Coasting (8 page)

“Auntie went to Douglas on the train,” the butcher said, breaking a long silence with an interesting fact.

Anti wint ta Dooglus on di treen
.

It was delivered in a series of tom-tom beats or sixteenth notes, as if the butcher were reciting the last line of a chorus of a popular song.

Ań-tĭ-wĭnt-tă-Dóo-glŭs-ŏn-dĭ-tréen
.

Or, set to music:

Indeed, to my ears the whole conversation seemed to be all tune and no content. The men might just as well have been birds in a wood; and I had no idea whether these pleasant bursts of sound were alarm signals, mating calls, or what.

The proprietor was an exiled Englishman: florid, friendly and slow-moving, he had the unsettled-down face of an adolescent boy. He’d been a wartime naval officer, which explained the brass ship’s bell behind the bar and the big tidal clock whose needle pointed at High Tide when it was in fact just coming up past Low Water. After the war he’d had a job in Essex, then run a pub in Wales; in the Isle of Man he had at last found a happy niche for himself—a place where a Lieutenant RNVR, vintage 1921, could come decently home to roost.

“We’re thirty years behind the times here,” he said, putting a superfluous sparkle into the glass he was drying. “And we mean to keep it that way.”

The thrushes were singing at the far end of the bar.
Dooglus. Frocks. Ida. Spoods. Queenies
. The picture window looked out over a gully of pines and tamarisk leading down to a deserted cove where the sea was foaming over rocks. The proprietor assured me that what I was seeing was a New Eden. There was no crime and little income tax. Your daughter could walk alone at night without fear of molestation. There was the Youth Orchestra for culture, and the Gulf Stream for warm winters. There were Manx Shearwaters, if I liked birds. There were—oh, a hundred and one
things that made the Island the best place on earth. The proprietor was himself standing for elective office, as a town councillor or village selectman, in this paradise. “On what platform?”

“As an Independent. We don’t need a Conservative Party here. Everyone’s more conservative than the Conservatives. If Mrs. Thatcher came to the Island, she’d be thought too ruddy left-wing by half.”

Gazing down at the empty cove, the overgrown cliff walk, the ruined jetty in the rocks, I could see one conspicuous serpent in the proprietor’s garden.

“You’ve lost your tourist trade, though.”

“Oh, it’s been a bit off this year. Goes up and down, you know. There’s a guest here now.”

To substantiate the proprietor’s veracity, the hotel’s solitary guest came out to the dining room and sat at my end of the bar, where he ordered a Bacardi-and-Coke. His crushed gray suit looked as if it were in the habit of making flights, in Executive Class, all on its own; although the evening was hardly even warm, the knot of his Playboy Club tie had been wrenched down from his neck, like the ties of reporters in American movies.

“Here on business?” he said.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Super place,” he said wanly. “Smashing,” and sipped his Bacardi-and-Coke. “Wish I could spend longer here.” Saying the words prompted him to consult his watch. It was the sort of watch that one was meant to notice: people who care about Rolex Oysters and Patek Philippes would have acknowledged it with a nod. I knew the names, but couldn’t fit them to their faces.

He was staying on the Island overnight to see an accountant and launder some money. He had a company here—“a useful dodge,” he said. He had rented a car at the airport and was planning to drive to Douglas and spend the rest of the evening at the casino there. “Come along for the jolly, if you like.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.” I had always enjoyed the mixture of adrenaline and despair which goes with trying to Pelmanize
your number to come up; it had been years since I had sat up till dawn at Monte Carlo or the Venice Lido listening to the rattlesnake
tick-tickety-tick
of an ivory ball bouncing from compartment to compartment of a roulette wheel. The prospect of doing so in Douglas, Isle of Man, made the gale warnings on the wireless easier to bear.

We took to the road, where I was intrigued by the sparse traffic. Elderly Ford Populars, like black sedan chairs, were still going here, at a breakneck twenty-five miles an hour. There were Morris Minors, their paintwork waxed and polished down almost to bare metal, of the model that I remembered district nurses driving in England in my childhood. Every so often a new gray Daimler or Mercedes, far too big for these narrow lanes, came stalking through the greenery. As we squeezed past, window to window with the gleaming fatties, our nearside wheels deep in a hedge, my companion remarked on the obvious.

“Tax exile,” he said, in a voice that was oddly censorious for a man who went in for useful dodges of his own.

“What’s your company called?” I asked.

“My company? Oh … Stepma Securities Offshore (I.O.M.) Ltd.,” he said, trying to throw the name away fast. But it wasn’t a name that took kindly to being thrown away.

“Whose stepmother? Yours?”

“
Stepmar
. With an
r
.” Rabbits scarpered away from us up the lane ahead in cowardly contrast to the impudent bunny ears of Stepmar’s Playboy Club tie. “Stephen and Margaret. My ex. Had to buy her out, of course, after the divorce. Cost a bomb. You married?”

“I was once.”

We stopped at a level crossing and waited for a bright green train to go by on the miniature railway, its heavy rolls of steam flattened by the building wind.

“Anyone can land an idea on the beach,” said the offshore company. “The problem is to get it off.”

“What?”

“Sorry. Just thinking.”

The landscape was full of things that I couldn’t remember
seeing since my childhood—steam trains, old cars, squads of butterflies, deep tangled hedgerows full of wildflowers. Beatrix Potter rabbits. We turned a corner into a darkening woody dell and crossed a small stone bridge.

“Hello, Fairies!” Stepmar said, then looked considerably embarrassed. “Fairy Bridge. You’re supposed to—ah—always say hello to the fairies. They’re all superstitious as hell round here. By the way. Important tip. Never mention r-a-t-s. That can cause real trouble. Always call them “long-tails” if you have to.”

“Are there a lot of ra—”

“Shh!” He accelerated away from the spot where I’d said the word. “Rented cars. They’ve always got their systems clogged. You’ve got to give them a good blow-through with the gas. Yes, actually. Place is swarming with long-tails. They’re bigger than the cats.”

The country we were passing through was doing something funny to my sense of time and space. Each village was separated from the next by wild tracts of moorland and mountains; but a whole Dartmoor or Peak District would come and go within sixty seconds or so, and the mountains, impressively rocky and barren, were just a few hundred feet high, no more than hummocks, really. They made the sheep that grazed on them look as big as shire horses, and modest, private peat diggings at the sides of the road had the air of major industrial excavations. The villages themselves had the same stunted and foreshortened quality: cinder-block bungalows mucked in with squat stone cottages roofed in slate. Little houses, little gardens, little farms, little mountains, little towns … everything looked squashed and Lilliputian. Then, just occasionally, something genuinely huge would happen: a transplanted Tuscan villa with shabby palms showing over its high walls and electronic eyes guarding its wrought-iron gates; a giant slice of Mexican adobe, with twin Mercedeses left askew in the driveway; a bungalow, monstrously swollen to the size of a Texan ranch, its bilious green floodlights beating the sunset at its own game. These excessive Brobdignagians towered over the surrounding countryside, making the mountains
shrink and the moorlands pucker into poorly kept suburban lawns.

One by one, Stepmar ticked the giants off his list. “Tax exile … tax exile … tax exile … tax exile … I bet the buggers are bored out of their skulls.”

“I thought you liked the Island.”

“Oh, it’s all right. For the odd overnight, you know. But you wouldn’t catch me living here, hell’s bells. You been to L.A.?”

“Yes.”

“Great place. Fantastic. Beverly Wilshire. Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood Bowl. Rodeo Drive. I played a hole in L.A. back in June. It was a steal.”

It was nearly dark when we reached Douglas, twenty minutes away from Port St. Mary, but a twenty minutes in which we appeared to have covered several hundred miles. The casino was not quite like the ones at Venice and Monte Carlo. Instead of champagne and anisette there were mugs of draft beer. Instead of a palm-court orchestra, there was a rather faded tape of Sandy MacPherson at the Blackpool Theatre Organ on the Muzak system. There were no contessas, no gigolos, no Saudi princelings, no fidgety Dostoevskian neurotics marking cards and working out their beat-the-bank combinations. There were some fat ladies in Bri-Nylon prints, with churning laughs like concrete mixers’; some bored traveling salesmen; a few holidaying dads, out on the lam for the night away from their boardinghouse-bound wives and kids. Much the most exciting thing about the roulette table was the way one’s money was changed into chips, in yet another vertiginous loop-back in time. For the Douglas casino was still using currency that had gone out of date twenty years ago: for twelve and a half pence you bought a chip marked 2/6d, for fifty pence you got one marked 10/—. These scratched and grubby wafers of old plastic had survived decimalization, inflation, deflation, revaluation, incomes policies, sterling crises, the one-dollar pound, Hayek, Keynes, Friedman and the Gnomes of Zurich. The Douglas casino was sticking to the Gold Standard.

I bet on the numbers in my birthday and the hours and minutes of High Water, Liverpool, and lost £7/2/6d. Stepmar Securities Offshore (I.O.M.) Ltd. cannily staked out the table in blocks of four, and, judging by the height of his stack of chips, it looked as if he were well past the hundred-guinea mark. Scooping up his winnings, he went off to invest them at the blackjack table. I kept my place, drinking warm beer and listening to Sandy MacPherson playing something that should have been sung by Vera Lynn.

We left at eleven, far into the small hours, Douglas-time. Stepmar’s face was shining like a ripe cheese. “It was straight down the fairway for me,” he said. “How did you do?”

“I got into the rough,” I said.

“Oh, well,” he said, “win some, lose some,” as if the phrase were his own mint coinage.

On the outskirts of Douglas, a couple of hundred yards from its center, the car headlights picked out a flapping
Examiner
poster:
Fire Brigade in Peel Cat Rescue Drama
.

With its miniature railways, its miniature roads, its miniature landscape and its miniature news, it was clear that the Isle of Man was not so much itself as a scale model of something bigger.

Ten minutes later, after we’d passed a few mountains in the dark, Stepmar said hello to the fairies again, and I croaked “Hello, Fairies” too. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I thought, in Stepmar’s voice, as we scared hell out of the rabbits, racing through Toyland.

The Nimrod aircraft was out of sight somewhere off the coast of Ireland when I heard the radio in the wheelhouse talking to me.

“
Gosforth Maid, Gosforth Maid, Gosforth Maid
, this is Holyhead Coastguard, over—”

“
Field
,”
I said. “
Gosfield
. Golf Oscar Sierra Foxtrot India Echo Lima Delta.”

The aircraft had reported my position to the Coastguard. Serious news followed. A fishing boat, the
South
Stack
, had gone missing after failing to return to Holyhead Harbour the previous day. I was to look out for evidence of a vessel 42 feet long, with a wheelhouse forward, red hull, white upper parts and gantry mast. Three men were on board. A close watch should be kept on the water for fragments of wreckage, lifebuoys, a diesel slick, or any other sad clue as to what might have happened. All other craft in the area were being similarly contacted.

The Irish Sea is, as Seas go, small, shallow and parochial. It responds, as parochial places do, to any news or change with the rapidity of a village. When a gale blows up, the Irish Sea turns instantly to whipped cream; when the wind dies, it goes flat in an hour. Its capacity for springing violence on one without warning is notorious, and charts of the Irish Sea are thick with the double daggers that mark lost ships. It is a dangerous, quirky, fast and malignant piece of water.

Yet on today of all days … On this oily sea, which was now collecting the crimsons and golds of sunset … The idea of the
South Stack
being “lost” in this still, idyllic lake was difficult to grasp. There must be a mistake somewhere. No doubt the crew, enjoying themselves on the water much as I was doing myself, had lost track of time and were quietly trawling, and knocking back cans of lager, in some pretty, un-Nimroded part of the pool.

I kept a close lookout. I saw a fleet of purple jellyfish sail past like tasseled lampshades. I saw some seaweed. I saw a bit of granulated polystyrene packing bob past my stern. But no lifebuoys, no wreckage, no trace of the
South Stack
.