‘Look, that carries the River Westbourne, flowing down from Paddington. If that was to take and start leaking, we’d all have to swim for it.’
Tilda eyed the great pipe.
‘Where does it come out?’
‘The outfall? Well, it’s one of the big sewers, my dear, I’ll get the name right for you.’ He made a note.
The other passengers drew back from the dishevelled river dwellers, so far out of their element.
Laura was doubtful whether the little girl ought to be allowed to go out like that alone with an old man, and not a very scrupulous one at that, for a whole afternoon. She told Richard a number of stories on the subject, some of them taken from the daily papers, and suggested that he might turn the matter over in his mind. But Richard said it wasn’t necessary.
‘You told me yourself that he was dishonest.’
‘It isn’t necessary.’
Willis and Tilda usually stopped on the way at a little shop in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, which seemed glad of any kind of custom, to buy a quarter of aniseed marbles. These were sold loose, but were put into a special paper bag overprinted with the words
COME ON, CHILDREN, HERE’S A NEW HIT!
FIRST YOU ROLL IT, THEN YOU CHEW IT.
Willis had never known many children, and until Nenna had come to the boats he had rather tended to forget there were such things. The very distinctive taste of the aniseed marbles, which were, perhaps, some of the nastiest sweets ever made, recovered time past for him.
Once at the Tate, they usually had time only to look at the sea and river pieces, the Turners and the Whistlers. Willis praised these with the mingled pride and humility of an inheritor, however distant. To Tilda, however, the fine pictures were only extensions of her life on board. It struck her as odd, for example, that Turner, if he spent so much time on Chelsea Reach, shouldn’t have known that a seagull always alights on the highest point. Well aware that she was in a public place, she tried to modify her voice; only then Willis didn’t always hear, and she had to try again a good deal louder.
‘Did Whistler do that one?’
The attendant watched her, hoping that she would get a little closer to the picture, so that he could relieve the boredom of his long day by telling her to stand back.
‘What did he put those two red lights up there for? They’re for obstruction not completely covered by water, aren’t they? What are they doing there among the riding lights?’
‘They don’t miss much, do they?’ the attendant said to Willis. ‘I mean, your little granddaughter there.’
The misunderstanding delighted Tilda, ‘Dear grandfather, are you sure you are not weary? Let us return to our ship. Take my arm, for though I am young, I am strong.’
Willis dealt with her admirably by taking almost no notice of what she said.
‘Whistler was a very good painter. You don’t want to make any mistake about that. It’s only amateurs who think he isn’t. There’s Old Battersea Bridge. That was the old wooden bridge. Painted on a grey ground, you see, to save himself trouble. Tide on the turn, lighter taking advantage of the ebb.’
It was understood that on their return they would have tea on Grace.
‘How old do you think I am, Mrs James?’ Willis asked, leaning quietly forward. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it. It’s my experience that everybody thinks how old everybody else is.’
There was no help for it. ‘Well, perhaps nearer seventy than sixty.’
Willis’s expression never changed quickly. It seemed to be a considerable undertaking for him to rearrange the leathery brown cheeks and the stiff grey eyebrows which were apparently supported by his thick-lensed spectacles.
‘I don’t seem to feel my age while I’m on these little expeditions, or when I’m drawing.’
Now he wouldn’t have time for either. Cleaning ship, and worrying about the visits of intending purchasers, occupied his entire horizon.
His ideas proceeded from simplicity to simplicity. If the main leak could be concealed by showing only at low tide, Willis thought that the equally serious problem of rain – for the weatherboards were particularly weak in one place – could be solved if he stood directly under the drip, wearing a sort of broad waterproof hat. He was sure he had one stowed away somewhere.
‘He’s no idea of how to sell anything except his drawings,’ Woodie told Charles, ‘and then I doubt whether he charges enough for them. I should describe him as an innocent.’
‘He knows a fair amount about boats.’
‘He lives in the past. He was asking me about some man called Payne who seems to have died years ago.’
Richard saw, with reservations, where his duty lay, and put Dreadnought on the market through the agency of an old RNVR friend of his, who had gone into partnership, on coming out of the forces, as an estate agent in Halkin Street. Perhaps ‘acquaintance’ would be a fairer description than ‘friend’, but the difference was clearer in peacetime than it had been during the war.
The agent was up-to-date and wished, as was fashionable in those years, to give an amusing turn to the advertisement, which he thought ought to appear, not where Willis had thought of putting it, in the Exchange and Mart, but in the A circulation newspapers.
‘… Whistler’s Battersea … main water … no? well, main electricity … two cabins, one suitable for a tiny Flying Dutchman … huge Cutty Sark type hold awaits conversion … complete with resident Ancient Mariner … might be persuaded to stop awhile if you splice the mainbrace …’
The senior partner usually drafted these announcements himself, but all the partners felt that, given the chance, they could do it better.
‘The Cutty Sark was a tea clipper,’ Richard said. ‘And I don’t think there’s any question of Willis staying on board. In fact, that’s really the whole point of the transaction.’
‘Did this barge go to Dunkirk?’
‘A number of them were drafted,’ Richard said, ‘Grace was, and Maurice, but not Dreadnought, I think.’
‘Pity. It would have been a selling point. How would it be, Richard, if we were to continue this discussion over a very large pink gin?’
This remark, often repeated, had earned Richard’s friend, or acquaintance, the nickname of Pinkie.
Since this meeting, Richard had had a further debate with his conscience. It was, of course, the purchaser’s business to employ a surveyor, whether a house or a boat was in question, and Pinkie would not be offering Dreadnought with any kind of guarantee as to soundness, only, after all, as to quaintness. On the other hand, Pinkie seemed to have lost his head to a certain extent, perhaps at the prospect of making his mark by bringing in something novel in the way of business. Surely he hadn’t been quite so irritating as a watchkeeping officer in the Lanark? But the weakest element in the situation – the one most in need of protection, towards which Richard would always return – the weakest element was certainly Willis. He had begun to neglect himself, Laura said. She had gone along once to pay a casual visit and found one of Nenna’s youngsters, the little one, cooking some kind of mess for him in Dreadnought’s galley. Richard rather liked Willis’s pictures, and had got him to do a pen and wash drawing of Lord Jim. He saw the old man as in need of what, by current standards, was a very small sum to enable him to wind up his affairs.
Richard was not aware that he was no longer reasoning, but allowing a series of overlapping images – the drawing of Lord Jim, Tilda cooking – to act as a substitute for argument, so that his mind was working in a way not far different from Maurice’s, or Nenna’s. But the end product would be very different – not indecisive and multiple, but single and decisive. Without this faculty of Richard’s, the world could not be maintained in its present state.
Having explained carefully to Willis what he was about to do, Richard invited Pinkie out to lunch. This had to be at a restaurant, because the only club that Richard belonged to was Pratt’s. He had got himself put up for Pratt’s because it was impossible
to have lunch there. There was, too, something unaccountable about Richard – perhaps the same wilfulness that induced him to live offshore although his marriage was in a perilous state – which attracted him to Pratt’s because celebrations were only held there for the death of a king or queen.
The restaurant to which Richard invited Pinkie was one at which he had an account, and there was, at least, no difficulty in knowing what drinks to order. Pinkie sucked in his drink in a curious manner, very curious considering how many gins he must have in the course of the week, as though his glass was a blowhole in Arctic ice and to drink was his only hope of survival.
‘By the way, Richard, when are you and Laura going to give up this nonsense about living in the middle of the Thames? This is the moment to acquire property, I’m sure you realise that.’
‘Where?’ Richard asked. He wondered why Pinkie mentioned Laura, then realised with sinking heart that she was no longer keeping her discontent to herself, and the echo of it must have travelled for some distance.
‘Where? Oh, a gentleman’s county,’ Pinkie replied, wallowing through his barrier of ice, ‘Say Northamptonshire. You can drive up every morning easily, be in the office by ten, down in the evening by half past six. I calculate you could spend about 60 per cent of your life at work and 40 per cent at home. Not too bad, that. Mind you, these Jacobean properties don’t come on the market every day. We just happen to be more lucky at laying hands on them than most. Or Norfolk, of course, if you’re interested in small boats.’
Richard wondered why living on a largish boat should automatically make him interested in small ones.
‘Not Norfolk, I think.’ A number of Laura’s relations lived there, but he had not come to the Relais to discuss them. ‘You wouldn’t make a profit on Lord Jim anyway,’ he added, ‘I don’t regard her as an investment.’
‘Then what in the name of Christ did you buy her for?’
This was the question Richard did not want to answer. Meanwhile, the waiter put a warm plate printed with a name and device in front of each of them and, after a short interval, took it away again, this, presumably, representing the cover for which the restaurant made a charge. Subsequently he brought various inedible articles, such as bread dried to a crisp, and questionable pieces of shellfish, and placed these in front of them. Pinkie chewed away at a raw fragment.
‘We might call him an old shellback, if you think that’d go down better, instead of an Ancient Mariner.’
‘Who?’
‘This Willis of yours. It doesn’t do to be too literary.’
The waiter invited them to choose between coq au vin and navarin of lamb, either of which, in other circumstances, would have been called stew.
‘Knows his job, that fellow,’ said Pinkie. Richard felt inclined to agree with him.
The wine, though Richard was not the kind of person whom the sommelier kept waiting, was not particularly good. Pinkie said nothing about this because he was dazed by gin, and was not paying, and Richard said nothing because, after a little thought, he concluded that the wine was good enough for Pinkie.
After they had been given the coq au vin the waiter shovelled on to their plates, from a mysteriously divided dish, some wilted vegetables, and Richard recognised that the moment had come to make his only point.
‘I really haven’t any particular interest in the sale, except that I want to do the best that I can for this retired artist, Sam Willis,’ he said. ‘I regard him as a friend, and you remember that apart from all this local colour, I gave you the specifications of his boat.’
‘Oh, I dare say. They’ll have those in the office. The invaluable Miss Barker. Well, proceed.’
‘There wasn’t any mention, I think I’m right in saying, of a survey – that rested with the purchaser.’
Another waiter brought round a trolley on which were a number of half-eaten gateaux decorated with a white substance, and some slices of hard apple resting in water, in a glass bowl. The idea of eating these things seemed absurd, and yet Pinkie asked for some.
‘Well, these specifications. I’ll have to go back to the shop, and check up on them, as I said, but I imagine you won’t grudge me a glass of brandy first.’
Richard gave the order. ‘There’s something which I didn’t mention, but I want to make it absolutely clear, and that is that I’ve reason to believe that this craft, the Dreadnought, leaks quite badly.’
Pinkie laughed, spraying a little of the brandy which had been brought to him onto the laden air. ‘Of course she does. All these old boats leak like sieves. Just as all these period houses are as rotten as old cheese. Everyone knows that. But age has its value.’
Richard sighed. ‘Has it ever struck you, Pinkie, what it would be like to belong to a class of objects which gets more valuable as it gets older? Houses, oak-trees, furniture, wine, I don’t care what! I’m thirty-nine, I’m not sure about you …’
The idea was not taken up, and half an hour later Richard signed the bill and they left the Relais together. Pinkie could still think quite clearly enough to know that he had very little prospect of a new commission. ‘As you’re fixed, Richard,’ he said, half embracing his friend, but impeded by his umbrella, ‘as you’re fixed, and you’re an obstinate bugger, I can’t shake you, you’re living nowhere, you don’t belong to land or water.’ As Richard did not respond, he added, ‘Keep in touch. We mustn’t let it be so long next time.’
The second or third lots of clients sent along by Pinkie, an insurance broker and his wife, who wanted somewhere to give occasional parties in summer, at high tide only, were very much taken with Dreadnought. It was raining slightly on the day of inspection, but Willis, who had not been able to lay hands on his waterproof ‘tile’, but made do with a deep-crowned felt hat, stood on duty under the gap in the weather-boards, while an unsuspecting clerk from the agency showed the rest of the boat. The galley was very cramped, but the ship’s chests, still marked FOR 2 SEAMEN, and the deckhouse, from which Willis had watched the life of the river go by, both made a good impression.
‘You’ll have noticed the quality of the bottom planking,’ said the clerk. ‘All these ends are 2½ English elm for three strakes out from the centre, and after that you’ve got oak. That’s what Nelson meant, you know, when he talked about wooden walls. Mind, I don’t say that she hasn’t been knocked about a bit … There may be some weathering here and there …’
After a few weeks which to Willis, however, seemed like a few years, the broker’s solicitors made a conditional offer for the poor old barge, and finally agreed to pay £1500, provided that Dreadnought was still in shipshape condition six months hence, in the spring of 1962.
Six months, Willis repeated. It was a long time to wait, but not impossible.
Richard suggested that the intervening time could well be spent in replacing the pumps and pump-wells, and certain sections of the hull. It was difficult for him to realise that he was dealing with, or rather trying to help, a man who had never, either physically or emotionally, felt the need to replace anything. Even Willis’s appearance, the spiky short black hair and the prize-fighter’s countenance, had not changed much since he had played truant from Elementary school and gone down to hang about the docks. If truth were known, he had had a wife, as well as a perdurable old mother, a great bicyclist and supporter of local Labour causes, but both of them had died of cancer, no replacements possible there. The body must either repair itself or stop functioning, but that is not true of the emotions, and particularly of Willis’s emotions. He had come to doubt the value of all new beginnings and to put his trust in not much more than the art of hanging together. Dreadnought had stayed afloat for more than sixty years, and Richard, Skipper though he was, didn’t understand timber. Tinkering about with the old boat would almost certainly be the end of her. He remembered the last time he had been to see the dentist. Dental care was free in the 60s, in return for signing certain unintelligible documents during the joy of escape from the surgery. But when the
dentist had announced that it was urgently necessary to extract two teeth Willis had got up and walked away, glad that he hadn’t taken off his coat and so would not have to enter into any further discussion while he recovered it from the waiting-room. If one goes, he thought, still worse two, they all go.
‘Dreadnought is good for a few years yet,’ he insisted. ‘And what kind of repairs can you do on oak?’
‘Have you asked him about the insurance valuation?’ Laura asked Richard.
‘There isn’t one. These old barges – well, they could get a quotation for fire, I suppose, but not against flood or storm damage.’
‘I’m going home for a fortnight. It may be more than a fortnight – I don’t really know how long.’
‘When?’
‘Oh, quite soon. I’ll need some money.’
Richard avoided looking at her, for fear she should think he meant anything particular by it.
‘What about Grace?’ Laura went on.
‘What about her?’
‘Is Grace in bad condition?’
Richard sighed. ‘Not as good as one would like. There the trouble is largely above the waterline, though. I’ve told Nenna time and again that she ought to get hold of some sort of reliable chap, an ex-Naval chippie would be the right sort, just to spend the odd day on board and put everything to rights. There aren’t any partitions between the cabins, to start with.’
‘Did Nenna tell you that?’
‘You can see for yourself, if you drop in there.’
‘What a very odd thing to tell you.’
‘I suppose people have got used to bringing me their queries, to some extent,’ said Richard, going into their cabin to take off his black shoes and put on a pair of red leather slippers, which, like all his other clothes, never seemed to wear out. The slippers made him feel less tired.
‘There are more queries from Grace than from Dreadnought, aren’t there?’
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