Martin gave her a quick, nervous smile and began searching for a place for the chair to stand.
‘How are you doing, Martin?’ she asked, deliberately not looking at anything too closely.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good. I’ve been making lists of everything.’
‘Lists?’
‘You know. All the ships he sailed on. All the injuries he had. All the hotels he stayed in. All the rivers he fished. There’s a lot to do.’
He pulled two chairs together and began to arrange the fishing chair between them.
‘Do you want a hand?’ Ruth asked.
‘Yes … yes … thanks.’ He spoke quickly, nervously again.
They pushed the chair into position. He didn’t sit in it right away. His fingers brushed lightly along the armrests and lingered across the rough, worn back supports, as if renewing acquaintance with an old friend.
‘I hope you don’t mind me coming round like this?’ she asked him, cautiously.
‘No.’
‘I came to see you in the post office a couple of times but you weren’t around.’
‘No. I don’t work there any more,’ said Martin, quickly, dismissively. He took hold of the arms of the chair and leaned his weight on to it.
‘You left?’
Martin stood back, looked down at the concoction of wood and leather and metal balanced uncomfortably against the thick shoulder of an armchair. He nodded admiringly.
‘You left the post office?’ Ruth repeated.
Martin looked up as if hearing the question for the first time. ‘I was asked to leave.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the campaign.’ He turned towards her and looked up, with a nervous smile that faded quickly. ‘You can’t keep things like that a secret in Theston,’ he said.
Suddenly and unexpectedly Ruth found herself too upset to speak. Tears filled her eyes in an aching rush. Martin turned away, embarrassed, the way she had hoped he wouldn’t be, staring uncomfortably out of the window. As she angrily fought back the tears Ruth was in a sense relieved. If his response had been friendly and physical who knows what she might have said and done.
‘I’m sorry.’ She shifted. ‘It’s all been my fault.’
‘What for?’
‘For opening my big mouth. For getting you into chairs and campaigns.’
Martin turned back to her and wagged a finger. He seemed suddenly to have regained confidence. He heaved himself into the chair. It swayed precariously. ‘The battle’s not over.’
He grinned, broad and wide and pushed himself hard against the unyielding wooden back. ‘The battle’s not over, Ruth. We’ll start another campaign. Only this time we’ll run it ourselves.’
Ruth smiled. She reached in her bag and searched briskly for a cigarette. ‘You’ll have to do it without me this time,’ she said.
Martin’s face clouded. ‘Why?’ he asked.
‘I’m going away for a while.’
His frown deepened. ‘How long?’
‘However long it takes to finish my book.’ She lit up and inhaled hard.
‘I thought you’d nearly finished.’
‘So did I. But –’ He watched as she tossed her head and stretched her long neck and threw a column of smoke high into the air as she had the first day he set eyes on her. ‘I was wrong,’ she said flatly.
Martin lay back in the fishing chair and took in what she had said.
‘I’ll be in Oxford,’ she went on. ‘I need the libraries. I’ve got to find a whole lot of new stuff.’
‘How long?’
‘Six weeks. Maybe two months. As long as it takes.’
Martin nodded slowly. He seemed about to speak, then quickly, abruptly, his mood changed. ‘Can we go for a drive? There’s something I want to show you.’
* * *
They drove down to the bypass and across into Theston, avoiding the centre of town and coming out on the hill above the harbour. Here Martin asked her to pull over and park. They got out of the car. He had brought with him an old pair of marine binoculars. He led her a little way down the hill to where they could see the harbour more clearly, and raised the glasses to his eyes.
In the short time since he had been there with Elaine, the place had been galvanised. Vans and trucks painted with the lightning-bolt logo of the Telemark company were clustered around what had once been Frank Rudge’s cold store and processing warehouse. This was now scaffolded and a lightweight aluminium frame was already in place on the roof. Even though it was a Sunday there were men working, securing a fabric skin across it. A line had been marked out towards the pier and trenches were being dug. Beside the trenches lengths of pipe were piled ready and a huge drum of cable dominated one end of the site. Council contractors had begun laying a new and wider tarmac surface to the harbour approach road.
But today Martin was looking elsewhere. He took down the binoculars and handed them to Ruth. ‘There, look.’ He pointed excitedly. ‘In the harbour.’
Ruth adjusted the glasses and focused on a long, graceful motor yacht with a black tinted perspex screen and a white streamlined hull and superstructure. A line of four portholes led to a name on the bow that she could just pick out. Nordkom IV. It was a glamorous boat, incongrous and dominating in the harbour.
Martin whispered to her. ‘Pilar!’
‘Oh come on!’ Ruth grunted derisively. ‘Pilar’ had character. That’s just a playboy boat.’
But Martin was hardly listening. His eyes were fastened on it, as it rocked gently, lazily at anchor. She could see beads of sweat on his temple. He spoke softly and urgently, without a glance towards her.
‘Imagine being out on that. Outriggers in place, lures dropped. Riding a ten-foot swell, in the fighting chair, a five-hundred pounder circling on the line. Reeling in slow and steady. Hours sometimes.’
Ruth knew nothing about boats and fishing. She hated The Old Man and the Sea and found Santiago the fisherman the most dismally sentimental of all Hemingway’s heroes.
‘They blow them out of the sea nowadays, don’t they?’ she said sourly.
Martin didn’t hear her. He was gazing at the boat. It was as if she had already gone away.
Thirty-seven
One month to the day after he had received his letter of dismissal, and three weeks after Ruth had left for Oxford, Martin Sproale returned to Theston post office. He presented an extraordinary aspect. His hair had grown thick and bushy. His face had fleshed out and much of it was now concealed beneath a thickening pale red beard. His shoulders had grown broad enough to hold a wide beige sweatshirt, which hung way down over a billowing pair of cotton shorts. He wore grubby espadrilles and no socks. The whole effect was of a weird distortion, as if Martin’s long, rangy frame was seen in a fairground mirror. This, at any rate, was how it looked to Elaine who happened to be between transactions as he appeared, hovering at the handmade chocolate counter and glowering through at the long line of Monday morning post office customers.
Since Martin had been sacked there had been rumours in Theston that he had gone away or even that he was seriously ill. These were contradicted by reported sightings of him on the hill overlooking the harbour. Though all confirmed that something had snapped, nothing quite prepared Elaine for the wild, shambling figure who was now approaching the ten-deep queue which coiled obediently around the rope and stainless-steel cordon.
‘Position Number Four.’ The high, strident tone of the earlier announcements had been traced to a fault in the system. The tape had now been readjusted and the voice was deeper and more vibrant. The Swedish eunuch had been replaced by an elderly tragic actress.
Martin went straight to the head of the queue. There was some shuffling and much whispering among those customers who recognised him. The wide-bosomed middle-aged lady at the front of the queue was not one of them. She shot a withering look of disapproval as Martin took up position alongside her. ‘Do you mind?’ she said sternly. ‘There is a queue, you know.’
&
nbsp; Martin leaned in towards her. ‘I’m disabled.’
She eyed Martin sceptically, glancing quickly down at his lower half. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, but there is a queue.’
He leaned in closer. ‘Cambodia. With the UN. Clearing land mines.’
The lady was not convinced. ‘You look all right to me.’
‘Internal,’ Martin whispered.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘My stomach has been almost entirely replaced.’
‘Position Number One,’ the voice announced, tragically.
As the woman made to go forward Martin held up a carrier bag. ‘My stools,’ he said. ‘They were meant to go off yesterday.’
He moved swiftly to the counter. Shirley Barker was at Position Number One. She could not disguise a mixture of shock and distaste at Martin’s appearance.
Martin pushed aside a few matted strands of hair and regarded her cheerfully. ‘Hello, daughter,’ he beamed.
‘Hello, Martin,’ Shirley replied cautiously. ‘How are you?’
His eyes searched behind the counter.
‘It must be a nice change not having to get up at six thirty every morning,’ Shirley ventured warily.
Martin nodded enthusiastically. ‘Means I can get up at six, when it’s barely light enough to see the pine trunks and the soles of your feet are wet from the dew on the stones, and the touch of the air from the sea promises how the day will be. It’s the best time to write.’
Shirley was aware of disapproving faces behind the rope. ‘What is it you wanted, Martin?’
He sighed heavily. ‘I want the same as anybody else, daughter. I want to know that I’ve taken care of the big things. Like love and hate and fear. And that I haven’t done too bad at the small ones either. And when the time comes to make my peace –’
She interrupted. ‘D’you want stamps or anything?’
Martin stopped and looked sharply across at her. She felt a strong intimation of hostility. ‘I want to see Geraldine please,’ said Martin.
‘Well she’s at the end there. She’s occupied.’
‘Will you tell her I’m here?’
Shirley had recovered her composure by now. She fingered the brooch at her throat. ‘Look Martin, there are a lot of people waiting in that queue.
‘I don’t care how many people are waiting in the queue,’ Martin replied quietly. He leaned closer. ‘Get off your goddamn ass, go down that goddamn counter and tell Miss Cotton to get the fuck down here. Fast!’
Ever since she had started work at the new office, Shirley Barker had been longing for an excuse to press the security alarm button. In her imagination she had always seen it magically producing two or three burly ex-marines abseiling down from the roof to rescue her. She was considerably disappointed that security appeared, after a short delay and a little nervously, in the shape of Alan Randall, sporting a new leather sports coat and a spotted bow-tie.
Martin felt a tight grip on his elbow. ‘Come on now, Martin. Let’s talk about this outside.’
Martin turned angrily and pulled his elbow sharply away. ‘Do you mind!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve come here for postal services. I don’t want sweeties. I don’t want dirty magazines. I want to talk to one of the employees of the Post Office service of this country.’
‘We are running a business here, Martin,’ said Randall firmly. ‘You will be dealt with in strict rotation.’
Alan Randall was a confectioner and abhorred physical violence, so when Martin hit him it was a completely new and unfamiliar sensation. One moment he was the voice of reason, the next he was lying flat on the floor. He didn’t feel anything other than faintly ridiculous, and the fact that Hettie Loyle, a woman half his size and with an artificial hip, should be helping him up only made things worse. He rubbed his jaw as he had seen them do on television and assured all and sundry he would survive.
* * *
‘What was that all about then?’
Martin sat, long legs squeezed uncomfortably beneath one of the dainty round tables of the Theston Tea Shoppe. Geraldine sat opposite him. She was wearing a purple chenille sweater which she had pulled hastily over her company blouse as they had left the post office. With one hand she twirled a lock of hair – which had grown recently and changed colour from ash blonde to light auburn, and with the other she rotated her spoon slowly round a mug full of pale brown coffee.
‘Well?’ she asked again. ‘What was so important about seeing me that you had to slug someone?’
Martin looked up. Geraldine could see his eyes were red-rimmed and unhealthy. Too much booze or too little sleep. Maybe both. He was certainly in bad shape.
‘I hate that place,’ he began. I hated it the first time I saw it and I hated it when I worked in it –’
Geraldine nodded quickly. ‘Martin, after what just happened I’m sure the feeling’s mutual.’
He lowered his head again, then peeped up at her with a quick, coy smile. ‘It was a good punch, though.’
Geraldine took a sip of the coffee. It was warm to tepid, which was how she liked it. When she spoke she tried hard to balance exasperation with consideration.
‘Martin, we would all have been pleased to see you. There was no need to come in looking for trouble.’ She couldn’t help adding, ‘Trouble is out today, anyway, he’s meeting the bankers.’
Again Martin shook his head scornfully. ‘I came for you.’
Geraldine narrowed her eyes. ‘Why me?’
Martin looked her in the eye for the first time. ‘Because of the boat,’ he said.
Geraldine was about to drink again, but the cup stopped halfway to her mouth. She frowned. ‘I’m sorry, Martin,’ she said. ‘Did I miss an episode?’
‘The boat I’ve seen you on. In the harbour.’
‘You’ve seen me on a boat?’
Geraldine felt suddenly uncomfortable. Not with the boat so much as the seeing. His look of concentration intensified. ‘Sure. I watch that harbour every day. I watch what’s going on. I watch who’s there. I know when Devereux comes. I know when Nick comes. I know when the boat’s in and who it brings here.’
‘So?’
Martin’s eyes met hers. She saw something in the back of them, some remnant of what had appealed to her that night at Marshall’s. Some odd light that burned.
Martin continued, slowly and precisely. ‘I want, more than anything else, to go out in that boat.’
Geraldine was aware of having to get back to work. She glanced at her watch and made to speak. Martin cut in quickly. ‘Do you understand?’ he asked her. ‘I want to go on that boat. I want to go fishing.’
Geraldine gave a half-shrug, half-laugh. ‘Martin, I don’t want to see you get in any more trouble. Just forget all this mess. Forget all these people. Take a job somewhere else. Honestly. There is nothing else you can do and no way I can help you.’
‘I want to go out and I want to go deep and I want to feel just what it’s like.’ The pitch of his voice rose again. ‘You understand, don’t you? I know you do. You’re not like the rest of them, Geraldine. Are you. Are you?’
Geraldine watched him pityingly. He was a sad sight. A battered, bruised, beaten man. He was not bad or wrong, he was just hopeless. But it was not her fault. She was not particularly happy with the work she was doing, but she did it and she did it without complaining. She also did it well enough to have been given, amongst other things, the responsibility of liaison between Shelflife and Nordkom each time the yacht made one of its increasingly frequent visits across the North Sea to Theston. She had been brought up with boats and she knew exactly what Martin meant about the excitement of being at sea, but whatever his delusions were, she could not satisfy them.
‘I’m sorry Martin, there is no way I could get you anywhere near that boat.’
In any case, Nordkom IV was no fishing boat. It was a state-of-the-art, seventy-five-foot motor yacht built in Sweden for Nordkom at a cost of one and a half million pounds. She was a beautiful ship, but she was no
t for recreational purposes. The sun-lounge, the jacuzzi, and the integrated bathing platform were rarely used. Nordkom IV was an ocean-going boardroom, able to cover the one hundred and thirty miles from Rotterdam to the English coast in the space of one planning meeting.
To let this threatening, wild-eyed derelict anywhere near the pristine white powder-coated steel hull, let alone the solid teak-strip deck or the twenty-foot-long polished mahogany boardroom table, would not be sensible.
Thirty-eight
In the twenty-five years of her life Geraldine Cotton had rarely done the sensible thing. If two courses of action were presented to her she would evaluate them as to what she probably should do and what she probably shouldn’t do and invariably she chose the latter. She blamed this entirely on her parents who had devoted two otherwise promising lives to being sensible. They had made a sensible marriage and bought a sensible house and taken sensible jobs to which they could drive their sensible cars. They had sensibly had three children whom they enrolled at sensible schools in the hope that they would grow up to be as sensible as themselves.
It had nearly worked. Geraldine’s sister George, older by four and a half years, was a Human Resources Officer with one of the most sensible companies in Britain. She had been married for eight years to an intelligent, hard-working loss adjuster with an unblemished record of marital fidelity. They had two delightful children and were planning a third. Her brother Giles was a geography teacher at a school for largely sensible children in the Thames Valley. He had recently joined the Ecology Party but, despite this encouraging trend, had dashed Geraldine’s hopes by becoming engaged to a terminally sensible girl called Sheila who worked as a Centralised Billing Query Co-ordinator for South-Eastern Gas.
Geraldine had become aware of wanting to do things that were not sensible from the age of six. She had decided to climb the massive sycamore tree at home as soon as she was old enough to do so, not just because it was massive but because it overhung the garden of the house next door. But her curiosity had misfired. What she had seen Mr Marsden doing to Mrs Marsden through an upstairs window of the house had so surprised her that she had lost her footing and plunged through a greenhouse. She was badly cut and very shaken but conscious enough to be able to tell her parents that Mr Marsden appeared to be a cannibal.
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