Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘The genoa,’ said Logan. ‘I’ll hold her still if you dress her.’

  Nick and Sandro moved forward over the deck, thin, light young men who knew what to do without talk. They pulled the long fanfolded sail forward and clipped its head ready to haul it up and set it. Before raising it, they tied to the sail’s foot a rope the length of the boat, with a simple knot the size of Sandro’s head. Logan turned the rope around and with the thread of the hefty winch. At the same time he steered a course that held the sails unmoving as robes, then he called out and Nick ran aft to grind up the enormous sail and Logan turned the wheel till the wind punched and then lay once more within the cloth, that this time pulled the boat along with more speed. The tilt was so high you could sit on the windward side and look down into the sea as it was taken away by the air pushing over it. As long as it lasted, the rushing of water along the tipped boat slaked Logan’s great thirst.

  Elspeth sat at the highest point she could find where she was not in Logan’s sight and looked down into the blue water that was continually never the same. There in the sails and blue she was happy as a person can be in rich emptiness.

  Occasionally the lowest edge of the genoa touched the water and cut it, drawing white in that instant.

  Gabriel was in the sail bin, covered with bergamot oil. The second lot of carrots she had peeled was on the gimballed stove in a pan clamped over the bobbing gas. The water in which they boiled was at an angle more probable in ice. When their warm winter kitchen smell grew strong, Gabriel stretched herself out of the sail bin and walked gingerly down the sloping deck to look through the galley hatch at these travelling carrots. How miraculous normal things could be, thought Gabriel, wondering if she ought to fall in love.

  Alec looked up into the sails white on white on blue, full of an invisible resource held in place and exploited by intelligence. He knew why he had come. This was it, the rare time when peace and purpose coincided in beauty. Logan would not put it like that, but to see the man achieving this angle, this flight, was like watching a builder at work. First Logan had set a trap for the wind, then he held it and built it into racing towers.

  The pitch of Alec’s thought had been lifted high by simple physical processes. Although the boat seemed sometimes vulgar to him, sometimes also squalid, that was to do more with human needs. This flying over water shook out the human dust.

  He settled with himself that at the worst of the voyage he would remember that things could be like this. That there would be bad points he was certain: he had felt like a man trapped in a roomful of birds when the mainsail flapped against itself: he had noted his skipper’s temper.

  He watched Logan and admired him. In many ways he seemed a creature well adapted to life. His disposition did not allow for the things upon which Alec feared he had wasted his life, shades, vagaries and tentative hues. Alec also allowed himself to feel superior to Logan, though he did not put it to himself like that.

  All that day they were awake simultaneously, although Elspeth took herself off during the afternoon to read below. She did this from self-protective habit, in case there came a day when she must hide herself. If she were as a rule not there at a certain time, it would not be noticed that she was not there.

  During the afternoon, she tied herself into her lee-cloth so that she did not fall out of the bunk. She read more slowly than she liked to, because the reading was one of the lures she used to get herself through the days. If she had read at her normal speed there would have been no room for the books she would need.

  ‘Tell me why you need to look at all these books,’ said Logan.

  ‘Just as you play with boats,’ she rejoined. The foolishness of replying in kind to a man who had not intended the slight he had given was typical of her, a woman who had chosen a life whose chief saboteur was herself. It was unfair of her to have lit upon him for his certainties if she was going continually to jib at his want of fluidity.

  They had each chosen the other for the soothing sense they had of being to some degree balanced by the other; she felt braver, simpler, he felt less access to his rage and loneliness.

  The speculations and scepticisms that had been the theme of her earliest life were dust kittens to him. He believed in Church and State; she was reared to mistrust them. The sanctity of fact filled his life; among the facts was religious belief. It was not so mystical as faith, being more a repository for exalted feelings, heightened fears and a sense of self.

  She wanted to believe, for reasons as selfish as his own. Her highest bliss, in want of children, was aesthetic. She wanted to ascribe what she found transcendent to something. Elspeth had an impulse to praise.

  Gabriel had been the surprise, to Elspeth. It was fortunate that this was a boat. On land, Elspeth was sure, there would have been trouble. The stags would have begun to rub away their velvet. On a boat the proximity to danger can hold off intrigue.

  The big seashell was in the hatch at the foot of her bunk, its mottling subdued by the soak in soda crystals. It smelt a little, still, and moaned when held to the ear. At some stage she would give it to Gabriel as a souvenir. She wondered if it could be blown like a conch.

  Getting it out from among her seaboots and oilskins, she shook the shell for roaches and put it to her lips.

  The noise was tired, the sad greeting of a bus driver to his wife, pressing on a perishing rubber bulb, when he expects nothing much for dinner. Hoarser than a lowing, the sound emerged. The small hole at the tip of the shell’s spiral that had marred its handsomeness was now its main point.

  She blew again.

  Feet moved indirectly up the deck over her head in the cabin.

  She blew.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Logan just thought you might be unhappy.’

  It was Alec. What could it have cost her husband to speak this way? How strange he could not come for himself.

  ‘Does he think I make a noise like this?’

  She held up the horn and smiled at Alec over its antique flourish. The sheet she wore was held over her in the Attic fashion, falling down from her nipping elbows behind. The lee-cloth was hauled-to.

  Happy, there was something to her, he thought, warily, but something better handled by such a man as Logan.

  Ardent Spirit reached Huahine in the dark. On the radio the local coastguard was telling boats outside the reef to hang off till morning. Through the night they watched in changing pairs in case the coral should scrape, although the boat was not close. It was a steep sharp reef, the spray burning off it all night in smoke and in the morning composing a white wreath around the island, lying slow around the lagoon like dry ice on a stage.

  They took the boat in when daylight had filled the sky. Within the reef a band of pale blue encircled them. The island was dense green, its summit-high pasture planted with a shrub like a victor’s garland of parsley.

  From the shore came peals of church bells.

  Sandro flinched.

  ‘Better than the Mormons,’ said Nick. The interiors of these islands, less remote than the Marquesas, and not, like them, protected by convinced Catholicism, were settled with one-storey churches of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.

  A bureaucracy from France and a religion from America at present lay over the islands.

  Alec and Nick swam in together after breakfast. Alec, stockier, had not Nick’s otter’s cunning against the current.

  At the summit of the island, Alec saw as he swam, pretending to be taking his time because he was looking about him, were horned peaks, some of them with trees growing sideways out of them.

  ‘The problems islands have – are they much the same wherever the island is, would you say?’ asked Nick when they reached the shore. Alec had watched him nightly forbear to join in conversations. Perhaps it was tact? Nick combined with intense practicality a theoretical tendency that he protected by holding it in his head against oxidisation from exposure to windier minds.

  ‘Incest, uncontrollable usurpations, postage?’ said Alec
.

  ‘The balance between need and ruination, too.’ They were passing between irrigation canals in which stood blue lilies on one tall leg, heronwise.

  In a square-backed Renault van, a family went by, elbows out of windows. They were driving in the direction of ‘The Open-Air Museum With One Hundred-Year-Old Fish Trap’, indicated on a hand-painted sign.

  ‘A hundred years is old for a fish.’ Nick spoke.

  On the point of putting him right, Alec caught the over-straightness of Nick’s face.

  ‘About islands. We feel better coming here maybe because it’s the French who have done most of the recent harm. But that is picking nits. There’s not the time to explain that it’s not one who threw the stone but someone very like one.’

  ‘There is time, there’s not the inclination.’ Nick’s correction moved the dawdling words to a clip. ‘Differences are not spoken of and at once there are none, because the bullies have won, like those snails in Moorea, and we all recall how pleasant and rewarding and eccentric, if you can say that about something spiral, the old snails were. So someone gets together some shells of the old snails and makes a display, correct in every important detail, the old snails to the life, and people feel much better after that. Replication and surrogacy are the future. You are participating in some of the last nonvicarious experiences of this century. Everything will have its substitute, its empty double. And a generation of people is already born that cannot tell the difference between the water and the mirror. Even when it has drunk the mirror.’

  ‘Are you so pessimistic? Is that why you are at sea?’ asked Alec.

  ‘I’m not pessimistic. It’s not that. I’m afraid we’ll be evolved beyond what is good for us, back into simpler, greedy organisms. Just appetite and controlled imaginations.’

  They passed the PTT. A girl in green was smiling and making eyes into the receiver. Her imagination showed her the face of the person at the other end.

  ‘I come to sea for that reason. I want to see the last places that are not blurred, if I can. This is a way to live without money. I earn a bit and it goes. I own so little that I do not have to own more on its account. The combination of living intensely with people and of there being times when people are nothing seems to agree with me. I’m curious but uninterested in knowing other people through time.’

  ‘All other people?’

  ‘I’ve a wife and when we meet it is a nice surprise. She married me for nationality but we had to part so soon after that the interest I had in her, which had been small, grew, and now if we coincide I am sad to part. She’s a South African, the sea is covered with them, but mostly they are older. Liberal whites who couldn’t bear it. The boat she’s on at the moment should be round here somewhere. She sends me her position on the globe when she can. I think of her with the same stars over her. There are letters in boxes all over from one of us to the other, lost letters, but they’ll do for the next time round.’ Not the next marriage, the next circumnavigation.

  ‘Her name is Evelyn.’ He had known the only question Alec could ask and answered the one he did not. ‘We talk about family but not until we find a boat of our own. And I wonder how it is to be raised on the sea. It might make them mountaineers or turn them into plankton.’

  ‘Plankton?’ So Nick, like many theorists, had an irrational streak.

  ‘It’s what Evelyn calls the numberless infinities of souls.’

  ‘Are you faithful?’ It was a drunk man’s question, a question that went too far; Alec took the licence to ask it from Nick’s tone of sober openness. He was a man who would answer anything he wished to and let nothing drop without meaning to.

  ‘I am. The gossip at sea travels faster than on land. Some conventions are apparently loosened and talk is the other thing to do in the evening. Boats are known oceanwide and who is on them. And messing about unbalances a ship, turns it sour and leads to mistakes. Inshore from here there should be an inner lagoon. We can look out for lipsticked bonito. I’ve not got my book on me, but I’m fairly reliable on fish.’

  Above, the sun was reaching the top of the sky, blinding their raised eyes through a star of palm.

  ‘There’ll be rain later in the afternoon,’ said Nick, ‘but before that shall we go for a beer?’

  They stuck out their thumbs and were picked up by a Citrön DS that came round the corner on juicy wheels. In the back seat was a goat with gold eyes.

  A group of old men around a tin table rested their stomachs in wide blue braces and salopettes worn without shirts. The shade over them seemed like old rough lace. Looking up, Alec saw that the proprietor of the nearby Café Snack Bar Ritz had rested over the branches of a spreading tree a flat tranche of coral the size of a large table. Among the beer and mineral-water bottles the old men drank from was a metal tray of langoustines. Some of the men smoked, others sucked long claws or bent out tail-flesh from the shell with wide thumbs.

  ‘They are doing nothing. It’s the best thing, the thing we are best at, but everyone does it differently. More art should be about doing nothing,’ said the driver of the DS. The sense of drunken talk increased for Alec, loosening him. He thought of the man’s remark: ‘More art should be about doing nothing.’ He did not dismiss it as he would have almost all his life, except for during the short glowing spaces when babyhood or happiness had cancelled thought. He felt a shell crack from him, a shell of opinion and self-consciousness, and recognised a strong desire to be back at work, painting, and conveying in paint what he had not tried before to paint, a goodness in life. It was easier to think of an art that concerned itself with expressing the doing of nothing in a place like this, than in Scotland where to do nothing was to be worthless, or to be very cold.

  The pleasure of holding such a conversation in French, a language well suited to statement, enclosed them. Alec enjoyed the concentration of speaking in another language and the liberation from certain forms of embarrassment.

  He reflected that in the new life with new people he had been living on the boat he had also been concentrating. He had made his speech another language as one does with strangers. The strain of that had been greater than the pleasant effort he made now, to speak French. On the boat he had been thinking of how the others wanted him to be. Now he was thinking of what to say best to express what he wanted to say.

  His faintly superstitious wariness of the types to which Logan corresponded (man of action, man of influence) had set up an anxiety in him to be some type or other recognisable to Logan. In so doing he had laid traps for himself, having picked his role as Scottish boffin.

  A sweet-smiling man of about forty unloaded watermelons from a barge moored by a grocer’s shop. Elephantiasis made his legs as full and thick as the long, shiveringly striped fruit.

  The Citrön stopped and relapsed towards the dust. Alec and Nick went in to the store for stamps.

  The rain came and went, warm drops filling every lifted vessel, mouth and flower until, at a swipe, it was gone and the sky renewed.

  When they reached the inner lagoon it was hot again. Nick swam, in the same shorts he wore all the time and washed in the sea by letting them down on a line with a pocket full of saline-adapted soap. Alec took off his jeans and walked into the pale water; to dive smack into the water would be too violent. That was for paying back cold water that hurt you when you entered it.

  They swam with rather than over fish that were so precisely marked, spotted, barred, dotted they seemed retouched. When the lagoon seemed suddenly to shatter, the shadows of many fish becoming one on its white floor and spurting away like a comet, Nick punched Alec and pointed out to him a grim-faced patrolling shark. The dead eye and cuneiform moves of the animal stayed with Alec, although he seemed not to have felt afraid when in the water with it.

  Nick was neutral on the topic. He did not make more of the incident than there had been – a lot of small fish alarmed by a bigger one that very possibly feared himself and Alec.

  When in the night it was time for Alec
and Nick to take the dogwatch, Nick woke Alec with hot tea. It was a cool night, dripping with falling stars.

  ‘Your dream was bad,’ said Nick. ‘Everyone is afraid of sharks unless they are one themselves.’

  After first confidences between people moving towards friendship, a rest between exchanges of information somehow hastens, not impedes, the growing trust. Alec and Nick had now to talk, in order to stay awake on watch, and with no sails to check for chafe or horizon to scan for container ships or unmarked yachts. There had been no time for Nick’s story to ferment, but the slight hangover of over-intimacy did not brush the two men.

  ‘You go below and read if you like, or you could catch some sleep,’ said Nick. ‘There’s nothing to do but listen for mermaids.’

  They watched the sky. In falling, the stars shed chalkdust and were gone down the sky in a blink. The discrepancy in time between the actual hour of the death of the star and the eye receiving the news did not fit inside the head.

  ‘Travelling light is what those stars are. I mean doing, obviously. But also what they are made of.’

  ‘The speed of a boat under sail is a better speed for my constitution than the speed of light,’ said Alec.

  ‘It is a good speed. You arrive at places at the right time, not before it like on a plane, so all of you arrives at once.’

  ‘What would you say was the right speed on land? Horse?’

  ‘Foot. Solar-powered sedan chair. I suppose horse but I resist it. They have personalities.’

  ‘So does a boat.’

  ‘But she is female.’

  ‘A horse may be that.’

  ‘But never as feminine.’

  The shrouds of another boat tinkled. The buoy at the teeth of the reef issued its tocsin.

  ‘I suppose you are married,’ said Nick. Such convention in this unusual man annoyed Alec. He gave the usual irritating answer: ‘Yes and no.’ It was a reply that never pleased unless in reply to two separate questions. It forked the tongue.