Authors: Meg Rosoff
What I Was (15 page)
34
Years later I asked another woman to marry me, but she turned me down, not unkindly, merely wanting something more than I could offer. I never asked again, but my life was not empty of incident or affection, which I sought where I could find it, like a man seeks food who has been starved at an early age. I have written books about the coastline, great texts filled with geological observations, meticulously researched and recorded in case some day somebody might care. When I die they will call my contribution invaluable, but my books will slowly fade into history and eventually my life story will be written, if at all, by someone like me who occasionally thinks about such things.
You will have to excuse an old man for conduct you may consider sentimental, but I have made my point and now have a job to do. It is one that I do not with joy or sadness, but resolve.
I am not where I need to be yet, and will not pretend that I have managed to row row row this boat all on my own. My strong and capable boatswain, the godson whom I have loved as a son and who never knew the coast as it was then, follows my trembling finger with great patience as I point and look for landmarks that no longer exist, and estimate distances and study the map, and search for a marker.
Do I sense his relief, now, that my story is done?
What I seek is a Gothic tower, collapsed now. And there, I’ve found it! Just the base, more or less where I expected it to be. This way, I tell my patient boy (who is no longer a boy, and no doubt thinks me mad), out of the school gate turn right and row along the path just here, now right again that we’ve come to the dunes. He pulls hard on the oars and looks at me fondly and moves as I direct him, over the featureless sea where once upon a time there was an island, and once upon a time there was a boy who lived on that island, and once upon a time I was young.
And here (approximately, though something in me says
here
) is where we stop for a moment, while I throw a handful or two of dust and bone into the wind and say a prayer to the spirit of the sea and sky. And in my prayer (which I pray silently, so as to embarrass neither of us) I give thanks for all that has passed, and all that is passing, and all that is yet to come.
