Offshore (2 page)

‘I wish I knew the exact time,’ she said.

Richard was immediately content, as he only was when something could be ascertained to the nearest degree of accuracy. The exact time! Perhaps Nenna would like to have a look at his chronometers. They often didn’t work well in small boats – they were affected by changes of temperature – he didn’t know whether Nenna had found that – and, of course, by vibration. He was able to give her not only the time, but the state of the tide at every bridge on the river. It wasn’t very often that anyone wanted to know this.

Laura put the bottles and glasses and a large plateful of bits and pieces through the galley hatch.

‘It smells of something in there.’

There was the perceptible odour of tar which the barge-owners, since so much of their day was spent in running repairs, left behind them everywhere.

‘Well, dear, if you don’t like the smell, let’s go aft,’ said Richard, picking up the tray. He never let a woman carry anything. The three of them went into a kind of snug, fitted with built-in lockers and red cushions. A little yacht stove gave out a temperate glow, its draught adjusted to produce exactly the right warmth.

Laura sat down somewhat heavily.

‘How does it feel like to live without your husband?’ she asked, handing Nenna a large glass of gin. ‘I’ve often wondered.’

‘Perhaps you’d like to fetch some more ice,’ Richard said. There was plenty.

‘He hasn’t left me, you know. We just don’t happen to be together at the moment.’

‘That’s for you to say, but what I want to know is, how do you get on without him? Cold nights, of course, don’t mind Richard, it’s a compliment to him if you think about it.’

Nenna looked from one to the other. It was a relief, really, to talk about it.

‘I can’t do the things that women can’t do,’ she said. ‘I can’t turn over
The Times
so that the pages lie flat, I can’t fold up a map in the right creases, I can’t draw corks, I can’t drive in nails straight, I can’t go into a bar and order a drink without wondering what everyone’s thinking about it, and I can’t strike matches towards myself. I’m well educated and I’ve got two children and I can manage pretty well, there’s a number of much more essential things that I know how to do, but I can’t do those ones, and when they come up I feel like weeping myself sick.’

‘I’m sure I could show you how to fold up a map,’ said Richard, ‘it’s not at all difficult once you get the hang of it.’

Laura’s eyes seemed to have moved closer together. She was concentrating intensely.

‘Did he leave you on the boat?’

‘I bought
Grace
myself, while he was away, with just about all the money we’d got left, to have somewhere for me and the girls.’

‘Do you like boats?’

‘I’m quite used to them. I was raised in Halifax. My father had a summer cabin on the Bras d’Or Lake. We had boats there.’

‘I hope you’re not having any repair problems,’ Richard put in.

‘We get rain coming in.’

‘Ah, the weatherboarding. You might try stretching tarpaulin over the deck.’

Although he tried hard to do so, Richard could never see how anyone could live without things in working order.

‘Personally, though, I’m doubtful about the wisdom of making endless repairs to these very old boats. My feeling, for what it’s worth, is that they should be regarded as wasting assets. Let them run down just so much every year, remember your low outgoings, and in a few years’ time have them towed away for their break-up value.’

‘I don’t know where we should live then,’ said Nenna.

‘Oh, I understood you to say that you were going to find a place on shore.’

‘Oh, we are, we are.’

‘I didn’t mean to distress you.’

Laura had had time, while listening without much attention to these remarks, to swallow a further quantity of spirits. This had made her inquisitive, rather than hostile.

‘Where’d you get your guernsey?’

Both women wore the regulation thick Navy blue sailing sweaters, with a split half inch at the bottom of each side seam. Nenna had rolled up her sleeves in the warmth of the snug, showing round forearms covered with very fine golden hair.

‘I got mine at the cut price place at the end of the Queenstown Road.’

‘It’s not as thick as mine.’

Laura leaned forward, and, taking a good handful, felt the close knitting between finger and thumb.

‘I’m a judge of quality, I can tell it’s not as thick. Richard, like to feel it?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t claim to know much about knitting.’

‘Well, make the stove up then. Make it up, you idiot! Nenna’s freezing!’

‘I’m warm, thank you, just right.’

‘You’ve got to be warmer than that! Richard, she’s your guest!’

‘I can adjust the stove, if you like,’ said Richard, in relief, ‘I can do something to the regulator.’

‘I don’t want it regulated!’

Nenna knew that, if it hadn’t been disloyal, Richard would have appealed to her to do or say something.

‘We use pretty well anything for fuel up our end,’ she began, ‘driftwood and washed-up coke and anything that’ll burn. Maurice told me that last winter he had to borrow a candle from
Dreadnought
to unfreeze the lock of his woodstore. Then when he was entertaining one of his friends he couldn’t get his stove to burn right and he had to keep it alight with matchboxes and cheese straws.’

‘It’s bad practice to keep your woodstore above deck,’ said Richard.

Laura had been following, for some reason, with painful interest. ‘Do cheese straws burn?’

‘Maurice thinks they do.’

Laura disappeared. Nenna had just time to say, I must be going, before she came back, tottering at a kind of dignified slant, and holding a large tin of cheese straws.

‘Fortnum’s.’

Avoiding Richard, who got to his feet as soon as he saw something to be carried, she kicked open the top of the Arctic and flung them in golden handfuls onto the glowing bed of fuel.

‘Hot!’

The flames leaped up, with an overpowering stink of burning cheese.

‘Lovely! Hot! I’ve got plenty more! The kitchen’s full of them! We’ll make Richard throw them. We’ll all throw them!’

‘There’s someone coming,’ said Nenna.

Footsteps overhead, like the relief for siege victims. She knew the determined stamp of her younger daughter, but there was also a heavier tread. Her heart turned over.

‘Ma, I can smell burning.’

After a short fierce struggle, Richard had replaced the Arctic’s brass lid. Nenna went to the companion.

‘Who’s up there with you, Tilda?’

Tilda’s six-year-old legs, in wellingtons caked with mud, appeared at the open hatch.

‘It’s Father Watson.’

Nenna did not answer for a second, and Tilda bellowed:

‘Ma, it’s the kindly old priest. He came round to
Grace
, so I brought him along here.’

‘Father Watson isn’t old at all, Tilda. Bring him down here, please. That’s to say …’

‘Of course,’ said Richard. ‘You’ll have a whisky, father, won’t you?’ He didn’t know who he was talking to, but believed, from films he had seen, that RC priests drank whisky and told long stories; that could be useful at the present juncture. Richard spoke with calm authority. Nenna admired him and would have liked to throw her arms round him.

‘No, I won’t come in now, thank you all the same,’ called Father Watson, whose flapping trousers could now be seen beside Tilda’s wellingtons against a square patch of sky. ‘Just a word or two, Mrs James, I can easily wait if you’re engaged with your friends or if it’s not otherwise convenient.’

But Nenna, somewhat to the curate’s surprise, for he seldom felt himself to be a truly welcome guest, was already half way up the companion. It had begun to drizzle, and his long macintosh was spangled with drops of rain, which caught the reflections of the shore lights and the riding lights of the craft at anchor.

‘I’m afraid the little one will get wet.’

‘She’s waterproof,’ said Nenna.

As soon as they reached the Embankment Father Watson began to speak in measured tones. ‘It’s the children, as you must be aware, that I’ve come about. A message from the nuns, a message from the Sisters of Misericord.’ He sometimes wondered if he would be more successful in the embarrassing errands he was called upon to undertake if he had an Irish accent, or some quaint turn of speech.

‘Your girls, Mrs James, Tilda here, and the twelve-year-old.’

‘Martha.’

‘A very delightful name. Martha busied herself about the household work during our Lord’s visits. But not a saint’s name, I think.’

Presumably Father Watson said these things automatically. He couldn’t have walked all the way down to the Reach from his comfortless presbytery simply to talk about Martha’s name.

‘She’ll be taking another name at confirmation, I assume. That should not long be delayed. I suggest Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, since you’ve decided to make your dwelling place upon the face of the waters.’

‘Father, have you come to complain about the girls’ absence from school?’

They had arrived at the wharf, which was exceedingly ill-lit. The brewers to whom it belonged, having ideas, like all brewers in the 1960s, of reviving the supposed jollity of the eighteenth century, had applied for permission to turn it into a fashionable beer garden. The very notion, however, ran counter to the sodden, melancholy, and yet enduring spirit of the Reach. After the plans had been shelved, the whole place had been leased out to various small-time manufacturers and warehousemen; the broken-down sheds and godowns must still be the property of somebody, so too must be the piles of crates whose stencilled lettering had long since faded to pallor.

But, rat-ridden and neglected, it was a wharf still. The river’s edge, where Virgil’s ghosts held out their arms in longing for the farther shore, and Dante, as a living man, was refused passage by the ferryman, the few planks that mark the meeting point of land and water, there, surely, is a place to stop and reflect, even if, as Father Watson did, you stumble over a ten-gallon tin of creosote.

‘I’m afraid I’m not accustomed to the poor light, Mrs James.’

‘Look at the sky, father. Keep your eyes on the lightest part of the sky and they’ll adapt little by little.’

Tilda had sprung ahead, at home in the dark, and anywhere within sight and sound of water. Feeling that she had given her due of politeness to the curate, the due exacted by her mother and elder sister, she pattered onto
Maurice
, and, after having a bit of a poke round, shot across the connecting gangplank onto
Grace
.

‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t go any further, Mrs James. It’s exactly what you said, it’s the question of school attendance. The situation, you see, they tell me there’s a legal aspect to it as well.’

How dispiriting for Father Watson to tell her this, Nenna thought, and how far it must be from his expectations when he received his first two minor orders, and made his last acts of resignation. To stand on this dusky wharf, bruised by a drum of creosote, and acting not even as the convent chaplain, but as some kind of school attendance officer!

‘I know they haven’t been coming to class regularly. But then, father, they haven’t been well.’

Even Father Watson could scarcely be expected to swallow this. ‘I was struck by the good health and spirits of your little one. In fact I had it in mind that she might be trained up to one of the women’s auxiliary services which justified themselves so splendidly in the last war – the WRENS, I mean, of course. It’s a service that’s not incompatible with the Christian life.’

‘You know how it is with children; she’s well one day, not so well the next.’ Nenna’s attitude to truth was flexible, and more like Willis’s than Richard’s. ‘And Martha’s the same, it’s only to be expected at her age.’

Nenna had hoped to alarm the curate with these references to approaching puberty, but he seemed, on the contrary, to be reassured. ‘If that’s the trouble, you couldn’t do better than to entrust her to the skilled understanding of the Sisters.’ How dogged he was. ‘They’ll expect, then, to see both your daughters in class on Monday next.’

‘I’ll do what I can.’

‘Very well, Mrs James.’

‘Won’t you come as far as the boat?’

‘No, no, I won’t risk the crossing a second time.’ What had happened the first time? ‘And now, I’m afraid I’ve somewhat lost my sense of direction. I’ll have to ask you my way to dry land.’

Nenna pointed out the way through the gate, which, swinging on its hinges, no longer provided any kind of barrier, out onto the Embankment, and first left, first right up Partisan Street for the King’s Road. The priest couldn’t have looked more relieved if he had completed a mission to those that dwell in the waters that are below the earth.

‘I’ve got the supper, Ma,’ said Martha, when Nenna returned to
Grace
. Nenna would have felt better pleased with herself if she had resembled her elder daughter. But Martha, small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world’s shortcomings, was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha.