Debatable Land (31 page)

He was like a man who knows the pain he has will certainly get worse. This intensifying was perfectly sincere, its suggestions alarming.

Did Logan know there awaited a maelstrom ahead? Did he enclose himself in this black mantle as a way of warding off disaster? Or was this barometric sinking of his glass just one of the habits he had fallen into as he tried to wear out the seas with crossing them?

Elspeth took to making thermos flasks full of soup and cocoa, standing with Gabriel, one or other of them in the galley, the angle of sailing fairly acute but settled. Elspeth was enjoying the female company as an escape from her husband who seemed to her sometimes to be conjuring something from the sea that he did not want and could not understand. He had been preoccupied and angry on long ocean passages before, but the anger had at least been animated, the preoccupation susceptible to interruption.

‘Pass me an onion,’ she said to Gabriel, ‘please. The new string of them’s under Sandro’s bunk. As you probably realise too well.’

Gabriel lifted the thin mattress of the bunk and pulled up the ring-pull of the hatch cover. She heard and ignored the scuttling of roaches.

Gabriel took the onion, twisting it off the crackly rope, and passed it round from where she crouched, trying to keep all her weight low, round to Elspeth in the galley.

The galley was like a crossword. If you could cook and carry (without spilling) and clean up a meal you had completed the puzzle. The long swells of the ocean seemed to tug the stomach down and along and turn it over as one swell passed the boat on to another one. Often whoever cooked the meal was sick. Sandro and Nick were sick like cats, neatly and fast, with the minimum distraction from what they were doing. Gabriel was dopey on some sickness drug she insisted on. Elspeth was sick only when they were close-hauled, heeled over to port. She was then sick till she was empty, in which state she found reading an almost psychedelic pleasure, until her stomach raised itself once more to her brain. The concentration that having been repeatedly emptied gave her was like exaltation. If empty-headedness was stupidity, empty-bodiedness made the fumes of the words rise at once to her mind and inebriate it.

If I can peel and chop this onion exactly as I would in a flat, unmoving kitchen, Logan will calm down, things will get better. Elspeth propitiated the domestic gods of the sea, who did not exist. She wedged her bottom under the galley drawer-clips and pushed her feet and calves over against the oven. Then she bent over in a half-crouch to hold herself against the sea’s flexing and pored over the onion like someone operating with little hope of life and the next of kin watching.

The first incision at the top of the onion went well. As she had been taught, not in kitchen things only, she was avoiding the roots to keep away tears. Forcing her body to become weighty in the lowslung way of a baby, she peeled off the brown thin skin and put it in the bag, held with a clip at base and top, where they slung rubbish that could go into the sea. I will chop it the perfectionist’s way, she thought, pressing the onion down on the board she had slotted within its battens, and making five cuts across the rings. She turned the onion through ninety degrees and cut again. She had a grid for noughts and crosses. Making ready a small pan, that she held cradled in her right elbow on the small kitchen surface as she cut, she sliced through the onion from the top, achieving a pearly heap of cubes of onion, each about a quarter of an inch square. That was one onion done towards soup for six people. The most satisfying thing about cooking in a galley
was
the puzzle aspect of it.

Logan never got sick to the stomach. He had a headache he was unaware of that hollowed out his head. He considered the pain inside there to be the power of his will, the tension of sustained emotion. It was a pain that he held to give him energy.

Soon the air had turned colder, the sea breathed out ice. The laughable bright cotton clothes were folded away and jeans and jerseys came out. Nothing was ever perfectly dry. The sun was withdrawing itself. The chill came from the wind, that was co-operative and not moody, though it repaid watching.

Logan looked out at the wind, reading it. The sea was unreadable. The only consistency its waves showed was in their deep blueness and an almost imperceptible mounting in their height as watch succeeded watch. The water was now bigger than the sky. Logan found this surrounding gratifying; it reassured him that they were progressing south at a roaring pace and that the sea was as tremendous as he knew it was. He worshipped it, but in his heart he was looking in a mirror that showed him his ennobled self, made a hero.

On the 21st of June it was the shortest day of the southern hemisphere’s year. The sky and sea held the sun when it appeared between them in jealous balance. The sea let it go with trails of red.

At noon the six met in the cockpit for soup. It was all they could face cooking. It was difficult to keep hold of the soup at such an angle. To move about with hot soup hauled against such waves was to learn once more to crawl. A lumbering infancy descended on them all, though they each maintained some dexterity in areas where they were already competent. Alec veered between feeling competent and feeling cowed, reduced to a state of nature.

The superfluities of the boat began to horrify Alec. He became convinced the sea was trying to repossess them all, to shake off the boat’s graces and reduce it back to its elements. His own life seemed to him not replete with the subtleties and dilemmas that had obsessed him and sterilised his work, that had enticed him to come in on this voyage, but a declaration from first to last of false quantity, wrong emphasis and over-indulgence in complication. Life was showing its simplicity, as he had required of it; but still he fled. He did like the simplicity he now saw. He began to hope for the life he had abused and questioned, to wish for it back in every respect he had once shrunk from.

He began steadily to think of his parents and of his ancestors, even. He approached prayer, that is to say he began bargaining with indifferent forces. He did not know what possessed him.

‘Here he is! Albert Ross!’ called Sandro, who was holding the helm and had looked back for a moment hearing the mizzen flap.

The bird was twice as wide from wing-tip to wing-tip as
Ardent Spirit
’s transom, and so white it shone with snow’s blinding silence. The heavy suspended bird did not appear to move under its own physical power, but was borne on the wind, making a mockery by its composure and haunting poise of the canvas the boat bore, lame and lashed short now as the wind rose. The sails had been moved aft from the sail bin and the bows, lashed to the deck or stowed in the fo’c’sle, the storm jib and mainsail twice reefed. The bows of the boat were often now covered by folding waves, falling like glass buildings in noise and shattering white.

The bill of the bird was the colour of spring, cruel yellow, a new colour that comes fresh and consigns old things to death. The bird’s eye was fixed on the eye of whoever looked at it. To look at it was to look into it. It was black and told nothing.

‘The barometer’s down,’ called Logan. There was relief in his voice as he told the bad news.

Things will be worse, knew Elspeth.

Nick too knew this was so, though he did something about it. He moved forward to the mainmast, attached himself to the deck by his clip, hauled down the mainsail. Logan took down the mizzen, reluctance mixing with excitement in his face.

The personal matters that had filled part of his mind for the earlier part of the passage now seemed remote to him. He recorded the drop in the barometer in the log for that hour like a man who listens to his genius.

Here he was at home.

‘It’s down again,’ called Gabriel, an hour later, pulling down the companionway hatch to call down to Logan who was plotting at his charts. Rain had begun to dive out of the sky at all angles and along the waves and off them as spray. Logan smiled at Gabriel. He had a beautiful smile. She received it as the blessing of this ordeal she was undergoing for love.

Full of an energy that grew as though on course, Logan called, ‘It’s about a degree an hour.’ Nick, amidships, watching the visibility shorten like walls dropped one within the last, saw that this must be so.

The sea began to climb. It was against the sky by the time night came, a night too obscure for stars. The Southern Cross was eaten by the sea and rain.

The albatross hung astern.

When Elspeth went above to join Logan on their watch, she was dizzy and careless. She greeted fear like this. Clipping herself into the cockpit, she thought she was seeing double, but there it was, another albatross, slightly behind the second. The bird in front was the size of a constellation in the blacked-out sky. Sometimes they were taken from sight by a wave that threw itself up like a mountain and then slid away with a sucking rush that threw the boat down a slope ending only with another climbing mountain of water under the bow.

Waves came over the boat, one after another, leaving no time to recover between the buffetings. The tightness of the grip the boat had upon her adornments, the things that did not matter and may have impeded her, cupboards full of glasses in nests like jewellery, the snapped-in tantalus, the mirrors set over bunks, was like the grip a woman keeps on pretty things as she fights decline. Now the important thing about the boat was her seaworthiness and that only. In spite of the damp within and her repeated covering by waves, she took it with discretion, emerging each time to be smashed again.

Elspeth did not look at the size of the waves. She took each one as if it were single, trying to forget in the three seconds before the next wave came that they were at sea at all. She was steering the course Logan had told her.

He was not able to take sights, so he had to rely on dead reckoning. His state of bliss was level now as he looked around him and his boat at the black water heaped high against them. He was fighting the storm as though it were meant for him.

‘The compass light has gone’, said Elspeth. The dome of light to which the helmsman steered a course had just gone out, snuffed.

‘That’s bad,’ said Logan.

‘Damp in the connection,’ said Nick. He pulled a snap-on waterproof torch from his oilskin and trained it on the compass, squatting to fiddle with the wires exactly as he had throughout the voyage.

Is he taking it lightly because he is brave or because it is not as bad as it seems? Alec wondered.

Nick concentrated on the wires in the thin gibbering beam of the torch, while Logan raged at the sea, and admired it, and asked it to admire him.

For eighty hours the weather squeezed at the sea and cracked the sky. The noise was thick and pained the breathing. A tight panic-inducing howl of wind attacked with random unceasing roar of waters; the boat moaned and creaked. There was at length nothing to do but wait and attempt to keep the naked boat on some sort of course. Under no canvas she raced over the sea faster than they had gone behind the fleetest combinations of sails.

Within, the whole boat was alive with loosed electric shocks from the sodden wiring (What boat rightly has reading lights, thought Alec, we are paying for the overmuch) and with cockroaches that seemed to prefer human company now it was constantly sodden, smelly, reeking of wool. When they were able to eat, they opened tins.

The smell below was of beans and meat and bile and sewage.

‘She’s in her element,’ Logan said at one point. He was near to tears. The performance
Ardent Spirit
was putting up was herculean, he thought. What beauty there was in seeing her not down in spite of it all. Gabriel brought him tea. It was an act of love, and Elspeth acknowledged it. To make tea when you are sure you may die or would anyway rather die, with a rocking kettle in a near-horizontal cabin in which you are accompanied by a naked gas flame and a canister of gas, and being juggled by the sea from without, is more than a gesture. Gabriel poured the tea half-way up the weighted mug and took it, lurching, with the sticky rubber mat for securing it, to Logan.

He looked at her from the great distance of his isolation; she was pretty, he remembered that. He looked at her down a long corridor from high within his head, like a man who is dying seeing the world recede and knowing heaven is better.

Gabriel was consumed with the difficulty of doing anything on this sodden boat, far from home. It was like getting old suddenly. She had seen old women take seven minutes to undo a shoelace, watched an old man select pence from his pocket as though he had to read the coins with his thumb-tips, and now she felt like these old people. There was a solution to this continual dragging wretchedness, she thought, not naming death because she was a cheerful girl who had been taught that certain things you do not meddle with. She wanted, as a young person may, to be dead as a solution to not feeling wholly well.

Three waves came at the height of the storm, lifting the boat then hurling it down another and another and another mountain. The ship’s decanters in the tantalus broke free of their dovetailed wooden rail and blattered around the stripped saloon like weights, eight pounds each of base-loaded lead crystal. The noise was like an explosion within the exploding wave. Everyone below shrank away, trying to scramble forward to avoid being cannoned or splintered. The glass seemed molten in its threat. When the decanters at last rattled to the lowest corner of the saloon, their necks had smashed. They lay rocking on their sides, the glass crazed with the violence of its crashing from wall to floor to ceiling off the sides of the saloon. The neck of one decanter had torn the dimpled seat of the captain’s chair. Glass shards had marked the wood of the saloon like wolves’ nails.