Sea Change (10 page)

‘Where?’

‘She does it,’ she says, almost proudly. ‘She’s a nosey girl.’

‘Am I acting suspiciously?’

‘She’s going to quiz me about you.’

‘Really? Well, stick to the truth and we’ll be OK,’ he says, wondering why he’s flirting, and glimpsing Rhona on a bench under the Rushcutter’s Arms sign, wrapped in a towel. Her hair hangs limply on one side of her head. She turns away and he looks at the youthful span of her collarbone, spread below her neck like the wings of a bird. Then she looks back, raising her eyebrows in a questioning gesture.

Marta is looking beyond him, out into the estuary. He sees strands of grey hair like stiff fuse wire where the dye has grown out. ‘The thing is,’ she begins, sadly, ‘I hate being on that damned boat too. She’s right. I hate everything it’s ever meant.’

As Guy motors back to the
Flood
he watches Marta calmly walking towards her daughter. Marta is tall, and there’s a hint of a stoop in her shoulders which suggests an apology of sorts, for being so. He didn’t ask her about her accent. Danish or Norwegian, he thinks. She must be in her mid-to-late forties, and the daughter, she can’t be more than twenty-two. Rhona’s hair is already beginning to spring with curls, as it dries, and the mother’s hair might once have been like that too, but is now cut straighter and shorter. Expression reigned in. They have a similarity of posture too, the way they sit at the garden table - they both push a shoulder forward - that kind of detail has a lot of charm. He wonders if they’re conscious of it. He sees them looking and he raises a hand, not quite a wave, but something close to it, a gesture he’s not fully understanding himself - it feels like a handshake, and he smiles, falsely, because he’s suddenly feeling alone.

The truth is he’s always felt on the edges of other people’s lives. Even when he was a child he’d felt this way. He remembers being six, possibly seven, having to wait in his father’s BMW each morning, looking at the strange details of its dashboard, at the controls he didn’t know the purpose of, waiting for his dad to emerge from their small pebble-dashed house. The front door would be open, although Guy could only see shadows inside, as his dad collected the last few items of his luggage. Guy would sit in the car, with his school uniform on, ignored.

The time would be getting late, when suddenly his dad would walk briskly out of the house with a disarmingly apologetic smile on his face, crunching the gravel in his good conker-coloured shoes and his shirt only tucked in on one side, putting his suitcase of clothes next to his salesman’s stock-bags of cameras and films in the boot, then slamming the boot and getting into the car and even while he was sitting down, he would already be taking a cigarette from a packet and pressing in the dashboard lighter. Guy’s mum hadn’t even known her husband smoked, and Guy would just sit there, in total awe of his dad’s brazenness, in awe of his dad’s ability to change identity at the flick of a switch. To light up, take a first deep puff, even while the car was still on the drive.

Guy’s dad would take another deep inhalation of the smoke, then wink at his son. Our secret, he would say, grinning as he turned the ignition.

The appearance of that concealed cigarette, the glow of the lighter’s coils touching the dry papery end, the indulgent inhalation, the wink - these turned out to be the first times in Guy’s life when he’d known his family might not be quite as it seemed. Adults had their own lives and deceit could rise like genies from the end of those cigarettes.

Until then, Guy imagines his childhood passing in a hazy sunlit calm, tinted with the bronze and faded blues of old Instamatic photos. Damp plastic anoraks, polyester trousers, quiet country walks, apricot halves from the tin. Overwhelmingly, a sense of certainty. But the cigarette lighter, the knowing wink, it had undercut all that. ‘Our little secret,’ said without fail, every day.

His father had been a travelling salesman, selling cameras and photographic goods in the era when they were still relatively glamorous. He kept his Nikons, Canons, Pentaxes and medium format cameras in the boot, alongside a suitcase packed with several expensive shirts and a couple of suits. A navy blue suit, with braiding-edged large lapels, that’s one Guy remembers his dad in.

Although Guy’s not seen him for thirty years, he remembers his dad was small, with a quick energy that kept him slim, and he’d had an unusual name - Conrad. You can’t have a name like that in an East Anglian market town, not without attracting attention. He had an acrobat’s sense of balance, even while he walked, and the hours on the road had given him a seasoned, semi-rugged look, often mistaken for worldly-wisdom by his clients, but not trusted by his wife’s friends, who viewed him exotically.
Got a sparkle, ain’t he
, by which they meant he had an eye for the ladies. But in Guy’s memory, his father had had the air of a traveller, always, even while he dozed in his armchair after an exhausting day on the road, his fingers ever-so-slightly clenched, and his curly hair, long at the temples, tousled by the wind from his open car window, even in the stillness of the front room. His chair and his house, but never quite at home in either of them - because he preferred to be in other people’s spaces rather than create one of his own. The BMW was a more natural fit. It had wheels.

Guy remembers how his dad would contemplate the ash as it grew along the cigarette and watch patterns of smoke rising from its tip, as if they might fleetingly reveal a secret. The seconds ticking, all the other children already hanging their coats on the pegs outside the classroom, no doubt. And there would be Guy, watching his father smoking, looking at his small spiky moustache which was cut thin, like Clark Gable’s. Large sideburns, an inch lower than the rest of the men in the area, not a single grey hair in them. Conrad would pass his son a Yorkie bar to put in his satchel - despite chocolate being banned from school - and Guy would see that famous glint in his father’s eye which always seemed to sell himself as someone who has seen things, lived a life, lived by instinct.

He’d wanted to be like his father right up to the day his mother packed those expensive clothes into several tea chests, put them on the drive, and sent them away, mysteriously, seemingly off to a great adventure themselves.

‘You’re my little man, now, Guy, my own little man. All right?’ Guy’s mother had said that day, her tears falling on the gravel so the stones appeared to have drips of polish on them.

Those are the moments that make us, Guy thinks. We’re the culmination of those moments. We’re the culmination of knots and fixes.

Without her husband, Guy’s mother had quickly seemed boring. She was unsporty, a joiner of societies, with the East Anglian habit of gentle humour and a vague way of expressing herself. Too soft and mussy in the mornings, kept her nightgown on till lunch time, always the first to look tired in the evenings. She took her wedding photos off the mantelpiece and put them in a drawer, and Guy found them in there, removed from view, and saw that in all the photos his mother had had a surprised look - outside the church porch, at the reception, in the back seat of the car.

And to fill the space his father had left, Guy’s mother bought a piano. Lessons followed, scales and chromatics, practice and practice, making Guy fill the house with new noise. ‘You’ll thank me one day,’ she would say, mantra-like, and he supposes he does, now, even though he certainly didn’t back then. It seemed she’d anchored him to the largest, most unmoveable piece of furniture in the house. There’d be no more running off.

Years of piano practice left no mark at all, had no place in his memory, but a performance he went to aged thirteen did, at Orford Church. He remembers how shadowed and magical the church had seemed, filled with an air of expectancy, with the stained-glass windows looking like the mysteriously opaque images in his father’s slide boxes, before a light was shone through them, and the cast dressed in robes from Japanese Noh theatre, sitting patiently by the raised platform which served as a stage. Then the opening plainsong of Benjamin Britten’s
Curlew River
, so monastic in sound,
Te lucis ante terminum
, and the cast walking dreamlike into their places. The drum, beat with a finger, sounding like rainfall, the strange dissonant chords.

He had seen his mother cry that night, in profile; single tears moving slowly down her cheek, illuminated in the soft light of the performance, each tear forming like wax welling from a candle, as the Madwoman’s grief became evident on stage. Guy had listened to the music and realized, for the first time, music was all he ever wanted to do. There, in that church, the strange layers of Britten’s sound, simply embellished by each new voice and instrument, pared down, textured, it had truly inspired him.

Music’s filled his life ever since. He has it within reach, always, a necessary addiction, not in neatly ordered CD racks and bookshelves, but in piles scattered here and there, like snacks. A messy heap of scores and arrangements on top of the piano in the
Flood
’s saloon, open CDs on the table, scraps of treble clef notation on corners of the newspaper. He whistles. He hums. He goes over melodies, messing them up with quirky modulations. Without that concert he might never have discovered this language. Might never have viewed the five lines of the bass and treble clefs as endlessly stretching out like the lanes of a racetrack, in perfect and unquestionable parallel for all eternity. The E line will never rise to cross the G. These geometric washing lines on which music notes are hung - they never alter. It is certainty in a life that lost its certainty. Like that Middle C, alone on its little peg of a line below the treble clef, so important, but pushed out nonetheless. Ignored. He’s always felt sorry for it, really.

Guy stands naked, examining his reflection in the full length mirror on the back of his wardrobe door. The same mirror the original Dutch bargeman may or may not have bothered to look at. A reflection isn’t always necessary, especially at sea. Guy looks at how pale his belly is - it’s a little podgy too - he tries to lift it, then breathes in and turns to the side. Mm, getting hairy on the shoulders, that’s something he hasn’t noticed before. But he looks strong, he’s always had that.

He’d tried to sleep in the afternoon, but had been unable to. Maybe it was the turning of the tide that heralded his unease, a direction under the boat that swung the
Flood
on its mooring till it pointed downriver. An implied direction, to go out to sea again.

He puts on a white shirt and his thick-rimmed glasses, then has a shave. He looks at himself in the mirror again, and pushes his hair back behind the temples - he’s getting quite grey there, not that he minds. But in the shirt he begins to feel too clean, too stiff, his skin has a gleaming look on the cheeks that will undo him all evening, he knows it, he won’t relax. He’s still haunted by crying in front of the trawler men. He can’t trust himself in company. It was easier to be alone on the North Sea, he thinks, with its endless water and air and sandbanks. But was it? Really?

Position: The
Falls of Lora
. 7:10pm

‘You’re early,’ Marta says, leaning over the rail to take his rope. She too has changed for the evening. She’s in a dark-green crocheted cardigan, with baggy sleeves. It looks like a complicated piece of clothing, and has been held together by a large brooch. Guy thinks both of them making such an effort to look good is in some way embarrassing.

‘This boat has seen some sailing,’ he says.

‘My husband’s other woman,’ she replies. She guides him down the cockpit steps towards the cabin, adding, ‘It’s horribly small.’

It’s an understatement. The saloon is amazingly cramped, part galley, part bunk area, with a fixed Formica table and curved walls that follow the yacht’s shape, but it’s the shelves that are most oppressive. On both sides there are books crammed into any space that will take them, held in place by batons that run across their spines. They narrow the saloon and give the air the subdued sound of a library. He sees the books before he sees Rhona, seated at the table in an emerald-green knitted top. More of her clothes spill out from a large saggy holdall pushed to one side, none of them folded, full of their own unwrapping, and through an open door beyond, he can see a tapering bunk area filled with duvets and rugs and more clothes on the floor.

Guy is very aware that he hardly knows them. It makes him over-keen to put them at their ease, so he sets off the evening telling them about coming here ten years earlier, how the pub still had that bricolage whale back then, and how he and four others had been in a country-folk band doing a gig.

He wonders afterwards why he didn’t mention that one of the band was his wife.

Marta replies politely, ‘Are you still a musician?’ She doesn’t look comfortable in her cardigan. She keeps having to adjust it.

‘Oh no, I teach kids how to play the piano. That’s how I afford the mooring fees. I mean, I don’t get much, but I don’t need much any more, just enough to get by. I’ve got about ten pupils who have lessons after school, but not in the summer holidays. I have a piano on board.’