Offshore (6 page)

Richard wondered why living on a largish boat should automatically make him interested in small ones.

‘Not Norfolk, I think.’ A number of Laura’s relations lived there, but he had not come to the Relais to discuss them. ‘You wouldn’t make a profit on
Lord Jim
anyway,’ he added, ‘I don’t regard her as an investment.’

‘Then what in the name of Christ did you buy her for?’

This was the question Richard did not want to answer. Meanwhile, the waiter put a warm plate printed with a name and device in front of each of them and, after a short interval, took it away again, this, presumably, representing the cover for which the restaurant made a charge. Subsequently he brought various inedible articles, such as bread dried to a crisp, and questionable pieces of shellfish, and placed these in front of them. Pinkie chewed away at a raw fragment.

‘We might call him an old shellback, if you think that’d go down better, instead of an Ancient Mariner.’

‘Who?’

‘This Willis of yours. It doesn’t do to be too literary.’

The waiter invited them to choose between coq au vin and navarin of lamb, either of which, in other circumstances, would have been called stew.

‘Knows his job, that fellow,’ said Pinkie. Richard felt inclined to agree with him.

The wine, though Richard was not the kind of person whom the sommelier kept waiting, was not particularly good. Pinkie said nothing about this because he was dazed by gin, and was not paying, and Richard said nothing because, after a little thought, he concluded that the wine was good enough for Pinkie.

After they had been given the coq au vin the waiter shovelled on to their plates, from a mysteriously divided dish, some wilted vegetables, and Richard recognised that the moment had come to make his only point.

‘I really haven’t any particular interest in the sale, except that I want to do the best that I can for this retired artist, Sam Willis,’ he said. ‘I regard him as a friend, and you remember that apart from all this local colour, I gave you the specifications of his boat.’

‘Oh, I dare say. They’ll have those in the office. The invaluable Miss Barker. Well, proceed.’

‘There wasn’t any mention, I think I’m right in saying, of a survey – that rested with the purchaser.’

Another waiter brought round a trolley on which were a number of half-eaten gateaux decorated with a white substance, and some slices of hard apple resting in water, in a glass bowl. The idea of eating these things seemed absurd, and yet Pinkie asked for some.

‘Well, these specifications. I’ll have to go back to the shop, and check up on them, as I said, but I imagine you won’t grudge me a glass of brandy first.’

Richard gave the order. ‘There’s something which I didn’t mention, but I want to make it absolutely clear, and that is that I’ve reason to believe that this craft, the
Dreadnought
, leaks quite badly.’

Pinkie laughed, spraying a little of the brandy which had been brought to him onto the laden air. ‘Of course she does. All these old boats leak like sieves. Just as all these period houses are as rotten as old cheese. Everyone knows that. But age has its value.’

Richard sighed. ‘Has it ever struck you, Pinkie, what it would be like to belong to a class of objects which gets more valuable as it gets older? Houses, oak-trees, furniture, wine, I don’t care what! I’m thirty-nine, I’m not sure about you …’

The idea was not taken up, and half an hour later Richard signed the bill and they left the Relais together. Pinkie could still think quite clearly enough to know that he had very little prospect of a new commission. ‘As you’re fixed, Richard,’ he said, half embracing his friend, but impeded by his umbrella, ‘as you’re fixed, and you’re an obstinate bugger, I can’t shake you, you’re living nowhere, you don’t belong to land or water.’ As Richard did not respond, he added, ‘Keep in touch. We mustn’t let it be so long next time.’

The second or third lots of clients sent along by Pinkie, an insurance broker and his wife, who wanted somewhere to give occasional parties in summer, at high tide only, were very much taken with
Dreadnought
. It was raining slightly on the day of inspection, but Willis, who had not been able to lay hands on his waterproof ‘tile’, but made do with a deep-crowned felt hat, stood on duty under the gap in the weather-boards, while an unsuspecting clerk from the agency showed the rest of the boat. The galley was very cramped, but the ship’s chests, still marked
FOR 2 SEAMEN
, and the deckhouse, from which Willis had watched the life of the river go by, both made a good impression.

‘You’ll have noticed the quality of the bottom planking,’ said the clerk. ‘All these ends are 2½ English elm for three strakes out from the centre, and after that you’ve got oak. That’s what Nelson meant, you know, when he talked about wooden walls. Mind, I don’t say that she hasn’t been knocked about a bit … There may be some weathering here and there …’

After a few weeks which to Willis, however, seemed like a few years, the broker’s solicitors made a conditional offer for the poor old barge, and finally agreed to pay £1500, provided that
Dreadnought
was still in shipshape condition six months hence, in the spring of 1962.

Six months, Willis repeated. It was a long time to wait, but not impossible.

Richard suggested that the intervening time could well be spent in replacing the pumps and pump-wells, and certain sections of the hull. It was difficult for him to realise that he was dealing with, or rather trying to help, a man who had never, either physically or emotionally, felt the need to replace anything. Even Willis’s appearance, the spiky short black hair and the prize-fighter’s countenance, had not changed much since he had played truant from Elementary school and gone down to hang about the docks. If truth were known, he had had a wife, as well as a perdurable old mother, a great bicyclist and supporter of local Labour causes, but both of them had died of cancer, no replacements possible there. The body must either repair itself or stop functioning, but that is not true of the emotions, and particularly of Willis’s emotions. He had come to doubt the value of all new beginnings and to put his trust in not much more than the art of hanging together.
Dreadnought
had stayed afloat for more than sixty years, and Richard, Skipper though he was, didn’t understand timber. Tinkering about with the old boat would almost certainly be the end of her. He remembered the last time he had been to see the dentist. Dental care was free in the 60s, in return for signing certain unintelligible documents during the joy of escape from the surgery. But when the dentist had announced that it was urgently necessary to extract two teeth Willis had got up and walked away, glad that he hadn’t taken off his coat and so would not have to enter into any further discussion while he recovered it from the waiting-room. If one goes, he thought, still worse two, they all go.

‘
Dreadnought
is good for a few years yet,’ he insisted. ‘And what kind of repairs can you do on oak?’

‘Have you asked him about the insurance valuation?’ Laura asked Richard.

‘There isn’t one. These old barges – well, they could get a quotation for fire, I suppose, but not against flood or storm damage.’

‘I’m going home for a fortnight. It may be more than a fortnight – I don’t really know how long.’

‘When?’

‘Oh, quite soon. I’ll need some money.’

Richard avoided looking at her, for fear she should think he meant anything particular by it.

‘What about
Grace
?’ Laura went on.

‘What about her?’

‘Is
Grace
in bad condition?’

Richard sighed. ‘Not as good as one would like. There the trouble is largely above the waterline, though. I’ve told Nenna time and again that she ought to get hold of some sort of reliable chap, an ex-Naval chippie would be the right sort, just to spend the odd day on board and put everything to rights. There aren’t any partitions between the cabins, to start with.’

‘Did Nenna tell you that?’

‘You can see for yourself, if you drop in there.’

‘What a very odd thing to tell you.’

‘I suppose people have got used to bringing me their queries, to some extent,’ said Richard, going into their cabin to take off his black shoes and put on a pair of red leather slippers, which, like all his other clothes, never seemed to wear out. The slippers made him feel less tired.

‘There are more queries from
Grace
than from
Dreadnought
, aren’t there?’

‘I’m not sure. I’ve never worked it out exactly.’

‘They’re not worth talking about anyway. I expect they talk about us.’

‘Oh, do you think so?’

‘They say “There goes that Mrs Blake again. She turns me up, she looks so bleeding bored all day”.’

Richard did not like to have to think about two things at once, particularly at the end of the day. He kissed Laura, sat down, and tried to bring the two subjects put to him into order, and under one heading. A frown ran in a slanting direction between his eyebrows and halfway up his forehead. Laura’s problem was that she had not enough to do – no children, though she hadn’t said anything about this recently – and his heart smote him because he had undertaken to make her happy, and hadn’t. Nenna, on the other hand, had rather too much. If her husband had let her down, as was apparently the case, she ought to have a male relation of some kind, to see to things. In Richard’s experience, all women had plenty of male relations. Laura, for instance, had two younger brothers, who were not settling very well into the stockbrokers’ firm in which they had been placed, and numerous uncles, one of them an old horror who obtained Scandinavian au pairs through advertisements in
The Lady
, and then, of course, her Norfolk cousins. Nenna appeared to have no-one. She had come over here from Canada, of course. This last reflection – it was Nova Scotia, he was pretty sure – seemed to tidy up the whole matter, which his mind now presented as a uniform interlocking structure, with working parts.

Laura was very lucky to be married to Richard, who would not have hurt her feelings deliberately for the whole world. A fortnight with her parents, he was thinking now, on their many acres of damp earth, must surely bring home to her the advantages of living on
Lord Jim
. Of course, it hadn’t so far done anything of the kind, and he had to arrive at the best thing to do in the circumstances. He was not quite satisfied with the way his mind was working. Something was out of phase. He did not recognise it as hope.

‘I want to take you out to dinner, Lollie,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘You look so pretty, I want other people to see you. I daresay they’ll wonder why on earth you agreed to go out with a chap like me.’

‘Where do you go when you take people out to lunch from the office?’

‘Oh, the Relais, but that’s no good in the evening. We could try that Provençal place. Give them a treat.’

‘You don’t really want to go,’ said Laura, but she disappeared into the spare cabin, where, unfortunately, her dresses had to be kept. Richard took off his slippers and put on his black shoes again, and they went out.

M
ARTHA
and Tilda were in the position of having no spending money, but this was less important when they were not attending school and were spared the pains of comparison, and they felt no bitterness against their mother, because she hadn’t any either. Nenna believed, however, that she would have some in the spring, when three things would happen, each, like melting ice-floes, slowly moving the next one on. Edward would come and live on
Grace
, which would save the rent he was paying on his rooms at present; the girls, once they were not being prayed for at the grotto, would agree to go back to the nuns; and with Tilda at school she could go out herself and look for a job.

Martha could not imagine her mother going out to work and felt that the experiment was likely to prove disastrous.

‘You girls don’t know my life,’ said Nenna, ‘I worked in my vacations before the war, wiping dishes, camp counselling, all manner of things.’

Martha smiled at the idea of these dear dead days. ‘What did you counsel?’ she asked.

The girls needed money principally to buy singles by Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard, whose brightly smiling photograph presided over their cabin. They had got the photograph as a fold-in from
Disc Weekly
. If you couldn’t afford the original records, there were smaller ones you could buy at the Woolworths in the King’s Road, which sounded quite like.

Like the rest of London’s river children, they knew that the mud was a source of wealth, but were too shrewd to go into competition with the locals from Partisan Street for coins, medals and lugworms. The lugworms, in any case, Willis had told them, were better on Limehouse Reach. Round about
Grace
herself, the great river deposited little but mounds of plastic containers.

Every expedition meant crossing the Bridge, because the current on Battersea Reach, between the two bridges, sets towards the Surrey side. The responsibility for these outings, which might or might not be successful, had worn between Martha’s eyebrows a faint frown, not quite vertical, which exactly resembled Richard’s.

‘We’ll go bricking to-day,’ she said. ‘How’s the tide?’

‘High water Gravesend 3 a.m., London Bridge 4, Battersea Bridge 4.30,’ Tilda chanted rapidly. ‘Spring tide, seven and a half hour’s ebb, low tide at 12.’

Martha surveyed her sister doubtfully. With so much specialised knowledge, which would qualify her for nothing much except a pilot’s certificate, with her wellingtons over which the mud of many tides had dried, she had the air of something aquatic, a demon from the depths, perhaps. Whatever happens, I must never leave her behind, Martha prayed.

Both the girls were small and looked exceptionally so as they crossed the Bridge with their handcart. They wore stout Canadian anoraks, sent them by their Aunt Louise.

Below the old church at Battersea the retreating flood had left exposed a wide shelf of mud and gravel. At intervals the dark driftwood lay piled. Near the draw dock some longshoremen had heaped it up and set light to it, to clear the area. Now the thick blue smoke gave out a villainous smell, the gross spirit of salt and fire. Tilda loved that smell, and stretched her nostrils wide.

Beyond the dock, an old wrecked barge lay upside down. It was shocking, even terrifying, to see her dark flat shining bottom, chine uppermost. A derelict ship turns over on her keel and lies gracefully at rest, but there is only one way up for a Thames barge if she is to maintain her dignity.

This wreck was the
Small Gains
, which had gone down more than twenty-five years before, when hundreds of barges were still working under sail. Held fast in the mud with her cargo of bricks, she had failed to come up with the rising tide and the water had turned her over. The old bricks were still scattered over the foreshore. After a storm they were washed back in dozens, but most of them were broken or half ground to powder. Along with the main cargo, however,
Small Gains
had shipped a quantity of tiles. At a certain moment in the afternoon the sun, striking across the water from behind the gas works, sent almost level rays over the glistening Reach. Then it was possible for the expert to pick out a glazed tile, though only if it had sunk at the correct angle to the river bed.

‘Do you think Ma’s mind is weakening?’ Tilda asked.

‘I thought we weren’t going to discuss our affairs today.’ Martha relented and added – ‘Well, Ma is much too dependent on Maurice, or on anyone sympathetic. She ought to avoid these people.’

The two girls sat on the wall of Old Battersea churchyard to eat their sandwiches. These contained a substance called Spread, and, indeed, that was all you could do with it.

‘Mattie, who would you choose, if you were compelled at gunpoint to marry tomorrow?’

‘You mean, someone off the boats?’

‘We don’t know anybody else.’

Seagulls, able to detect the appearance of a piece of bread at a hundred yards away, advanced slowly towards them over the shelving ground.

‘I thought perhaps you meant Cliff.’

‘Not Cliff, not Elvis. And not Richard, he’s too obvious.’

Martha licked her fingers.

‘He looks tired all the time now. I saw him taking Laura out to dinner yesterday evening. Straight away after he’d come back from work! Where’s the relaxation in that? What sort of life is that for a man to lead?’

‘What was she wearing?’

‘I couldn’t make out. She had her new coat on.’

‘But you saw the strain on his features?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Do you think Ma notices?’

‘Oh, everybody does.’

When the light seemed about right, striking fire out of the broken bits of china and glass, they went to work. Tilda lay down full length on a baulk of timber. It was her job to do this, because Martha bruised so easily. A princess, unknown to all about her, she awaited the moment when these bruises would reveal her true heritage.

Tilda stared fixedly. It was necessary to get your eye in.

‘There’s one!’

She bounded off, as though over stepping stones, from one object to another that would scarcely hold, old tyres, old boots, the ribs of crates from which the seagulls were dislodged in resentment. Far beyond the point at which the mud became treacherous and from which
Small Gains
had never risen again, she stood poised on the handlebars of a sunken bicycle. How had the bicycle ever got there?

‘Mattie, it’s a Raleigh!’

‘If you’ve seen a tile, pick it up straight away and come back.’

‘I’ve seen two!’

With a tile in each hand, balancing like a circus performer, Tilda returned. Under the garish lights of the Big Top, every man, woman and child rose to applaud. Who, they asked each other, was this newcomer, who had succeeded where so many others had failed?

The nearest clean water was from the standpipe in the churchyard; they did not like to wash their finds there, because the water was for the flowers on the graves, but Martha fetched some in a bucket.

As the mud cleared away from the face of the first tile, patches of ruby-red lustre, with the rich glow of a jewel’s heart, appeared inch by inch, then the outlines of a delicate grotesque silver bird, standing on one leg in a circle of blue-black leaves and berries, its beak of burnished copper.

‘Is it beautiful?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the dragon?’

The sinuous tail of a dragon, also in gold and jewel colours, wreathed itself like a border round the edge of the other tile.

The reverse of both tiles was damaged, and on only one of them the letters
NDS END
could just be made out, but Martha could not be mistaken.

‘They’re de Morgans, Tilda. Two of them at one go, two of them in one morning.’

‘How much can we sell them for?’

‘Do you remember the old lady, Tilda?’

‘Did I see her?’

‘Tilda, I only took you three months ago. Mrs Stirling, I mean, in Battersea Old House. Her sister was married to William de Morgan, that had the pottery, and made these kind of tiles, that was in Victorian days, you must remember. She was in a wheelchair. We paid for tea, but the money went to the Red Cross. We were only supposed to have two scones each, otherwise the Red Cross couldn’t expect to make a profit. She explained, and she showed us all those tiles and bowls, and the brush and comb he used to do his beard with.’

‘How old was she?’

‘In 1965 she’ll be a hundred.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Mrs Wilhemina Stirling.’

Tilda stared at the brilliant golden-beaked bird, about which there was something frightening.

‘We’d better wrap it up. Someone might want to steal it.’

Sobered, like many seekers and finders, by the presence of the treasure itself, they wrapped the tiles in Tilda’s anorak, which immediately dimmed their lustre once again with a film of mud.

‘There’s Woodie!’

Tilda began to jump up and down, like a cork on the tide.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘He’s getting his car out.’

There were no garages near the boats and Woodie was obliged to keep his immaculate Austin Cambridge in the yard of a public house on the Surrey side.

‘I’m attracting his attention,’ Tilda shouted. ‘He can drive us home, and we can put the pushcart on the back seat.’

‘Tilda, you don’t understand. He’d have to say yes, because he’s sorry for us, I heard him tell Richard we were no better than waifs of the storm, and we should ruin the upholstery, and be taking advantage of his kindness.’

‘It’s his own fault if he’s kind. It’s not the kind who inherit the earth, it’s the poor, the humble, and the meek.’

‘What do you think happens to the kind, then?’

‘They get kicked in the teeth.’

Woodie drove them back across the bridge.

‘You’ll have to look after yourselves this winter, you know,’ he said. ‘No more lifts, I’m afraid, I shall be packed up and gone till spring. I’m thinking of laying up
Rochester
in dry dock. She needs a bit of attention.’

‘Do you have to manage all that packing by yourself?’ Tilda asked.

‘No, dear, my wife’s coming to give me a hand.’

‘You haven’t got a wife!’

‘You’ve never seen her, dear.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Janet.’ Woodie began to feel on the defensive, as though he had made the name up.

‘What does she look like?’

‘She doesn’t much care for the river. She spends the summer elsewhere.’

‘Has she left you, then?’

‘Certainly not. She’s got a caravan in Wales, a very nice part, near Tenby.’ Although Woodie had given this explanation pretty often, he was surprised to have to make it to a child of six. ‘Then in the winter we go back to our house in Purley. It’s an amicable arrangement.’

Was there not, on the whole of Battersea Reach, a couple, married or unmarried, living together in the ordinary way? Certainly, among the fairweather people on the middle Reach. They lived together and even multiplied, though the opportunity for a doctor to hurry over the gangplank with a black bag, and, in his turn, fall into the river, had been missed.
Bluebird
, which was rented by a group of nurses from the Waterloo Hospital, had been at the ready, and when the birth was imminent they’d seen to it that the ambulance arrived promptly. But, apart from
Bluebird
, the middle Reach would be empty by next week, or perhaps the one after.

Martha, who had decided to stop thinking about the inconvenience they were causing, asked Woodie not to stop at the boats; they would like to go on to the New King’s Road.

‘We want to stop at the Bourgeois Gentilhomme,’ she said, with the remnants of the French accent the nuns had carefully taught her.

‘Isn’t that an antique shop, dear?’

‘Yes, we’re going to sell an antique.’

‘Have you got one?’

‘We’ve got two.’

‘Are you sure you’ve been to this place before?’

‘Yes.’

‘I shall have to pull up as near as I can and let you out,’ said Woodie. He wondered if he ought to wait, but he wanted to get back to
Rochester
before she came afloat. He watched the two girls, who, to do them justice, thanked him very nicely, they weren’t so badly brought up when you came to think about it, approach the shop by the side door.

On occasions, Martha’s courage failed her. The advantages her sister had in being so much younger presented themselves forcibly. She sharply told Tilda, who had planted herself in a rocking-chair put out on the pavement, that she must come into the shop and help her speak to the man. Tilda, who had never sat in a rocker before, replied that her boots were too dirty.

‘And anyway, I’m old Abraham Lincoln, jest sittin and thinkin.’

‘You’ve got to come.’

The Bourgeois Gentilhomme was one of many enterprises in Chelsea which survived entirely by selling antiques to each other. The atmosphere, once through the little shop-door, cut down from a Victorian billiard-table, was oppressive. Clocks struck widely different hours. At a corner table, with her back turned towards them, sat a woman in black, apparently doing some accounts, and surrounded by dusty furniture; perhaps she had been cruelly deserted on her wedding day, and had sat there ever since, refusing to have anything touched. She did not look up when the girls came in, although the billiard table was connected by a cord to a cow-bell, which jangled harshly.