The Old Man nobbled him a few days later, and in spite of his sixty years and an air of nothing on earth being set to trouble him, grasped Tom’s arm and said: ‘Has that mad bloody Sparks been getting on to you about all of us being Jews yet? He has? I can see he has. Don’t deny it. I’ll have to get rid of him. Can’t go on like this. He converted the chief engineer yesterday, and once he gets a bee in his bonnet there’s no telling what happens. Not that I’ve anything against the Jews, mind you – no, not at all, Mr Phillips – but I can’t have the blue-and-white flag run up on my ship. You know what the Mozzies are – it’s like a red rag to a bull. No, I’ll have to get rid of him.’ And he went away shaking his head. ‘It’s a pity, though, a great pity to have such a good Sparks going off his rocker!’
9
He relit his pipe and opened the book while the train was sucked through the lights of Gatwick. Instead of reading, he preferred to sample his own immense space which, if nothing else, made him well off in possessing an area that kept people at a distance, so that he could manoeuvre without harming himself or causing offence to others. Awareness of space had always kept his head clear on meeting the greater and often far from friendly vastness of the sea, for if you weren’t afraid of your own space it wasn’t difficult to meet that of the ocean which, sometimes denying that space existed, reduced the world to a boxroom of unexpected perils.
Clara had occupied sufficient space in his life for him to send her postcards and telegrams, even the occasional letter, as echo-sounders registering her presence in himself. On their first meeting she had stepped into his space without asking, and stayed there because he realized no person could exist in absolute emptiness. She had gone into a bigger space than he could yet know about, and had left his own space emptier than any in which he had so far existed.
He went to the hospital. His age took on importance now that the one person close to him was dead. He had felt her solid assistance without seriously admitting it, and at the undertaker’s kissed her lips for the first and last time. On meeting her he had looked forward to the bigger space seen from her living-room window, and the only other space that lay before him now was the one she had already gone to.
He laid a cool finger on her colder forehead. People moved beyond the curtain. The more subtly you perceived life the more brutal it appeared. He stood straight, hands at his side. She had little space in that narrow box, and would have even less when the lid went down and wet earth was packed around. Who needed more room when the spirit was absent?
He would prefer to be buried into a bigger space than that of soil, for his body to meet water without an encasing box. Either the fishes got you, or the worms. He did not want to die because there was still too much to think about. There would be, right to the end, he didn’t doubt. He shrugged, which she would never have allowed, then went out, and walked by the public library and art gallery, to sit in the park by himself for half an hour.
A patient at the hospital told him that Beryl had gone to lunch. Must have seen us holding hands when we left last night. He signed for his aunt’s wallet and suitcase in the ward sister’s office, then took a taxi to Clara’s flat. From the large window he saw the roughening indigo sea on which two boats struggled. The surface changed from hour to hour, but was the same that had press-ganged him thirty-five years before.
He could sit without being told, but looked at the elegant unsafe chair and smiled at the thought of breaking it leg by leg. He took the marble-encased timepiece from the shelf, set the hands and turned the large key at the back, offended to see a clock not fulfilling its purpose. In the kitchen he opened a bottle of whisky and poured half a tumbler before returning to his stance by the window.
The view paralysed him. He sipped at the glass and looked at the sea. Toy boats on a bilious pond. Arms dead except to drink, sea dead except to swallow, landfall every few days, the stink of diesel oil and salt, coffee and disinfectant, stale tobacco and stew. The smell of heat and that peculiar odour of invigorating cold: he did not want to go back. The spell was broken. She had kept him at it long enough. He had searched all lanes and knew it well, yet had found nothing. More years than he had fingers and toes, as an old salt said. His contract had two months to run, then he would take his last sway down the gangplank to ironical cheers, and never a look back from dock gate or customs shed. A mote in the eye for ever as his first love vanished.
Dust flew when he hit a velvet-covered chair. He telephoned the hospital. She hadn’t given her second name, but they knew who he meant. ‘Are you free for dinner?’
A tone of nothing-doing came from her. ‘Boy-friend tonight. Really. All right?’
‘Some other time?’
‘Try when you can. It was fine last night. Really came off well, didn’t it?’
‘I liked it, too.’
‘Sorry about your mother.’
‘Aunt.’
‘Aunt, I mean. Must go. Busy-busy! Bye now.’
‘Goodbye, old girl.’
He was still a sailor: ‘as much at sea on land, as I am on land at sea’ – so the ditty went. The vacuum cleaner fell from its cupboard, and he took his jacket off, running the machine along lane after lane of carpet till dusk came and he switched on every table lamp and the overhead chandelier in a flush expenditure of amps that the flat couldn’t have seen for years.
A few dozen tins of food stood ready as if for another bout of wartime shortage. He opened asparagus and corned beef. There was a case of wine, and bottles of port and sherry. He found a jar of coffee beans, and tinned pineapple for dessert.
He wandered around the flat while eating. The built-in wardrobe held scores of dresses. A mothball smell when he slid back the door was almost solid. He banged it shut. In a drawer of her desk he found an album with snapshots of his mother which Clara had never shown. She hadn’t cared to disturb him, he supposed, by what he had never known. Not wanting to complicate their relationship, she had kept him totally in her power.
He went back to the dining-room to finish his meal, turning off the electric lights and setting out enough candles to see by. Clara had tied him firmly to herself by the simple trick of endeavouring to keep him as far away from her as possible. He regretted not having visited her more often. She had wanted it that way, and could no longer answer his questions. Perhaps her purpose had been to open his mind to speculation the moment she was no longer here.
She had disliked him so much, yet been kind to him. There was no doubt about it. His sextant and deckwatch from Potters had been paid for by her, and she had settled the bill for his third mate’s uniform, all by way of accepting responsibility for his fateful glance out of her window.
‘Responsibility,’ she told him, and he wondered in his young arrogance where she could have read it, ‘is the hallmark of maturity. I accept the responsibility for whatever I have caused in this life, and I expect you to act in the same way.’
She had said no more, for he was being taken to tea at the Metropole, where she talked only about the weather, and his career. She checked his appearance and behaviour as if he were still a boy, and he held himself from being cheeky because he knew by then that he was afraid of her.
He fetched a pack of Jamaican cigars from his bag, and smoked by the living-room window so that he could hear the thump of breakers between passing traffic. He notified her death to The Times, more to inform himself than to tell anyone who might still remember. On the telephone her solicitor said he would like to see him. ‘You’re her only beneficiary, and have a fair amount coming to you after probate, taxes, duties and all costs have been settled. Hard to say how much. Something like three hundred thousand, I’d say. She was fond of you. After the funeral will be a good time for us to meet. You will be staying till then, I expect. Keep account of all receipts and expenses regarding death certificate, funeral costs, rates on the flat, and so on. It’s your responsibility now.’
A swollen bank book would be an affliction. His savings and pension plan were enoug
h for his needs. Having been free of land-ties all his life he had no worries. See her well buried, get back to the ship, and stay for as long as you can stand by the wheel and lift a sextant, then find a Pacific island where you can live like a king on your bit of income. He’d heard talk of places where you wanted for nothing as long as you didn’t want much.
The sea glistened in the morning, ominous blades of light across the surface, that could change all too quickly into a white-capped Force Ten blow-up with four horizons only as far away as the hand could reach. Yet it would alter to a grey and tolerable chop before long. The state of the sea never stayed the same, you could be sure of that, which fortunately applied to everything else as well.
He once heard talk of a sailor who carried a piece of rope in his kit to hang himself if things got too bad. When he showed the rope to his shipmates they had a good laugh and thought what a way to make sure you never did yank yourself up. The tale of the bloke with the portable rope went the rounds for years till he met an acquaintance in Galveston who said: ‘Remember Jimmy Hawkins on the old ship Alinoa who always had a rope in his kit? Well, he actually topped himself. The Sparks told me, who’d got it from another sparky-bloke who was on the very old tub that Jimmy did for himself. We learned it only a few hours after it had happened. You know how fast news can travel when those mad wireless operators get spirit-tapping away. I expect the story is still bouncing into all sorts of one-eyed french-letter grateholes that haven’t heard about it yet. But what misery old Jimmy must have gone through before doing a crazy thing like that.’
No, he wasn’t built in any way, shape or form, he told himself, to go the way of Saintly Jimmy. Neither the igloo of his heart nor the fireplace of his brain was set on it, and in any case what would Clara say if ever he did, and they met in the lobby of the ‘Nevermore Hotel’?
10
The train squeaked alongside the platform, and stopped to the sound of a few doors banging back against the carriages. He steadied the handle and manoeuvred his luggage. There were no trolleys, and no such people as porters any more. Which was why, Clara said, she hadn’t travelled in the last ten years. One needed looking after, but nowadays no one wanted your florins, so you had better stay at home.
He lugged his stuff through the desolate station. There were more down-and-outs on the benches than a few years ago. He found it strange that though there were a million unemployed no one wanted the work of cleaning the station, which was looking more like some God-forsaken place in South America.
At Clara’s funeral, sunlight flamed through the windows while the chaplain read his piece. There were more people than expected. She had given money every Christmas to those who worked in the shops, to the milkman and the postman, to rubbish collectors and caretakers, and some came to see her buried.
By the grave Beryl held his hand, her glove curving over his, but he drew away so as to bring his right arm up into a salute which he assumed his aunt would expect. They went to the flat for food and drinks, and when everyone had left he telephoned for a taxi to take Beryl to the hospital. He was glad to be alone.
A few more trips at sea allowed him to ponder on what to do, and to get so fed up with life on board that he had no alternative but to leave. When taxes had been paid from Clara’s estate he found it hard to believe that so much money was his. In the orphanage he started with a penny a week, and never had more than the ten-shilling note she had given him till he went into the Merchant Navy. He made certain never to lack a reserve of money. Even with the few pounds a month of those days it was possible to put a little cash into the bank, his self-respect added to by the fact that he had earned it. Instead of spending more than he allowed himself, he found excitement in spare-time reading for his various certificates. He searched secondhand bookshops in Liverpool and Preston for texbooks which, though a few years out of date, served for his studies. After thirty years of varying parsimony he would need no other money than his own to live on when he left the sea, yet the invested capital of Clara’s assets would bring in more than thirty thousand a year before tax. Twelve months ago he’d been alone in his simple life, but now he had a lawyer, an accountant, and a broker. The whole of the family money had devolved on to him.
His London room felt more like home than Clara’s flat. Five years ago he had seen an advertisement at a tobacconist’s, went to look, and rented it. He sat back in the taxi. Cars flashed by on Park Lane. He felt free, lost in space, without a ship and with nothing to do, too disorientated to know whether or not he liked it. The nearest human being seemed as far as the closest star. No one could reach him. Neither could he touch them. He didn’t want to. Some hardly visible being ran across the road, and the driver braked: ‘Did you see that meshugge?’
He slid the window a few inches open. ‘I did.’
‘Drunk.’
They turned into the Bayswater Road. ‘It seemed like it.’
He looked for a star, to reassure himself that he existed, but the sodium orange lights made a ceiling that hid them. Beryl had telephoned some days after the funeral. ‘What about tonight, sailor?’
‘Tonight?’
‘My boy-friend’s away.’ Her tone clashed with the shield that covered his grief.
‘I’m busy,’ he said.
The intense feeling of loss surprised him. Except to shop for food he didn’t leave the flat till the time to go back to his ship. He looked at the changing sheet of sea during the day, and paced at night with all lights on. He could not say what he thought. Hours of dark and light passed as if the time they spanned did not exist. His life had no meaning. He tried to understand the tenuous connections that held one person to another, and knew that if he didn’t find an answer in the place where Clara had lived he would not be able to do so when he went back to sea.
The pull of luggage told him he was alive and fit. The taxi driver carried one case to the kerb and offered to help him upstairs, but Tom said he could manage. A ten-watt bulb on the top landing gave more shadow than light. There was a glow under next door and he wondered who was there, before turning to sort among his wad of keys. He pushed the cases across the threshold with his foot, then hauled in the hold-all. The damp wallpaper smelled as if some occupant had rotted there. He unscrewed the release on the Rippengilles stove and heard the reassuring bubble as paraffin went down into the burner ring.
His only secure space on shore was tidy but needed heat. Before going back to sea the floor was swept and books placed on the shelf. Dishes were washed and put away, and bedclothes folded on to the mattress as neatly as any recruit’s. A small wooden box on the table contained rations of coffee, tea, soda biscuits and sardines. There were matches in a plastic case, a two-ounce tin of tobacco, a packet of pipe cleaners, a quarter-bottle of whisky and some cigars. A pile of cheap classics lay on top of his record player. He plugged in the radio, and tuned to the nearest caterwauling transmitter so that the room would have a voice to which he need not listen.
Until the heat took hold he kept warm by unpacking. He put his uniform and spare suit into a shallow cupboard which did for a wardrobe, remembering how an otherwise taciturn old captain once said: ‘A good mariner wants for little, and needs little. Necessaries are luxuries, but no luxury is necessary’ – a habit of speaking which caused Paul the wireless operator to refer to him as Captain Epigram.
He looked along the spines of his books: a set of Gibbon, all of Dickens except A Tale of Two Cities which someone had taken a fancy to, odd compendiums of geography and travel published donkey’s years ago, a Bible lifted from some hotel, his old seamanship and navigation manuals, a few maps and novels brought back from various parts of the world. There was no reason to keep them, yet they were the capes and pinpoints of his recollections, each marking an otherwise empty log of a dead-reckoning plot, and never to be replaced by Clara’s inherited library of leatherbound editions. If his own motley books had been packed in a watertight container and floated to the beach of a desert island on which he was stranded
he would want for little in the way of reading till a banana boat came to his rescue.
The radio broke into his thoughts, and he diminished its noise before turning to make the bed. Tripping against a shoe reminded him that it was time to sleep. He asked what he was doing here, and answered that he needed refuge from Clara’s flat where no reflection seemed to be his own. Between these four walls he had never known anyone but himself.
His eyes obstinately fought the dead weight of the body pushing against them. Braying music was halted by the rattle of news and weather: frost was coming, cold and clear, a Force Nothing easterly with chilly sunshine to get the black dog off old Beaufort’s back. Water jiggered in next door’s tap, though the place was quieter than when a student and his girl-friend used to hammer each other under the sound-umbrella of a pop group that shook the windows.
He screwed down the Rippengilles to bubble itself out, but left the wireless on in case silence should disturb his peace of mind while going to sleep. On a ship, engines rattled the bones for weeks at a time, and there was a vigorous thudding of water to go with it. He needed noise in order to sleep, as if he were still on board and had to wake up in four hours.
The easiest way to attain unbroken repose was to drink alcohol till he was unconscious, but he was no longer willing for such dynamite to blow down the walls that separated him from peace. His patience would get him there in its own good time, and if it baulked at the task then he would lie there till it did.
Clara had never suspected his occasional indulgence in alcoholic blackouts – as far as he knew, though she was a realistic woman who was perhaps more familiar with the world’s ways, and those of men who went to sea, than he realized. Even so, she certainly did not imagine the depth of his occasional severance from reality and decency. On wondering whether she had died in order that he could reform, he felt the light of morning behind his eyelids.
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