‘Where’d you get your guernsey?’
Both women wore the regulation thick Navy blue sailing sweaters, with a split half inch at the bottom of each side seam. Nenna had rolled up her sleeves in the warmth of the snug, showing round forearms covered with very fine golden hair.
‘I got mine at the cut price place at the end of the Queenstown Road.’
‘It’s not as thick as mine.’
Laura leaned forward, and, taking a good handful, felt the close knitting between finger and thumb.
‘I’m a judge of quality, I can tell it’s not as thick. Richard, like to feel it?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t claim to know much about knitting.’
‘Well, make the stove up then. Make it up, you idiot! Nenna’s freezing!’
‘I’m warm, thank you, just right.’
‘You’ve got to be warmer than that! Richard, she’s your guest!’
‘I can adjust the stove, if you like,’ said Richard, in relief, ‘I can do something to the regulator.’
‘I don’t want it regulated!’
Nenna knew that, if it hadn’t been disloyal, Richard would have appealed to her to do or say something.
‘We use pretty well anything for fuel up our end,’ she began, ‘driftwood and washed-up coke and anything that’ll burn. Maurice told me that last winter he had to borrow a candle from Dreadnought to unfreeze the lock of his woodstore. Then when he was entertaining one of his friends he couldn’t get his stove to burn right and he had to keep it alight with matchboxes and cheese straws.’
‘It’s bad practice to keep your woodstore above deck,’ said Richard.
Laura had been following, for some reason, with painful interest. ‘Do cheese straws burn?’
‘Maurice thinks they do.’
Laura disappeared. Nenna had just time to say, I must be going, before she came back, tottering at a kind of dignified slant, and holding a large tin of cheese straws.
‘Fortnum’s.’
Avoiding Richard, who got to his feet as soon as he saw something to be carried, she kicked open the top of the Arctic and flung them in golden handfuls onto the glowing bed of fuel.
‘Hot!’
The flames leaped up, with an overpowering stink of burning cheese.
‘Lovely! Hot! I’ve got plenty more! The kitchen’s full of them! We’ll make Richard throw them. We’ll all throw them!’
‘There’s someone coming,’ said Nenna.
Footsteps overhead, like the relief for siege victims. She knew the determined stamp of her younger daughter, but there was also a heavier tread. Her heart turned over.
‘Ma, I can smell burning.’
After a short fierce struggle, Richard had replaced the Arctic’s brass lid. Nenna went to the companion.
‘Who’s up there with you, Tilda?’
Tilda’s six-year-old legs, in wellingtons caked with mud, appeared at the open hatch.
‘It’s Father Watson.’
Nenna did not answer for a second, and Tilda bellowed:
‘Ma, it’s the kindly old priest. He came round to Grace, so I brought him along here.’
‘Father Watson isn’t old at all, Tilda. Bring him down here, please. That’s to say …’
‘Of course,’ said Richard. ‘You’ll have a whisky, father, won’t you?’ He didn’t know who he was talking to, but believed, from films he had seen, that RC priests drank whisky and told long stories; that could be useful at the present juncture. Richard spoke with calm authority. Nenna admired him and would have liked to throw her arms round him.
‘No, I won’t come in now, thank you all the same,’ called Father Watson, whose flapping trousers could now be seen beside Tilda’s wellingtons against a square patch of sky. ‘Just a word or two, Mrs James, I can easily wait if you’re engaged with your friends or if it’s not otherwise convenient.’
But Nenna, somewhat to the curate’s surprise, for he seldom felt himself to be a truly welcome guest, was already half way up the companion. It had begun to drizzle, and his long macintosh was spangled with drops of rain, which caught the reflections of the shore lights and the riding lights of the craft at anchor.
‘I’m afraid the little one will get wet.’
‘She’s waterproof,’ said Nenna.
As soon as they reached the Embankment Father Watson began to speak in measured tones. ‘It’s the children, as you must be aware, that I’ve come about. A message from the nuns, a message from the Sisters of Misericord.’ He sometimes wondered if he would be more successful in the embarrassing errands he was called upon to undertake if he had an Irish accent, or some quaint turn of speech.
‘Your girls, Mrs James, Tilda here, and the twelve-year-old.’
‘Martha.’
‘A very delightful name. Martha busied herself about the household work during our Lord’s visits. But not a saint’s name, I think.’
Presumably Father Watson said these things automatically. He couldn’t have walked all the way down to the Reach from his comfortless presbytery simply to talk about Martha’s name.
‘She’ll be taking another name at confirmation, I assume. That should not long be delayed. I suggest Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, since you’ve decided to make your dwelling place upon the face of the waters.’
‘Father, have you come to complain about the girls’ absence from school?’
They had arrived at the wharf, which was exceedingly ill-lit. The brewers to whom it belonged, having ideas, like all brewers in the 1960s, of reviving the supposed jollity of the eighteenth century, had applied for permission to turn it into a fashionable beer garden. The very notion, however, ran counter to the sodden, melancholy, and yet enduring spirit of the Reach. After the plans had been shelved, the whole place had been leased out to various small-time manufacturers and warehousemen; the broken-down sheds and godowns must still be the property of somebody, so too must be the piles of crates whose stencilled lettering had long since faded to pallor.
But, rat-ridden and neglected, it was a wharf still. The river’s edge, where Virgil’s ghosts held out their arms in longing for the farther shore, and Dante, as a living man, was refused passage by the ferryman, the few planks that mark the meeting point of land and water, there, surely, is a place to stop and reflect, even if, as Father Watson did, you stumble over a ten-gallon tin of creosote.
‘I’m afraid I’m not accustomed to the poor light, Mrs James.’
‘Look at the sky, father. Keep your eyes on the lightest part of the sky and they’ll adapt little by little.’
Tilda had sprung ahead, at home in the dark, and anywhere within sight and sound of water. Feeling that she had given her due of politeness to the curate, the due exacted by her mother and elder sister, she pattered onto Maurice, and, after having a bit of a poke round, shot across the connecting gangplank onto Grace.
‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t go any further, Mrs James. It’s exactly what you said, it’s the question of school attendance. The situation, you see, they tell me there’s a legal aspect to it as well.’
How dispiriting for Father Watson to tell her this, Nenna thought, and how far it must be from his expectations when he received his first two minor orders, and made his last acts of resignation. To stand on this dusky wharf, bruised by a drum of creosote, and acting not even as the convent chaplain, but as some kind of school attendance officer!
‘I know they haven’t been coming to class regularly. But then, father, they haven’t been well.’
Even Father Watson could scarcely be expected to swallow this. ‘I was struck by the good health and spirits of your little one. In fact I had it in mind that she might be trained up to one of the women’s auxiliary services which justified themselves so splendidly in the last war – the WRENS, I mean, of course. It’s a service that’s not incompatible with the Christian life.’
‘You know how it is with children; she’s well one day, not so well the next.’ Nenna’s attitude to truth was flexible, an
d more like Willis’s than Richard’s. ‘And Martha’s the same, it’s only to be expected at her age.’
Nenna had hoped to alarm the curate with these references to approaching puberty, but he seemed, on the contrary, to be reassured. ‘If that’s the trouble, you couldn’t do better than to entrust her to the skilled understanding of the Sisters.’ How dogged he was. ‘They’ll expect, then, to see both your daughters in class on Monday next.’
‘I’ll do what I can.’
‘Very well, Mrs James.’
‘Won’t you come as far as the boat?’
‘No, no, I won’t risk the crossing a second time.’ What had happened the first time? ‘And now, I’m afraid I’ve somewhat lost my sense of direction. I’ll have to ask you my way to dry land.’
Nenna pointed out the way through the gate, which, swinging on its hinges, no longer provided any kind of barrier, out onto the Embankment, and first left, first right up Partisan Street for the King’s Road. The priest couldn’t have looked more relieved if he had completed a mission to those that dwell in the waters that are below the earth.
‘I’ve got the supper, Ma,’ said Martha, when Nenna returned to Grace. Nenna would have felt better pleased with herself if she had resembled her elder daughter. But Martha, small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world’s shortcomings, was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha.
‘We’re having baked beans. If Father Watson’s coming, we shall have to open another tin.’
‘No, dear, he’s gone home.’
Nenna felt tired, and sat down on the keelson, which ran from end to end of the flat-bottomed barge. It was quite wrong to come to depend too much upon one’s children.
Martha set confidently to work in Grace’s galley, which consisted of two gas rings in the bows connected to a Calor cylinder, and a brass sink. Water came to the sink from a container on deck, which was refilled by a man from the boat-yard once every twenty-four hours. A good deal of improvisation was necessary and Martha had put three tin plates to heat up over the hissing saucepan of beans.
‘Was it fun on Lord Jim?’
‘Oh, not at all.’
‘Should I have enjoyed it?’
‘Oh no, I don’t think so. Mrs Blake threw cheese straws into the stove.’
‘What did Mr Blake say?’
‘He wants to keep her happy, to make her happy, I don’t know.’
‘What did Father Watson want?’
‘Didn’t he talk to you at all?’
‘I daresay he would have done, but I sent him out to fetch you, with Tilda, she needed exercise.’
‘So he didn’t mention anything.’
‘He just came down here, and I made him a cup of tea and we said an act of contrition together.’
‘He wanted to know why you hadn’t been to class lately.’
Martha sighed.
‘I’ve been reading your letters,’ she said. ‘They’re lying about your cabin, and you haven’t even looked at most of them.’
The letters were Nenna’s connection, not only with the land, but with her previous existence. They would be from Canada, from her sister Louise who would suggest that she might put up various old acquaintances passing through London, or find a suitable family for a darling Austrian boy, not so very much older than Martha, whose father was a kind of Count, but was also in the import-export business, or try to recall a splendid person, the friend of a friend of hers who had had a very, very sad story. Then there were one or two bills, not many because Nenna had no credit accounts, a letter-card from an old schoolfriend which started Bet you don’t remember me, and two charitable appeals, forwarded by Father Watson even to such an unpromising address as Grace.
‘Anything from Daddy?’
‘No, Ma, I looked for that first.’
There was no more to be said on that subject.
‘Oh, Martha, my head aches. Baked beans would be just the thing for it.’
Tilda came in, wet, and black as coal from head to foot.
‘Willis gave me a drawing.’
‘What of?’
‘Lord Jim, and some seagulls.’
‘You shouldn’t have accepted it.’
‘Oh, I gave him one back.’
She had been waiting on Dreadnought to watch the water coming in through the main leak. It had come half way up the bunk, and nearly as far as Willis’s blankets. Nenna was distressed.
‘Well, it goes out with every tide. He’ll have to show people round at low tide, and get them off before it turns.’
‘Surely he can do some repairs,’ said Martha.
‘No, Fate’s against him,’ said Tilda, and after one or two forkfuls of beans she fell fast asleep with her head across the table. It was impossible, in any case, to bath her, because they were only allowed to let out the bathwater on a falling tide.
By now the flood was making fast. The mist had cleared, and to the north-east the Lots Road Power Station had discharged from its four majestic chimneys long plumes of white pearly smoke which slowly drooped and turned to dun. The lights dazzled, but on the broad face of the water there were innumerable V-shaped eddies, showing the exact position of whatever the river had not been able to hide. If the old Thames trades had still persisted, if boatmen had still made a living from taking the coins from the pockets of the drowned, then this was the hour for them to watch. Far above, masses of autumn cloud passed through the transparent violet sky.
After supper they sat by the light of the stove. Nenna was struck by the fact that she ought to write to Louise, who was married to a successful business man. She began, Dear Sis, Tell Joel that it’s quite an education in itself for the girls to be brought up in the heart of the capital, and on the very shores of London’s historic river.
2
TILDA was up aloft. Grace’s mast was fifteen foot of blackened pine, fitted into a tabernacle, so that it could be lowered to the deck in the days when Grace negotiated the twenty-eight tideway bridges between Richmond and the sea. Her mizzen mast was gone, her sprit was gone, the mainmast was never intended for climbing and Tilda sat where there was, apparently, nowhere to sit.
Martha, whose head was as strong as her sister’s, sometimes climbed up as well, and, clinging on about a foot lower down, read aloud from a horror comic. But today Tilda was alone, looking down at the slanting angle of the decks as the cables gave or tightened, the passive shoreline, the secret water.
Tilda cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness. At the moment she was perfectly happy.
She was waiting for the tide to turn. Exactly opposite Grace a heap of crates which had driven up through the bends and reaches, twenty miles from Gravesend, was at rest in the slack water, enchanted apparently, not moving an inch one way or the other. The lighters swung at their moorings, pointing all ways, helpless without the instructions of the tide. It was odd to see the clouds move when the water was so still.
She blinked twice, taking the risk of missing the right few seconds while her eyes were shut. Then one end of a crate detached itself from the crates and began to steal away, edging slowly round in a half circle. Tilda, who had been holding her breath, let it go. A tremor ran through the boats’ cables, the iron lighters, just on the move, chocked gently together. The great swing round began. By the shore the driftwood was still travelling upriver, but in midstream it was gathering way headlong in the other direction. The Thames had turned towards the sea.
Willis had frequently told her that these old barges, in spite of their great sails, didn’t need a crew of more than two men, in fact a man and a boy could handle them easily. The sails had been tan-coloured, like the earth and dressed with oil, which never quite dried out. There were none left now. But Grace wouldn’t need them to go out to sea on the ebb tide. She wouldn’t make sail until she reached Port of Lo
ndon. With her flat bottom, she would swim on the tide, all gear dropped, cunningly making use of the hidden drifts. The six-year-old boy knew every current and eddy of the river. Long had he studied the secrets of the Thames. None but he would have noticed the gleam of gold and diamonds – the ring on the dead man’s finger as his hand broke the surface. Farewell! He recognised it as the hand of his father, missing now for countless years. The Grace, 180 tons fully loaded, nosed her way through the low arches by the Middlesex bank, where there was no room for other craft, passing, or surpassing, all the shipping there. At Tower Bridge if four foot diameter discs bearing black and white signal stripes are displayed fourteen foot to landward of the signals, this is an indication that the bridge cannot be raised from mechanical or other cause. Only Grace could pass, not Maurice, not even Dreadnought, a sight never to be forgotten. Men and women came out on the dock to watch as the great brown sails went up, with only a six-year-old boy at the winch, and the Grace, bound for Ushant, smelled the open sea.
There was a scratching at the heel of the mast. A cat, with her mouth full of seagull feathers, was feebly trying to climb up, but after a few feet her claws lost purchase and she slithered back by gradual stages to the deck.
‘Stripey!’
The ship’s cat was in every way appropriate to the Reach. She habitually moved in a kind of nautical crawl, with her stomach close to the deck, as though close-furled and ready for dirty weather. The ears were vestigial, and lay flat to the head.
Through years of attempting to lick herself clean, for she had never quite lost her self-respect, Stripey had become as thickly coated with mud inside as out. She was in a perpetual process of readjustment, not only to tides and seasons, but to the rats she encountered on the wharf. Up to a certain size, that is to say the size attained by the rats at a few weeks old, she caught and ate them, and, with a sure instinct for authority, brought in their tails to lay them at the feet of Martha. Any rats in excess of this size chased Stripey. The resulting uncertainty as to whether she was coming or going had made her, to some extent, mentally unstable.
Offshore Page 2