Sailors on the Inward Sea (10 page)

HE SLEPT POORLY
, plagued by dreams. A huge black wave whose curl hooded him was closing down with a roar when he woke, feeling his heart thudding, the wave fading but still clear enough in his
mind to frighten him. As soon as he dressed he went outside. Not a hint of fog. A pink border at the base of the sky ran like a fringe along the low hills to the east, where the clarity of the scalloped horizon, the luminous quality of the light reminded him of the yellow cylinder. Turning up the collar of his coat against the chill, he set out toward the docks and had reached the building where the sailors had taken Whelan when he saw Fox-Bourne approaching the
Brigadier.
After he reached the top of the gangway and returned the salute of the watch officer, he disappeared behind the superstructure and came into view again near the bow, stopping where Whelan had died. He put his hands on the rail and gazed out to sea in the direction they had gone the previous day. Conrad was certain that the man shared his sense of irony over the clear sky, yet no sooner did the idea occur to him than another swept in like a wave that washes away the underpinnings of a pier. Whereas he regretted with every fiber of his being the fog that had enveloped the
Brigadier
and the yellow cylinder that had fallen like a spotlight on the
Valkerie,
it was far more likely, more in keeping with what he knew of Fox-Bourne, that he was grateful for the opportunity the fog had provided. Had he been close enough to see Fox-Bourne's expression, he knew that it would be touched with the cold satisfaction of vengeance.

He watched until Fox-Bourne stepped back from the rail and cast a last glance at the sea before walking back to the superstructure, where he climbed the ladder to the bridge, lingering a moment on the platform before going inside. Conrad's sympathy went out to the man, that peculiar sympathy we can feel for someone in distress without exonerating him, staying with him all the way back to the mess.

Scorsby, Higgins, and Chambers were at a table on the far side of the room. He wanted to talk to them, compare his sense of what had
happened with theirs in the hope that he might have missed something that would change his mind about Fox-Bourne. But they looked decidedly uncomfortable when they noticed him and so he waved to them and asked the steward for a cup of tea, which he took with him up to the headquarters building, where an officer arranged for someone to drive him to the train station.

C
ONRAD REACHED
this point in his story a bit past noon. By then, the fog had burned off and the red sun—Crane's and now Conrad's, too—was golden, as was the sky over London. The color reminded me of the yellow cylinder, which in turn brought to mind the interior dome of an Eastern Orthodox church lined with Byzantine frescoes, the saints' large almond-shaped eyes forever fixed on supplicant and visitor alike. When I told Conrad, he grinned, saying it was an apt image for the story. The big eyes conveyed the exact sense of things on the dock where the sailors had watched the German prisoners coming down. I had the impression that he might take up the story again but he did not. Talking for nearly three hours had tired him so I suggested that we have lunch at a nearby café that served passable fish and chips. Fried food no longer agreed with him, he said, but a bowl of chowder would be fine.

As the heat had returned full force, we shed our jackets, though Conrad left on his waistcoat. On the road an old man walking a Doberman passed us, the two of them looking straight ahead, eyes fixed on a mutual goal, their paces matched after what must have been many years together. They headed for a bench, where they stopped, and the man withdrew a metal bowl from one pocket and a small bottle from the other, bending down to fill the bowl with water while the dog waited patiently for the command to drink. A few doors down the road we reached a ship chandler's shop I visited for all sorts of hardware and advice, the owner, Martin Sebold, having been a shipbuilder in his earlier days. The big windows were
packed with tools, ropes, compasses, brass clocks with beveled glass, latches, locks, knives, and a wonderful old sextant Sebold had taken weeks to restore. Conrad nodded appreciatively as I told him about the instrument, stepping to the left a pace or two to see it better and asking if I remembered ever seeing anything like it. I didn't.

“Surely you remember Walter Craig's.”

It came back to me in a flash. Our captain had had an identical sextant, which he kept in a velvet-lined box in his cabin. The old days rushed back and as we continued toward the café, Conrad dwelt on those good times as if he were seeking refuge from his story, throwing up defenses of vivid happy memories. I pitched in, too, relieved to put some distance between us and those dire events.

It seemed like a good time to tell him that I planned to return to the East before long and retire on Java, very likely in Batavia. He was not surprised, given how often I used to rave about the island. After a pause he asked if Ayu had anything to do with it. Of course she did. Her spirit infused the light of the island, the color, the shadows of the puppet theater she loved and had taught me to love, too. I saw her in many places, in the house in the highlands, the open-air markets where she sold her jewelry, the flash of silver rings on her hands, all of it as real as the buildings and people we passed. For a moment it seemed impossible that she was not still alive, waiting for my return.

During lunch Conrad asked after Viereck, a Dutch friend who had lived in Java for many years, and was delighted to hear that the old boy was still alive. Viereck and Jim had been much on his mind during the week he spent at home, waiting to be called back to Lowestoft for the inquiry. Viereck's ideas about how men survived seemed particularly germane in the aftermath of the
Valkerie
tragedy. Jim's trial in the Eastern port hovered in the back of his mind like a storm flag warning that things are rarely the way they seem.
There were enough similarities between Jim's and Fox-Bourne's situations to make him cautious. Of all the people who would be called to testify, he alone knew why those Germans died. He did not believe that Fox-Bourne's sorrow exonerated him, but it put another face on the events that bore a striking resemblance to Jim's fear of drowning that had sent him vaulting over the side of the ship filled with religious pilgrims into the lifeboat. Both acts were as instinctual as anemones closing up at the slightest touch. Though their crimes were different in nature and degree, Jim's was infinitely less consequential than Fox-Bourne's. Conrad had no doubt that Fox-Bourne would share Jim's disgrace and wondered aloud whether the captain might not also creep off as Jim had done, seeking anonymity.

“I thought of that,” I said. “By comparison, Jim comes off looking almost saintly.”

“Perhaps.”

“That sounds like you have doubts.”

“No,” he said after a pause, “put them side by side with a bill of particulars and there's no question that Jim's is the lesser offense. But what if the ship had gone down with those eight hundred souls?”

“There would still be a difference of intention,” I argued. “He wouldn't have deliberately drowned those people. Besides, there was nothing he could do anyway to stop the bulkhead from giving way if it decided to. I suppose he might have given up his place in the lifeboat.”

“Do you think he would?”

“I don't know. I hope so. In any case, Fox-Bourne murdered those Germans.”

“Let me tell you something, Malone. I never doubted Fox-Bourne's guilt. Never. What bothered me during that week I was at home—what still bothers me—was the degree of his guilt. Poor
Jessie. I talked about it nonstop, trapped her in the kitchen, the parlor, at the dinner table, in bed, making her listen to my interpretations. There was my own point of view, what I imagined to be Fox-Bourne's, the junior officer's, the ratings', the admirals' who stormed aboard. They coincided at certain points, diverged at others. Mostly they diverged.”

“But you knew what you saw.”

“I knew what I saw and what I felt. The sequence of cause and effect was clear. Edward's death. Ramming the U-boat. Whelan's death. Outrage and revenge. The question of what I might have done had I lost Borys.”

“You wouldn't have done that,” I said emphatically.

“I would have considered it, Malone. The difference is between thought and action.”

“Staying on board or going ashore for a howl and a dance.”

“Exactly. I'd have stayed put, I'm almost certain. But the question, the possibility of doing otherwise, clouded the issue.”

“What did you conclude about Fox-Bourne?”

“Less than I wanted. I wanted clarity, a clear explanation. That was the reason I kept after Jessie day after day. I thought that if I kept talking I might get to it. All the while I was aware of the irony—still am—of wanting something in life that I worked to suppress in my writing. Explicitness kills the illusion you create, robs the reader and the writer of complexity. There I was, contradicting one of my deepest beliefs, wanting to know the degree of Fox-Bourne's guilt, trying to pinpoint it the way you do a position on a chart.”

“Did you?”

“Not to my satisfaction. Not then.”

“And now?”

“I wanted to shoot his position as precisely as one can the sun and stars with a sextant. But a man's soul is harder to pinpoint. He was
guilty. I had a range of culpability. That was what made him so fascinating, you see, that despite his guilt it wasn't possible to label it, give it a number and position.”

“The shades of meaning you and Ford used to talk about,” I said.

He smiled.

“That was something we always agreed on.”

I remembered several of those occasions, Ford, particularly one in Rye where we'd all gone to visit Henry James only to find him tucked up in bed with a dreadful cold. We went for lunch at an old inn and the two of you worried the topic of guilt for a good hour. What fascinated me as a layman was the enormous concern you brought to the creation of your characters and your mutual horror at the possibility of simplifying them. Conrad never seemed quite clear in his mind over how Fox-Bourne saw his own actions. Had he lived another six years I could have told him, as I will you, eventually, the facts of the matter having come to me quite unexpectedly. I suspect Conrad wouldn't have been surprised, but it isn't what you may suspect, not by a long shot.

We left the café even though it was quiet now that the noontime crowd was gone. Conrad was eager to go back to the
Nellie,
as if she were the only place he could finish telling his story. We returned the way we had come and, when we passed Sebold's, I took another look at the sextant, seeing it in a different light. I'd always had a deep faith in that instrument to get me through perilous times at sea. It is still a splendid way to take stock of the natural world, but taking the measure of a man required something other than finely machined and calibrated metal. It seemed to me that you and Conrad had that skill in abundance and when I told him he laughed.

“We don't have answers, Malone. We just know how to ask interesting questions. That's part of the paradox of our line of work. We want, personally, to know everything. But our success depends on
staying clear of the explicit, letting the reader make up his mind where he is going based on the evidence.”

“You still see better than the rest of us,” I asserted.

“Sometimes. And when we do there's a cost.”

“In what respect?”

“Self-knowledge. Things you'd rather not know that come as a consequence of probing the hearts of others. Ford knew that better than any of my friends.”

O
N THE MORNING
train to Lowestoft and the hearing, Conrad felt as if he were on his way to witness an execution. The same orderly met him at the station. This time the young man was sober and uncommunicative, the only words they exchanged on the drive about the weather. As they passed the sentry at the entrance, Conrad could see the whole installation, the grass plots between buildings a deep lush green, the Union Jack flying from the flagpole crisp and brilliant under a cloudless sky, though neither the light nor the intense colors could dispel the grimness that touched every corner of the base, as if it were covered with a film of fine soot. Even his room, in the same building where he had been put up a week earlier, looked dour.