Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  Guy’s dad would take another deep inhalation of the smoke, then wink at his son. Our secret, he would say, grinning as he turned the ignition.

  The appearance of that concealed cigarette, the glow of the lighter’s coils touching the dry papery end, the indulgent inhalation, the wink - these turned out to be the first times in Guy’s life when he’d known his family might not be quite as it seemed. Adults had their own lives and deceit could rise like genies from the end of those cigarettes.

  Until then, Guy imagines his childhood passing in a hazy sunlit calm, tinted with the bronze and faded blues of old Instamatic photos. Damp plastic anoraks, polyester trousers, quiet country walks, apricot halves from the tin. Overwhelmingly, a sense of certainty. But the cigarette lighter, the knowing wink, it had undercut all that. ‘Our little secret,’ said without fail, every day.

  His father had been a travelling salesman, selling cameras and photographic goods in the era when they were still relatively glamorous. He kept his Nikons, Canons, Pentaxes and medium format cameras in the boot, alongside a suitcase packed with several expensive shirts and a couple of suits. A navy blue suit, with braiding-edged large lapels, that’s one Guy remembers his dad in.

  Although Guy’s not seen him for thirty years, he remembers his dad was small, with a quick energy that kept him slim, and he’d had an unusual name - Conrad. You can’t have a name like that in an East Anglian market town, not without attracting attention. He had an acrobat’s sense of balance, even while he walked, and the hours on the road had given him a seasoned, semi-rugged look, often mistaken for worldly-wisdom by his clients, but not trusted by his wife’s friends, who viewed him exotically. Got a sparkle, ain’t he, by which they meant he had an eye for the ladies. But in Guy’s memory, his father had had the air of a traveller, always, even while he dozed in his armchair after an exhausting day on the road, his fingers ever-so-slightly clenched, and his curly hair, long at the temples, tousled by the wind from his open car window, even in the stillness of the front room. His chair and his house, but never quite at home in either of them - because he preferred to be in other people’s spaces rather than create one of his own. The BMW was a more natural fit. It had wheels.

  Guy remembers how his dad would contemplate the ash as it grew along the cigarette and watch patterns of smoke rising from its tip, as if they might fleetingly reveal a secret. The seconds ticking, all the other children already hanging their coats on the pegs outside the classroom, no doubt. And there would be Guy, watching his father smoking, looking at his small spiky moustache which was cut thin, like Clark Gable’s. Large sideburns, an inch lower than the rest of the men in the area, not a single grey hair in them. Conrad would pass his son a Yorkie bar to put in his satchel - despite chocolate being banned from school - and Guy would see that famous glint in his father’s eye which always seemed to sell himself as someone who has seen things, lived a life, lived by instinct.

  He’d wanted to be like his father right up to the day his mother packed those expensive clothes into several tea chests, put them on the drive, and sent them away, mysteriously, seemingly off to a great adventure themselves.

  ‘You’re my little man, now, Guy, my own little man. All right?’ Guy’s mother had said that day, her tears falling on the gravel so the stones appeared to have drips of polish on them.

  Those are the moments that make us, Guy thinks. We’re the culmination of those moments. We’re the culmination of knots and fixes.

  Without her husband, Guy’s mother had quickly seemed boring. She was unsporty, a joiner of societies, with the East Anglian habit of gentle humour and a vague way of expressing herself. Too soft and mussy in the mornings, kept her nightgown on till lunch time, always the first to look tired in the evenings. She took her wedding photos off the mantelpiece and put them in a drawer, and Guy found them in there, removed from view, and saw that in all the photos his mother had had a surprised look - outside the church porch, at the reception, in the back seat of the car.

  And to fill the space his father had left, Guy’s mother bought a piano. Lessons followed, scales and chromatics, practice and practice, making Guy fill the house with new noise. ‘You’ll thank me one day,’ she would say, mantra-like, and he supposes he does, now, even though he certainly didn’t back then. It seemed she’d anchored him to the largest, most unmoveable piece of furniture in the house. There’d be no more running off.

  Years of piano practice left no mark at all, had no place in his memory, but a performance he went to aged thirteen did, at Orford Church. He remembers how shadowed and magical the church had seemed, filled with an air of expectancy, with the stained-glass windows looking like the mysteriously opaque images in his father’s slide boxes, before a light was shone through them, and the cast dressed in robes from Japanese Noh theatre, sitting patiently by the raised platform which served as a stage. Then the opening plainsong of Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River, so monastic in sound, Te lucis ante terminum, and the cast walking dreamlike into their places. The drum, beat with a finger, sounding like rainfall, the strange dissonant chords.

  He had seen his mother cry that night, in profile; single tears moving slowly down her cheek, illuminated in the soft light of the performance, each tear forming like wax welling from a candle, as the Madwoman’s grief became evident on stage. Guy had listened to the music and realized, for the first time, music was all he ever wanted to do. There, in that church, the strange layers of Britten’s sound, simply embellished by each new voice and instrument, pared down, textured, it had truly inspired him.

  Music’s filled his life ever since. He has it within reach, always, a necessary addiction, not in neatly ordered CD racks and bookshelves, but in piles scattered here and there, like snacks. A messy heap of scores and arrangements on top of the piano in the Flood’s saloon, open CDs on the table, scraps of treble clef notation on corners of the newspaper. He whistles. He hums. He goes over melodies, messing them up with quirky modulations. Without that concert he might never have discovered this language. Might never have viewed the five lines of the bass and treble clefs as endlessly stretching out like the lanes of a racetrack, in perfect and unquestionable parallel for all eternity. The E line will never rise to cross the G. These geometric washing lines on which music notes are hung - they never alter. It is certainty in a life that lost its certainty. Like that Middle C, alone on its little peg of a line below the treble clef, so important, but pushed out nonetheless. Ignored. He’s always felt sorry for it, really.

  Guy stands naked, examining his reflection in the full length mirror on the back of his wardrobe door. The same mirror the original Dutch bargeman may or may not have bothered to look at. A reflection isn’t always necessary, especially at sea. Guy looks at how pale his belly is - it’s a little podgy too - he tries to lift it, then breathes in and turns to the side. Mm, getting hairy on the shoulders, that’s something he hasn’t noticed before. But he looks strong, he’s always had that.

  He’d tried to sleep in the afternoon, but had been unable to. Maybe it was the turning of the tide that heralded his unease, a direction under the boat that swung the Flood on its mooring till it pointed downriver. An implied direction, to go out to sea again.

  He puts on a white shirt and his thick-rimmed glasses, then has a shave. He looks at himself in the mirror again, and pushes his hair back behind the temples - he’s getting quite grey there, not that he minds. But in the shirt he begins to feel too clean, too stiff, his skin has a gleaming look on the cheeks that will undo him all evening, he knows it, he won’t relax. He’s still haunted by crying in front of the trawler men. He can’t trust himself in company. It was easier to be alone on the North Sea, he thinks, with its endless water and air and sandbanks. But was it? Really?

  Position: The Falls of Lora. 7:10pm

  ‘You’re early,’ Marta says, leaning over the rail to take his rope. She too has changed for the evening. She’s in a dark-green crocheted cardigan, with baggy sleeves. It looks like a compl
icated piece of clothing, and has been held together by a large brooch. Guy thinks both of them making such an effort to look good is in some way embarrassing.

  ‘This boat has seen some sailing,’ he says.

  ‘My husband’s other woman,’ she replies. She guides him down the cockpit steps towards the cabin, adding, ‘It’s horribly small.’

  It’s an understatement. The saloon is amazingly cramped, part galley, part bunk area, with a fixed Formica table and curved walls that follow the yacht’s shape, but it’s the shelves that are most oppressive. On both sides there are books crammed into any space that will take them, held in place by batons that run across their spines. They narrow the saloon and give the air the subdued sound of a library. He sees the books before he sees Rhona, seated at the table in an emerald-green knitted top. More of her clothes spill out from a large saggy holdall pushed to one side, none of them folded, full of their own unwrapping, and through an open door beyond, he can see a tapering bunk area filled with duvets and rugs and more clothes on the floor.

  Guy is very aware that he hardly knows them. It makes him over-keen to put them at their ease, so he sets off the evening telling them about coming here ten years earlier, how the pub still had that bricolage whale back then, and how he and four others had been in a country-folk band doing a gig.

  He wonders afterwards why he didn’t mention that one of the band was his wife.

  Marta replies politely, ‘Are you still a musician?’ She doesn’t look comfortable in her cardigan. She keeps having to adjust it.

  ‘Oh no, I teach kids how to play the piano. That’s how I afford the mooring fees. I mean, I don’t get much, but I don’t need much any more, just enough to get by. I’ve got about ten pupils who have lessons after school, but not in the summer holidays. I have a piano on board.’

  ‘Right,’ Rhona pitches in. ‘We’ve been guessing what you do.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Mum thought you were on the run.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘And not true, either,’ says Marta.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ Guy’s calming down rapidly.

  ‘We hate this boat,’ Rhona says, dramatically. She has a curious mouth, slightly unconventional in the way the top lip rises. Her teeth are strong and prominent. It’s attractive.

  Marta brings a large bowl of pasta to the table. ‘We thought we could manage and bring these dusty books back without them getting wet - though really we haven’t been doing much sailing - we’ve used the motor. Ro’s here to watch me fail.’

  ‘You’re not failing,’ Rhona says.

  ‘Very kind. But I am.’

  ‘We used the sail the other day.’

  ‘With mixed results. Problem is, the motor makes it boring, and it gives us too much time. We’re not into too much time at the moment, are we, love?’

  Marta gives her daughter a slightly testing look. Rhona shrugs and gives a warm smile back.

  ‘Where are the books going?’

  ‘Eventually, in the attic. In Cambridge. We’ve motored all the way round from the Solent, and we’re going to leave it here, aren’t we?’ Rhona nods. ‘You live by yourself?’ Marta asks.

  ‘Yeah. All year round, and I spend most of it thinking I’m not up to it.’ He tells them about his estuary - the Blackwater - and his own mooring slotted between the wrecks and the soon-to-be wrecks of the Tide Mill anchorage. He tells them about the gulls landing on the wooden roof above his cabin, falling like sacks of bones in winter when the sea’s cold and the birds are full of anger and empty inside. How they wake him up. And the flocks of starlings that blow up into the cold air above the estuary, turning in strange patterns in the dusk before they settle in the trees. The patches of phosphorescence that drift by in the flow during the middle of the night, sparkling like glitter lost in the water, and the cormorants that fish from his bow, wings outstretched in the morning sun to dry their feathers. It all sounds more enjoyable than he’d intended.

  ‘That’s great,’ Rhona says, enthusiastically. She’s not all cool young woman, after all.

  ‘Ro’s a fan of houseboats. Viking blood.’

  ‘Right - are you Norwegian?’

  Marta seems to find that hilarious. She laughs loudly and puts her hand to her mouth, concealing that quirky tooth of hers.

  ‘Icelandic,’ she says.

  ‘It’s not that funny, Mum.’

  ‘To a girl from Reykjavik, it’s always funny. Sorry,’ she says, ‘it’s just I don’t think I have an accent. I came to England at eighteen to study archaeology - and instead I fell in love and never went back.’

  ‘How long’ve you lived on the boat?’ Rhona asks, half interrupting her mother.

  ‘Five years. I suppose it’s not all bad,’ Guy says, forcing a brightness, ‘the way the tide lifts your whole life up just to put it back down in the mud twice a day, that’s wonderful, when you’re asleep and you start to float - I really like that - it’s like you drift away in every sense, from yourself.’ Guy realizes he might be talking too much; living alone has made him an unpredictable guest. He needs to rein it in. ‘And the pub on the quay’s good - they do crispy whitebait and sweet scallops, and dark nutty ale.’

  ‘See - you like it,’ Rhona says, downing a glass of wine. Rhona’s top has small metallic threads woven into it. Guy notices Marta looking concerned.

  ‘But the spring tides are scary - they stretch the ropes. And I’ve had enough of chemical toilets.’ He gets the desired smile from the others, both of them with a slight crinkle at the edges of their mouths - he hasn’t noticed that similarity before. He’s buoyed by them. The simple pleasure of making a woman smile, there’s nothing like it.

  ‘What made you live on a boat?’ Rhona asks.

  Guy hesitates - he doesn’t want to ruin the evening like he did on the trawler. But it’s hard. He can feel the space where Freya should be, even here, where there is no space. He decides to be vague, ‘Various reasons.’ He can tell Marta senses a subject he’s hiding, but she lets it pass.

  ‘Yesterday,’ he jokes, ‘I woke up and the barge was stuck on a sandbank.’

  ‘Told you!’ Ro says, looking at her mother as if it’s confirmed one of their dreads. ‘Where?’

  ‘About ten miles offshore. But the odd thing was how relaxing it was. The sand was only this much higher than the tide, and it’s really very strange, to be walking around in the middle of the North Sea like that.’ He goes into the story at this point, making it an idiotic adventure, describing how the Flood dragged him and the inflatable off the bank at the end, aware too that he’s not telling them so many other things, such as his swim into nowhere, how he looked up at the sky and felt the presence of his daughter by his side, or the impenetrable steel cliffs of the container ship passing inches away from him last night. It almost feels like they’re spending the evening with a dead man, that they’ve invited a ghost. But he sees that they’re amused, and they respond with similar tales of getting lost and dropping things accidentally over the side and confusing one mud-lined estuary for another.

  He tells them that he’d love to see a basking shark. That every time he comes across the plumes of plankton floating in the water, he thinks this will be the moment, expecting that great shadow of a body to drift by his boat like in a dream. How, with the calm sea, he’s been scanning the water for the tiny tip of the dorsal fin.

  Marta listens, spellbound it seems. She offers a toast: ‘To seeing a basking shark, then?’

  They clink glasses. Marta adjusts her cardigan again. She’s too thin for it, he thinks.

  Marta takes his glass, politely, to offer him more. Guy looks at a framed photo of a terraced stone cottage on the opposite side of the cabin. It’s called Whalebone Cottage. In the photo Marta’s pulling the front door shut. Above her head is what appears to be a whale vertebrae, set into the wall.

  ‘That’s a nice picture,’ he says.

  ‘It’s in Scotland - it’s our secret bolthole
- we’ve had it for years.’

  ‘So why isn’t your husband here, doing all the sailing?’ Guy asks innocently. The two women say nothing.

  Directing her gaze straight back at Guy, Marta says, ‘He just can’t.’ She leaves it at that.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says.

  But Marta smiles warmly. ‘Don’t be,’ she says, ‘it’s lovely having you here, isn’t it, Ro?’

  ‘After a week of being cooped up with you - I’d say yes, very lovely. Very lovely indeed,’ she repeats, glinting at Guy with a bright-eyed look which, although she’s young, has clearly been many a man’s ruin. She glows. Her expression glows, surrounded as it is by the helmeted wrap of her curls. ‘It gets lonely on a boat,’ she whispers, mimicking a film starlet. Guy’s struck by a hotness at the look she gives him as she leans forward, her head tilted up, her mouth slightly parted. She’s about to speak, but holds it back so he has to look at her lips. She could have anyone she wanted.

  Rhona downs another glass of wine. That’s three, or four even, since he arrived, Guy thinks.

  ‘Let’s give you more food,’ Marta says, taking his plate with her long fingers, and breaking her daughter’s moment. Rhona’s fingers are shorter, they look lazy, and are tipped in dark-red nail varnish. Rhona smiles to herself and looks away while her mother clambers awkwardly round the mess by the table. Marta’s conscious of her height in this boat. Her brooch is a large smooth pebble of amber, flecked inside like it might have seeds buried in it.

  Guy looks across at the crowded shelves. Whoever this man is, he’s made his home away from the others, in rows of books. God, men are maddening - they’re surrounded by the love of women, like these two, and all they can think about is their own private getaways - their books and their garden sheds and themselves.