Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  At the side of the creek in which they had anchored were ranked several palm-thatched huts, built out on stilts over the water. Elspeth found herself looking at the two other boats in the creek to see if either of them belonged to the family who had visited her with the shell. One was registered in Noumea, the other in Panama.

  ‘We’ll meet them later, I guess,’ said Sandro. It was his way to move between the islands, make friends, have a jump-up, fall asleep where he had to, and resume life under the discipline of the boat with an ease he did not question. It did not seem wrong or strange to him to use these plates of coral sand fallen into the ocean simply to feed from. The effect was of Edenic innocence. He consumed all experience in the same flat way. Elspeth would think up ways to shock him and then forget it. He’d just say, ‘Oh, right.’ He could not be teased because he was so easy-going that he allowed for all forms of oddity in others, markedly in Poms.

  Sandro could not take unkindness. He would not have taken it himself and became shifty if he saw it shown to other people. His trick was to shame the person who was being unkind by pretending not to understand what was going on. That way he disentangled the secrecy of the way people talked, though he did not do it between a man and his wife.

  ‘I know those guys out of Panama,’ said Sandro. ‘She’s an ugly tub, isn’t she? Roller reefing,’ his voice was dismissive as it would not have been of a person, ‘and a rear end like a fur seal.’

  Alec looked at the transom of the boat. It was wide and sloped outwards towards the water. She was painted the brick red of anti-foul paint all over her hull.

  ‘They’re repainting her, look,’ said Sandro. He was right. A man in underpants was sitting in a swing over the side applying paint slowly from a small pot. It looked as though the paint was thick and sticky, hard to get off the brush.

  ‘It’s terrible stuff, that paint, smells like polar bears’ pits and sticks fast. Hang a man over the side against that paint and he could hitch a ride around the Horn.’

  To Logan, Cape Horn was the Star of the Sea. It combined the history of courage with the certainty of nature’s indifference in a way that thrilled and touched him. In his office in the States he kept videos hidden where no one but he could find them.

  A woman called Sigrid had made these tapes for Logan over years. They were made of assembled old film transferred on to video tape and showed old men linking passages of old film, often speaking in thick Norwegian or Icelandic accents. Some few were Poles and others spoke in the rock-faced accents of Cornwall or the Shetlands. Most of the men had faces cut deep with wrinkles; several had stubble that glittered, or frosty overhanging eyebrows. A disproportionate number of the old men looked straight out of the screen with piercing pale eyes. These old men were Cape Horners, men who had been round Cape Horn under sail. Many of them had done it as cabin boys or as deck monkeys, on the tall ships with their more than a hundred sails, all made of hefty sailcloth pulled on hempen ropes, thousands of times heavier, even when dry, than the Terylene and nylon Logan knew.

  The films before which he used to sit in his office and weep, as a boy will weep at the death of King Arthur, showed these old men as boys, in flickering black-and-white, high up in the trees of ships, their hair whipped back from grinning faces, the camera wobbling up at them from below as they climbed up masts with iron footholds, or were swung out on a rope to fix a block and tackle caught on a spar over a webby, boiling ocean, shorn and smoking around the Horn.

  These short strips of film were like bits of memory, somehow held. The events shown on them, the queenly boats, seemed too magnificent, to Logan, for something so overused as film. For this reason, like a connoisseur, he rarely watched his films of Cape Horn. Each old man would introduce himself before the piece of film concerning his ship: ‘I am Captain Erikson and I was before the mast on the old Walpurgis before she was lost . . . Here she is in ’twenty-three, I believe the cargo was jute. I was fourteen at the time.’ The boy would appear, in a child’s tight jersey, smiling and heaving at the same time on a top gallant or whatever it was. The mind supplied the sound of the sea more accurately than a soundtrack. The sea at its most extreme, recollected in tranquillity, may be Wagnerian. At the time its own great noise fills all the air and it was this Logan would recall.

  Indeed, the massive orchestration of Wagner like the sea answered Logan’s northern hunger for the tragic. He had less aptitude for the personal than for the wide scale. He had a great urge to patriotism, yet what was his country, Scotland or America? – the one too small, the other too large, in his view. He escaped from them; his urge to romantic patriotism attached itself to the sea.

  The old films of old men surpassed incomparably his one home movie of his first wife, wearing short gloves and holding in the one hand a small dog like a mophead and in the other, as so often, a glass, just slightly listing, the Martini in it at a slope. They had visited his mother earlier that day before he made the film of Hortense. Just as they arrived at his mother’s house, Hortense said to him, ‘You are an ugly and unpleasant man. You have no soul.’ Then she smiled at him very winningly and picked a fleck off his jacket. They were the worst words he had ever heard in his life.

  He was surprised sometimes when he heard himself praising Hortense to Elspeth. He knew she understood, it was just a form of piety that set in after death. He had not the time to be intimate, so he was sentimental.

  Poor Elspeth, but she probably would do, thought Logan. She was a borderline case really, a bit dreamy, too, but Scots through and through, and he had thought that would matter to him at the end when he came to be an old man. He had forgotten how her failures of competence had seemed sweet to him or how her insistent belief in his good motives had for some years given him a sense of being a good man. Now he had pulled too far away from her. It was his work to trust no one and it had become part of his private way too.

  He did not look forward to going ashore unless he would be able to get into the island itself and away from the houses surrounding the harbour. Bora Bora was part of the small world; it was one of those conduits through which many of the rich, members of that world, would pass. Logan, though, was a purist and held himself above this geographical gossip. He would have worked his way around the world on boats had he not been as lucky as he was. He did not embark upon voyages to see people, about whom he had little curiosity, and certainly not to see people he could have met by picking up the telephone. He was not shopping by another means in his travels, unlike many of the rich.

  He was also fearful of cosmopolitanism in case he should be caught out. The complications of Europe seemed to him like a fearful exam; he thought he had to know things, would be obscurely tested by masked art historians, not realising open eyes were all he required. His upbringing had combined what was most conventional of what was British with what was most puritanical of what was American. He felt obscurely abandoned by the consolation of art. He was uneasy with the secular since it threw you upon the human, and he mistrusted humans. Periodically, he tore up the books Elspeth left by her side of the bed. It seemed a way to get through to her. He liked music more, the crashing magnificent composers who put him in mind of the sea.

  He had no idea that one could at any stage in one’s life start to learn.

  ‘Come in with me to the bar?’ he said to Elspeth. ‘It’s run by a character. Since everyone else has their own plans, apparently.’ He sounded piqued, or baffled.

  ‘Yes? A character?’

  ‘A character.’

  ‘Oh. I won’t, then. But you go.’

  ‘I might have a walk. There’s a visitors’ book and carafe wine at the bar, so I’ll give it a miss. A bit frequented for me. It’s said to be very pretty, the bar.’

  ‘It must be. It’s here.’

  ‘So, Sandro, off to chase some skirt, a vahine or three?’ said Logan, a bit uneasy with Sandro’s unfailing extraversion.

  ‘If that suits you.’

  ‘Course. Could you just make sure sh
e’s not dragging and check all the tanks. We should take on water here before we go.’

  Sandro asked Alec to help him lift and lower the Zodiac over the side. The rubber boat had absorbed the smell of smoke from the shore and seemed slightly greasy. They unclasped the outboard and lowered it on to the Zodiac’s stern plate, Sandro squatting in the boat, Alec holding it to with his feet tucking its edge in under the curve of Ardent Spirit’s white hull.

  ‘I’d like to take Gabriel, she’s had a bad go,’ said Sandro. ‘But she’s pretty crook, I’ll leave her be.’

  ‘How about Nick coming with you?’

  ‘I will indeed,’ said Nick, ‘but I might not go all the way. I might swim off the Zodiac and look for fish.’ He tapped his shorts pocket. There was the waterproof book on fish of the South Pacific.

  Sandro laughed. Nick looked confused.

  Alec thought he might wait till the next day. He was tired, and he liked reading in the tropical night, watching the stars. With the dusk music came from the bar, French night-club music, Jacques Brel, Barbara:

  Ami, remplis mon verre, ami, remplis mon verre . . .

  The sea was black and full of stars, the sky violet.

  The music was excitingly, confusingly, appropriate.

  Elspeth was humming, flat.

  ‘What slush this stuff is,’ said her husband. ‘Nothing to do with the place. What can this man have known of such islands?’ Logan went below to find himself a drink. He put on Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony turning it up very loud; it came as a salvo, a beautiful thing used as a weapon.

  It’s peculiar, thought Elspeth, to use serious things in that frivolous way, a kind of snobbery so far from art. And how sad to recall that I used to be touched by his listening to pop and feel I was learning something from him.

  She strained to hear Brel.

  Je chante et je suis gai, j’ai mal d’être moi.

  Ami, remplis mon verre, ami, remplis mon verre.

  She heard Logan pouring another drink. He would later collapse. How like their life it was that when they had visited Hiva Oa they had not been to see the grave of Jacques Brel. How like herself it was that she had found it more pacific not to suggest doing so to her husband.

  The Zodiac, Alec saw, stopped by the boat registered in Noumea. Sandro stood and held the Zodiac into her side and Nick climbed up and over the guard-rail. He took off his specs. Usually he just pulled them down and they hung around his neck on the greasy bit of string.

  A woman came out of the cabin, carrying a plate that she held out to Nick. He took one of the flat things from the plate in his left hand then threw open his arms. The woman held the plate out behind his back, flat, for a time, while she kissed him.

  Sandro was able to make fast the Zodiac, pull himself up on a fender, hop over the rail and take one of whatever it was on the plate, before Nick separated himself, and then he stood and every few moments flicked hair back off the woman’s forehead.

  Alec heard Logan talking on the radio telephone. He was shouting, though the coastguard on Bora Bora must have a decent line.

  He heard Logan finish talking and then yell, ‘Elspeth.’

  She came at once. A boat was ideal for this genie and lamp trick.

  ‘Guess what that fire was.’

  ‘I can’t. Long pork? Or do the tourists turn up their noses at actually eating people?’

  ‘How tired they must be of those comments, these poor people.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s an added tourist attraction. Cannibalism. Though God knows it’s easy to see how a cannibal might have his stomach turned by tourism.’

  ‘Guess what that fire was.’

  The Beethoven was protesting its use as background music by sounding at once stretched and soupy.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The post office. Phones melted, letters burnt. No news from home. I’m fine, but you might not like it.’

  Her disappointment was out of proportion. She expected no letter, though she had hoped for a couple. She had hoped Gabriel would have a letter, perhaps with news of small brothers and sisters, and maybe news from Scotland for Alec. She had begun the familiar pattern of these voyages, the anticipation of small ordinary pleasures to compensate for the large extraordinary ones she was so bad at enjoying.

  She went to see Gabriel, who was asleep on her bunk under a white-cotton cloth printed with hibiscus flowers in dark blue. Her hand lay under the basket like a doe rabbit.

  She knocked at the door of the fo’c’sle.

  ‘Yes?’ answered Alec.

  ‘It’s Elspeth.’ Then she felt foolish. She could not go in to what was his room. That would have some meaning. On a boat the vital prerequisite of feeling human is a small lozenge of space that is your own.

  ‘Come on up,’ said Alec. She could not hear very clearly.

  Elspeth pushed the fo’c’sle door. It gave. There was no one in there, though a reading light was on and under it were arrayed six or seven shells the size of pincushions, seemingly made out of mother-of-pearl. Nick had made casts in salt of some snail shells from Moorea.

  Alec’s head hung down through the hatch.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was just worried,’ she said. The tentative word, the sort of word Logan did not receive on his verbal transmitter, made her feel weak.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘In case you were getting a letter. The post office has burnt down, with all the things awaiting collection in there.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Alec. He sat up and that lost Elspeth his face. She went back out between the bulkheads and down to the bow to him.

  ‘I am sorry. Were you expecting something?’

  ‘Not really, but now this has happened I can’t hope. Now I know I am in the Pacific with, forgive me, a lot of strangers.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘People say that.’

  ‘I mean it,’ she said.

  Then he remembered. ‘Say “post office”.’

  ‘Postoffice,’ she said, as it was pronounced in her part of the world, one word, with the emphasis on the ‘O’.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ he said. ‘Oh yes indeed. Of course you are one too. I was put off by the carry-on, all so very English.’

  ‘One what?’

  ‘A Scot.’

  ‘My name is Elspeth Urquhart.’

  ‘Yes, but you get them called Deacon Brodie and they have gone English.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that,’ she said, ‘though I dread the day I need a passport to be admitted. I was born there yet I sound like this.’ She exaggerated her English accent.

  ‘Come on now; admit you like the feeling of being different in the either country,’ he said. It was an argument he had perfected over the years. His own father thought he spoke in an English voice and abhorred it.

  ‘It would be more patronising to slip into different accents on purpose, but yes, it is odd. There is less place for Anglo-Scots, whatever the word is, than there was. Things are bad. There could be a split. People want it. They sing about it. There was the fish, there is the oil. The stupidity of the South has hurt, the tactlessness that has looked like pillage, the willingness to treat the place like a plaid, to throw on for its ancient rustic glamour and to throw over puddles to save them getting their feet dirty. I fear for the border, I really do.’

  He laughed at her.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, ‘on debatable lands.’

  She looked into his face and turned away.

  ‘Which of you is it that drinks?’ he asked. ‘Ardent Spirit, that name, I mean. She is named for the drink, is she not, this boat? It’s a fine passion, the Scot and the bottle, no doubt. Escape and engagement. And cheaper than all this, by all appearances.’ He indicated the white, glittering boat. She saw it in a bottle suddenly.

  ‘The ardent spirit who did drink, you’re right, is not him, not me. His first wife, and she was French Canadian. In both senses, it applied to her. She was more alive and more full of spirit in every way than most.’


  ‘Were you expecting a letter?’ he asked her.

  ‘No, not like that. But I like letters.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘In the sentimental way, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ he said, looking at her wide face with the face of a palaeontologist, or the face he thought a palaeontologist should have, and had practised in the museum mirror while the hot-air machine dried his hands. That was, he looked at her with grave, impassioned concentration, affecting to pity her extreme age and plainness, while also acknowledging in his expression that further research might be rewarding.

  Logan came to see what was going on. The first half of the cassette of the Seventh Symphony had abruptly stopped and Elspeth was laughing too much. He had started from a stupor that was more sleep and sea than drink.

  ‘Elspeth,’ he shouted, a little hoarse, rather deserted. ‘Where are you? Come to me.’ It sounded like the voice of a blind man.

  She said goodnight to Alec with a nod, and took off back to the stern of the boat, leaning inwards when she came to the stays, a white figure on the long deck. The sea rocked so regularly it might have been breathing.

  Logan had said the anchorage was firm enough and the creek sufficiently secure for there to be no watch again that night. So they were asleep, Nick on the yacht from Noumea and Sandro ashore, when the squall came like a gun. Alec recognised what he had heard of: the storm rising without rumour or promise. It was an assault by water and air, sudden as a bucket of water thrown over dogs.

  Logan, who was used to springing alert from his sleep, straight on to his legs like a cat, was on deck at once.

  ‘The hatches,’ he yelled. Gabriel awoke from so deep a sleep that she did not know where she was.