sumptuously wasteful toy that was for a time his home.

Their house in Edinburgh was the grey of spurned beaches, made of concrete harled with small pebbles that appeared to have been picked from the noses of hills. It was a house built on quicksand promises, assembled from components, as notionally fit for humans as is a hutch for rabbits. The front door and three windows equalled those on the house’s other half, so you might have folded it together for the doors to kiss and the windows to look into one another’s eyes.

Alec had a usefully forbidding presence, though he was not tall. His black hair, red cheeks and white skin gave him the crisp appearance of a knave on a playing card. The condensedness of bearing that belongs to dark Celts was coupled in him with a capacity to become invisible, so that not many people saw how much he was taking in at his pale-blue eyes. No one could have guessed how much he took in or how he saved it. His greatest greed was behind his eyes.

The cleansing of Alec as a child began daily at the basin. His mother checked him over as though she might return him to the shopkeeper if she found a mark. She pushed his poll up the wrong way lest vermin might be resting in the shade of a hair. She soaped behind his big ears and under his small arms, in the cleft of his neck and down the knobs of his spine as though she was cleaning through to the bones.

One morning, unrewarded by the view down the plug, he strained his eyes up under his smarting lids as his mother skinned him with a flannel seemingly made of thistle-silk – and saw a delightfully shattered world, a dazzling reorganised frost-garden.

The lower pane of the bathroom window had been installed with modesty not revelation in view. Its thick glass was moulded in a million asterisks, a frozen field of dandelion clocks. If you looked through it at impossibly close range everything – the leaning iron washing-pole, the shed, the other cockle-brown houses – exploded into smithereens. The weatherproofed green shed where Jim’s budgerigars lived became a fountain of bottle-glass, a green fanfare to a newly splintered world.

This pane of glass was not as limited as its immobility at first led Alec to fear, since within its frame it recorded changing weather and seasons, the times of day, domestic rhythms. In itself nothing but a new way of seeing things, it made of a monotony that had seemed unshakeable something incomprehensibly new that was also comprehensibly familiar. It was as though a ravishing abstraction had grown out of a flowerpot.

Even long grudging Edinburgh days of sea mist offered themselves to fracture and reinterpretation through that frosted bathroom window. Each child hunts for a solution to the boredom of being no one but itself. Alec’s first answer was a sheet of modesty glass.

The mania of his mother for cleanliness also played into his hands, or eyes, since the washing line was constantly changing its wardrobe, from dancing white-and-blue teacloths to his father’s white work-coats with their wind-filled arms untypically gesticulating. Once when it was snowing his mother took out the rugs to beat them with her cane carpet-beater, for the fresh snow to suck out the ingrained dirt. The fractured red and yellow of the carpets, the persistent seething flakes, the privacy of what he enjoyed as he pressed his cold face to the starry window, gave him a sense of being real that did not otherwise outlast his dreams.

That his first self-discovered pleasure took place in a bathroom was much to his mother’s innocent satisfaction. If it was otherwise for his father he gave no word. Strangely, it was part of Alec’s gratification to lock himself in in order to look through the – he thought of it as his – window. He did not speak of the window to either parent, each of whom he now as an adult supposed naturally came to a separate conclusion from the other about their eight-year-old son.

They thought he lied, but it was just the way he saw things. Alec sensed that he was pale in the bright colours of the modern street, not up-to-the-minute, not developed, his nature not fixed. He was not modern, nor old-fashioned in a way readily understood by modern people.

He was folding and settling his thoughts, as though ready to stow them for the life to come at sea. What I carry, he thought, is the memory of a time that should not have burned away so fast. What is called progress has consumed the fabric of our towns like fire, where war has not acted the mad dentist. Or does every man feel this as he ages? Our lives have been stretched beyond enduring by history and the result is that people welcome inanition, which is available in more forms than ever before. How I fear the young, although I am not old.

Alec ascertained that Nick Pedersen possessed a knife with a marlinspike on a lanyard as dirty as the string on his specs, an old green Everyman of
The King of the Golden River
that smelt of cinnamon and cat, and a Chinagraph pencil tied by, for Nick, rather extravagant nylon twine to a small, plastic-coated book showing commonly seen fish of the Pacific.

Perhaps Nick was more like Alec’s mother, with his frugality and patience? But his want of possessions was an emancipation not a discipline against gross pleasures, and his patience did not seem to have enclosed and snuffed out the fire of his nature. No, for the moment it must be Elspeth, since she was the consort of the ruling male.

Alec picked up from the end of his bunk the newspaper he had bought two days ago. He had found it in a supermarket next to a pile of
Club International
on whose recurrent cover was a pink blonde dressed as a parcel. Browsing among the exhausted
saucissons
and Normandy butter costing its weight in gold were women more lovely, more exotic and more naked than the pink parcel, who seemed to represent an idea of sex uniquely Anglo-American, at once clean and creepy, more useful in confirming than gratifying masculinity. This look, the pink parcel and all Alec associated with it, he thought deserved the bulbous generic name ‘porno’. He had picked up his newspaper and a small box of violet-scented indigestion cachous; he imagined caches of sweets would be found on a boat, but he would need something to suck if things became miserable. All his life Alec had taken small stolen sweets to bed at the end of wretched days. Sometimes he awoke with a cheek full of syrup, a reservoir of melted comfort.

The headline on the page of the paper to which he now turned read: ‘
Won Chiu Lee s’est pendue dans une boucherie après une dépression de 64 ans
.’ It was wonderful to think of the relief death must have brought to her, the peace, the deliverance from blood and meat and the routine of the butcher’s shop. Remembering the early mornings his father had to work, going to the docks when the sky was brown and the gulls screaming around the boats, Alec tried to translate this memory into its equivalent in a French Polynesian butcher’s shop run by Chinese. All he could think of was the horrible obligation to use every part of the animal but its squeal, which was used up entirely at the time of slaughter, presumably. Supposing each pig to have thirty yards of gut, how many miles of pig’s intestine alone must Won Chiu Lee have washed? Enough to rig a schooner with sails made out of sewn sow’s ears.

‘I am writing this,’ Alec’s first sweetheart had written, ‘in my pyjamas.’ In fact she had been dressed, she later told him, in stout boots and a flowered dress that had reached its autumn. That first love was an
allumeuse
, indiscriminate, involuntary, dejected when her flirtatiousness was pointed out to her, not on account of having been found out, but on account of the lowness of her habit and her addiction to it. It was as though she chewed gum without being aware of it, not merely sappy, minty chewing gum, but the juicy, pink, softer bubble gum that you couldn’t stop yourself winding around your tongue or concentrating into a wad at the tips of your teeth before inflating it into a bubble of precarious rosiness that might burst in your face, and sometimes did.

The relief from my mother’s clarity offered by such a girl set my life’s habit, he thought. Have I always to take the longer road? My parents worked to give me everything that made me strange to them. I hanker now for the simplicity you can no more work for than faith, which it seems to me they had.

Light was changing its weight and pulling the sky out down towards the edge of the sea at the end of that first day out of Tahiti. At the bow of the boat the anchor chain girned with a faint but surprisingly serious sound, as though the stone knight on a tomb were waking and beginning heavily to stir in his burdensome carapace, the stone conjunctions of his armour beginning painfully to grate into articulation. In the fo’c’sle it was less easy to forget the boat’s vulnerability. Although he felt he would settle into the sleep-fracturing watch system after only a few days of it, Alec was still constantly nervous aboard, with two forms of unease. Among people still strange to him he felt a protracted and almost physical unease that was the tense social pain of a term begun, or a long stay in another family. The greater unease was a fear of falling short of some still-unpresented ordeal. In trying to keep himself ready at all times to respond to some practical mishap that might smite the boat, Alec chafed at and wore down the distance he kept habitually between himself and others. He wondered if the utter unfamiliarity he had forced upon himself would not merely force himself more into his own company.

An excited, thin-skinned hypochondriacal trance, like the sensation that precedes flu, enclosed Alec during his first days at sea among the Society Islands. That there was a right way to do things in this ordered, constrained community was clear, but he watched so closely and so much that the other men did not feel easy with him, and he was overcome by the self-distaste of the intelligent mimic. He had hoped that intelligence and practical ability would tell him what to do, but many of the words were new. Nothing could release him from his fearful sense of impersonating a man on a boat at sea. He felt a gap in himself where instinct should have been, a gap intelligence took time to fill.

He awoke to a roaring that seemed to pull downwards, and a looser crunching grinding, accompanied by the hard sudden noise of a big rebellious engine thrown into reverse. His open-mouthed dreams had been full of talk and tinkling and the booming of men; he realised these sounds came with the peaceful down-hauling of sail.

What was afoot now though was not peaceful. In the bow the anchor had thundered down, but there was a twitching in the boat. Her anchor was dragging, poiseless and lame. The engine was holding the boat off rocks or coral. So much he had picked up from listening to the talk.