The Bed I Made (28 page)

Peter carried the outboard to one of the small wooden dinghies pulled up on to the strip of grass and turned upside down to stop it filling with rain. He righted it and dragged it down to the water, then got in and connected the engine. I passed him the petrol can and the bottles of water he’d brought.

I pushed us off, then sat on the thwart in the middle to balance our weight. The noise of the motor made conversation difficult so instead I watched our wash as it fanned out on the river behind us, a widening white V. We passed a large area of marsh extending down from the quay to the opening of another branch of the river, isolated mud stacks topped with blowing grass and sea heather. In the foot or two of mud which the incoming tide had yet to cover, a tern picked busily, the feathers at its wing-tips ruffled by the breeze. The air was rich with the smell of salt and seaweed and the chemical tang of petrol. We passed more boats, their size gradually increasing as the water got deeper, and a barge-like platform with an industrial clutter of ironwork on deck.

‘For laying buoys,’ he shouted.

A few minutes later and we were down the river enough to see the Solent. Something moved fast on the periphery of my vision and, turning quickly, I saw a scow cutting behind us, its blood-red sail tight with wind. Immediately I thought of Alice. Had she sailed
Vespertine
in the river here? She must have been here hundreds of times with Peter. Presumably she’d been in this dinghy, had sat just where I was sitting now. I pushed that thought away, unnerved by it. The scow tacked sharply to avoid a muddy promontory and as it zipped in front of us, I saw the boy at the helm was no more than eleven or twelve, his curly ginger hair blowing bright in the wind.

A minute or so later, Peter throttled down the engine and we came alongside a white-hulled wooden yacht.
Beatrice
was written on the stern in black italics. He tied us on and then stood and swung himself up on to the deck. I passed the things and then he pulled me up next to him.

‘Have a seat in the cockpit while I get a few things organised.’

It was an old boat, I thought, the fittings on deck all wooden and brass, not steel and chrome like a lot of the modern yachts I’d seen tied up at the quay in Yarmouth. It was a good size but not big; a boat to use rather than a status symbol. For such a tall man, he was surprisingly light on his feet. I noticed the unhurried but efficient way he moved around, taking a long hook out of the locker opposite and retying the dinghy to the mooring buoy at the bow, bringing in the fenders. He slid the hatch back and went down into the cabin.

‘Shall we have some coffee before we go?’ he called up from below.

I climbed carefully down the wooden steps to join him. He was lighting a ring on a gas stove and filling a tin kettle with water from one of the bottles.

‘It’s lovely – the boat.’

‘Do you like her?’ He turned and smiled at me suddenly. ‘I’ve had her five years. I always wanted a wooden boat, an older one. She was built in the fifties.’

I sat on the step while we waited for the kettle to boil. The cabin was much larger than it looked from the outside. To the left there was the galley with the stove and a small square sink and on the right a sloping table for charts. In the middle of the cabin, illuminated by the daylight coming through round portholes, was a fold-down table with bunks on either side. There was a rich smell of damp and diesel.

When the kettle whistled, he made coffee in two enamel mugs and we went back on deck to drink it. The breeze felt newly cold having been out of it for a few minutes but the air itself was mild, especially for the end of February. A pair of swans swam up, their legs powerful beneath the surface. I watched as they arched their long smooth necks to dip their beaks into the water, their feathers white as angels’ wings, their black eyes assessing.

The motor started with a wheezy cough and chugged under the floor beneath my feet. Peter let us off the mooring and came back to the cockpit. A cloud of blue diesel smoke hung over the water behind us. A couple sitting out in a boat further down the river raised their hands to greet him as we passed. There were more marshes on our left and then the channel took us out between a pair of beaches that guarded the mouth of the river like cats’ paws. The one on our right had signs prohibiting landing.

‘It’s a nesting area for seabirds,’ he said. ‘It’s to stop people disturbing them or collecting the eggs.’

When we reached clear water beyond the river, he started to put up the sail. The sound of waves moving round us and the breeze in the rigging was loud in the abrupt peace when he cut the engine. I watched while he hoisted the sail and then paid out the rope so that it filled with wind. The boat leaned with it.

‘Come and sit over here,’ he said. I moved across and braced my feet against the lower seat as he pulled the sail tighter and our angle deepened. The water bubbled and raced past us, suddenly close.

I measured our progress against old posts and trees, and the shore slipped past at a surprising rate. Beyond it, the body of the Island rose in a gentle swell, richly green. The breeze blew my hair round my face and occasionally we hit a wave that sent up spume I could taste in the air. I shot surreptitious glances at Peter. He was sitting at the back of the cockpit, his hand resting lightly on the wooden tiller, the adjustments he made to our course every now and again almost imperceptible. Even behind the glasses he was squinting into the sun, forehead furrowed again. His right leg was tensed to stop him sliding, the muscle in his thigh curving under the denim.

A seagull floated above us, angling to ride the breeze with an elegance it could never own on land. The mildness of the weather had brought out more boats than I had expected and the Solent was dotted with sails that were white against the water like pointed teeth. I’d dreaded the thought of long silences and awkward conversation but in fact there was something easy about the lack of constant talking. He was undemanding; I was free to look around and watch and let my thoughts wander. To my surprise, I felt myself relaxing.

He took us up until we could see Cowes and then we turned around. I swapped sides and faced the mainland instead. There was a cargo ship between us and the shore, the containers on deck stacked like Lego. ‘I thought we could go up the Beaulieu River for lunch,’ he said. ‘Would you like to steer for a bit?’

‘I’ve never done it before.’

‘I’ll show you.’ He moved over and I sat next to him, careful not to get too close. ‘You want to get near to the wind without heading directly into it. You feel where it’s coming from? No sudden movements. That’s it. If you think you’re going too fast, just broaden the angle a bit, spill some of the wind out. It’s all about physics.’

‘That doesn’t augur well for me, I warn you.’

He took his hand off the tiller and let me have it. The sail tightened above us again, the tension lines that he pointed out returning. The shore of the mainland began to move past us more quickly. The sail was no longer blocking the sun; it shone on my face so that I had to screw up my face like he had.

‘Do you want my sunglasses?’ he said, noticing.

‘No, I’m OK. Thanks.’ The tiller felt good under my hand. He looked away, watching the progress of a larger yacht ahead of us, and I took it as a positive sign that he didn’t feel he had to keep a hawk eye on me. Almost as soon as I’d had that thought, though, I hit a wave with a real thump on the bow, and spray came flying back at us. I heard myself laugh out loud and when I looked at him, I saw that he was smiling, too.

‘That’s how not to do it,’ he said.

The moorings at Beaulieu were all taken so he dropped the anchor instead, the heavy chain rattling out and out until it hit the bottom.

‘Thanks for bringing all this,’ he said, as I handed him one of the Cornish pasties I’d bought at the delicatessen earlier.

‘Thanks for inviting me.’

‘Here.’ He put out his hand. I passed him the bottles of beer and he took the tops off with his penknife.

‘You know, this is the closest I’ve got to the mainland since November,’ I said, looking at the marshes nearby, the grass blowing this way and that.

‘You haven’t been back at all?’

‘No need, really.’ I shrugged and looked away but not before I’d seen the question on his face. I was annoyed that I’d brought it up; I didn’t want to think about Richard now. For the first time in days, I’d felt the dread receding a little.

‘Doesn’t the quietness drive you mad, after London?’

‘Sometimes, especially when I first got here. But I’m getting used to it now. I still feel like a total outsider, though.’

‘Give it two hundred years and the locals will start to warm up a bit.’ The sunlight caught his eyes and made them sparkle.

‘Are you an old Island family?’

‘No, only third generation.’ He took a sip of beer. ‘My grandparents came over before the war. To some people I’m still an overner.’

‘Overner?’

‘It’s what the Islanders call people from the mainland. Like foreigner – and said with the same sort of inflection.’

‘Have you ever lived on the mainland?’

He shook his head. ‘I was going to go to London – I had a place at university – but I didn’t in the end. I’d give that to the gulls if you’re not going to eat it,’ he said, indicating the crust of the pasty which I’d put down. ‘Go to them before they come to you – best policy.’

I broke it into several pieces and threw them over the side. They’d barely touched the surface of the water before several gulls materialised. ‘They were lying in wait,’ I said.

‘They’ve probably been tracking you since you left the shop.’

We sat without talking for a minute or two. The water was calmer than out in the channel and we were in the lee of a bank of sedge but the boat still rocked gently. I leant against the cabin side and listened to the waves lapping against the hull. Peter went below and I heard the sound of a pump and then water in the sink as he washed the mugs from earlier. I wished I could just come out and ask him about her. There was so much I wanted to know. One thing, however, was clear to me: I was becoming less suspicious of him. Something had happened with Alice, yes, but I was no longer certain that he was at the root of it, as I’d once been convinced. Nonetheless, a small voice cautioned me that I was no judge of character.

After lunch, he lifted the anchor and we motored out from Beaulieu into the Solent and put the sails up again. We went down to Lymington, then crossed over to come back to Newtown on the Island side. The sky was beginning to cloud over, turning the water a greyer shade of green, and the wind seemed to bite a little harder but I could have stayed out for hours regardless. Like I did when I was rowing, I felt different, somehow more alive. I thought of Alice again and the two women I’d overheard in the Mariners, months ago, before I’d even met Peter. Hadn’t they said that she went out in her boat all the time, in all weathers? She’d told me that herself, how she’d thought it was the only thing that kept her sane.

Peter let me take the helm again and I got better at working out where the wind was and steering smoothly. I felt a strange sadness when we came back into the river and he took the sails down, as if the access to something wonderful and otherwise out of my grasp had been shut off again.

On the mooring, I packed up the lunch things while he put the sail covers back on. Then he replaced the hatch-boards and locked them, and we got into the dinghy and motored back up the river to the quay. The light was softening and the tide which had been coming in this morning was now hard away, leaving greater and greater expanses of exposed mud. My nose was beginning to run with the cold.

‘That was a good day,’ he said, when we were in the car, weaving round the potholes on our way back up to the village.

‘I loved it – thank you.’

‘You’ll have to come again. Come next weekend if you haven’t got anything else on. Oh, and it’s Pete, by the way. No one calls me Peter except Chris.’

Chapter Twenty-three

The next time I went down to row, I could see even from the harbour wall that there was something in the boat. It was in the middle of the central thwart, just where I sat. I kept looking, trying to work out what it was. I hadn’t left anything there, I never did. Whatever it was, it was large, probably a foot across, and a greyish-white colour. It wasn’t until I was on the pontoon, pulling in the mooring line to bring the boat closer, that I realised I was looking at a carcass.

I got into the dinghy for a closer look. It was the remains of what had been a substantial bird, a Canada goose or perhaps one of last year’s cygnets. There was no head or even much of a neck, just a ribcage to which white, grey and light brown feathers adhered in clumps. The bones of it were as symmetrical as the ribs of a Viking ship. Obviously it had been dead some time: there was hardly any flesh left on the frame or within it, and what little there was had been dried by the sun and wind and rain until it was like biltong, a dark, desiccated substance in which the remaining feathers were anchored. The plumage itself was greasy-looking; there was a smear of something like tar across the largest patch of it and the rest of the feathers were ragged and grimy from post-mortem exposure to the elements. It stank.

How had it got into the boat? Clearly it hadn’t flown here and died, just dropped out of the sky; something or someone had brought it here. I supposed it was possible that another animal had done it; a scavenging seagull might just have lifted it, then dropped it again, realising that it had taken on more than it could carry, but it seemed unlikely. It seemed unlikely, too, that if it had been dropped from a height even of five or so feet, it would have landed so neatly; it would have bounced into the bottom of the boat, surely. Might a fox have brought it? Not to a boat on water.