One of the posts had a nest on it—white head, hawk's beak, and my goodness two chicks looking out of the nest!
Cheep cheep, they said, cheep cheep, as we passed by and under them.
Ospreys, shouted Monica, ospreys!
A white heron floated over, magnificent, yellow bill with a blue flash—egrets, I've had a few—and here are some gulls with black heads, and swallow-type birds flicked across our path. A wooden landing stage before pretty wooden houses: pines, the water calm.
On the right a creek—we should have been going along it into the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, but we can't—we have to go four miles to the Atlantic Yacht Basin, on the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal.
A lock. A red light. We started to moor up but a notice said Go away, there is turbulence, go and moor up back there. We fastened ourselves as best we could to a post made for an ocean liner.
Hi there—a voice below my feet—someone holding on to our rudder. He was tanned, bearded, with a braided sailor's cap. He looked as if he should have been captaining a destroyer, not sitting in a kayak three inches above the water. Love your boat, he said, where are you going?
We told him. Welcome to our country, he said, and we warmed at his welcome.
The water in the lock rose two feet and took an hour, with much shouting and a lady lock-keeper striding back and forth along its hundred yards, and bells and tannoys. In an hour we can do three locks in England but there are few locks round here and they want to get full value from them.
Ahead of us a great bridge. We moored and waited and a klaxon bellowed and the counterweights as big as houses dropped on to the banks and the great bridge broke in the middle and we sailed under the great bridge into Great Bridge.
ATLANTIC YACHT BASIN, GREAT BRIDGE, Virginia, is on an island of pines. A river port, with workshops, big boats on the wharves, in the air, in the row of sheds, each shed big enough to hold an airship. Many workmen, a few boaters, a simple lounge and an ice machine and a courtesy car. You brought her in nice and easy, said the dockmaster.
A quarter of a mile up the track the main road with shops and takeaways. We walked up towards the shops, through the perfume from the pines.
Monnie, I said, there is something awfully wrong, something important, something that could stop us getting to Fort Myers.
STAND
AND DELIVER
Virginia
Dr Gormley — The Dying Whippet — Passion and Grief — Weather from Hell — A Continuous Plangent Shriek — Young Dr Berger in Apple Green — Your Rat? — Just One More Day — The Cancellation — Rusty the Sheriff — The Jellyfish — It's Just Not Going to Be Me Any More — All the Shadows, All the Memories — You Have Had No Egrets? — Two Hundred and Fifty Beats a Minute — Black Chaps with Spanners — Stand and Deliver
DR GORMLEY WAS THIN AND TALL WITH A southern voice. His face showed concern, and humour about the burden of mortality that was so boring when we could have been looking at photos of the grandchildren. You would tell Dr Gormley anything, and you would trust him completely, even if he called you into the back room to take out your liver with a Stanley knife.
It had taken us only an hour to get to Dr Gormley from scratch, though it was Sunday and the Fourth of July weekend. In America the medical profession has a special relationship with patients—you give them money and they treat you. If you haven't got any money I suppose it doesn't work so well.
I am going to the UK in a fortnight, said Dr Gormley. My son is marrying a lady from the UK.
Good move, I said, did it myself.
Yes, you have a hernia. It shouldn't bother you if you are careful but it could strangulate and kill you at any time. This is the best man to see—ring him on Monday. He will probably operate.
That night it was ninety degrees. Jim screamed and yelped in his sleep.
• • •
I DON'T KNOW IF YOU HAVE EVER GONE TO bed wet
It was over ninety and the air was sodden and the mosquitoes fierce and cunning. The boat had to be left open at night or we would suffocate, so we slept under mosquito nets. Mosquito nets are hot and I tangle with them and pull them down and the mosquitoes bite me through the mesh. Monica slept in the saloon and I lay in the cabin soaking, and my old bites came to life, firing up my whole nervous system.
Many people were taking part in the fitting of the air-conditioner. There was Mike and his secretary and his installer, the site supervisor of the Atlantic Yacht Basin and the ladies from the finance department, the dockmaster, the foreman carpenter, the carpenter and the other carpenter, the paint-shop people, the African-American gentlemen with their little boat who towed the Phyllis May around, the operator of the boat-lift, the gentlemen who pushed the boat into the canvas swing of the boat-lift and half a dozen other people with fat bellies and moustaches who came on board and patted Jim and said Owyall doon? and Neat boat, never seen one before, and looked worried.
I never wanted anything more than I wanted that air-conditioning. In fact I never wanted anything half as much that did not involve sex or six figures.
The marina worked on a time-plus-materials basis and relying on forty years of business experience Monica and I set our estimate of the bill at twice the highest figure mentioned in conversation, including any sum mentioned in jest. Monica transferred funds from the UK. I hope you have not destabilized the pound, I said.
Mike's colleague, the installer, walked out on him after eight years and the timing began to fall apart. We could not leave the boat as we could be needed any time. We waited all day for her to be taken out of the water to have the hole punched under the waterline and no one came.
It got hotter and hotter and Jim was doing his impression of the Dying Whippet, lying on his side gasping, with twitches and moans. Jim is a gifted actor but he wasn't acting this time. Monica was thinly coated in maple syrup, and there were things crawling inside my shirt, pissing themselves as they went.
At breakfast the dockmaster called by. Mike's mother had died. I could hear the high, thin laughter of the mosquitoes.
THE COOLEST SPOT IN THE ATLANTIC YACHT Basin is under the trees by the dockmaster's office. I agree with Winston Spencer Churchill that taking a nap after lunch is a healthy practice, providing of course you get your full night's sleep as well. The low wooden chairs let me lean back and relax and I closed my eyes and the breeze from the water was almost cool.
A voice in my ear—Y'all English? I have a half-brother in Southampton.
I did not open my eyes.
Oh yes, said Monica.
My father was over in the war, said the voice. His English girlfriend got pregnant and in those days they posted you somewhere else right away. Nowadays you can find out about your parents if you are adopted and after fifty-seven years my brother found his mother living a couple of miles away, and then he found his father in America and then he found me.
I don't know if I was asleep or awake.
Goodness me, said Monica to the voice.
Ah well, said the voice, and got up and went away.
Rude bugger, I thought, and me having my afternoon rest. And then I thought of the passion and the grief and the loss and the meetings too late and I felt guilty and I should have been more interested but the voice had gone.
One day the grief and the loss will be gone too, but sixty years will hardly be long enough for that.
HEAVY CLOUDS, FLASHES, THUNDER, RAIN, A tempest of afternoon rain. When it was over Monica and Jim and I went for a walk down the island among the pines. The island is sandy, a few acres, with pontoons, boats and boardwalks, and pines. Jim liked the island and so did we. I had bought a special mosquito kit—cloth bands for wrists and ankles, which I had to soak with a foul oil.
The boardwalks were wet, the grass standing in water, the air like soup. Frogs sang in the puddles. Jim became interested in a stick, offering it to me as he does and then refusing it and growling and running away and frolicking—ha ha ha. Perhaps he is adjusting to the heat, I t
hought, nice to see him happy. Across the river a heron lowered its bum into the water, trying to cool down. It flew off, dripping. Dusk fell quickly.
That night I woke and our ship's clock, lit through the window, said four o'clock. My fancy bug kit had failed me and my legs were ablaze. I scratched and sweated and scratched and grieved and scratched and swore and the hands of the clock froze and the wind blew through the window like the exhaust from a bus engine.
At five thirty it was first light and I took Jim for a walk—perhaps it will help my legs, I thought, and I must look after the poor dog. It will be too hot later and I must put the helpless creature's health above my own convenience and I am really an excellent fellow. The frogs were asleep but it was ninety degrees and all the world—river, grass, trees and air—was poached and sodden. I put my hand over the side of the boardwalk and the canal water was hot.
Jim stopped—he did not want to go for this walk. He tried to pull me towards the little marina lounge, which was air-conditioned, then he sat down. Not want to go for a walk? I said. I get up at dawn for you and you don't want to walk? You ungrateful hound, you don't deserve me as your master. Everything is against me—a whippet that won't take exercise, bug defences that don't work, death, delays, physical collapse, weather from hell.
Back at the boat Monica was in tears—We are getting nowhere—no air-conditioning, and you ill and everything soaking wet all the time and that chap yesterday said the Intracoastal was closed and he was a yacht broker and he should know. It's like waiting in an airport in a tropical country and the windows are broken and you don't know if the plane will ever come and you don't want to get on it when it does. And look at the Virginia Pilot—the mosquitoes have started carrying deadly diseases. People over the age of 50 are at the greatest risk of serious illness, such as encephalitis or meningitis. Idon't want people to be afraid but I want them to be aware, said Dreda A. McCreary, Virginia Beach Mosquito Control Biologist. Thanks Dreda, nice of you to keep us in touch.
Remember in business, Mon, I said, we used to say that anyone can be a star when the orders are coming in and the staff are loyal and the suppliers are delivering on time. You think you are making the money then, but you aren't really. You make the money when there are no sales and the staff have betrayed you and suppliers are letting you down and you can't sleep for worrying and you just hang on and hang on. Anyone can blast across Albemarle Sound on a calm day with a good engine and be a hero. But the real adventure is now. We'll hang on and we'll hang on. But I must mention this lump on my head. I think it might be cancer.
JIM LED ME TO THE DOOR OF THE MARINA lounge and we went in.
I made myself a coffee and turned on the television and fiddled with the remote control and hit one of those programmes about people from trailer parks for the fat. There was a pale woman of immense size, with a long sullen face. She was weeping out of control. She had just admitted to her partner that her baby could have been fathered by another bloke. She wept and wept and her partner wept and wept and the audience wept and wept and the anchorman looked pretty upset. From time to time they showed shots of the baby, who was taking it all very well.
The network had paid for a DNA test to decide the parentage of the baby and, God forgive them, were going to tell us the result on camera. The woman began to scream and her partner began to groan and the audience shrieked and the camera cut back to the baby, who was blowing bubbles.
The baby had been conceived by the partner! The couple fell on each other, rolling on the floor. The audience began to break bits off the chairs. In came the baby in the arms of a sobbing nurse and emotions went into the red zone, with random whirling and throwing movements by all involved and a continuous plangent shriek like a train trying not to run into the WH Smith bookshop on Waterloo Station.
And now the commercials.
Come on Jim, back to the boat. Poor little chap—the gravel is so hot for your paws. But I have to go and see a man.
OVER THE MILLENNIA EVOLUTION FITS US OUT to deal with life, sometimes in funny ways. Since my mid-sixties I have developed a defence against humiliation and risk—my heart races and I nearly faint and I have to sit down. It happens when I feel threatened, as when I am about to set out against informed advice across the Channel in an inland boat, or see a surgeon about an operation that could wreck the plans of two years. I leaned against the wall and tried to regain full consciousness.
The waiting room in Chesapeake General Hospital was small, without windows. In the corner a brownskin boy was asleep with his head on the shoulder of a brownskin girl. Two ladies felt their way in, each twenty years older than Monica and me.
Mr Darlington!
Stand up, don't faint. Into a consulting room and here at once is young Dr Berger, tanned and handsome, in apple green.
This your ECG? Your heartbeat is a bit fast—are you an anxious sort of a guy?
Yes, I have always been a bit of a coward.
Excellent—not the sort to go and do anything silly, eh?
Young Dr Berger pushed a finger into my abdomen. No doubt what's the matter with you. Do you have the problem in your family?
Probably, they are a funny lot.
And you are writing a book—hey that's neat, and you are in a hurry. I will operate on Tuesday.
Do you have any questions? asked Andrea at the admin desk. I wanted to ask What is Winston Churchill's middle name? or What happened to the crispy bacon we used to have before the war? But I made do with a short gibber and Monica took on the paperwork.
Andrea was tattooed from her wrist all up one arm, not the other, in tangerine yellow, and blue, like Chris's compass rose in Portsmouth. She was all flowers and fairies. And joy of joys, the design on her Hawaiian shirt, surfers and fish, matched the frieze on the wallpaper.
Dr Berger is a very good doctor, volunteered Andrea.
I thought—what if she had said old Butcher Berger, Berger the Bugger, Half Blind Berger, the Killer of the Eastern Seaboard. What could I do anyway? But thanks Andrea.
I smiled and nodded—See you Tuesday.
• • •
WHEN WE STARTED BOATING IT WAS AROUND the Potteries, which are near Stone. A canal boat goes at walking pace and walkers often greeted us. Are you all right? they would say, pronouncing it Your rat? as if checking the ownership of a passing rodent.
Yes, we are fine, I would say, how kind of you to ask—we had a bit of trouble with a loose throttle cable an hour or two ago but for once I managed to fix it myself and now she is going like a train.
The walkers would look puzzled and fall back.
I turned to my friend Dave, who was born and brought up in Stoke. You have got it all wrong, he said. The correct answer to Your rat? is Your rat?
From then on when a walker called out Your rat? I would call back Your rat? and the walker would wave and smile and sometimes we would exchange further words, each in our respective tongues. Sometimes I would take the initiative and call out Your rat? and they would call back Your rat? and it was great.
In Virginia everyone we passed in the boatyard or in the shops said Owya doon? And we would reply Hello.
But that is wrong, I said to Monica. The correct reply to Owya doon? must be Owya doon? Owya doon? must be the polite greeting round here.
A gentleman of three hundred pounds, one of the African-American chaps who moved the boats, came towards me.
Owya doon? I said.
We had a rather perplexing time with that trawler over there, said the African-American gentleman—I thought for a moment goodness me I have got the lifting rope caught in the rudder, but in the end we got her out fine. How kind of you to ask.
Perhaps you should try Your rat? said Monica.
ATLANTIC YACHT BASIN HAD FOUND US A mooring by the side of one of the boat sheds, near the carpenter's shop. Behind us a wide creek and on the other side of the tea-coloured water tall trees, lightly egreted.
I had given up trying to sleep on the Phyllis May and was sleeping
in the marina lounge on the floor and Monica and Jim joined me in the daytime and we listened to the air-conditioner and read paperbacks and looked at the walls. Outside the air came off the water like sheets before they go through the wringer.
Our carpenter, Tim, a melancholy man, became slower and slower. One day, I said to Monica, we'll come on to the boat and find him in the corner, covered with lichen.
Mike came back after his mother's funeral. OhmiGard—they haven't put in the cabinet yet—I can't believe it! I can't believe it! But she had a lovely occasion yesterday—after it I felt calm and easy. Don't worry, I'll keep going, I have got to do something.
Mike, I said, I must have the unit in tomorrow. If I have to sleep on the boat without it when I come back from the hospital I won't last the night.
Tangerine-yellow-and-blue Andrea rang with instructions for the operation tomorrow—where to go, what not to eat. There would be a general anaesthetic but I would be able to come home that night.
Will it hurt? I asked.
Dr Berger is very aggressive with pain control, said Andrea.
I wasn't quite sure if she meant aggressive towards the patients or the pain but I think she meant No, it won't hurt.
Just one more day, darling, I said to Monica—the air-conditioning will be in and my hernia will be done and we can get going—Indian River here we come, the narrow dog is on his way!
HELLO MR DARLINGTON, ANDREA HERE FROM the hospital. Your operation has been cancelled. The anaesthetist looked at your ECG and said he can't possibly anaesthetize you or you might die. Your heart rate is out of control and it is a much worse danger than the hernia. Didn't you know about it? You must come and have cardiac tests. I will ring you tomorrow.
First numbness, then anger, then grief. Why didn't the fools pick it up on the first ECG? And I have known about this heart thing for ages and ignored it. Oh bugger, bugger, bugger.
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