Debatable Land (21 page)

‘
Guess what that fire was
.’

The Beethoven was protesting its use as background music by sounding at once stretched and soupy.

‘Tell me.’

‘The post office. Phones melted, letters burnt. No news from home. I’m fine, but you might not like it.’

Her disappointment was out of proportion. She expected no letter, though she had hoped for a couple. She had hoped Gabriel would have a letter, perhaps with news of small brothers and sisters, and maybe news from Scotland for Alec. She had begun the familiar pattern of these voyages, the anticipation of small ordinary pleasures to compensate for the large extraordinary ones she was so bad at enjoying.

She went to see Gabriel, who was asleep on her bunk under a white-cotton cloth printed with hibiscus flowers in dark blue. Her hand lay under the basket like a doe rabbit.

She knocked at the door of the fo’c’sle.

‘Yes?’ answered Alec.

‘It’s Elspeth.’ Then she felt foolish. She could not go in to what was his room. That would have some meaning. On a boat the vital prerequisite of feeling human is a small lozenge of space that is your own.

‘Come on up,’ said Alec. She could not hear very clearly.

Elspeth pushed the fo’c’sle door. It gave. There was no one in there, though a reading light was on and under it were arrayed six or seven shells the size of pincushions, seemingly made out of mother-of-pearl. Nick had made casts in salt of some snail shells from Moorea.

Alec’s head hung down through the hatch.

‘Yes?’

‘I was just worried,’ she said. The tentative word, the sort of word Logan did not receive on his verbal transmitter, made her feel weak.

‘Yes?’

‘In case you were getting a letter. The post office has burnt down, with all the things awaiting collection in there.’

‘Oh no,’ said Alec. He sat up and that lost Elspeth his face. She went back out between the bulkheads and down to the bow to him.

‘I am sorry. Were you expecting something?’

‘Not really, but now this has happened I can’t hope. Now I know I am in the Pacific with, forgive me, a lot of strangers.’

‘I know.’

‘People say that.’

‘I mean it,’ she said.

Then he remembered. ‘Say “post office”.’

‘Postoffice,’ she said, as it was pronounced in her part of the world, one word, with the emphasis on the ‘O’.

‘Yes indeed,’ he said. ‘Oh yes indeed. Of course you are one too. I was put off by the carry-on, all so very English.’

‘One what?’

‘A Scot.’

‘My name is Elspeth Urquhart.’

‘Yes, but you get them called Deacon Brodie and they have gone English.’

‘I couldn’t do that,’ she said, ‘though I dread the day I need a passport to be admitted. I was born there yet I sound like this.’ She exaggerated her English accent.

‘Come on now; admit you like the feeling of being different in the either country,’ he said. It was an argument he had perfected over the years. His own father thought he spoke in an English voice and abhorred it.

‘It would be more patronising to slip into different accents on purpose, but yes, it is odd. There is less place for Anglo-Scots, whatever the word is, than there was. Things are bad. There could be a split. People want it. They sing about it. There was the fish, there is the oil. The stupidity of the South has hurt, the tactlessness that has looked like pillage, the willingness to treat the place like a plaid, to throw on for its ancient rustic glamour and to throw over puddles to save them getting their feet dirty. I fear for the border, I really do.’

He laughed at her.

‘Here we are,’ he said, ‘on debatable lands.’

She looked into his face and turned away.

‘Which of you is it that drinks?’ he asked. ‘
Ardent Spirit
, that name, I mean. She is named for the drink, is she not, this boat? It’s a fine passion, the Scot and the bottle, no doubt. Escape and engagement. And cheaper than all this, by all appearances.’ He indicated the white, glittering boat. She saw it in a bottle suddenly.

‘The ardent spirit who did drink, you’re right, is not him, not me. His first wife, and she was French Canadian. In both senses, it applied to her. She was more alive and more full of spirit in every way than most.’

‘Were
you
expecting a letter?’ he asked her.

‘No, not like that. But I like letters.’

‘How?’

‘In the sentimental way, obviously.’

‘Obviously,’ he said, looking at her wide face with the face of a palaeontologist, or the face he thought a palaeontologist should have, and had practised in the museum mirror while the hot-air machine dried his hands. That was, he looked at her with grave, impassioned concentration, affecting to pity her extreme age and plainness, while also acknowledging in his expression that further research might be rewarding.

Logan came to see what was going on. The first half of the cassette of the Seventh Symphony had abruptly stopped and Elspeth was laughing too much. He had started from a stupor that was more sleep and sea than drink.

‘Elspeth,’ he shouted, a little hoarse, rather deserted. ‘Where are you? Come to me.’ It sounded like the voice of a blind man.

She said goodnight to Alec with a nod, and took off back to the stern of the boat, leaning inwards when she came to the stays, a white figure on the long deck. The sea rocked so regularly it might have been breathing.

Logan had said the anchorage was firm enough and the creek sufficiently secure for there to be no watch again that night. So they were asleep, Nick on the yacht from Noumea and Sandro ashore, when the squall came like a gun. Alec recognised what he had heard of: the storm rising without rumour or promise. It was an assault by water and air, sudden as a bucket of water thrown over dogs.

Logan, who was used to springing alert from his sleep, straight on to his legs like a cat, was on deck at once.

‘The hatches,’ he yelled. Gabriel awoke from so deep a sleep that she did not know where she was.

Alec and Elspeth closed the hatches and the companionway cover and were up on deck. The rain came down hard. The boat was twisting and thrashing. Her anchor had dragged. She was veering closer all the time to the red yacht from Panama, newly patched with sticky red paint. In no time, the sea’s nature had changed. The boats approached each other through the battered water, determined as great magnets. Worse than red anti-foul all over the hull would be the crushing impact of boat on boat, which could finish them both off. There was no one to be seen on the red boat.

Ardent Spirit
screwed over the water towards the red boat.

‘Alec, bring up the anchor, I’m going to hold her off with the engine, there’s no hope of holding them apart with the hooks.’

Alec began to set the anchor-chain mechanism to go and Elspeth ran into the fo’c’sle to guide the chain.

The sea was lifting and suddenly lapsing with a crash. Purple lightning in curtains rolled over the island. An electric heat burst with thunder that never quite stopped between its hard claps. The red boat was close. It seemed futile to attempt to steer against this sea that was rubbing the boats in its jaws.

The anchor was at last up and Logan able to go to full throttle. He forced the boat astern of the red yacht and kept her off like that. On shore Alec saw a man, it may have been Sandro, standing in front of the thatched huts. Then the lights on shore went out.

The thunder grew heavier. It never stopped, just grew louder. The blue yacht was thrashing in the waves, pitching at fretful speed up and down on her chain. Suddenly, a light went on in the red boat. Someone was moving about on her. Under the sound of thunder came a long moan of metal. Her engine started, and she began to move, into the creek, away from any rocks there might be on the coast.

The boat that had felt like a house now felt like balsa to Alec. He heard
Ardent Spirit
strain and fight the engine. She felt like a thing burning, writhing in the fire, no longer possessed of itself.

Then, like a bird falling shot from the sky, the squall dropped and was gone.

‘Take her back to where we were,’ said Logan to Alec, who took the wheel. He could feel the heavy tug of weather helm in the disturbed water, the sulky disturbed low water fighting the boat’s rational, designed, directedness. The angered water was less biddable than water after calm.

‘I’ll drop the hook,’ said Logan, from up by the anchor. ‘Elspeth, get below and check how she pays out. Thank God someone’s had the sense to move that ugly red monster. We could have been matches and dog chow.’

The sky was calm again, the new stars visible, unshaken. The moon appeared with no aura and no face. It was pale yellow.

Though the sea was still loose and running at a spate, its waves had sunk.

Elspeth heard the Zodiac: ‘Sandro, Nick, are you OK?’

‘More to the point, are you?’ Sandro held up a Tilley lamp that put his young dark face into deep shadows and made his olive skin glow yellow where the light lay on it. On the thwart of the Zodiac sat Nick, all wet.

‘Nick, come and dry, what did you do?’

‘Skin dries on its own. I’m great, thanks, Elspeth.’

‘What did you do?’

‘He swam over to the red boat from his wi  –  ’

‘I just moved the red one a bit,’ interrupted Nick. Both matters he would rather leave, Elspeth saw.

‘Well, thanks,’ said Logan. ‘Quick thinking.’

‘It could’ve been a bad scene,’ said Nick. He was embarrassed, as he often was, by the response of others to things he did that he could not have done.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Logan. The squall had left clear air but on the boat it thickened. ‘The post office is down. It’s a loss for those of you expecting letters. For me it’s a grave inconvenience.’ The things were evidently not of equal weight. ‘I was wondering if you, Alec, would like to go back to Papeete and do a couple of things for me. I’ll enlighten you about them later.’ When no one else is about, his words suggested.

It was curious, Alec thought, that he had not asked his wife to do whatever it was for him, if he was not anxious to go back to the town. This voyage, presumably intended as a flight from the implications and involvements of dry land, was taking its time in hauling free of them.

‘Elspeth can go with you, if you want.’ If she wants, at all? thought Alec, impressed at the way some men have a habit of declaring the outrageous quite normal and making it so. He was so tired he agreed, will-less. The squall had pulped him. It had had the same effect as the alternating kindness and unpredictable cruelty that break the will of trainee soldiers. Was he becoming Logan’s man in some way?

Before he slept, he asked Nick, ‘That was your wife?’

‘Indeed. And because of your trip to Papeete, I get to see her for more time. Thanks.’

‘Don’t thank me, thank Logan,’ said Alec.

He was too tired to sleep, he thought, but was soon below the glassy thin dreams that presage some sort of test.

‘It’s the certificate to show that the bank have returned the bond I placed with the representatives of the French Government. It’s a thing you have to do if you take a boat to an island the French own. They ask for these bonds. Kilo of flesh. When they asked me for it I had a hard time keeping cool. To pay for three feet of the rue Pomare and night after night of polluted air and klaxons seems rich, but there. You seem the type to hold his temper when they take you through the forms.’ Logan was speaking to Alec.

‘Will they not need you there?’

‘To
give
the cash, they did. Now they’ve given it back, any fool will do. I just need the duplicate certificate. The bond’s been transferred. It’s back in an account of mine. I just want to show them they can’t go burning up things that I need for the proper conduct of my affairs.’ This odd selection of words struck Alec as showing what money had done to words. ‘I want to keep face.’

‘But with
my
face.’ Alec chanced this remark.

‘I’ll give you a covering letter. There’s a word they allow you to choose, a kind of password, as a security precaution, and I’ll enclose it. I’m also giving you telegrams to send to various interests of mine. Do not send them from a post office. Use the bank.’

Alec used a bank as little as possible, and for such matters as paying a bill. He had no idea a bank could be used as a factotum.

‘Here’s the stuff,’ said Logan. Instead of producing it right away, which would surely have been more discreet, he moved the tantalus and swivelled two discs until he had displayed a combination of figures that seemed to satisfy him. He pushed the safe handle down thirty degrees from the straight, and pulled the slow chunky door forward. There was the grey little cupboard.

‘If we’d gone on fire like that post office, that safe and what’s inside it would have been all that remained,’ he said. It was a deep safe; before extracting what he wanted, he pulled out a case of brown leather.

‘Stupid to have them in a case really,’ he said, ‘as if they’re going to wait till you’ve opened it and only shoot after you’ve armed yourself.’