Sailors on the Inward Sea (31 page)

“You'd better,” he replied, and then he called me a swine.

With Straw's insult ringing in my ears I set off for the post office a few blocks away, chastised but happy, a spring in my step, a grin pasted on my face, nodding amiably to passersby. I think that I must have known what I had to do since the evening of Conrad's wake, known it, I mean, on the deep level of consciousness where things bide their time, waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves. This one occurred when I turned down the street and saw the post office. It wasn't a blinding realization, and I can't say that I was even mildly surprised, not in the least. It was very simple, very clear, unassailable.
Of course,
I remember thinking,
of course.
While I stood at the high table in the gloomy great room of the post office, the light filtering through the arched windows casting long yellow oblong shapes across the floor, I thought of what I had to do to prepare
while I wrote a check to Straw and addressed the envelope with an uncharacteristic flourish. If I'd possessed the talent to conjure spirits as men in Java claim they can do, I know Conrad would have applauded and given me his blessing, very likely asking why it had taken me so long to see which way the wind blew.

Back on board, I made sure the oars were in the dinghy, then uncoiled the rope ladder and saw that it was frayed but strong enough to bear my weight. I checked the petrol can that I kept in reserve in the event her tank went dry. With everything in order, I went up to a fish-and-chips shop for lunch, eating by the window where I could see the
Nellie
and dozens of other boats strung out in a line that led my eye to the spot where I'd last seen Conrad. My thoughts went back to the Pent, Singapore, to our days of working for Walter Craig, Conrad standing bare-chested on a tiny dock, his head done up in a blue rag, none of it in sequence but that didn't matter. The shape of his life was there for me to see and I thought that, on the whole, it had been more satisfying than most I knew, including my own.

It was going on toward six o'clock when I slipped the
Nellie
's mooring lines, running on the old Chalmers auxiliary engine out of the estuary, where I raised the sails and headed down the coast a few kilometers to a spot well away from the shipping lanes. After tying the wheel down, I lowered the dinghy from the stern, secured the painter with a half-hitch, gave it an extra tug to make sure it held, tossed the rope ladder over the side, and waited for the sun to go down. I was feeling sentimental, Ford, the elegiac mood that had earlier come over me stronger now, piqued by the light show that was beginning in the west, the sunset reminding me of all those the five of us had witnessed together and they all seemed to be happening at once, as if years had never separated them.

The
Nellie
was one of the boats in my life inhabited by the presences
of former owners and passengers, and I must say this was never clearer than during the next hour or so. Conrad and Harrison and Barnes and Kepler were as good as there. The air was redolent from Harrison's shag. I even had a vision of the legionnaire, girded for a run-in with the local savages and probably wishing for a glass of good Falernian wine, standing on the trireme's deck and staring into the dense growth along the riverbank.

When all that was left of the sun was a fiery dome pooling like orange paint on the horizon, I got up and went over to the locker, where I removed the gooseneck petrol can. On my way to the bow I unscrewed the cap and began sprinkling petrol in a zigzag pattern across the deck. In the wan last light of day the liquid reflected the mast and sails as well as my own shadowy figure in peacoat and visored cap, looking rather like an old salt watering his plants. As there was still some petrol in the bottom of the can, I walked back through the fumes, which made my eyes water, and poured it around the base of the mast. The voices of the old gang started while I was on my way toward the ladder. Faint at first, they quickly grew louder, the lot going on as vivaciously as ever, a medley of heated arguments, reflections, storytelling, Conrad talking about the
Roi des Belges,
me holding court about the Congo, Jim, a swirl of words and images that for a few moments preserved our past together as perfectly as Dowell's minuet of the Hessian bathing places, where he had what he wanted and took his ease in shadows and coolness.

I climbed over the side and stood on the lowest rung of the ladder while I removed a waterproof container from my pocket and struck a match. The moment I tossed it onto the deck there was a tremendous thud, as if a huge boot had come down squarely on the
Nellie.
I felt a blast of heat and saw black smoke billowing skyward as I stepped into the dinghy and slipped the knot on the painter, letting her drift away a hundred meters or so. Holding her steady with
the oars, I watched the conflagration, the flames' fierce reds and golds and yellows an homage to Conrad. Within the hour, the
Nellie'
s mast fell toward the bow, trailing sparks like the eyes of peacocks staring into fire. The cabin roof collapsed and, when she began to settle, I could see the interior of her hull filled with the glowing embers of mast and sails and decking. Soon afterward she went down without a struggle, without trying to hold on longer than was seemly, went down by her stern in a hiss of steam lighted by the last embers.

The flames were still dancing in my eyes when I swung the dinghy round and began to row, the scent of burned wood and canvas, of petrol and metal and rope dissipating till there was only the cool, fresh smell of the sea. I can't say how long I labored, only that my arms were tired and my back ached and pain ran from my palms into my fingers long before I saw the dock lights and the shadowy forms of the great pilings looming up. I was exhausted by then and it was an effort to row onto the
Nellie
's empty slip. After snaring a mooring line with an oar, I pulled the dinghy up against a piling, tied her off, and went down on my knees, plunging my hands into the water, bathing the pain out, exulting in the cold. In a while I climbed the ladder up to the dock, holding on to its rails with the heels of my hands. It was deserted at that time of the night except for a watchman walking his dog. I greeted him and after he went on stood there at the head of the ladder, not quite ready to leave, wanting to take it all in one last time. The lampposts ran off in the distance, patterning the rough boards with pools of yellow light like steppingstones that grew closer together and smaller toward the far end. On an impulse, I walked over to the rail and looked down at the dinghy, noting that it occupied only a fraction of the space, that the water where the
Nellie
used to be was untouched by any of the lamplight and felt satisfied that I had done right by her. I gingerly
felt around in my pocket for the key to a room in the boardinghouse where I would spend my last night in London, a decent place on a narrow street along which I'd wandered the night of Conrad's wake, turned up the collar of my jacket against the chill, and went out to the road.

I
T
'
S MORNING IN
this part of the world, Ford. We have come round to another season of the dry monsoon, the time of sweltering heat and the
Wayang,
where I spent last night. When I came home at dawn, tired but at peace with myself, I was not quite ready to take up my pen and finish this memoir and so I drew a chair up to the table on the veranda and have been gazing down at the Old Port for the last hour. The dock has filled up with lorries, bullock-drawn wagons, men with pushcarts hawking food and drink and clove cigarettes, the daily bustle that will continue until the light fades. Three freighters lie at anchor in the bay, waiting to enter and disgorge their cargoes. Others are tied up at the piers, where men who bend beneath the sacks of bounty ceaselessly flowing to Batavia move like hunchbacked beetles from the ships to warehouses and back again. The South China Sea is a mosaic of blues: cerulean where the ocean floor falls away, turquoise near the reefs, the shade of a blond child's eyes close to shore. Past the beach, huge shining leaves shaped like hearts, spiky palm fronds, delicate runnels of vines, long strands of chartreuse grass flutter on the trades like a great batik banner. This is the seductive Indonesia Conrad had in mind when he wrote of Almayer dozing on his wharf, having succumbed to the jungle's sensuousness, hardly able to rouse himself in the scent-laden heat. Were the end of this memoir not in sight, I would very likely unroll the futon I keep out here and sleep away the day.

Given the troubles I had finding my way into this writing, you may be wondering if I am satisfied. All things considered—and by
that I mean the intractable nature of key elements in the story that will never fully be known, most obviously the details of Conrad's manuscript, along with what he thought those last two weeks of his life—I am, though not quite as I had imagined. I am probably not the only memoirist who set out to record his impressions confident that he would eventually reach a point in his narrative where some overarching meaning would poke its head over the horizon and become clearer as he neared the end. That was certainly my expectation. But the moments along the way when I thought the adventures of our troika were beginning to suggest a larger idea or two never developed into anything significant. I have no reasoned explanation to offer, no pithy summary of human nature, no hard-won cautionary lessons, only an image from last night's shadow show that is self-contained and requires no gloss from me. I will come to it soon, but it must wait its turn while I address a last bit of unfinished business concerning Fox-Bourne.

I
NEVER SAW HIM
again after he sped away from the church, never wanted to. I had said what I had to say in the rose garden and whatever further thoughts I entertained about the man weren't fit to give vent to. He had damaged all of us in the seaborne life by tarnishing the standard of conduct we stood for. In that respect, I was considerably more harsh on him than Conrad, who, in writing about Fox-Bourne, had to put aside his anger and contempt in order to do justice to him. I suppose the by-product was a kind of sympathy. I don't mean that he forgave the man. You can tell from the story he told me that he did not and also that he had told nothing but the unvarnished truth. He was just and fair. Being under no artistic constraints myself, I was free to indulge my distaste, quite happy to think of him living with the words of Conrad's manuscript knocking about in his head for the rest of his life. After a while he drifted out of my consciousness almost entirely and when I did think of him it was fleeting.

In any case, you can imagine my surprise when I received a letter from William Scorsby, the naval oficer who testified against Fox-Bourne with Conrad. It contained an exhaustive if inconclusive account of the circumstances surrounding Fox-Bourne's death that were so ironically convoluted they still make my head swim. Scorsby began by explaining that he was writing at Fox-Bourne's request, the captain having told him that as an old friend of Conrad's I would be interested in how things had turned out. He had given Scorsby my card—the same one I'd handed him at Conrad's funeral!—and suggested
that if I were no longer in London, Scorsby could track me down through the Maritime Association, which was what he'd done. Scorsby had no idea why Fox-Bourne urged him to contact me, saying he had decided to do so only because he remembered that Conrad had been extremely kind to a young colleague of his named Whelan who had been killed in the war. The rest of the letter was devoted to a detailed account of part of one night and the following morning aboard the
Brigadier,
a period of roughly ten hours. I couldn't make head nor tail of anything until I was halfway through. The central event was connected through
Lord Jim
to the tragedy of the
Valkerie
and, in my view, Scorsby having no way of knowing it, to Conrad's lost story of Fox-Bourne and the doomed German sailors.