If she says anything inept about Scotland I shall find the energy to dislike her, perhaps, thought Elspeth.
‘It must be very nice.’ It was safe enough.
‘I love it.’
‘How did you meet – on this island?’
‘I was moving sheep so that he could land in an aeroplane. I was up there making drawings of remains.’
‘Human?’
‘Stones. Buildings.’
This was not a story that so far offered much to Gabriel.
‘Why were you doing that?’
‘It was my job. What is yours?’
‘Cooking on a boat. At the moment.’ She spoke without malice.
I am put in my place, thought Elspeth.
‘And the sheep?’ Gabriel went on.
‘You have to move sheep off a field so a little plane can land. Also cows off a beach. They land on beaches too. Planes, not cows.’
‘What does a cow do at the beach?’
‘On the beach a cow stands and cools her legs against flies in sandy pools. Sometimes they sit down and look odd with the waves and the seagulls. It is part of the place.’
‘And the sheep?’
‘They are used as markers on the runway while the plane is descending. They tie them down to four pegs, red sheep to the left, green sheep on the right.’
‘I know I’m ignorant.’
‘You are right. It isn’t true. The sheep are everywhere and the plane lands anywhere. When you see it coming you shoo the sheep and pen them if you can. Anyhow, that’s how I met him. It was an island with one long meadow they used as a landing strip, and a beach used more often unless the tide was in and it was an emergency.’
‘So it was an emergency.’
‘No. Logan just does what he wants. He wanted to see the Scottish islands from the air. He was flying low, flew lower, saw me and made a few circles, asked the coastguard for permission to land, and did.’
The emergency had been love at first sight, for which he was ripe after Hortense’s death. Such melodrama was the pitch at which he lived or he did not believe in himself. He feared to take life plain. Reared to mistrust all artificial savour, Elspeth had fallen at once for the intensity, and later had come to hope they had wound down a little, to a palatable decent compromise. She had paid for the delusions she had swallowed in the early days and anticipated some lightness in casting them off.
‘What did you do then? After the sheep?’
‘He parked the aeroplane and shouted at me.’
She was giving truthful answers because she had not thought about the encounter for so long that it had failed to get wrapped up in ways of turning it into romance. They had walked through a graveyard with turf like brocade. It was a Catholic island. The graveyard was full of angels, some of them reading books. Flowers lay on a rich compost heap within a stone wall, thrown away and renewed by the families of the dead. In these graveyards by the sea there are few names, repeated over and over, Euphemia, Colum, Ella, Angus, and fewer last names yet. The dead lie in families. Many of those who are mentioned in the stones are very old, kept at work into their eighties, eating modestly, living a hard life. The dead babies are many, and the drowned men. These are fishermen and the unnamed. Men without names have been washed up on the shores of the Western Isles after battles at sea since there was fighting. It was the place for us to fall in love, thought Elspeth. It filled our hearts with our respective indulgences, love of death and love of place. And there were flowers. He loves death as I love flowers.
The two cycled on. I should ask her about herself, it is the kind thing to do. And it would be kind to him. I can’t let him go to someone who will not look after him, thought Elspeth.
‘Are you fond of children?’ she asked. It would not matter either way. If she really wanted him she would take his strictures.
‘Yes.’ It was an agreement made as though there could be no other answer. It was the answer Logan would want as a sign of good nature in the girl. He would take it no further. He would never give children life.
A pick-up went by, four children sitting in the back with a disdainful pig, the curl of whose nose showed him the most spoilt member of the family. One of the children had her arm around the pig, another scratched its back. The pig smiled like a drunk woman.
Alec and Logan took a longer way back to town. They started to count churches, then became dispirited by a guilt they did not discuss. Alec felt ashamed. Logan defected within himself from his American to his Scots blood. He felt the American missionaries had been the worst, taking tithes from the people to build the churches that seemed to mark the half-miles.
Half his childhood he spent in a big black house with small rooms, once outside the city of Glasgow but now within it. In the rooms there hung dark paintings of men in frock coats and women with the faces of misers. The paintings had been bought with the house by his Glasgow grandfather who had made the American fortune; he bought it without looking at it, on the number of its rooms and the reputed splendour of its great stair. To accommodate the staircase, the rooms of the house had had to breathe in. They never let out that breath in Logan’s experience. The staircase had a balustrade of steel that shone like guns in the dark and the banister was ebony, inlaid with the knucklebones, his father told him, of fallen Englishmen. There could not have been so many ivory-handed men even in a country so decadent as England.
The drum of the great hall of the black house was eighty feet high, a blaze of knives and longswords, dirks, daggers and cutlass. Some of the blades were set like the rays of metal suns, some inwards like the irises of staring eyes. There was a panel of interwoven swords the height of the room and six feet wide, each sword being the length of a big man’s arm. Pikes were crossed over each barrelled door out of the hall. Once a year for a fortnight four men came from Sheffield to sharpen the swords whose present aim was decoration and whose edges were mortal. At the same time the balustrade of the stairway was cleaned by three women with guncotton. This was the most companionable time in the year at the House of the Mearns, when the weapons came down to be sharpened and polished and made useless again in starry arrangements on the walls.
The garden of the house was dark too and wet, relieved by purple bells of fuchsia that made faint pomp in long hedges that led down to the tower where he could sit and watch the Clyde. He waited for launchings as other boys wait for birthdays. His father gave him binoculars early on, to watch the making of the ships in the yards on the Clyde. He saw the last great liner built at John Brown’s Yard, a ship growing between cranes she came to dwarf, her wide swelling sides completed in a curve and turn that moved him more than anything had up till then in his life. The ship was the size of a town of men, but beautiful as an animal, as something inhuman. Logan already had a distaste for other humans. It came from his isolation in the House of the Mearns and his horror of crowds. His mistrust of himself led him to see the human race as himself, multiplied. Trained to be disgusted by weakness in himself, to be deathly proud, he saw in towns rat-runs. It was an illiberal upbringing for a child.
Through his binoculars in the Largs stone crow’s nest built to give the house a fine view of the river, Logan saw the builders of the great ships carried on gantries, walking up gangplanks, letting down the ropes of the ships. The men here had a virtue to them, he could see that. They were of one mind, like a swarm. A taste for autocracy was established in him, for the mass moved as one by one; co-operation was not a word he heard and he could not be expected to imagine it for himself in a household such as his own.
His mother was quiet. Her power was in her puritanical temperament and in the wide fortune in wheatfields and mills she brought to her marriage.
In New York the apartment reproduced the heaviness of the House of the Mearns, on a more extended scale and without the knives. His mother wore a uniform; a grey dress with white cuffs in the day, black at night. Her face was strong, down-drawn, white. She took no perverse pleasure in the disciplines she lived
by; they were right and she did not question them. This certainty helped her to compensate for shyness. A plain heiress will be shy. The pretty one fears her money is part of what is wanted. A plain one knows that she is not involved in her fate at all, she is merely the buoy marking the spot where the treasure is sunk.
Logan loved his mother but saw her little. No one said it, but his parents lived separately as much as they could. She came over from America in ships and he would imagine her always in a ship, filling it somehow on her own, with her own strict, fair decorum. He said his prayers at night to a God who was a ship with the face of his mother.
The warmest times for him were the launching of the ships, when they fell free down the grooved slips into the river, trembled, splashed up two curves of light, and were afloat.
Logan swore that he would never bring life into the world as soon as he knew that it was possible to do so. He took up this position because of the pain his own growing had caused him and because he believed that the world was, being in the hands of men, bound to end in horror. The proliferation of humans made this more likely. He took comfort in his belief in doomsday. It also excused his failings, the difficulties he had at school, the temper that lived in him like a chained wolf, when he compared them with the baseness of human kind in general. He used such words as ‘base’ and ‘scum’.
But he became a man with a heart that was half-tender. Because he had known few people as a child he had not learned to be easy with them. He soon learned that his awkwardness, the sense that he did not belong, was attractive to women. They rested their own fantasies in his emptiness, and it suited him. He developed the attractiveness of the man who behaves badly on more than one continent. He was spoken of, said to have a broken heart, an illness all women believe they can heal.
He began the business of marrying because of the sensation of new life it offers, though he made it clear to each wife there should be no actual conception.
Alec did not know whether to talk. Logan was not used to initiatives from other people. Perhaps it might have relaxed him to be spoken to. Alec could not think that they had much to talk about except things too serious to mention, that people trying to live in the confined quarters of a boat did not mention. Although he was continually intrigued and surprised by life at sea and its particular discomforts and rewards, Alec had realised by now that he was a landsman. He missed the detail of life on land more each day. He wanted, as a man wants to eat again after illness, to work, to paint.
Their common ground was their homeland, a prickly place to grasp. Alec imagined the life of a rich man in Scotland. He could picture no real life lived thus. Blurry nineteenth-century oils, considerably greater than life-size, showing dovelike chieftainesses welcoming huge kilted lairds with knees like faces, came into his mind. Every available surface would be overwhelmed with tartan, the walls loaded with the heads of surprised stags, their antlers pointing to a groined ceiling dark with smoke from the fire before which long hounds twitched.
He was far from imagining the truth. The idea of a character, once formed, is dangerously quick to accoutre every aspect of the character’s imagined life. To see what others are actually like is not the gift of the most imaginative, necessarily.
To invent was more interesting, too, though Alec would not have said he was inventing a life for Logan.
Logan did not think much about such things. When he did, he made assumptions based upon a certain amount of knowledge and no observation. Swift to grasp fear, subordination or weakness in others, he was not interested by the laminations and contradictions of human character. They did not strike him. He was like a bad king in this way, a person who must have a jester in order to know who is telling jokes. Logan made his mind up fast about people, did not like many of them, and was slow but sudden to confiscate affection.
‘Were you near the docks where you grew up?’ Logan spoke politely. He found talk around topics wasteful. There was something in Alec that was not effeminacy, he thought, but the man watched you while you spoke, and that was like a woman.
‘Most days,’ Alec replied, and decided to be less mean with his words. ‘I went with my mother and father. They worked in Leith.’
‘To my mind that’s the best part of the city. But then I’m Glaswegian.’ The accent was more English in that sentence than Alec had ever heard it, but Logan did not say things he did not mean.
‘Did you use to come over then, from Glasgow?’
‘In order to be with my mother when she gave the Christmas message to the Distressed Seamen in their hostel. She endowed it. She would not have a heated bedroom in our house herself. In the evenings she knitted socks for the seamen that were so thick you couldn’t get them on. God knows what they did with them. The seamen were excellent blokes. My mother was one of these women who do not realise how people hate to have good done them. And she was temperance. After the speech, and the talking, and the tea and the buns that got taken out and dusted year after year, she would take me to Leith.’
Here is his tenderness, thought Alec. It is to himself as a boy.
‘What would you do?’
‘Watch fishing boats. I more than anything wanted to get into one of them and run away to sea. I wanted to catch herring out of Leith. It was the thing I wanted above all. The sea, the company, it looked great to me. I sat in rope coils and looked at the old boats slapping up and down in the water. I stole glass floats from the docks and kept them in my room. There were seventeen by the time I was sent down to my English school.’
Logan was enjoying himself. He calculated that he need never see Alec, in his view a rather unrewarding character, again, after he had paid him when the voyage came to its end in New Zealand. Besides, confidences on land did not prejudice the balance of the boat. Some people grew confidential at sea, lured into indiscretion by the unreality. To Logan the sea was the more solid thing.
Would he be envious of me if I were to tell him? thought Alec. Or would it spoil his fantasy to tell him about the gutting floor and the backs done in by pulling nets, and my great-grandfather lifted overboard by a wave?
‘I know it was a hard life, and anyhow now it’s all but gone, but that is the way of life I first coveted,’ said Logan, ‘like some boys want to be pirates or to drive trains. I wanted to be a seafisherman. The nearest I came was this.’ He made a face that indicated his burdensome freedom and shoals of silver.
Should I knock your head off, thought Alec, for the sake of my father, or should I simply watch you as one watches a rare animal and trust to your extinction? He did not feel a malevolence that was anything more than theoretical, now that he knew the man. He did not like Logan, he thought, but even to know a few things about someone was to fall away from wishing him and his like dead. He supposed it was corrupt, but he preferred corruption to the cleanliness of social purging.
Corruption of this sort, Alec thought, the mixing of people and the sheen and variety of these mixtures, has been the great thing of this voyage for me. I see that the sailing is, when not boring or frightening, beautiful, but it is the people and places I have learnt from. There is no human purity. It is a lie. The combinations of peoples are without end.
Logan assumed Alec’s early life must have been pretty grim. It fitted in with the finickiness of the man now when you thought about it, he considered, pleased with his perception. He would tell Gabriel. The man obviously grew up in squalor and grime. That would explain his habits, his precision, the way he boned a fish perfectly before beginning to chivvy any flesh on to his fork.
In this way, Logan subdued Alec to himself and made him pitiable and comprehensible. If we were actually to comprehend other people we would not be able to use them for our own ends.
This is not an exchange of confidences, thought Alec. It is Logan honouring me. How shall I find myself paying for the honour?
They cycled up to and past the royal parish church and the palace beside it through the violet hour; in the air around each of them bats pinched at
the breeze while in the mind of each man settled carefully coloured false pictures of the other’s early life.
Sandro was waiting for them at the harbour.
‘It was a good day,’ he both asked and stated.
‘Good enough,’ said Logan, locking the bikes to the reception post at the quayside, though he knew they would not be stolen.
‘Great with us too. We’re all set. She’s ready to go.’ Sandro nodded all along the sentence as he spoke. He had the energy to waste.
It was men like Sandro and Nick who best survived the life at sea and the cramped, overlooked life in the harbour, thought Alec. They carried no slack. He had been looking for goodness; he had found, certainly, good natures.
‘Gabriel’s made real fancy tucker,’ said Sandro. ‘It’s a question of pancakes and corned beef hash.’
‘Great gear,’ said Logan, all American, no trace of the irritable superior with whom Alec had passed that afternoon.
The boy on the coiled rope watching fishing boats had not been an invention; he was still there.
Chapter 10
The longest stretch of ocean lay before them, between Tonga and New Zealand. Logan set the course due south. Alec and Nick once again took the two-to-six watches, Logan and Elspeth the six to ten, Sandro and Gabriel the ten till two. Each of them had checked every set of oilskin trousers and jacket, shaken the roaches out of the seaboots over the side, and checked the clips on hard lengths of nylon webbing that were tucked deep in the oilskins, to be made fast to the deck in case of foul weather. The webbing was rolled around its biting clip and the packed discs of ribbon and metal tucked in an oilskin jacket pocket, a small measure against what the sea could do. The oilskins themselves made a busy sound like water running on an old wooden clinker-built dinghy in shallow water, a hissing noise, very light.
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