I cocked an eye at the bishop, who for once was silent. I certainly didn’t want him to know that I let Sissie swing the obstinate little bastard of a starting handle in the impossibly confined space below the weatherdeck. It was to me as if she had asked if she should let an imaginary idiot brother, drooling, out of the forward dodger, and thus divulge a dark family secret. But the bishop was still beaming at me, and God, whom I had thought had gone away for the holidays, was back in heaven.
“No, we’ll do it like we always do,” I growled, giving Sissie a look which would have silenced Kublai Khan. “You take the wheel. Head for the entrance. I’ll start the fuc . . . fucated engine.”
“Fucated engine?” roared Willie.
“Yes, it means painted . . . We painted it the other day, in Formentera.”
I heaved up the engine hatches. Almost in tears with shame, humiliation, and frustration at not having sailed Cresswell out, and with the old schooners still only yards away, I stared round my boat again, like a madman trying to figure out which way he should head after climbing over an asylum wall.
Now that she had her hands on the wheel (a rare treat), Sissie was becoming romantic again. “Oh, deah Willie,” she gushed, “I do so wish that Miss Benedict were heah! She would have enjoyed herself so bally much. Oh what a rotten shame. I do hope she wins the tournament.”
“I’d rather not talk about croquet just now,” boomed Willie. “After all, we are out here to enjoy a rattling good sail, aren’t we?” He watched me in silence—the miraculous silence that always falls just before a sailing boat’s engine is started and after it has been stopped.
I spitefully rammed oil into my old enemies, the two cylinders. I pushed down viciously my old antagonist, the decompression lever. I attacked with brute malice my old adversary, the starting handle, even as Willie roared the words, “Reminds me of the good old days, out with Algernon and Bertie, punting down the Thames at Windsor. . . .”
“Deah Algernon, how awf’ly sweet he was . . . He used to dandle me on his knee . . . awf’ly kind,” Sissie screeched.
As I attacked the handle for the third time, sweat now pouring from me, the engine sensed my fury and decided to surrender to my wishes. With at first a sort of burp, almost apologetic, then a cough, it spluttered to life. I dropped the now-free starting handle. I leaned over and hissed at the loudly exploding engine, “Now you bastard, if you stop before half a bleedin’ hour’s up I’ll unbutton you and you’re for the deep-six!”
The engine missed a stroke, as if it were swearing that it wouldn’t dream of letting me down, then roared away again.
“And I don’t want to hear that bloody voice up there for at least half an hour! Understand?” I kicked the front casing of the engine, then poked my head above the hatchway. Unbelievably, Willie’s voice could still be heard. I bent down again, and with a spanner soon unslipped the throttle-limiting attachment so that I could get more power and, hopefully, more noise out of the engine.
It was to no avail. Even with the throttle wide open and the hatches left gaping, deah Willie boomed out still over the very best the engine could do. Resigned to defeat, I made my way up to the foredeck, where I sat alongside Nelson and let the working jib flap away at my head. Its noise, combined with the engine, the spattering mainsail, the creaking sheet-blocks, and the slapping of loose halyards, helped to drown Willie’s, but not quite. His voice, like an aura, like an odor, penetrated everything.
Willie was now lecturing Sissie on Art. She must have mentioned the visit to Elmyr’s villa the day before. “ . . . And of course works of art are the only means whereby we can truly communicate with one another, completely and unhindered?”
I stared aft as Cresswell slid through the glassy harbor. Sissie was replying to her brother, tilting her head to one side and squinting. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her.
Then his voice chanted on. “Well, of course, the problem of art and morals . . . the relationship between them, my dear Cecilia. . . .” (Cecilia?) “is that it’s too often mooted that the problem only exists on the side of art? Our type of people too often assume that our moral standards are satisfactory and appropriate, at least in the theory if not in the fact? We seem to question only in what ways art should conform to our ideas of morality?”
Willie droned on and on. I lay down and buried my head under Nelson’s neck. He lifted his head and licked my ear. I groaned. I lifted my head and grinned at him. He grinned back. I groaned again. Nelson whimpered in reply. Even the passing harbor water looked exhausted.
When Cresswell was a mile offshore the sea was still as flat as a baker’s tray. It was obvious there would be no wind all day. There would be no lifting to the sea-swell, no zizzing of the wind in the shrouds, not even any crafty jiggling to a soft breeze. There would certainly be no beating into the wind, with spray whizzing into our intent eyes; no sudden gusts to frighten Willie into startled silence, even momentarily, as had been my hopeful consolation until now. Cresswell would feel no ground-swell, nor the proud wonder of her first heaves over them, the same every time it happened, now as the very first time, way back in 1908. Today her hull would not tremble as she ran out from the protection of the jutting headland. Today she would stay a dead, inanimate collection of bits of wood and metal, put together by men’s hands, like a house ashore. Today there would be no sense of heart and spirit, the soul and dream which had been built so truly and honestly into her. Today she would not send the spit of the seas playfully over her shoulder, hosing spray aft at us. She would not communicate to us the soaring praise of life from the sea and every living thing in it.
I stopped the engine. Cresswell sorrowfully slowed down and stopped dead in the dead water. She wallowed.
“No point in going any further,” I mumbled, as I crawled up out of the engine space. “We’ve only got enough diesel oil to get us back in again. . . . Unless you want to row.”
Willie was now in the midst of a descant on Satisfaction. “ . . . And the amount of satisfaction that we get from life largely depends on our own ingenuity?”
“Oh, dahling, not to fret one teeny bit. Deah Willie’s awf’ly heppy.”
“ . . . Those of us who sit around waiting for satisfaction to overtake us. . . .”
“Well, we’ll have to sit here. It’s not too bad. Maybe you can talk him into going over the side for a swim.”
“. . . . usually find only boredom instead?”
“Oh, Ai say, what a splendid idea!”
“Yes, if I were you I’d get him over the side as soon as possible, just in case a wind comes up. You never know.”
“ . . . And, although one can be satisfied with one’s circumstances, of course one can never be satisfied with one’s attainments?”
Willie was in the ideal circumstance of a preacher who has achieved his highest earthly attainment: He had a captive congregation. The only escape was over the side. Either me or him. It wasn’t going to be me—I can’t swim.
Soon Sissie, in her black one-piece swimming suit, which made her look as if she were a contender in a 1922 beauty contest, and the bishop, who had doffed his shirts, socks, and tennis shoes, were clambering down Cresswell’s rudder as Nelson and I watched them gleefully. Once in the water, Willie, although he spluttered at first some declamation on how fine and good it was, spoke little, and then in low tones to Sissie. For an hour or so, after I had told them there were shoals of all kinds of exotic fish by the headland a mile to the east of us (which there weren’t), they stayed over there, well out of earshot, and I lay down in the sun on the weatherdeck to relax my frayed nerves. After a while there came a soft padding on deck and Nelson lay down beside me. And so we spent a sunny, calm forenoon.
As the sun reached the meridian, the rolling, vrooming voice, like a slow-moving squall, relentlessly approached Cresswell again, and, to Sissie’s occasional murmur of comprehension and approbation, lectured
to her and five wheeling seagulls on Disappointment. Presumably they had searched hard for the exotic fish.
“ . . . And Belloc wrote that he had a friend who told him in early life that he was determined to expect the worst always? For thus he would receive no . . . (splutter) . . . disappointment? Belloc wrote that he watched his friend living by that doctrine and finally discovered his friend to be abominably disappointed?!”
Sissie crowed a laugh. “Oh, deah Willie . . .” Her head rose over the rudderpost simultaneously with my heart dropping into my deck shoes. “ . . . So very clevah, so terribly, awf’ly funny!” she said as she passed by, dolloping seawater from her thick, dimpled thighs onto the decks and over me.
There was consolation, though, on that windless day off Ibiza. Willie handed up the hamper he had brought with him. Sissie opened it and revealed an Aladdin’s treasure of culinary delights. There was pâté de foie gras, which we smeared on some bread that Sissie had made only two days before; a fine Wiltshire ham, applesauce from Warwickshire; cheddar, Lancashire, and Caerphilly cheeses; Keiller’s marmalade and Robinson’s jam; clotted cream and Eccles cake—all of which we washed down with real scrumpy cider from Cornwall. It was an epicurean tour of the cathedral towns and cities of England, Scotland, and Wales, and we all ate in precious, almost absolute silence, except for Willie’s thundered comments on Appetite.
“It is somewhat humiliating for me . . .” (another large ham sandwich disappeared into the maw of the cathedral organ) “ . . . to realize what a controlling influence the intestines have on the thoughts and ways of humanity?”
As I handed Nelson a long string of ham fat I reflected that heaven might or might not be for Sissie and Nelson and me, but that this world was certainly for the clergy. And I thought of what an ancient fisherman had once said to me in Ireland: “It’s a strange priest, beJasus, whose pig dies of starvation.”
After lunch Cresswell was still floating absolutely still in the water, as ashamed as an abandoned bride, so Sissie and Willie took off again swimming over the side for a pair of hours. This time they did not swim far, so instead of sleeping in peace I was treated to commentaries on various subjects.
Enjoyment: “It takes a good, clean mind to know how to enjoy the bright and worthwhile things in life?”
Happiness: “It has been said, my dear Cecilia, that the moment when one realizes true happiness is when one distinguishes the idea of felicity from that of wealth. But I think that can hardly be true—consider Prince Elmyr, for example?”
Heroism (this after Sissie had spent a good ten minutes telling Willie how awf’ly, terrific’ly brave I was): “Well, of course, Cecilia, the only thing that gives bravery and heroism—I mean the physical sorts—any kind of meaning, is death.”
This cheered me up no end, as you may imagine.
But even the best of days draw to their ends, and by three in the afternoon Willie and Sissie, both rather exhausted and a lot quieter now, returned onboard. I started my mortal enemy, the banging Iscariot below; it clattered away at my first hate-filled, sweaty exertion, and Cresswell, like a scorned woman, her hull tense and furious, slunk back to the old hulk’s berth. As she slid in gently alongside the ancient Rosalinda, the hoary schooner seemed to tremble. The slight bump we gave her made the broken wires hanging from her rotting gaff jiggle and dance, as if the old girl was pleased that her little friend had returned to keep her company once more during the long nights of wistfulness over glorious days never to return.
Except for Willie’s voice, though, Cresswell was silent, with her sails lashed and all her loose gear stowed by Sissie. Willie, now with his sports outfit re-donned, stuck out a fluttering flounder at me. “Thanks for a wonderful outing, old chap?”
“Pleasure. Sorry about the wind.”
“Oh, think nothing of it. Can’t expect everything, can we, and your company’s been marvelous?”
“Thanks, Willie.” I turned to check the mooring lines.
“Deah, dahling Willie,” Sissie murmured behind me. It was like a litany in church, with Sissie intoning the replies.
“Yes, I say, do come along with Sissie and me for dinner tonight. Perhaps we can have a drink or two afterward?”
“Glad to.” (Never turn down comestibles or booze.)
So went the only time I ever sailed with a clergyman.
We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,
We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,
And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.
God help us! For we knew the worst too young!
Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought the sentence,
Our pride is to know no spur of pride,
And the Curse of Reuben holds us till an alien turf enfolds us
And we die, and none can tell them where we died.
We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray,
Baa-aa-aa!
Gentlemen rankers out on a spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha’ mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!
“Gentlemen Rankers” (last verse)
—Rudyard Kipling.
The Whiffenpoofs of Yale University changed the words to this poem and put them to music.
8. Little Black Sheep
By six o’clock in the evening Sissie was again bright and effulgent in her rose-bedecked white frock and wide-brimmed hat. I had changed into my corduroys and a clean tee-shirt—the only one onboard, as it happened. It was dusk, and time for mutual admiration.
“Deah, dahling Tristan, mai, how perfectly, ebsolutely adorable you look!” Sissie gushed at me, fishing for praise herself.
“And you look like a . . . a coronation!” said I. That got Sissie so flustered that she could just about stop her handbag from sliding over the side into the mucky old-wreck berth as she heaved Cresswell’s stern line. In some miraculous way she had done one of those things that women do with their hair, so that instead of looking like the frayed ends of a live 10,000-volt electric cable it shone aureate, a golden glow around her blue eyes, like sunset in a rose bower. Her new high-heeled white shoes made me again wonder at what marvelous solutions of engineering stresses are to be observed in women’s feet. As Sissie grabbed onto the mizzen topping lift and tensed to jump to the jetty, I had a vision of the Eiffel Tower balanced upside down on its television mast. I swiftly concluded that there must be some sort of levitation involved; surely those slender, delicate heels could never, on their own, support a whole 170-pound English games-mistress? This was obviously the question that the small, dark fishermen were asking themselves as they crowded to the door of the bodega opposite the old-hulks’ berth, and jammed themselves, stretching, straining, and craning in wide-eyed Latin wonder, to watch as this vision of blue-eyed pulchritude flashed by them, chatting away to me, like a full-rigged sailing ship sending semaphore signals by the dozen, and smelling of something that brought to mind the offshore breeze from Antibes.
Willie was waiting for us, his face a beaming, rutilant red, in the Hotel Montesol foyer. “Cecilia, my dear?!” His roar made the counter staff—a man of about ninety and a boy of about thirteen—jump almost to the ceiling. It was as if General Franco himself had just marched into the hotel. They sprang as much to attention as they could; then, recovering their wits, pressed just about every bell within reach, so that in seconds we were surrounded by a hovering flock of penguin-suited waiters, all staring at Sissie in her finery.
The bishop had undergone yet another transformation. Now he was resplendent in a white confection, worn over a light blue shirt and round collar.
“Deah, dahling Willie! How terribly naice to see you again!”
It was as if the pair had just
returned from the ends of the earth; she from the back reaches of the Kalahari desert, he from a mission through the Canadian arctic. You would never have dreamed that they had, only three hours before, been swimming out in the bay. I stared in wonder, and with a touch of sadness. Now, in the midst of this Continental display, I knew that the British Empire was finally finished.
Willie turned to me, his pate gleaming under the foyer chandelier. “And Tristan?” He clapped one ecclesiastically benign flounder on my shoulder and, taking Sissie by her chubby elbow, led us gently but surprisingly firmly into the hotel dining room. There, at a snowy white table gleaming with china and silverware, the bishop did us proud. There was no waiting for service with Willie’s voice around. He had only to mention the weather and right away three waiters and the wine-server were around us, as if they had been suspended on wires, awaiting the commands of “su honra, el obispo,” his honor the bishop.
It was obvious that the dining room staff cared not one whit that Willie was Anglican; he could have been a Catholic, a Methodist, a Seventh Day Adventist, a California prelate of the Mother Church, or even a Buddhist—he wore a round collar, and that was enough. The word had obviously been passed to the kitchen and wine cellar, for the food and drink were superlative and the after-dinner brandy excellent.
When we stepped out into the street our stomachs were replete with good food and wine, and our ears with Willie’s maxims: “One forgets how unsophisticated, how . . . indeed, how crude life remains outside the universities? Talk of television shows, cinema shows, the latest gadgets, sport; everyday anecdotes, what occurred at the office that day—that type of thing? No real talk at all? One is amazed that life goes on at all? People not caring much for anything that really matters at all?”
As we wended our way through the narrow streets Willie’s voice reverberated from the whitewashed walls of the little shops and made the raffia hats and mats hanging outside shiver and shake. As we passed the Ibizan families out for their evening constitutionals, or to display their offspring (of which there were plenty), the women turned their eyes, wondering, toward Willie, but didn’t move their heads under their black shawls. All the men, of course, were too busy gazing at Sissie to be bothered by the booming chant.
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