Offshore

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Above the river, the seagulls kept on the wing as long as they could, hoping the turbulence would bring them a good find, then, defeated and battered, they heeled and screamed away to find refuge. The rats on the wharf behaved strangely, creeping to the edge of the planking, and trying to cross over from dry land to the boats.

  On the Reach itself, there could be no pretence that this would be an ordinary night. Tug skippers, who had never before acknowledged the presence of the moored barges, called out, or gave the danger signal – five rapid blasts in succession. Before slack tide the police launch went down the river, stopping at every boat to give fair warning.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, have you checked your anchor recently?’

  The barge anchors were unrecognisable as such, more like crustaceans, specimens of some giant type long since discarded by Nature, but still clinging to their old habitat, sunk in the deep pits they had made in the foreshore. But under the ground they were half rusted away. Dreadnought’s anchor had come up easily enough when the salvage tug came to dispose of her. The mud which held so tenaciously could also give way in a moment, if conditions altered.

  ‘And how much anchor chain have you got? The regulation fifteen fathoms? All in good condition?’

  Like many questions which the police were obliged to put, these were a formality, it being clear that the barge-owners couldn’t answer them. It could only be hoped that the mooring-ropes were in better case than the anchors. The visit was, in fact, a courteous excuse to leave a note of the nearest Thames Division telephone number.

  ‘Waterloo Pier. WAT 5411. In all emergencies. Sure you’ve got that?’

  ‘We’d have to go on shore to telephone,’ said Woodie doubtfully, when his turn came. He was thinking of taking Rochester’s complement straight to Purley in the car, whether Willis agreed or not.

  ‘What do you think of this weather, officer?’

  The sergeant understood him, as one Englishman to another. The wind had ripped the tarpaulin off some of the laid-up boats, and huge fragments of oilcloth were flying at random, wrapping themselves round masts and rails.

  ‘You want to look out for those,’ he said. ‘They could turn nasty.’

  The Thames barges, built of living wood that gave and sprang back in the face of the wind, were as much at home as anything on the river. To their creaking and grumbling was added a new note, comparable to music. As the tide rose, the wind shredded the clouds above them and pushed a mighty swell across the water, so that they began to roll as they had once rolled at sea.

  Nenna and Martha had absolutely forbidden Tilda to go above decks. Banished to the cabin, she lay there full of joy, feeling the crazy desire of the old boat to put out once again into mid-stream. Every time Grace rose on the swell, she was aware of the anchor chain tightening to its limit.

  ‘We’re all going ashore,’ Nenna called, ‘Rochester’s gone already. We’re just taking a bag, we’ll come back for the rest when the wind’s gone down.’

  Tilda put on her anorak. She thought them all cowards.

  No-one knew that Maurice was on board ship, because there were no lights showing. Certainly not a habitual drinker, he was nevertheless sitting that night in the darkness with a bottle of whisky, prepared for excess.

  It wasn’t the uncertain nature of his livelihood that worried him, nor the police visits, although he had twice been invited to accompany the officers to the station. So far they hadn’t applied for a search warrant to go over the boat, but Maurice didn’t care if they did. Still less did he fear the storm. The dangerous and the ridiculous were necessary to his life, otherwise tenderness would overwhelm him. It threatened him now, for what Maurice had not been able to endure was the sight of the emptying Reach. Dreadnought, Lord Jim, now Grace. Maurice, in the way of business, knew too many, rather than too few, people, but when he imagined living without friends, he sat down with the whisky in the dark.

  When he heard steps overhead on deck, he switched on the light. Making two shots at it before he could manage the switch, he wondered if he’d better not drink any more. Of course, that rather depended on who was coming; he didn’t know the footsteps. Someone was blundering about, didn’t know the boat, probably didn’t know about boats at all, couldn’t find the hatch. Maurice, always hospitable, went to open it. His own steps seemed enormous, he floated up the steps, swimming couldn’t be so difficult after all, particularly as he’d become weightless. Reaching the hatch at the same time as the stranger outside, he collided with it, and they fell into each other’s arms. Not a tall man, quite young and thin, and just as drunk, to Maurice’s relief, as he was.

  ‘My name’s James.’

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘This is a boat, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it Grace?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘You said your name was James?’

  ‘No, Edward.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Edward took a bottle of whisky out of his pocket and, unexpectedly, two glasses. The glasses made Maurice sad. They must have been brought in the hope of some celebration to which the way had been lost.

  ‘Clever of you to come on the right night,’ he said.

  He was absorbed, as host, in the task of getting his guest safely below decks. Fortunately he had had a good deal of practice in this. As he filled the glasses his depression emptied away.

  Edward, sitting down heavily on the locker, said that he wanted to explain.

  ‘Doctors tell you not to drink too much. They’re very insistent on this. They’re supported by teams of physiologists and laboratory researchers.’

  He steered his way round these words much as he had negotiated the deck.

  ‘What these so-called scientists should be doing is to study effects. Take my case. If one whisky makes me feel cheerful, four whiskies ought to make me feel very cheerful. Agreed?’

  ‘I’m with you.’

  ‘They haven’t. I’ve had four whiskies and I feel wretched. Bloody wretched. Take that from me. And now I’d like to leave you with this thought …’

  ‘Do you have to make many speeches in the course of your work?’ Maurice asked.

  For an instant Edward sobered up. ‘No, I’m clerical.’

  The barge took a great roll, and Maurice could hear the hanger with his good suit in it, waiting for the job which never came, sliding from one end of its rail to the other.

  ‘I came to give Nenna a present,’ Edward said. Out of the same pocket which had held the glasses he produced a small blue and gold box.

  ‘There’s a bottle of scent in this box.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘It’s called L’Heure Bleue.’

  ‘Do you mind if I write that down?’ Maurice asked.

  ‘Certainly. Have my biro.’

  ‘It’s the Russian for “pen”, you know.’

  ‘Hungarian.’

  ‘Russian.’

  ‘A Hungarian invented them.’

  ‘He would have made a fortune if.’

  ‘What’s so special about this scent? You brought it for Nenna. Does she wear it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think perhaps not. I haven’t much sense of smell.’

  ‘I don’t think Nenna uses scent at all.’

  ‘Do you know her, then?’

  They both emptied their glasses.

  ‘The mother whose man I live of the house in suggested it,’ said Edward.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wasn’t that clear? I’m afraid I’m losing my fine edge.’

  ‘Not a bit of it.’

  ‘Gordon said I ought to bring her some scent.’

  From directly above them came a noise like an explosion in a slate quarry. Something heavy had been torn away and, bouncing twice, landed flat on the deck directly over their heads. The deck timbers screamed in protest. Edward seemed to notice nothing.

  ‘I’ve brought her purse.’

  This too he dragged a
nd tugged out of his pocket, and they both stared at it as though by doing so they could turn it into something else.

  ‘Do you think she’ll take me back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Maurice said doubtfully. ‘Nenna loves everybody. So do I.’

  ‘Oh, do you know Nenna, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must know her pretty well, living on the same boat.’

  ‘The next boat.’

  ‘I expect she sometimes comes to borrow sugar. Matches, she might borrow.’

  ‘We’re both borrowers.’

  ‘She’s not easy to understand. You could spend a very long time, trying to understand that woman.’

  There was about a quarter of the bottle left, and Edward poured it out for both of them. This time the movement of the boat helped him, and Maurice rocked the whisky out in two curves, one for each glass.

  ‘Do you understand women?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maurice.

  With a great effort, holding his concentration as though he had it in his two hands, he added,

  ‘You’ve got to give these things to her. Give them, that’s it, give them. You’ve got to go across to Grace.’

  ‘How’s that done?’

  ‘It’s not difficult. Difficult if you’re heavy. Luckily we haven’t any weight this evening.’

  ‘How do I go?’

  It was worse than ever getting up the companion, much worse than last time. The whole boat plunged, but not now in rhythm with the staggering of Maurice and Edward. They managed three steps. The hatch in front of them flew open and the frame, tilted from one side to the other, gave them a sight of the wild sky outside. A rat was sitting at the top of the companion. A gleam of light showed its crossed front teeth. Edward struggled forward.

  ‘Brute, I’ll get it.’

  ‘It’s one of God’s creatures!’ cried Maurice.

  Edward hurled all that he had in his hands, the purse, the scent, which struck the rat in the paunch. Hissing loudly, it swivelled on its hind legs and disappeared, the tail banging like a rope on the top step as it fled.

  ‘Did the scent break?’

  ‘I can smell it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I came here to give her a present.’

  ‘I know, James.’

  ‘What do I give her now?’

  Edward sat empty-handed on the companion. Maurice, who still hadn’t exactly made out who he was, suddenly cared intensely about the loss.

  ‘Another present.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hundreds. I’ve got hundreds.’

  Clinging together they followed the line of the keelson to the forward hatch.

  ‘Hundreds!’

  Record-players, electric guitars, transistors, electric hair-curlers, electric toasters, Harry’s hoard, the strange currency of the 1960s, piled on the floor, on the bunks, all in their new containers, all wrapped in plastic. Maurice snatched out a pile and loaded them on to the reeling Edward.

  ‘She’ll find these useful on Grace.’

  ‘How do I get there?’

  How had they got back on deck? As the battering wind seized them they had to stoop along in the darkness, fighting for handholds, first the base of the old pulley, then the mast. Three toasters sailed away like spindrift in the gale. It was still blowing hard north-west. The gang-plank to Grace was missing. The crash above their heads had come when it was lifted bodily and flung across the deck.

  ‘There’s still the ladder.’

  Maurice had a fixed iron ladder down the port side.

  ‘Is that Grace?’ Edward shouted above the wind.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can’t see any lights.’

  ‘Of course you can’t. It’s dark.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Don’t know much about boats.’

  Edward was much more confused than Maurice and needed all the help he was getting as Maurice manhandled him to the top of the ladder. Maurice was still sober enough to know that he was drunk, and knew also that the water between the boats was wilder than he had ever seen it. That something was dreadfully wrong was an idea which urgently called his attention, but it wavered beyond his grasp. It was to do with getting over to Grace.

  ‘This isn’t the usual way we go.’

  Edward had dropped the whole cargo of gifts by the time he had got down the twenty iron rungs of the ladder. As he reached the bottom the whole boat suddenly heaved away from him, so that the washboard at the top rolled out of sight and a quite new reach of sky appeared.

  ‘Look out!’

  Maurice was half-collapsed over the gunwale. Even like that, hopelessly drunk and quite tired out, there was about him an appealing look of promise, of everything that can be meant by friendship.

  ‘You must come again when the weather’s better!’

  He leaned out, perilously askew, just to catch a sight of Edward’s white face at the bottom of the ladder. Edward shouted back something that the wind carried away, but he seemed to be saying, once again, that he was not very used to boats.

  With that last heave, Maurice’s anchor had wrenched clear of the mud, and the mooring-ropes, unable to take the whole weight of the barge, pulled free and parted from the shore. It was in this way that Maurice, with the two of them clinging on for dear life, put out on the tide.

  About the Author

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. She was the author of nine novels, three of which – The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels – were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And she won the prize in 1979 for Offshore. Her most recent novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the ‘Book of the Year’. It won America’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and this helped introduce her to a wider international readership.

  A superb biographer and critic, Penelope Fitzgerald was also the author of lives of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (her first book), the poet Charlotte Mew and The Knox Brothers – a study of her remarkable father Edmund Knox, editor of Punch, and his equally remarkable brothers.

  Penelope Fitzgerald did not embark on her literary career until the age of sixty. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, she worked at the BBC during the war, edited a literary journal, ran a bookshop and taught at various schools, including a theatrical school; her early novels drew upon many of these experiences.

  She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three.

  Other Works

  Also by Penelope Fitzgerald

  EDWARD BURNE-JONES

  THE KNOX BROTHERS

  THE GOLDEN CHILD

  THE BOOKSHOP

  HUMAN VOICES

  AT FREDDIE’S

  CHARLOTTE MEW AND HER FRIENDS

  INNOCENCE

  THE BEGINNING OF SPRING

  THE GATE OF ANGELS

  THE BLUE FLOWER

  THE MEANS OF ESCAPE

  Copyright

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  Published by Flamingo 2003

  First published in Great Britain by Collins 1979

  Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1988

  Copyright © Penelope Fitzgerald 1979

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,

  characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work

  of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

  actual persons living or dead, events or localities,

  is entirely coincidental.

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