Sailors on the Inward Sea

by Lawrence Thornton

  I had gone to visit Viereck in the hope that with the aid of his considerable wisdom he might see Conrad’s last days and last acts more clearly than I did and help me understand them. While we sat on his veranda with the distant lights of Denpasar floating in the humid air, I told him everything, going on for what must have been upward of an hour. When I finished, Viereck nodded and stroked his voluminous white beard. From a nearby grove of hardwood trees came the call of nocturnal birds. “I see,” he said. “It is your opinion that Conrad’s conscience was clear at the end?”

  “Absolutely.”

  A monkey leapt from a tree onto the railing and sat there while Viereck took a nut from the bowl on the table, which the creature grabbed and cracked with his teeth. In the lamplight, his gums were pink. At that point, a woman materialized out of the gloom, walking silently on bare feet. Viereck rolled up his sleeve. I watched her swab his arm and give him an injection. After withdrawing the needle, she wrapped the syringe in a white cloth and handed him a dish containing some pills. He took them with wine as she was leaving. “You know, Malone,” he said, “with something like this a man has no choice. None in the least. He can put it off but time will run out.” In thrall to the drugs, he soon drifted into silence. Within minutes the woman returned and helped him into the house.

  I HAVE NOW given you my beginnings with Conrad and my beginnings with this story, Ford. I’d like to see you after you have read this, after you have had time to reflect and give me your impression of what it adds up to. I doubt you would fancy a voyage to Indonesia, though if you do I promise to show you things worth seeing in Batavia and out in the country. You would enjoy Panchuk. I, on the other hand, would be happy to return for a while to England. We might even take the train down to Kent as we used to do on occasion to see Conrad and persuade whoever now lives at the Pent to let us in for a look around. Who knows? Our voices might even be heard echoing faintly in the parlor.

  SINCE WE POSSESS the leasehold on the Pent until the story’s told, we might as well make ourselves comfortable in the big fireside chairs with white fleur-de-lis. From where we sit opposite the bow window we can see the oak trees that line the road back to Stanford. I pour a little whisky in our glasses, ask if you remember the heat that gripped London in the summer of 1924.

  “Bloody awful,” you say.

  It was. The sky rusty red at dawn, baking to a yellow haze soon after the sun came up, the motionless thick air that coated your throat and stung your eyes solidifying as the day wore on, hardening like plaster, humidity like the tropics. The only people who did not appear to suffer were members of a religious sect roaming Hyde Park, carrying signs inscribed with verses from the Book of Revelations warning that the Apocalypse was nigh, the lot licking their lips in anticipation of fire and brimstone raining down on the infidels through which they would walk untouched.

  I remember the weather so well because I was outside every day. After retiring from the sea earlier that year, I had taken rooms in a Chelsea boardinghouse near the Embankment while I looked for a boat to live on, the feel of the sea beneath my feet a spiritual requirement in the same way that daily chants are for a monk. I have few needs of this kind and will not burden you with them, but living on a boat, however modest, was crucial to my well-being. It still is. I keep a converted junk in a slip at the old port and divide my time between it and the bungalow.

  In any case, I was having a devilishly hard time finding a decent vessel. I visited every dock in the city whose name is remotely familiar to you and something was always wrong. Either the price was too high or the feel of the boat was off. The search led me into warrens, backwaters, abandoned channels trapped between old brick buildings where even at noon there were shadows, the water oily and viscous, clotted with debris, the boats advertised as being fresh as the day they were christened frequently half-submerged with such bad rot that their frames showed like bones through gaps in the hulls. It wasn’t as though I were looking for the Golden Hind. My needs were modest. The problem was that anything in good condition cost at least four times what I could afford, and so I began inspecting converted barges.

  For a man who had spent his life on fairly elegant ships the barges were an affront, like an insult hurled your way by an unkempt stranger on the street. With the heat getting worse, I dragged myself from one to another, working up a good-sized case of resentment, a perfect match for the weather. One afternoon I went to look at a seiner, a dark brown, snub-nosed thing, far from pretty but clean belowdecks, with spacious quarters done up in a light-colored wood and a serviceable galley, the best thing I had seen that I could afford. I told the agent I was interested and set out for the Port Authority to find the owner, one M. Simmons, who worked there as a clerk.

  That institution is housed in one of those utilitarian buildings one sees all along the waterfront, its brick facade pierced by small windows that appear like black squares from the street, the cavernous foyer lit by a few dim bulbs in sconces that hardly brighten things, the gloom filled with echoes of footsteps and voices and doors being opened and closed. I had just stepped inside when I saw Harrison, my old friend who owned the Nellie.

  He was resplendent in his formal getup, looking as if he had the keys to the exchequer tucked up in his ample waistcoat. As I had been away two years running a merchantman out of Singapore, Harrison and I had a good deal of catching up to do. When in due course he asked why I was at the Port Authority, I sheepishly confessed that I was interested in buying a boat, a barge to be exact.

  “What on earth for?”

  “To live on.”

  I made a vague gesture toward the high ceiling and asked if he knew where I might find a chap called Simmons.

  “Listen, Malone, why don’t you wait a bit . . . unless you’re afraid someone will beat you to it.”

  He couldn’t call the thing “her,” it was that low in his esteem. You can imagine how I felt.

  I said, “I don’t imagine the line will be very long. What’s on your mind?”

  “The Nellie. I have to let her go. I’ve known for a few weeks.”

  “Why?”

  “Arthritis.”

  He held out his hands and I saw the swollen knuckles. His doctor had been after him to stop sailing, but he had persisted until the exchange of pleasure for pain had become one-sided.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re getting old.”

  “We are old. Conrad has gout, keeps him down for days at a time.” He regarded me seriously. “Since you’re in the market, why not take a look at her? She’s in need of some refurbishing. It’s important to find the right person for her.”

  Excited, torn between sympathy for Harrison having to give her up and the sudden hope that I might escape the ugly brown thing that belonged to Simmons, I thought of the Nellie’s graceful lines and the way she handled under sail, easy enough for me to manage alone. Then I imagined a long string of zeros stretching her price to a king’s ransom.

  “I couldn’t possibly afford her.”

  Harrison screwed up his eyes and mentioned a sum far less than I expected. “Or thereabouts,” he added.

  Anything in the immediate vicinity was still beyond my means, but I couldn’t get her out of my head. At the same time, in my mind the seiner took on a startling resemblance to water-logged driftwood.

  “All right,” I said, “let’s have a look.”

  SHE WAS TIED up at Tilbury Dock, her faded white hull gleaming, the lines that descended from the crosstrees looking as delicate as a spider’s web. There were signs of rust. Near the bow a section of the deck was discolored by rot. But these were minor imperfections. I imagined the pleasure of working on her, the satisfaction, the way she felt moving before the wind, which I had never forgotten. I had a sentimental attachment to every spar and plank. I wanted her. There wasn’t anything that would have made me happier.

  After inspecting the cabin we came up and Harrison lighted his bulldog, disappearing in a cloud of sweet-smelling
tobacco that always perfumed the deck when the five of us were together. The smell brought with it a vision of him and the rest of the gang sitting around a lantern, listening as I went on about my adventures.

  He gave me a long, appraising look.

  “What do you think?”

  “I can’t put my hands on that kind of money.”

  I hated saying so because I assumed it would be the end of the discussion. He squinted at me through the smoke.

  “How much can you afford?”

  I did a quick calculation. Coming close to what he was asking meant serious debt, more than I could take on. Money had never been very important to me, but it was now. I was embarrassed having to admit that I had amassed so little in my lifetime, ashamed mentioning what I could pay, a ridiculously low sum, humiliatingly low. When I did, Harrison’s eyebrows went up. I think he may even have flushed.

  “I told you,” I said, trying not to sound too despondent, “that’s the best I can do.”

  He pursed his lips, nodded, stuck out his hand.

  “Done.”

  It took a few moments to understand. Harrison was doing me an enormous favor, changing the conditions of my future when I was at the point of accepting the barge as my home. He was always generous, even in the old days before he could afford it, but this crossed over the line to charity. My pride rose up, a miserable sensation because I knew I was going to lose far more than I’d gain.

  “You’d be giving her away for that,” I said. “I can’t let you.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Malone. You know I never do anything that’s not in my best interests. It’s true and I make no apologies. The fact is, the money doesn’t matter. I don’t need it. What I need is the Nellie, but I can’t have her. I’ve been dreading the prospect of selling to a stranger more than I can tell you. I’m serious, Malone. This way she stays in the family.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “I want you to have her. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

  Our exchange was more subtle than I have suggested. I have left out the gestures and the expressions, the almost bullying tone of his voice, all of which made it a bit unclear whether or not I was compromising myself, but he had given me a way to hang on to my self-esteem and once I knew that it was all over.

  “There’s no one I’d rather do a favor for,” I said with a grin.

  After stopping at my bank, we went to his office, where his clerk drew up the bill of sale. We signed and then the clerk handed it over to me and I held it reverently, our signatures still wet, the Nellie’s name as big and bold as a lighthouse. The document had the gravity of a sacred text for me and I must have looked rather foolish staring at it, though Harrison was discreet as always. Once the clerk had put it in a thick envelope, Harrison produced a bottle and we had a drink to celebrate, reminiscing a little about the old days. He said he hoped we might all get together again and I told him we would. We both missed those gatherings, missed the camaraderie, the interesting talk, and looking back on that moment now I seem to remember that my nostalgia and probably Harrison’s as well was colored with a desire to defy time and turn back the clock awhile to happier days. We had a drink to that too, and when we touched our glasses we looked into each other’s eyes and what I saw in Harrison’s he must have seen in mine, an acknowledgment of all the years that had slipped through our hands.

  He accompanied me out to the street, where we said good-bye. I watched him go back inside, disappearing like an apparition into that blank-faced building where I had just escaped meeting Simmons, acutely aware of how unpredictable events are, how often what we think will happen turns out to be a surprise for good or ill. For most of my life an unexpected piece of good luck has generally made me suspicious. I am not sure I understand exactly why that is the case; maybe it has to do with seeing too many things go bad for no apparent reason in my own life as well as in others’, but as a consequence I usually test my luck, weigh it carefully in my mind. But that day I was in no mood to scrutinize. My luck was as solid as a piece of gold. I walked away from the Port Authority in a kind of ecstasy, oblivious to the heat that only hours earlier had oppressed me, the Nellie floating in my mind’s eye like some fine vessel in a dream.

  I hailed a cab and returned to the boardinghouse, poking my head into the kitchen to tell the landlord I was leaving before I hurried upstairs and stuffed my belongings in a battered sea chest. It made a terrible racket thudding on the stairs as I dragged it down to the foyer, though to me it sounded like a fanfare. I paid my bill with what must have been a rather foolish grin, and when the landlord asked if I were moving to another boardinghouse I said, no, I was through with boardinghouses, which was not to say that I hadn’t thoroughly enjoyed living awhile in his. The fact of the matter was that I had just bought as fine a boat as he had ever seen and was about to move aboard.

  At the docks I tipped the cabdriver lavishly after he helped me carry the chest below. It was late afternoon by the time he left, getting on toward six o’clock. On its way down through the haze, the sun brought out a glow in the sickly yellow air that must have been a depressing sight for the citizens of the town, a perfect color for the predictors of the Apocalypse who were very likely still wandering through the park. I felt sorry for the city’s good citizens and fanatics alike, sympathizing with everyone who could not see that the sky was really burning like gold leaf, like a dome in St. Petersburg, on fire with color fit for a czar. I believe that I watched it as reverentially as a Druid peering along a sighting-line at Stonehenge until the brightness began to fade.

  And then, in the last soft light of dusk, with the estuary turning more deeply violet by the minute, I went aft and put my hands on the Nellie’s wheel, repeating over and over, like a child, that she was mine.

  I BECAME MASTER of the Nellie on 17 June, 1924, not quite two months before Conrad died. All things considered, he was lucky to have survived so long after that disastrous journey up the Congo in 1890, where a parasite-bearing mosquito descended from the green air somewhere near Matadi and infected his aristocratic blood. Of course, you know as well as I do that he hardly got off scot-free from that quixotic adventure. I have friends who live with the lingering effects of malaria but none who suffers from malarial gout, a filthy disease he fought with a great deal of courage, his other ailments filling in when it was resting. As a consequence, visiting Conrad was always an uncertain business. You never knew whether he would be up to it or, if his physical problems were in remission, if his mercurial mood would let him tolerate company. I remind you of this because I had been eager to see him even before Harrison and I fell to reminiscing about the old days. Coming into possession of the Nellie added a new urgency. The boat had a special meaning to Conrad and me that you don’t know about, Ford. I thought that, all things considered, he would be pleased, but I wanted to surprise him and so I wrote, saying only that I was back in London, newly retired. Rather than proposing a meeting time, I asked him to write to me at my post office address and set a date.

  I started my restoration project the next day. A number of things needed attention, the bad patch on the deck being particularly offensive since it was in exactly the spot where we used to gather our chairs in a circle and swap yarns. I spent that morning at a lumberyard going through all the teak, sighting down the planks to make sure they had been properly dried and were not warped, finally choosing a dozen. Over the next week I worked until dark ripping out the rotten boards with the help of a man from the lumberyard, who saved me from hurting my back. The rest I did alone. Planing the wood, drilling holes for dowels, laying the planks in was painstaking work that called on all my carpentry skills. As I recall, I had just put on the first coat of sealant when I received a letter from Conrad saying that he and Jessie were coming up to London in a few days to consult with their doctors and would be staying at the Brown Hotel. I rang him as soon as they arrived, using the telephone at a nearby ship chandler’s shop. The news about Jessie was alarming. She had gotten increasingly l
ame and there was some doubt whether the treatments would have a lasting effect. Conrad had his own problems, but for all that he was eager to see me and we agreed to meet the next morning.

  “In your rooms?” he said.

  “Not exactly. On my boat. I bought the Nellie.”

  I explained what had happened and he was politely enthusiastic, saying that he was happy for me and Harrison. It would indeed have been terrible if she had fallen into some stranger’s hands. His feelings about the Nellie were very complex, the boat having become something of a personal icon to him as a writer. She was also linked to an old anxiety of his that went back a quarter of a century, almost to the beginning of our friendship, regarding a matter concerning the two of us and his character Charlie Marlow. It had never meant much to me, but vexed him deeply, so much so that whenever we saw each other, or spoke on the phone after a long absence, he needed to be reassured that I had kept my mouth shut. He asked again while we were on the phone, not in so many words—he never did—falling back on indirection that would have made Henry James proud. I answered in kind, peppering my response with pronouns. “Good, good, good,” he said. Then he asked how he could find the Nellie and was clearly pleased when I told him that she was tied up at her old slip. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “There’s something I’ve wanted to talk to you about for a long time.” There was a sense of urgency in his voice, but when I inquired what it was he told me it was too complicated to discuss on the phone and rang off.

  I returned to the docks and went back to work brushing on a second coat of sealant, remembering how the old gang used to sit there talking their hearts out. When my turn came I would go on and on about my latest voyage, sometimes for hours, without a break except for a drink, while Conrad sat in his steamer chair listening with half-closed eyes, a thoughtful expression on his face as he took in every word. I won’t claim that I had a presentiment about his visit the next day, Ford, but I wondered if his story was connected to that time.