She shivered, and tried to persuade herself it was the damp. The saloon was musty. It looked and felt empty. Book racks with no books. An old, iron stove, black and cold like the coal scuttle beside it. Teak woodwork, dark with age, grey with dust.
‘Sleeping cabin through here.’ Jack had to stoop beneath the deckhead. He opened a narrower door in the forward bulkhead, to one side of the stove. George peered around him at a cramped space with a single berth port side, and a narrow double to starboard. Both had leeboards fitted to stop you falling out in rough weather, and they looked coffin-deep without their mattresses. A hole in the deckhead showed where the mast had been. A tarpaulin had been stretched over the gap, but damp had come in just the same, making a puddle of slime on the deck around the void where the mast had been stepped.
‘This was my bunk, as a boy.’ Jack put his hand inside the single berth and felt upwards, making a metallic rattle against a curtain rail. Leeboards and curtains, very cosy. The atmosphere was stronger here. Soon she’d be able to put a name to it.
‘Can you imagine what it was like, for a boy?’ Jack’s smile broadened into a grin, his guard slipping. ‘Sailing off to adventure? Channel Islands? One summer we went round Brittany into Biscay.’
‘Just the two of you?’ She was a big boat for two people to go cruising in, especially if one of them was a kid.
‘When I was older, in my teens perhaps. Day sailing only, and Grandpa was stronger, back then. We both knew what we were doing.’
‘People say he was a pretty wild sailor. Took risks.’
‘Not with me, he didn’t.’ Jack sounded defensive.
‘It was before my time, anyway,’ George shrugged. ‘Chippy Alan would know, if you want some local stories.’
‘Chippy Alan?’
‘Shipwright. Works here…’ She stopped when she saw loss in his eyes. ‘You really loved him, didn’t you?’
‘Grandpa…’ Jack’s voice faded away then started again, more strongly. ‘Grandpa opened up horizons. He gave me permission to be myself.’ He turned away.
‘Fo’c’s’le through there?’ George nodded at another door, leading further forward. Jack pushed it open.
‘Stores. Sail lockers. There’s another pull-down bunk in there, but it’s not comfortable. It’s where they put the paid hand when the owner employed a crew.’
The ‘bunk’ wasn’t much more than five feet long, wedged in behind a thick metal pipe that must have run from the anchor on deck to the chain locker below.
‘I suppose that’s what they mean by sailing short-handed,’ she quipped.
He had a smile that started small but broadened, lifting his face. George felt she’d been given a glimpse of a sweeter person hiding inside that dour exterior.
‘So I’d have one hull of a problem.’
And he could come back at her. It wasn’t great humour from either of them, but it broke the ice. Then she remembered his wedding ring and led the way back into the saloon.
‘Will your family restore her? She’d be worth a fortune, done up.’
‘Grandpa wants to be cremated on board, at sea, and for Draca to be scuttled.’
‘Feck, what a waste!’
‘It’s also illegal. I checked. The authorities aren’t keen on half-burned bodies washing up on the beaches. Besides,’ he ran a finger over the table, leaving a shiny trail through the dust, ‘I don’t think I could do it. This ship is Grandpa. He bought her as a wreck and spent years restoring her. It would be like killing him all over again.’
The atmosphere in the boat caught George for a moment, and she shivered again. It lurked in the background, just enough to make her uncomfortable. She sniffed, trying to make it out, but smelled only damp and rot and a hint of stale tobacco. It was as if she was in someone’s house without permission, knowing that the owner would be back soon. She stood still for a moment, trying to decipher this mood, and lifted her fingers to touch a deckhead beam. Here, where the dust hadn’t settled, the wood glowed a rich, dark honey. The impression was stronger through her fingers, and she closed her eyes, listening. She had the sense that if that absent owner came back, he wouldn’t like her and she wouldn’t like him, but the boat was waiting for him. And it was definitely a ‘him’.
Weird. Jack Ahlquist was standing beside her as she opened her eyes and dropped her hand, watching her with grey, gentle eyes that looked tired in the shadows of the cabin. She turned and made for the companion ladder up to the deck, still not sure why the boat made her so uncomfortable. Anyway, she had a boatyard to run.
II: GEORGE
Eddie Ahlquist didn’t get the fireship funeral Jack said he wanted, but a bog-standard cremation. George went, to represent the boatyard, but got there early because the buses weren’t convenient. She had over an hour to kill sitting on a bench outside a crem that had as much soul as a drive-through McDonalds.
Her mum had it right, although George had been young enough to sneer at the time. When her mum knew she was dying, she asked for a woodland burial, and chose a wicker coffin that creaked like a picnic basket when they lifted her. Her new-age girlfriends wore bright, Indian-print dresses, and burned joss sticks and candles in jam jars at the graveside. They’d all grown up in the Flower Power hippie era, and somehow never left it. One of them even brought finger cymbals. They wove yellow celandine flowers into her mum’s hair before they closed the coffin. Strange how colours stick with you, even though George always remembered her not in yellow but in shades of silver and violet. They glowed like a Mum-shaped photo frame around her memory.
That happened, with people she knew. Colours, that is. Her mum talked about auras, which made George laugh because she made it sound like people walked around all lit up like a Christmas tree. She wished her mum had lived long enough for them to have had a proper conversation about that stuff. It was just that some colours seemed to fit when she thought of people. They told her about them, the way they told her that Eddie was going to die. On her bench outside the crem, George watched Jack Ahlquist arrive, and when she thought about him he had strong reds, moody blues and sad greys. Interesting but dangerous.
Then an older man came who could only be Jack’s father and Eddie’s son. All of them sandy haired, big boned and strong jawed. Jack’s dad shepherded people outside the crematorium, shaking hands, the man in charge. He had the thick neck of someone who pumped iron, and a mouth that was a thin, straight line. When he smiled, the line got wider but didn’t curve upwards, it just got bracketed by folds in his cheeks, sharp as the triangles on a navigation buoy.
George stayed on her bench because she didn’t know anyone there apart from Jack, and he was busy with family. No one else came from the boatyard, not even Eddie’s old sailing cronies. He’d lost a lot of friends in recent years, but that was sad.
George could learn a lot from watching people. At first, everyone looked the same. All in black, all with that funeral look as if they wore a passport photograph where their faces should be. She could make out the Ahlquist crowd, all hugs and kisses except Jack, and then there was an older man and two women who stood a bit apart, both more smartly dressed than the rest, and the only women in hats. A husband, wife and daughter, at a guess. The man was a short, lean, military type who stood very square. When people came up to the older woman, she offered her hand palm-down, fingers drooping, as if she expected them to go down on one knee and kiss it. No one stayed with them, and the three kept to themselves as if they knew it was pointless to try to talk.
Jack moved between them and the rest, half belonging to both groups, neither oil nor water, looking stressed. Like all the men he was sweating in his dark suit, with spots of damp staining his shirt across his chest. The younger woman must be his wife, so the military man and the duchess were the in-laws, and the families didn’t get on.
Jack waved when he saw George. Nothing too enthusiastic, but enough for her to wander over and say hello. She was ready for the mother-in-law’s fingers. If you slide your hand under t
hat kind of regal greeting, then grip and twist, you can turn it into a proper handshake. The duchess didn’t like that. She didn’t like George’s looks, either. The duchess was tall enough for her eyes to be at the level of George’s hair, and George saw her wince. So what? George liked orange. It’s a strong colour, and it was only a streak. While Jack fumbled the introductions the woman’s eyes dropped so she was looking down her nose at George’s skirt, and her mouth pursed into a tight, wrinkly, cat’s-arse circle of disapproval. Maybe yellow was a bit bright for a funeral, but there wasn’t much call for dark, smart stuff in a boatyard. At least George had put a decent jacket over it, and she bet the duchess couldn’t tell that the jacket came from a charity shop.
Jack’s wife introduced herself as Charlotte. Very upmarket, with the sort of accent you hear in posh shops. Her handshake was straight, if a bit cool. She was tall, like her mother, and slender and attractive, unlike her mother. Her black straw hat was broad-brimmed so she had to tilt her head to one side to whisper in George’s ear.
‘Thank God for some colour. I think Old Eddie would have loved it.’
George decided she was going to like Charlotte. She stayed near her as they were ushered inside.
*
Twenty minutes later George was like, ‘was that it?’ A whole life, nearly eighty years, reduced to one reading, two hymns, a three-minute drone from Rent-a-Priest and a poem?
Jack’s father gave the reading, bellowing it out like a fire-and-brimstone preacher. Isaiah 61, the order of service said.
‘The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the poor.’ He stared at a young woman in the front row, with two young children beside her. Another Ahlquist by the look of her, and the kind of blonde who’s gone way too plump with motherhood. ‘He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted…’ She didn’t look very broken hearted. She had big, dark eyes, a snub nose and puffy cheeks, like a seal pup with tits. Jack’s father didn’t strike George as a preacher, either, but he turned that stare towards Jack as he finished, and thundered, ‘To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn.’
Rent-a-Priest did his job. He’d probably never met the man he was about to incinerate, even though he’d been fed the key facts and wrapped them up in lofty, churchy tones. Edvard Ahlquist, born into hardship as the son of a Danish sailor. Forty years a shipwright. Had his share of tragedy. Liked sailing and Nordic folklore. Let us pray.
Jack read a poem that was George’s favourite. She didn’t know many poems, but this one about the lonely sea and the sky had stuck, ever since she was a kid. Something in those words about steering a tall ship by a star had struck a chord. Other kids escaped into video games or petty crime but she was the loner who dreamed of sailing away. She couldn’t even remember which school she had been in when she had learned it, but it had told her about a world beyond a dirty playground and the waiting gangs. She’d been in her late teens before she felt a tiller’s kick for the first time, or heard Masefield’s wind song, and then it had been like coming home. She still knew it well enough to shut her eyes and mouth the words with Jack.
Jack spoke with passion, as if he’d chosen that bit of the service. It was the only time some feeling for Mad Eddie came over. His voice caught, just a little, as he spoke those final words about a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over, and George opened her eyes.
He was watching her. Again. She blushed and looked away, angry with herself, but not before she’d seen that he was a bit full. He paused like he was collecting himself, then said, ‘Sweet dreams, Grandpa,’ as if he really meant it, but Rent-a-Priest was already standing to announce the final hymn. The next lot were waiting.
‘…Oh hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea.’
The priest looked bored as he pressed the button.
III: GEORGE
Charlotte persuaded George to go to the reception afterwards. George had followed her out of the crem, wishing she had a dress like Charlotte’s and the body to wear it. Charlotte’s parents were in front of her, shaking hands with the line of Ahlquists. Charlotte’s father was a lot shorter than Harry Ahlquist, and he was a stiff little man who tilted his whole torso to look Harry in the eye, leaning back rather than looking up. They shook hands the way boxers touch gloves.
‘Will you come back to the house? The wife’s laid on a bit of a spread…’ Harry Ahlquist pushed out an invitation the way George would fend off a boat.
‘Awfully decent of you.’ Charlotte’s father spoke in clipped, plummy tones, recoiling from the invitation so much that George thought he might overbalance backwards. ‘But it’s a long drive home…’
‘Sure.’ Harry looked relieved. His shoulders opened, bonhomie restored.
‘You’ll come though, won’t you, George?’ Charlotte turned, making big, pleading eyes. She must have been dreading being stuck with Jack’s lot on her own.
‘I need to get the bus back to Furzey…’ George was like, ‘Feck, no way’.
‘We’ll run you back, won’t we, darling?’ Charlotte turned to Jack, who was last in the line of Ahlquists. He started and said ‘sure’ warmly enough, but his mind seemed elsewhere. Charlotte settled it by slipping her arm inside George’s and leading them towards her car. George was too flattered to argue.
Harry Ahlquist’s house was modern and a bit flash, the kind of place a man might build for himself if he’d made a shedload of money and wanted to show it by having the biggest house in the neighbourhood. There was a bar-and-games room where Jack’s mum had laid out sandwiches and nibbles. She was a dumpy, homey sort in a black dress who fussed around everyone, but wouldn’t stand still long enough to talk. Charlotte disappeared, leaving George clutching a sausage roll, looking at a lawn that was filling with people she didn’t know. Beyond the lawn was a hedge with a gap and more steps down, and there must have been a swimming pool on the far side because shifting sunlight was shining upwards through the hedge.
George didn’t fit with that kind of money. She’d find a taxi. The boatyard could pay. Eddie had been a customer, after all. She turned to go.
Charlotte had the kind of smile that made George think they shared some private joke, and she was holding two glasses of wine with a God-I-need-this look on her face. She’d taken off her jacket and hat, and had thick, brown hair pulled back into a ponytail in a way that emphasised her face. As she pushed a glass at George, she looked like a model who’d just walked off a photo shoot.
‘Sorry. Queue for the loo. Cheers.’ She winced at the taste but swallowed. ‘Today’s a day I’m really glad Jack’s driving.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Probably being told what a naughty boy he is.’ She swigged again and stared into her glass. ‘This gets better. The first mouthful kills the taste buds.’ She linked arms again as if they were old friends, and steered George onto the lawn. No one else tried to talk to them. All around, people were hugging each other and kissing children. My, look at you, how you’ve grown. Already it was more like a wedding than a funeral, but Charlotte and George stood alone, surrounded by enough grass to talk quietly without being heard.
‘Looks like you don’t get on.’
‘Oh, they don’t approve of me at all.’ Charlotte panned a smile around the gathering, almost like she enjoyed their hostility.
‘How come?’
At the end of the lawn a group of people gathered around Harry Ahlquist all looked at Charlotte over their shoulders at the same time, and turned away.
‘Sergeant Major Ahlquist,’ she lifted her glass towards him, ‘didn’t like Jack becoming an officer, and he especially didn’t like him marrying me.’
‘Why ever not?’ She was friendly, she was lovely and, although her parents were a bit stuck up, George hadn’t seen any pretensions. Charlotte lifted her glass towards Jack’s mother, who was darting from group to group like a rather
plump blackbird with a tea tray.
‘That’s the sort of woman they wanted for their boy. I bet she gets up early to dust the ceiling and iron the cat.’
‘Meow.’
‘Sorry, that was a bit bitchy.’
‘I like her.’ The only time George could remember her own mum baking savouries for her friends, they’d had cannabis in them. That was one weird party.
‘And Harry Ahlquist treats her like a dishcloth.’
‘He seemed relieved that your parents didn’t come.’
‘Mummy and Daddy have never forgiven him for boycotting our wedding.’ She turned her head as Jack appeared beside her and said ‘hey’ like they were workmates; friends but not friends enough to touch.
‘I’m just telling George some family history.’
Jack said ‘Uh-huh?’ in a tone that told George he wasn’t too sure about that, but Charlotte carried on anyway. ‘We wanted close family to wear morning dress, you see. Harry threw a wobbly and told Jack’s people not to come.’
‘But why?’
‘Inverted snobbery.’ Jack answered for her. He had a strange way of standing, with his weight on his right leg and his left leg flexed, on its toes. ‘He said there was no way he was going to pretend to be a toff, so we could go to hell.’
I could see the pain behind his eyes. It must still hurt.
‘So you had no one there from your side?’
‘School friends. Marines friends. A guard of honour with an arch of swords outside.’ He bent to touch his sister’s children, who were playing catch around his legs, unaware of the social tides around them. A preschool boy chased a girl at the giggly-screamy stage of infancy. The seal pup with tits glared across the lawn like she could call them back with a look.
‘That’s Tilly,’ Charlotte whispered, smiling sweet acid at Jack’s sister. ‘Daddy’s little girl.’
‘But no family?’ George prompted Jack.
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