Seagulls in My Soup

by Tristan Jones

  When I returned to the living room Elmyr seemed downcast. It was soon obvious that he had ascertained that deah Willie was not in the market for paintings, nor for anything else.

  Shortly thereafter Elmyr escorted Sissie to the gate and made his parting. We three made our way back down the hill, the bishop’s voice booming and echoing from the white walls of the tiny houses, all hung with garlic and fish, through the gloomy arch of the fifteenth-century walls, down to the lower town and the realm of ordinary mortals, with both Sissie and the bishop commenting on what an “awf’ly nice, splendid fellow” Elmyr was.

  In good King Charles’ golden days,

  When loyalty no harm meant,

  A zealous High Church man was I,

  And so I got preferment.

  To teach my flock I never missed;

  Kings were by God appointed,

  And lost were those that dare resist

  Or touch the Lord’s anointed!

  And this the rule that I’ll maintain,

  Until my dying day, sir,

  That whatsoe’r king may reign,

  Still I’ll be the bishop of Bray, sir!

  First verse of a seventeenth-century

  English Anti-Established-Church song.

  7. The Ship that Almost Died of Shame

  Early next morning, just after Sissie and I had finished breakfast—she once again domesticated in her dark blue gym slip and an inch-wide pink ribbon around her russet hair; and Nelson, as usual at that hour, under the cabin table, banging his tail against my leg in morning greeting—the bishop hailed us from the roadway. “Cresswell, ahoy?”

  As soon as she heard Willie’s voice, Sissie shot up the ladder. “A teeny tick, dahling—Ai’ll pull the jolly old boat in for you.”

  From the shady gloom of the cabin a portrait print of Her Majesty admonished me to no incivilities. I gazed up as Sissie hefted a heavy black Gladstone bag down into the cockpit. The Gladstone, which was almost covered with little hotel labels from places as far apart as Colombo and Coventry, was soon followed by a scampering, bouncing Willie.

  As Sissie let go of the stern line Cresswell creaked against the hull next to her, as if she were complaining, and the ancient work-worn schooner gave off rustling sounds as if she were comforting Cresswell, saying, “Cheer up, love, it’s only for one day, after all!”

  I ascended the companionway ladder. There was deah Willie, balanced precariously on the poop whaleback, holding onto the mizzen boom with one hand, grasping the handle of a wicker picnic hamper with the other. He beamed at me with a smile of benediction so wide that it looked as if his muttonchop whiskers would never find each other again. As Sissie took the hamper from him he chanted, “Good morning? Good morning?” Then he looked upward, as if sending a plea to heaven.

  I studied Willie as he gazed up. He had discarded his clerical mourning shirt and collar, and was now resplendent in a bright red sports shirt (shades of Elmyr’s Corvette), and khaki shorts which reached down to his white, knobbly knees and made him look as if he were just about to surrender the Southchester Cathedral to the Imperial Japanese Army. On his lower legs he wore short black nylon socks, and on his feet spanking white tennis shoes. With his red face, freshly roasted even under the rather weak November Mediterranean sun, and his peeling bald pate and gleaming silver whiskers, he looked, apart from his clothes, like one of those merry, well-fed squires depicted on fox-hunting prints, or on Christmas cards which show early nineteenth-century coaches wallowing through three feet of snow. He looked as if he’d stepped straight out of the pages of The Pickwick Papers. Before I, too, turned my glance to the heavens for signs of a breeze, I knew that God was up there, and all was right with the world. Willie’s face told me so.

  “Morning, Willie. Not much of a wind yet—in fact none at all. We’re a bit early . . . It won’t pipe up for a good half hour,” I told him.

  “We shall be blessed in the good Lord’s time?” said Willie.

  “Oh, golly whizz!” Sissie screeched, behind me now. “Then Ai’d bally-well bettah make some tea!”

  In the good old British tradition, sanctified wherever the sun (once) never set, it was Sissie’s immediate reaction to any crisis. I think that if Cresswell had ever been on the point of foundering into the dark deeps, Sissie would have gone down with a teapot and sugar spoon clutched to her breast. Humming merrily to herself as Willie, surprisingly agile for his age, clambered and slithered down into the cockpit well, Sissie marched forward to her dark, poky hideaway below in the forward dodger. There her huge traveling bag slumped to one side like a fat old Pasha leering in the gloom. She emerged within seconds with a sparkling white tablecloth clutched in one hand, and a box in the other. Once Willie was safely below, she laid out the tablecloth with a grand flourish over the oil- and salt-stained weatherdeck. She took a tinkling tea set out of the box and set it out on the cloth. Immediately Cresswell was transformed from a semi-exhausted workaday converted lifeboat into Cleopatra’s Barge.

  As I wordlessly watched the transmogrification of my vessel into something which looked as if it had strayed out of Regent’s Park Canal at Bloomsbury, the bishop beamed at me. “Decent library down here?” he boomed. “I suppose they keep you company when you’re on your own?”

  “Yes, I learn a lot about myself from them,” I replied warily. It was hardly the hour for a literary conversation, especially as I had seen a slight movement of a lamb-like cloud over the cathedral high atop the Ibiza Old Town hill, and hoped there was a bit of a breeze rising.

  “Yes?,” Willie said, “Many a hunted heart may flee to a good book and find peace and solace there?”

  “Oh deah Tristan simply adores reading, don’t you dahling?” observed Sissie.

  “Right, especially when I’m on a lee shore, with a bloo . . . a great gale blowing its head off, and the book is the Admiralty Pilot for that particular stretch of coast.”

  “Ah, yes? You have your pilot and I have mine,” said Willie, “but I suspect it’s the same pilot for all of us?”

  “Only if it’s amended and brought up to date,” I maintained.

  Willie’s querying look was puzzled but benign.

  “Tristan means that he has to keep all his jolly old charts and pilot books and all sorts . . . simply oodles of papers and meps and things, ebsolutely up to date, up to the awf’ly last word, don’t you, dahling?”

  Sissie poured the tea—no common Lipton’s for Willie, no indeed. This was genuine Fortnum and Mason’s Burma tea, from a secret stash in the sinister traveling bag.

  I tiptoed carefully over the tea set and made my way forward to single up the mooring lines. Nelson was now laid out on the foredeck, on his belly, with his head on his one front paw, gazing aft at the morning breakfast tea-party now in progress. When I bent over to tickle his ear he looked up with his one eye and heaved a great sigh. “Yes, I know, old son,” I told him.

  As I singled up the forward mooring line, Rosalinda, the old schooner which Cresswell was tied up to, seemed to shiver in the early morning haze, as if she knew that her little friend, which had been holding hands with her for four days, was about to abandon her, to leave her once more in the sad, sad company of her softly grumbling, night-complaining companions. I felt this, and reached over to pat the hulk’s scarred, gray, rotting bulwark. Just then the bishop’s voice psalmed, “I see you have all of Shakespeare?”

  I didn’t reply. The parting of Cresswell from the dying Rosalinda was too melancholy for me.

  Sissie chimed in. “Oh deah Tristan simply worships Shakespeare, don’t you, dahling?”

  “I find a repose in the Bard?” Willie intoned in a voice that seemed to make the teaspoons rattle. “When I read him, all questioning ceases for me?”

  As I unshipped the mainsail tiers I glanced at him. He held a tea cup in one hand. The other hand was pressed against his chest. His voice
thundered on. “All my difficulties . . . all the complexities of life . . . they all seem to lose their importance. I am a novice before an archbishop who knows all my fears, but who smiles at them?”

  I slid aft past Willie and let go the after mooring line, then trotted again to the forward line, let go of that, and heaved mightily against Rosalinda. Silently and slowly Cresswell slid over the oily surface of the harbor and away from the ships’ graveyard. All the while Sissie was gazing at deah Willie, a smile, half of wonderment, half of revelation, on her face. As I passed her I shot her a quick, dark look, and she bent to clear up the tablecloth.

  The bishop’s voice reverberated on and on. “My main reason for being glad that I was born English is that William Shakespeare was an Englishman?”

  Sissie hauled up the working jib and I heaved up the mainsail. As the mainboom clattered across the boat in the dead calm air, it almost caught Willie under his ear, and I was a little disappointed to see him duck out of its way just in time. Then a slight whiff of a whisper of wind caught the sails, and my attention was wholly taken up with working out across the flat waters of Ibiza harbor. Then I was, for a brief respite, only dimly aware, somewhere in a remote part of my hearing system, of the bishop’s voice, which, instead of resounding, now seemed to be a mere mumble. Such are the charms and demands of a sailing vessel and a shy zephyr to work her with, that for one blessed moment I forgot deah Willie.

  Cresswell reluctantly, and at a rheumatic snail’s pace, crept forward. Then the fickle breeze, to taunt us, died away. Only yards from the silent schooners Cresswell was left with sails empty and drooping, as embarrassed as an actress who has forgotten her lines. Some seabirds, out on their early-morning foray, glided over with the intention of jeering at us, but as soon as they heard Willie’s voice they changed their minds and headed away again to search for a fishing boat. It would be more profitable to them; they would not risk having their eardrums damaged, and they had the wisdom to know that seven in the morning is not the time for a lecture on Shakespeare. In the evening, with a bottle of rum on the cabin table, and the oil-lamp’s golden glow on the cabin bookshelves, by all means—but in the middle of a harbor, with all sails up and no wind, Shakespeare is definitely out. Conrad or Kipling, maybe. Shakespeare, never. The fact that Nelson, still lying on the foredeck, had seen the seagulls’ intent and snarled at them surlily might also have warned them off.

  The bishop sat on the coachroof now, with his red shirt, white knobbly knees, black socks, and red face. His mouth kept opening and closing as he droned on with his sermon, shattering the silence of the harbor.

  “ . . . and being alone a lot can, of course, lead to the discovery of one’s self?” The fruity boom carried clearly through the still morning air and over the murky water. A hundred yards away a deckhand who had been asleep on the deck of a fishing boat shook his head and stared at us. On the town quay, 150 yards away, the fishwives and their few early customers stopped haggling as the roaring notes of the cathedral organ, in all their tonal splendor, rolled over them and away up the narrow alleys toward the Old Town walls half a mile away. I stared at the walls for a moment, wondering if we were about to witness a repeat performance of Joshua’s remarkable feat before Jericho. But Ibiza’s Old Town was fortunate. The walls held firm against the detonating timbre of Willie’s monologue.

  “ . . . but perhaps we need solitude to find other people? Even the Saviour Himself reached mankind through being alone in the wilderness?”

  I silently gazed around the harbor. I stared at the sky. I gawped east, west, south, and north as deah Willie’s voice clanged and pealed and rang, shattering the holiness which comes before the wind’s rising.

  I looked at Sissie, who was busy adoring Willie. “Might as well put the breakfast dishes in a bucket,” I said. “We’ll wash ’em in seawater when we get outside the harbor. If we ever get outside the harbor.”

  The mainboom crashed across again. Again Willie ducked just in time, but he didn’t miss one word of his sermon. “It must be wonderful to be content in solitude? Content with one’s self? At peace with one’s self? And especially, I suppose, when there is a definite task to be accomplished, as, of course, there is in a small vessel crossing an ocean?”

  “No wind,” I mumbled to him from behind the steering wheel, which moved slack and non-resistant in my hand.

  “Ah, the wind and the weather?” he fog-horned down at Sissie, who was now in the galley. Then his head came upright once again and he clasped his hands behind his fishbelly-white knees. “What a joy it must be to be a man of the weather? What happiness must a man . . . sound in body and with peace of mind, mark you,” he beamed at me, “ . . . what happiness he must have to live for and with the weather? For such a man there can be no bad weather? Every sky, no matter how threatening, must have its beauty? Every storm which makes his heart pound and his blood race, surely, makes his heart pound and his blood race more vigorously?”

  “Not a breath,” I said. “Not a bloo . . . not a capful of wind.”

  “Poor, dahling Tristan. He’s so jolly patient,” Sissie’s voice rose from the galley. “More tea?” she yelled at the mizzen.

  “Not a fiddler’s far . . . Not a fiddler’s farrago,” I muttered, and spun the wheel both ways in frustration, so that the cable stops smashed against their U-bolt limiters down below in the after dodger. “Not a fu . . . fudge . . . Not a fuddle of breeze!” I complained.

  “I say, what a topping expression? A fuddle of breeze?”

  I peered around in the misty morning sunshine. I stared toward the harbor entrance a half-mile distant and beyond at the open sea, iridescent and shimmering. But there was a leaden hue to it, and it was quite obvious to me that all four winds, and all the western Mediterranean, now they were sure that deah Willie was trying to embark in, under, over, and upon them, were sulking. It was as if the gods of the wind and the sea had shut up shop and gone golfing for the day. There was a sudden deadness abroad. I expected to see a coffin come drifting around the seawall head at any moment, with the very dead Lady of Shalott dangling one arm over the side.

  “No wind, dahling? Not one teeny weeny bit?” screeched Sissie from the galley.

  “Not a sausage,” I snarled back. “And the sky’s as dead as a bloo . . . bludgeoned dodo.”

  “The good Lord will provide,” Willie bellowed, and just as he did the mainboom swung over and caught him smack on the ear.

  Feeling better, I said, “Careful, it might swing across again.”

  “Ah, accidents will happen in the best-regulated families.” His voice was somewhat pained and a mite lower in volume now, as he quoted Queen Victoria.

  “Are you all right, dahling?” yelled Sissie.

  “If pain did not exist, we should never experience happiness,” roared Willie.

  “Ai say, how simply brave of you,” Sissie screeched. “How simply splendid. Just a jiffy, old cheppie—Ai’ll have tea ready in a tick or two!”

  Forward, Nelson heaved and sighed; then, as if fascinated by Willie’s performance, he nestled his head once more onto his paw and stared at the bishop, blinking every now and then. I looked around me. Cresswell was stopped stone dead. The sails hung like a sailor’s pockets after a night ashore. The sky above and the water around us looked as if the world had decided never to turn again. Halfway up the hill, brazen morning sunlight shone on the Old Town walls, which reflected rosy-gold above the jumble of white cottages of the lower town. Seaward there was not a sign of any whiteness on the sea—no crests, no troughs, no undulations of the horizon. Everything seemed to have stopped in adamant indignation at the sound of Willie’s voice.

  It was like charity flag-day in Aberdeen. It was like five minutes before opening-time in a London pub, with Cresswell, Nelson, Sissie, Willie, and me the waiting, shaking, desperate patrons, gazing in despair through the gloomy Edwardian windows at the far wall of the saloon, trying to
see if the pub-clock hands were indeed moving, or if it was merely a mocking, painted face that stared back at us, begrudging our very existence.

  I turned back toward the companionway to see Sissie’s Sheffield-steel-blue eyes now melted in utter sympathy. “Oh, deah Tristan—tea?”

  The mainboom swung again. Willie ducked again. The clatter and squeak of the mainsheet block jeered and made sport of my frustration. The dull thud of the working jib up forward poked malicious fun at my hand on the wheel. The houses on the hill, the tower of the cathedral, the fishing boats alongside the town quay, the leaden water, the deadened sky, and the sound of the bishop’s voice as it hollered and squalled, yelled, belled, and vroomed, all chorused accusingly the twelfth commandment of the sailorman: “Thou shalt not take to sea with thee the man in black!”

  Willie by now was onto a subject obviously close to his heart—Cheerfulness. As I glowered at the sails and the sky, he roared on. “Of course we must thank the good Lord for any little blessings we have? When we count them we must remember that we do, in fact, suffer along with the rest of mankind? We must not think it is a sin to be cheerful?”

  Sissie cooed as she handed me my mug of Lipton tea. “Why don’t we start the jolly old engine, dahling? At least we shell get out of this dreadful harbor.”

  On Cresswell it was an unpardonable sin to initiate talk of the Iron Judas which lurked below. But now, with the burden of sin safely on Sissie’s shoulders, I perked up.

  “I’ve only got a gallon or so of diesel left,” I told her, “But at least we’ve got enough to get us outside the seawall. We might just find a bit of breeze out there.”

  “Jolly good idea, dahling. Shell Ai start the dratted thing, or shell you?” Sissie stood there like a tense messenger before a Spartan general at Thermopylae.