Sea Change (11 page)

‘Right,’ Rhona pitches in. ‘We’ve been guessing what you do.’

‘Really?’

‘Mum thought you were on the run.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘And not true, either,’ says Marta.

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ Guy’s calming down rapidly.

‘We hate this boat,’ Rhona says, dramatically. She has a curious mouth, slightly unconventional in the way the top lip rises. Her teeth are strong and prominent. It’s attractive.

Marta brings a large bowl of pasta to the table. ‘We thought we could manage and bring these dusty books back without them getting wet - though really we haven’t been doing much sailing - we’ve used the motor. Ro’s here to watch me fail.’

‘You’re not failing,’ Rhona says.

‘Very kind. But I am.’

‘We used the sail the other day.’

‘With mixed results. Problem is, the motor makes it boring, and it gives us too much time. We’re not into too much time at the moment, are we, love?’

Marta gives her daughter a slightly testing look. Rhona shrugs and gives a warm smile back.

‘Where are the books going?’

‘Eventually, in the attic. In Cambridge. We’ve motored all the way round from the Solent, and we’re going to leave it here, aren’t we?’ Rhona nods. ‘You live by yourself?’ Marta asks.

‘Yeah. All year round, and I spend most of it thinking I’m not up to it.’ He tells them about his estuary - the Blackwater - and his own mooring slotted between the wrecks and the soon-to-be wrecks of the Tide Mill anchorage. He tells them about the gulls landing on the wooden roof above his cabin, falling like sacks of bones in winter when the sea’s cold and the birds are full of anger and empty inside. How they wake him up. And the flocks of starlings that blow up into the cold air above the estuary, turning in strange patterns in the dusk before they settle in the trees. The patches of phosphorescence that drift by in the flow during the middle of the night, sparkling like glitter lost in the water, and the cormorants that fish from his bow, wings outstretched in the morning sun to dry their feathers. It all sounds more enjoyable than he’d intended.

‘That’s great,’ Rhona says, enthusiastically. She’s not all cool young woman, after all.

‘Ro’s a fan of houseboats. Viking blood.’

‘Right - are you Norwegian?’

Marta seems to find that hilarious. She laughs loudly and puts her hand to her mouth, concealing that quirky tooth of hers.

‘Icelandic,’ she says.

‘It’s not
that
funny, Mum.’

‘To a girl from Reykjavik, it’s always funny. Sorry,’ she says, ‘it’s just I don’t think I have an accent. I came to England at eighteen to study archaeology - and instead I fell in love and never went back.’

‘How long’ve you lived on the boat?’ Rhona asks, half interrupting her mother.

‘Five years. I suppose it’s not all bad,’ Guy says, forcing a brightness, ‘the way the tide lifts your whole life up just to put it back down in the mud twice a day, that’s wonderful, when you’re asleep and you start to float - I really like that - it’s like you drift away in every sense, from yourself.’ Guy realizes he might be talking too much; living alone has made him an unpredictable guest. He needs to rein it in. ‘And the pub on the quay’s good - they do crispy whitebait and sweet scallops, and dark nutty ale.’

‘See - you like it,’ Rhona says, downing a glass of wine. Rhona’s top has small metallic threads woven into it. Guy notices Marta looking concerned.

‘But the spring tides are scary - they stretch the ropes. And I’ve had enough of chemical toilets.’ He gets the desired smile from the others, both of them with a slight crinkle at the edges of their mouths - he hasn’t noticed that similarity before. He’s buoyed by them. The simple pleasure of making a woman smile, there’s nothing like it.

‘What made you live on a boat?’ Rhona asks.

Guy hesitates - he doesn’t want to ruin the evening like he did on the trawler. But it’s hard. He can feel the space where Freya should be, even here, where there is no space. He decides to be vague, ‘Various reasons.’ He can tell Marta senses a subject he’s hiding, but she lets it pass.

‘Yesterday,’ he jokes, ‘I woke up and the barge was stuck on a sandbank.’

‘Told you!’ Ro says, looking at her mother as if it’s confirmed one of their dreads. ‘Where?’

‘About ten miles offshore. But the odd thing was how relaxing it was. The sand was only this much higher than the tide, and it’s really very strange, to be walking around in the middle of the North Sea like that.’ He goes into the story at this point, making it an idiotic adventure, describing how the
Flood
dragged him and the inflatable off the bank at the end, aware too that he’s not telling them so many other things, such as his swim into nowhere, how he looked up at the sky and felt the presence of his daughter by his side, or the impenetrable steel cliffs of the container ship passing inches away from him last night. It almost feels like they’re spending the evening with a dead man, that they’ve invited a ghost. But he sees that they’re amused, and they respond with similar tales of getting lost and dropping things accidentally over the side and confusing one mud-lined estuary for another.

He tells them that he’d love to see a basking shark. That every time he comes across the plumes of plankton floating in the water, he thinks this will be the moment, expecting that great shadow of a body to drift by his boat like in a dream. How, with the calm sea, he’s been scanning the water for the tiny tip of the dorsal fin.

Marta listens, spellbound it seems. She offers a toast: ‘To seeing a basking shark, then?’

They clink glasses. Marta adjusts her cardigan again. She’s too thin for it, he thinks.

Marta takes his glass, politely, to offer him more. Guy looks at a framed photo of a terraced stone cottage on the opposite side of the cabin. It’s called Whalebone Cottage. In the photo Marta’s pulling the front door shut. Above her head is what appears to be a whale vertebrae, set into the wall.

‘That’s a nice picture,’ he says.

‘It’s in Scotland - it’s our secret bolthole - we’ve had it for years.’

‘So why isn’t your husband here, doing all the sailing?’ Guy asks innocently. The two women say nothing.

Directing her gaze straight back at Guy, Marta says, ‘He just can’t.’ She leaves it at that.

‘Sorry,’ he says.

But Marta smiles warmly. ‘Don’t be,’ she says, ‘it’s lovely having you here, isn’t it, Ro?’

‘After a week of being cooped up with you - I’d say yes, very lovely. Very lovely indeed,’ she repeats, glinting at Guy with a bright-eyed look which, although she’s young, has clearly been many a man’s ruin. She glows. Her expression glows, surrounded as it is by the helmeted wrap of her curls. ‘It gets lonely on a boat,’ she whispers, mimicking a film starlet. Guy’s struck by a hotness at the look she gives him as she leans forward, her head tilted up, her mouth slightly parted. She’s about to speak, but holds it back so he has to look at her lips. She could have anyone she wanted.

Rhona downs another glass of wine. That’s three, or four even, since he arrived, Guy thinks.

‘Let’s give you more food,’ Marta says, taking his plate with her long fingers, and breaking her daughter’s moment. Rhona’s fingers are shorter, they look lazy, and are tipped in dark-red nail varnish. Rhona smiles to herself and looks away while her mother clambers awkwardly round the mess by the table. Marta’s conscious of her height in this boat. Her brooch is a large smooth pebble of amber, flecked inside like it might have seeds buried in it.

Guy looks across at the crowded shelves. Whoever this man is, he’s made his home away from the others, in rows of books. God, men are maddening - they’re surrounded by the love of women, like these two, and all they can think about is their own private getaways - their books and their garden sheds and themselves.

‘Are those your sketches?’ Guy asks Rhona, over the table.

‘She’s good, yes?’ Marta comments proudly. ‘Especially the charcoal ones.’

It gives Guy the excuse to study them - he’s been intrigued since he sat down. Most of the drawings are of Marta, in various positions around the boat, and they reveal glimpses of a woman he’s not yet seen: sitting at the end of the bed, massaging her toes with thumb and forefinger; lying on the bed, looking tired, her wedding rings taken off and put to the side on a fold-out table; gazing out to sea, shielding the sun’s glare with her hand, in the same way Guy had first seen her do. And that’s the moment he spots a sketch of himself and Marta, standing this morning on the slipway. It’s been pinned to a shelf. ‘Is that me?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ Marta replies, drawing her breath in as she says the word. In the sketch he’s angling his head up towards Marta - he seems more eager than he remembered being.

‘I’m flattered,’ he says to Rhona, thinking she’s studied him, his posture and expression, she’s judged him already. And she’s tacked it to the shelf deliberately within his sightline, knowing he’d be sitting opposite it this evening.

Next to it is a photo of a man. He’s stocky, standing in swimming trunks and goggles, on a craggy rock ledge which slopes into the sea. It looks like Scotland. So this is the man Howard, Guy thinks. The man who’s not being talked about, although his presence is everywhere.

‘Ro’s just dropped out of art school,’ Marta says, a little aggressively.

‘I haven’t decided yet.’

‘But you have, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

Faced with a rising bluntness from her daughter, Marta acquiesces. ‘It’s just a waste, that’s all, love.’

‘Spoken like a mother.’

‘Spoken like a friend,’ Marta says. ‘Remember, I made a few wrong decisions when I was your age, I do know what I’m talking about.’

‘You mean having me?’ Rhona says angrily.

‘Of course not!’ Marta’s stung by the accusation. ‘Of course not. I mean giving up.’

‘Mum - you’ve never given up. Don’t be so hard on yourself.’

‘Ro. I don’t want to lose you. That’s all.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did you hear me?’

‘I don’t know why you say these things. You’re not going to lose me.’

‘Ever?’

‘Ever.’

‘I just needed to hear it.’

‘Don’t upset yourself. Why d’you have to say these things?’

Marta’s suddenly embarrassed this is taking place in front of Guy. ‘It’s a fault of mine,’ she says, apologetically. ‘And a fault of this boat, too - it brings out the worst in us.’

‘. . . and the best,’ Rhona says, expansively. Abruptly she stands and puts her arms round her mother, kissing her tenderly on the neck, their moods shifting quicker than Guy can follow. He looks at Rhona’s arm round her mother’s shoulder, a tableau of a grieving couple, somehow, a churchyard stance, by the grave.

And as they hold the hug, Guy gazes down Rhona’s body, at the twist she’s forced into by the table edge, giving it an erotic curve, accentuating her slightly raised thigh and the flatness of her childless waist.

Back on the
Flood
he’s surprised by how chilly it feels. It’s early September, the estuary had felt strangely warmed as he’d returned on the inflatable, a calm stream of black ink, but in his saloon it’s as damp as a cellar. All it takes is a few hours of not being on board and these boats take on the true cold of the river. He scrunches newspaper into tight balls and places them in the cylinder of the wood burner, a seventy-year-old cast iron furnace that came with the boat. He drops in the kindling, then a couple of seasoned quarter-logs, before replacing the hotplate at the top. He sets the flue from
zacht
to
matig
, its medium setting, then allows more air in at the bottom as the firebricks will be damp.

It’s the first fire he’s had since spring, the ritual is comforting. When he lights it, always just with the one match, he pats the curious nameplate on the front for luck.
ETNA SUN 1028
, it reads, with a raised steel outline of two men carrying a molten ingot between them. This more than anything is his sign that autumn will arrive soon and, sitting in front of it, as the fire begins to roar, he watches its light flickering across the surfaces of the room, giving it an underwater shimmer of life and movement it doesn’t ordinarily have. It seems to emphasize how alone he is on board. A big space with big shadows, full of an empty presence.

This is his home, he thinks. He’s made it for himself and it’s all that he is, really. There’s the spot in the galley where he wedges the wooden grinder between the worksurfaces when he’s making coffee; there are his cup-hooks, placed at his own arm-length from the sink; there is a shelf for his oil and salt which he can reach from the cooker. It fits him, this boat, after five years. It’s full of his measurements: his arm-span, his stride, his preferred routes from table to chair.

He thinks warmly about his last entry in the diary. That road he described across the Everglades - what a place. He remembers how he wrote about the sawgrass floating eerily on either side, in the dark bottomless swamp, and the glint of his dashboard lights reflected off the side window. Then the curious gas-stop with its random collection of souvenirs and stranger collection of people, how his family felt as they walked in - vulnerable, out of their depth, but together. The strange insect which looked like something pulled from the shower trap - these things appear now as if he has seen them in a film. A film of his own life, but not quite his own life - a life made complete by imagining just how it might have been. If.

They pull into a motel forecourt off the interstate in northern Florida. It’s been a long day, too long, and they’re arriving late. Guy’s face is burning from the sun they had in Everglades City earlier that day. He has the redness many soft-skinned Englishmen get, that makes him look unhealthy, just a little bit too cooked. It had been his idea to go to Everglades City, for no other reason than it looked an odd dead end on the map, his map, the map which by now he’s almost able to draw out himself. And it turned out to be a strange place too, with an extensive grid plan of roads cut into the mangroves waiting for a city which never, in fact, arrived. They’d taken a boat cruise round the islands, spotting the exotic pink of Roseate Spoonbills in the distance, and watched desperate-looking racoons hopping among the mangrove roots, their fur muddy and spiky. Freya had loved the boat, she loves all boats, and had taken it upon herself to spot the first manatee, not that they saw any. Judy had stood with a scarf tied round her head to stop the wind, and had produced a pair of large sunglasses Guy had never seen before. Her lipstick had looked glass-bright in the sunshine, every inch a star.