Coasting (28 page)

The buoyed channel led in a series of knight’s moves round the lake, with Rye traveling from west to east and back again across the horizon. Then the boat was suddenly deep in beds of wallflowers, garden gnomes, toy windmills, bird tables and window boxes. I found an elderly man in a sun hat reclining in his Barcalounger on the starboard bow. “You want to keep more over that way for the channel,” he said. Grazing his hardy annuals, I brought the boat’s head round, steered clear of someone’s dog, cruised through the
middle of someone else’s picnic lunch, and brought up under the eaves of the oasthouses on Strand Quay.

That a visitor was jumping aboard, collecting ropes and making
Gosfield Maid
fast to the bollards on the wall didn’t surprise me a bit; it seemed an inevitable part of the general domestic chumminess of Rye, where boats and houses were locked in such an intimate tangle that everyone was living in everyone else’s pocket. My visitor was making himself at home in the saloon. He was tangled and loose-jointed, with a stack of fair hair over a lucid face like an oriel window. He was standing at his full height in the cabin, and there were several separate stories of him.

“Your headroom! It’s a palace, isn’t it? You should see mine—”

In jeans, broken moccasins and faded denim workshirt, he didn’t look like a yachtsman, and he seemed too slender and lightly muscled to have earned the cracks and calluses on his hands. His voice was urban, his skin was open-air and pink.

Over the next two days, the different bits of Nick O’Brien assembled themselves. Fifteen months before, he’d been selling carpets in a flooring center in Croydon, where he lived with his wife in a terraced house. The job was boring and the marriage was cracking up. When his wife left him, Nick sold his car and his stereo system, rented his house, bought a boat, left the flooring center and became a water gypsy. He told me about his last meeting with the area manager of the carpet company.

“ ‘There’s three million unemployed,’ he said. ‘What d’you think you’re going to do?’ ‘Sail,’ I said. ‘Sail away. I’m buying a boat.’ ‘You’ll be back,’ he said. You could see it on his face—you know … poor sod, like his wife’s hopped it and now he’s going off his trolly. ‘What do you know about
sailing?’
he said. ‘Not a lot,’ I said. ‘But I can learn, can’t I?’ He sort of sighed, like he was dealing with a right loony. ‘See you in time for the autumn sale,’ he said, ‘when it starts getting cold,’ and gave me my cards. I thought then and there, I’m never going back, not if it kills me.”

Nick’s domestic economy was a model of belt-tightening
frugality. The rent from his house, after he had paid the insurance and the real estate agent’s commission, brought him £l, 100 a year. It was enough, he said. He ate no meat, caught his own fish, collected his own vegetables from the seashore. Wherever possible, he laid up at anchor in estuaries where no harbor dues were payable; Rye was the first port he’d entered in six months where a charge was levied, and he’d slipped in in the small hours, hoping to escape the notice of the harbormaster. For entertainment he listened to BBC Radio 4 and plodded assiduously round free art galleries and museums. He was happy.

“I’ve got something in my life now that none of my friends have got. None of them.”

“What’s that?”

“Direction.”

Freedom, yes—but
direction?
For more than a year, Nick O’Brien had been going off in all directions like a jumping jack. Last spring, he’d taught himself to sail and navigate around the east coast of England. In the early summer, he’d bought a plastic sextant, secondhand, practiced with it for a week, and set off across the North Sea. He’d wandered round the edges of Holland, West Germany, Denmark, Sweden. In the autumn, instead of returning to the flooring center, he’d sailed back to the Thames and put up for the winter in the creeks around the Swale and Medway. Now he was striking out, in the most leisurely way possible, for France, Spain, Portugal, maybe Africa, he thought.

“Winter in Africa. That sounds all right, doesn’t it?”

We took a bottle of claret from
Gosfield Maid’s
cellar in the bilges and climbed across to Nick’s boat,
Sussex Rowan
. It was a fiberglass sloop, tiny for such a full-time life: a few inches over 20 feet long. It looked like a minature floating junkyard, hung about with car tires, its deck loaded with plastic sacks, paint cans and fish crates. A supermarket trolly was lashed to the mast, and a rusty funnel stuck up through the foredeck.

In contrast to its disreputable exterior, the inside of the boat was like a tidy dolls’ house. The whole of the forecabin was occupied by a wood-burning stove of a kind that might
once have heated a Victorian boarding school. In the saloon there was a double bed, fastidiously tucked and turned, to port, with a gas cooker, a sink and a closet-sized john to starboard. On the central table, some fresh wildflowers stood in a jam jar.

“It’s … like the fetal life,” Nick said. “I must have had a pretty good time in the womb, I reckon.”

Even sitting down, I had to duck my head. I looked over Nick’s library on the shelf by the bed. There were field guides to plants and birds, two vegetarian cookbooks,
Food For Free
, a nautical almanac, Admiralty sight-reduction tables. The Literature section held a single book—Herman Hesse’s
Steppenwolf
.

He showed me his charts. There were just two of them. One was falling to bits and showed the whole of the North Sea and some of the Baltic, from the Dover Straits to Oslo; the other, in relatively mint condition, covered the entire English Channel from Dover to Brest.

“You use these for navigation? They’re on an impossibly small scale.”

“Yes, but look at all the water on them. Then there are the little charts in the almanac for getting into places—it’s all you need, really.”

It made me worry for his safety. “Would you like some of mine—the ones I’ve used already, from here to Land’s End?”

“No, thanks. I’d get confused if I changed scale now. Anyway, there’s nowhere I could put them.”

I thought I understood his reluctance. His two charts miniaturized the continent of Europe down to roughly the same scale on which he’d miniaturized his life. They were just right for Nick O’Brien, though I would no more have used them to sail by than I’d have used the maps in the endpapers of my diary.

“I suppose you’ll need one more to get to Africa—”

“There’s an Admiralty chart for the whole of the North Atlantic,” Nick said.

At low tide, we walked together across the salt marshes to the sea. Nick was full of his newly acquired natural history.
He named the wading curlews and turnstones, the snipe ricocheting up ahead of us, the lapwings with their pigtail crests. He found a thick bed of tuberous marsh samphire and stopped to harvest it.

“It’s brilliant in sandwiches,” he said. “See that stuff where you’re standing? Scurvy grass. It’s solid with vitamin C. They used to make sailors eat it, poor buggers—it tastes revolting.”

“What’s that bird there?”

“Greenshank. This time last year, you know, the only birds I ever knew were sparrows. When I walked out of the job, I didn’t know
anything
. For me, it’s been like going to a university. Every day I’m learning. There’s only one thing wrong for me now. I wish there was a girl to share it all with. It’s the only thing I miss—”

“You think your life’s big enough to
share?”
It looked to me as if the addition of a girl, even a very small girl indeed, to the minuscule world of
Sussex Rowan
would sink it instantly.

There had been a girl once, in the winter, Nick said. She’d moved into the boat when it was moored in Faversham creek. “It didn’t last, unfortunately.”

“How long?”

“Five days.”

The temperature outside the boat had been ten degrees below freezing-point. The mud around them froze as the tide ebbed. Nick’s friend had balked at washing herself and her clothes in icy seawater as he did. Yet he still seemed puzzled as to why she’d left.

“I don’t think she really liked boats,” he said, hands deep in his pockets, frowning at the sky. “What I need is someone who really likes boats.”

On the walk back to Rye, I talked about my own voyage. With Nick O’Brien, it was a voyage again, not simply a bad case of going boating.

“I can teach you basic astro,” he said. “You could learn to use a sextant in a couple of hours. There’s nothing to it. It’s a nice feeling—knowing you can find exactly where you are when you’re miles out of sight of land. It makes you independent, like. Just you and the sun …”

“I’d like that—”

“You won’t be able to stop this, you know. You’ll keep on going. I can tell. When you’ve learned how to live like a seagull, it’s not a thing you can just give up like that. I wouldn’t trade it. Nor will you. I bet you anything—”

By eleven the next morning a circle of tourist coaches surrounded Rye on its hill like a defensive laager of voortrekker wagons. For Rye was famous. It wasn’t famous in the way that most towns are, for making and doing things—Axminster for carpets, Cambridge for degrees, Melton Mowbray for pork pies, Nottingham for lace. Rye was famous for doing nothing. “Deserted by the sea … miraculously preserved from the developers … Rye is arguably the most enchanting town in the British Isles,” said the brochure which Nick O’Brien collected from the tourist kiosk because, like most things in Nick’s life, it was free.

We poked about through the streets, a pair of ignorant sight-seers in our own country. The polished cobbles were lapped in a pink surf of fallen cherry blossom; the half-timbered Tudor houses were up to their ears in honeysuckle and tea roses. Remembering Eliot on Kipling (“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it”), I sniffed at Rye, but it gave nothing away; it was as if someone had sprayed the town from end to end with a floral-scented underarm deodorant in order to give it the dehumanized loveliness of a glossy color photograph.

It was oddly hushed too. Doves purred and hiccuped in their dovecotes overhead, and the voices of the other visitors echoed overloudly under the sagging gables, like people talking in church. Wherever one looked, one saw another Cyclops—a slowly turning head culminating in the lidless mauve eye of a Yashica or a Nikon. Rye was going on record. There must now be at least a hundred holiday snaps, preserved in albums across the globe, in which Nick O’Brien and I figure as trespassers on the composition.

“Who are those people there?”

“Nobody. They were in the way.”

I had meant to buy provisions for
Gosfield Maid
, but though
the Mint was lined with shopfronts, there were no remotely useful things for sale. There were plenty of antiques and curios; there were “galleries” stuffed with anemic water-colors of oasthouses, fishing boats and gingerbread thatched hovels; there were “potteries” with untempting displays of folk earthenware in their windows—urns, vases and tankards all tricked out in a warty toad-skin glaze. It was true that you could buy souvenir tea towels and plastic pinafores with pictures of Rye on them, but there wasn’t an egg, or a half-pound of butter, or a pint of milk to be seen.

Even getting a cup of coffee was a problem. The place was solid with cafés, but I winced at the prospect of establishments with names like Ye Olde Tucke Shoppe and Simon the Pieman and hunted in vain for some grubby snack bar which would at least acknowledge that it shared the same century as Nick and I.

“This was exactly what used to drive Edward Burra to his wit’s ends.”

“Edward who?”

Edward Burra was not mentioned in Nick’s free guide. Although he was Rye’s best-known native son, he and the town were apparently still at loggerheads even after his death. In letters he always gave his address as “Wry.” Burra had no taste for the quaint and picturesque; his paintings glory in, and pine for, the raw, noisy, sexy twentieth-century world from which Rye had turned its genteel face. Leaving the family house on the pretext that he was going out for ten minutes to post a letter, he decamped to Forty-second Street, where he roistered happily with male whores from Harlem and bothered to write home only after he’d been gone a year. Yet Burra needed Rye in much the same way that Flaubert needed his provincial bourgeoisie and Marx his capitalists: exasperation with the place invigorated Burra’s work just as powerfully as if he’d loved it. He did come back. When he inherited his house on the corner of Church Square, he covered the windows with brown paper to exclude the intolerably pretty view. Painting by the light of a bare electric bulb, he was off in a private heaven of strippers, drunks, gangsters and lounging black boys with
diamond-splinter eyes and watermelon smiles, while Rye went on being wry beyond the brown paper screen.

The area around Burra’s house was heavily infested with artists at their easels, all of them registering the same received image, of mellow brick and old timber, jasmine and hollyhocks. The paintings themselves were fussy, lifeless things, with dicky perspectives and clouds of porridge floating in their skies. But their straw-hatted executioners had more in common with Burra than either they or Burra would probably have cared to admit. Like him, they’d blotted out the tiresome England in which they actually lived, because they preferred to paint, like him, by artificial light. Their rustic, thatched old-world utopia was not so very far in spirit from the version of pastoral which Burra made out of the gay dives off Times Square.

Rye itself was not so much a town now as a work of sentimental art—a depiction of life, not life in its own right. It was crude art, too, starved of paradox and contingent detail. In every brushstroke there was the same remorseless charm. “R
EBUILT
1420,” boasted the plaque on the honey-suckled Mermaid Inn, ryely self-preening. At 12:15 the Quarter Boys, a pair of gilded cherubs armed with gong-sticks, went into action on the clock tower of St. Mary’s Church. Nick O’Brien scrutinized them closely, wrinkling his eyes against the sun.

“They’re made of GRP,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“You can see the lines of the mold. That’s fiberglass, that is, no question.”