Coasting (30 page)

“Noon Sights are all you ever really need anyway,” Nick said.

I wasn’t sure quite what I was practicing for, but it seemed a good idea to get the hang of basic astronavigation in case one day I might have to do a bunk and escape into serious blue water.

“Away.”

“No, you’ve got it wrong. It’s Towards.”

“And you picked this up all by yourself?”

“Yes. It’s pretty obvious stuff. You don’t need O-levels for it.”

Simple possession of the sextant felt like a ticket to somewhere.
Maybe I’d find myself wintering in Africa along with Nick and the swallows. If you could lick “astro,” you could dispose yourself about the globe more or less as you pleased, and sail off to those remaining dots on the charts that were too small to land planeloads of tourists on, too small for laws, taxes, manila envelopes with windows in them. The boxed sextant, wrapped in its oily cloth, its lenses slotted into their green velveteen compartments, was a far more practical and reassuring object than the revolvers that some people keep under their pillows in case of emergency.

Indeed, it looked as if the sextant might have to be used in anger very much earlier than I had planned. At three o’clock in the afternoon of May 2, Falklands time, the submarine H.M.S.
Conqueror
torpedoed the Argentinian cruiser the
General Belgrano
. The news broke in Britain the following day. The Argentinian ship had been forty miles southwest of the declared exclusion zone. The Ministry of Defence spokesman who came on television to recite all Falklands news in a woeful bass at slow dictation speed gave the bare facts, and failed completely to explain why this attack had been launched on a ship which was more than two hours’ steaming time away from the cordon round the Falklands, which I had taken to be the only conceivably legitimate theater of war.
Why?

The papers were no help. The
Express
had an honorable front page:

The
Sun’s
front page was dishonorable even by its own standards:

The Times
ran two editorials on the sinking in its editions of May 4 and May 5. They were significantly different in tone. On the 4th, the paper was hesitant and regretful:

“Minimum” seemed an odd word to use under the circumstances, but in other respects
The Times
accurately reflected the concern and the queasiness felt by many people in Britain as they heard the news. On May 5, though, the paper was taking a much stiffer line:

Yes, but “close to” was still forty miles away from “inside.” Of course war is not cricket, but why bother to make rules when you are prepared to break them within twenty-four hours of their coming into force? Why had the British Cabinet agreed to the request of Sir Terence Lewin, the Chief of the Defence Staff, to permit the sinking of the
Belgrano
well outside its own declared threshold of war? It is frightening to be a citizen of a country whose government begins to act as if it were no longer constrained by ordinary reason. In international waters, forty miles outside the exclusion
zone, three hundred and sixty-eight sailors had been killed, some drowned, some burned. Their deaths seemed wanton.

Up till this moment, Mrs. Thatcher’s government had been backed by many governments around the world whose sympathy with her cause was founded in ordinary reason. The Argentinian invasion of the Falklands was a transparent violation of international law. The Falklanders themselves were generally seen as a peaceable and defenseless people who were being trampled underfoot by the occupying army of a neofascist power. Before the sinking of the
Belgrano
, Britain’s response to the invasion had sometimes been thought excessive but never entirely unreasonable.

Things had changed now. Alexander Haig, the American Secretary of State, who had broadly supported Mrs. Thatcher in the weeks before (YANKS A MILLION! A
T
L
AST!
R
EAGAN’S
B
ACKING
B
RITAIN
!), told a Congressional committee that the sinking of the
Belgrano
had “contributed to continuing the dispute.” Italy and Ireland both voted to lift their sanctions against Argentina. In the United Nations, Britain suddenly found herself very nearly friendless.

This roar of international disapproval, intended to dispirit, succeeded in doing quite the reverse. It worked like a dose of sea air on the government and on the British press. Standing alone in the world was what the British liked to believe that they did best. It brought out the Dunkirk Spirit, which was now being busily rebottled as the Falklands Spirit. It reminded them that they were a beleaguered island people, and reinforced their pride in the heroic solitude of their geography. It brought out, in the British Isles at large, all the crabbiness, the xenophobia, the determination to take the rest of the world down a peg, the hunch-shouldered go-it-alone-ism of the Manx—and of the Falklanders themselves.

They … Them
. Eight miles off Dungeness, with the coast of continental Europe showing as a thread of tinsel on the horizon to the east, the British looked to me like a very peculiar bunch of foreigners, definitely third persons and
not first.
Sussex Rowan
and
Gosfield Maid
had separated at the Rye Fairway buoy: Nick O’Brien was going west, to a place in Sussex that he’d heard of which didn’t have a harbormaster and didn’t levy dues; I was heading for the Thames and London. I’d promised that I’d be there in two days’ time, but … It would be so easy to quit Britain now. The French shore looked hardly farther away than the English one. I had a passport and a yellow Q flag to hoist on the mizzenmast—a shift of course from 050° to 140°, and I could be dining this evening in Boulogne, the standard hidey-hole for English black sheep, from Victorian bankrupts to Lord Lucan look-alikes.
Gosfield Maid
would have the wind behind her.… A plate of grilled langoustines at
La Matelote
—and after that, the exile’s life of day-old papers, the BBC World Service, letters from home and two rubbers of bridge with Mrs. Meiklejohn and the rest of the ex-pats.

But I had
“Dinner, Linda, 8:15”
written in my diary, there was a pile of unanswered mail waiting in my flat, and I was in the magnetic field of England’s dense and leaden bulk. I was stuck with my orbit. I could no more alter course for France than I could strike out for Polynesia.

I sheltered overnight (though “sheltered” was not really the word for it) in Dover Harbour, a square mile of sea, loosely corralled with breakwaters. The boat rolled, the anchor chain growled and muttered in its locker; I slept thinly through a continous program of bad dreams. In the early sun, Vera Lynn’s white cliffs were maculated with grime; drained of color under a ragged fringe of green, they looked much as I felt—not in good shape at all.

I took the back way round the Goodwin Sands, where the water was river-calm, protected by the line of shoals to seaward. Paul Theroux’s interest in my possible wreckage on the Goodwins was a landsman’s fancy. People on land think of the sea as a void, an emptiness, haunted by mythological hazards. The sea marks the end of things. It is where life stops and the unknown begins. It is a necessary, comforting fiction to conceive of the sea as the residence of gods and monsters—Aeolus, the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, the Goodwins, the Bermuda Triangle. In fact the sea is just
an alternative known world. Its topography is as intricate as that of the land, its place names as particular and evocative, its maps and signposts rather more reliable. I made for the Downs, where I breakfasted, rattled through the Gull Stream on a two-knot tide, rounded North Foreland and crossed the boundary between the cold green quartzy water of the Dover Straits and the weak tea, flecked with scum, of the Thames Estuary. The meeting of the two waters was precisely marked by a long diagonal string of lazy eddies. A trail of sea garbage had fetched up along this line: busted fish crates, discarded floats, detergent bottles. Distended plastic bags floated just beneath the surface like a shoal of sickly plaice. On one eddy, a torn car seat was placidly swiveling on its own, as if its occupant had just popped in for a quick dip. A troop of noisy gulls patrolled the frontier, watching out for tasty bits of contraband sewage and long-dead fish and squabbling over the rich, plowed water left behind by
Gosfield Maid
.

It was not so much an estuary as a broad sea gulf, thirty miles from jaw to jaw, with the ebb tide turning it to an expanding archipelago as whaleback islands of mud and sand began to ease themselves out into the hazy sunshine. I’d seen the mouth of the Thames from aircraft before—a delta of smooth and gleaming flats, with wrinkled fans of water spilling out from the tiny brooks which divided the islands. Making the most of my last drink, waiting for the sudden dimming of the cabin lights as the engine note changed from a steady purr to the rattletrap growl of a badly loaded washing machine, for the double ping that went with the seat-belt sign and the call to extinguish “all smoking materials,” I had been too anxious on other accounts to take any serious interest in the Thames. Now that I was actually on it, I wished that I’d concentrated a little harder on the view from the plane window; it would have been like looking down from the top floor on a lot of people blundering about inside Hampton Court Maze.

Lines of buoys stretched out everywhere, and some of the separate channels were so close to each other that it-would be easy to wander out of one and into another, and
collide with a sandbank on the way. It was like going blindfold, feeling one’s way from buoy to buoy, marking each one off on the chart as it slid past the boat, setting the compass course for the next, groping along with the needle on the depth-sounder bouncing puckishly from I fathom to 3 and back to I again.

This thin, pale water didn’t look like sea, nor did the land around it look like land. It was wide-open, flat and boggy, only by a few degrees less liquid in consistency than the stuff which was officially designated as water on the chart. It seemed that the basic entropy of eastern England, its river and its sea, was unusually volatile. Heat the whole lot up a little in a tropic summer, or freeze them in a severe winter, and everything would swap places, with oil tankers cruising placidly through the Kentish swamplands and cricketers hitting sixes down the Edinburgh Channel. Or perhaps they’d simply all combine into primal sludge, a frog heaven with insufficient water to set a walnut shell afloat for long.

Even flattered by the sun, it was a landscape of spectacular desolation, its empty sweeps of brown and gray occasionally broken by strange, angular pieces of Meccano work. A herd of hammer-headed cranes appeared to have found a watering hole on the northern shore. Pylons marched in line across the marshes. The top-heavy concrete towers of a power station were free-floating in sky. The estuary itself—so far as one could see what
was
the estuary itself—was dotted about with forts built on tall stilts, left over from old wars. Seen from a distance, they took on a momentary period charm, as old-fashioned plate cameras mounted on their tripods. Off the Isle of Grain—which, in this realm of ambiguous distinctions between sea and soil, was not, of course, an island at all, merely a boggy promontory—the rusty deckworks of the S.S.
Richard Montgomery
stuck out at a jaunty angle from its graveyard of thick slime. The wreck was ringed around with warning buoys and Keep Off notices. It had been an American supply ship during World War II, with a cargo of ammunition and high explosives. When it went down, it was thought too dangerous to
risk trying to salvage the cargo, and it was still intact forty years on. There were rumors that it could blow up at any moment, going off with a bang that would take most of the people of Sheerness and Wallend with it. Once a year it provoked the same Parliamentary question and received the same dusty Parliamentary answer, that it was safest left where it was. But in Sheerness, people race for their cellars whenever a car backfires. Passing it at close quarters, I lowered the engine revs of
Gosfield Maid
, keen not to become the man who made the vibrations that blew a hefty chunk of urban Kent to muddy smithereens.

Yet these charmless and forbidding marshes had been the making of London as a world city. London was tucked deep inland, more than sixty miles from the mouth of the delta. It squatted in its lair like one of Freud’s anal-retentive personalities, hoarding itself to itself, protected from the sea by a boggy plain of what looked and smelled like its own excrement. There was nothing to impede the wind across this flatland, and London’s ships could sail from the sea into the city without once losing the wind. Intruders, though, could be picked off one by one as the river narrowed. London was perfectly immune to siege by an enemy fleet. It was, uniquely among national capitals, both England’s snuggest port and England’s most central market town. Prising my way toward it against the running tide, past sandbank after sandbank and up swatchway after swatchway, I wasn’t sure whether I was approaching the city as a friend or an enemy, but it was clear that had I been in a Viking longboat I would have abandoned the raid long ago.