I watched the Peugeot lifted by a crane, its mudstained underbelly revealed, hoping the body wouldn’t bend like the long new car I once saw being similarly hauled on to the Majorca boat from the quayside of Barcelona. Its American owner watched, curious yet confident, but as the vehicle began its ascent, firmly hooked at all four corners, it began bending before our eyes, and his aspect changed to one that seemed brought on by seasickness. The clearly visible man at the crane grinned as if telling himself that whatever was happening couldn’t be his fault.
The higher the car went the more out of place the chassis became. The American was fond of his car, as who wouldn’t be, for he’d had it shipped from the United States, so far unscathed. I heard it bending, as did others, and we scattered from its vicinity like ants from vinegar. I later learned that an insurance company paid for the somewhat buckled vehicle, Spanish mechanics at that time having a reputation for doing what many considered impossible.
Nowadays one drives directly into the hold of boats from Barcelona, but not on the Allotar plying between Stockholm and Helsinki, though my car and a few others were stowed without damage.
Propellors pulverised the water. The gap between boat and quay was soon already too wide for those to jump who might change their minds about leaving. Sweden was out of touch, yet still not out of mind as I muttered thank you for my fair passage through. But no land could hold me when another was in the offing. For eighteen shipboard hours I could rest without being bored.
Our boat took long to reach open sea, the Scandinavian summer spreading heat over light blue water of the archipelago. Rocky islets with a tree or two were sprinkled to port and starboard, each with its summerhouse, landing stage, speed boat, and sunbathers now and again observed through my Barr and Stroud binoculars, bringing to mind Stig Dagerman’s novel A Burnt Child, in which the seduction of the hero by his father’s mistress takes place on one such island.
In the cafeteria-saloon a tall well-built man in suit and loosened tie, a shamanic grin on his blue-eyed sweating face, played a large electric accordian loud enough to loosen the rivets. The mostly middle aged who danced to his tune enjoyed the high pagan music of Swedish midsummer madness. A man who came exhausted (momentarily) from the throng explained that they belonged to a coach party of Finns who had been touring Sweden — a country they seemed in no way sad to leave.
As far as possible from the noise I drank coffee, and talked to a black man of twenty-five who sipped Coca-Cola. He told me — as well as his age — that he was going to live in Finland. He’d spent some years in Sweden but decided that it had no soul. He’d heard that Finland was more complicated in that respect.
I told him I didn’t agree with his views on Sweden, and in any case people were more or less the same everywhere. He’d become fed up and wanted a change. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I know what I’m talking about. I lived five years in Sweden, where I earned a living teaching English. I hope to do the same in Helsinki.’ I wished him luck.
The estuary widened, islands and shoreline more distant, sun burning but wind flapping across the boat on its way through calm water. To be cut off from the past seemed the purest state of contentment, though an antisocial zone of grace that sociologists deplore and psychiatrists strive to rob one of.
A sense of emptiness spun me down into a cul-de-sac, while the drug of the pure sky spurred me to annoyance at the plodding rate of the boat. I was eager to be back on land and driving east, with the devil behind and new scenery in front, to rejuvenate the soul yet not blacken the heart, a healing process, as I sat on deck in the sun and planned (and imagined) one motoring expedition after another, taking enough zigzags across the map to last a lifetime, and never thinking to go home again.
The ship rocked slightly and began to turn as I totted up the distances between Kiev and Karaganda, Paris and Peking, Sofia and Saigon, Cape Town and Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur. What trips, Pip! The longest highways in the world would one day be possible by Peugeot and Opel, Ford and Volvo, their drivers without passports and visas. The odd few might die of thirst in desert or salt marsh while travelling from Tiflis to Astrakhan, but what the hell!
I went to my second-class cabin for a change of handkerchief, and found a man of great corpulency packed into the top bunk, snoring louder than the engines. Jacket and shirt collar hung by the sink, shoes on the floor tripped me, and the air was so heavy with alcohol fumes I wouldn’t have dared light a match, unless there was time for me to reach a lifeboat. He was a child of heaven so drunk I wondered why he had put himself to the effort of achieving the higher place instead of wedging his parcel shape into the bottom one. Perhaps he’d imagined he was already in it, and the sea had been a bit rough in throwing him so high.
White birds chipped at the masts, and the music went on as if providing power for the boat to steer by. I asked a tall dark girl with large eyes and white skin where she had come from and where she was going. Set apart from everyone, she looked suspicious, as if I might be an evil traveller only wanting to get her into my cabin. On such a crowded boat, for God’s sake?
As I talked, obviously without malign intent, she told me she was going home after serving five years in a mission station on the Greenland coast, working as a printer of Eskimo newspapers. We discussed the explorer and anthropologist Rasmussen, whose book I had recently read at Ted Hughes’s place in Devon, but soon we had no more to say, locked too deeply in our separate musings for further connection to be made. Perhaps she had not seen her boyfriend since going to Greenland, and was on her way back to marry him. He would be on the quay to meet her in the morning, and the prospect of domestic bliss had even now lost any attraction for her. The thoughts she wanted to be alone with at the moment seemed more comforting than those a husband would be able to tolerate.
Threading the Åland Islands was something I had done before, but being alone gave a different state of mind, more prosaic and free. The deep blue sea rippled, and the horizon became a rose-coloured band rising to orange and yellow, the faint green above dissolving into steeliness, then a universal door holding back real darkness.
At midnight the boat steadily ploughed, a buoy so close to the porthole I could almost have put out an arm and touched it. The manic accordian still played, and probably would till morning.
Night wouldn’t come no matter how long I waited. The sun just above grey water watched the boat go by, and I couldn’t sleep under its bland stare, though a white fluorescent sickle of moon eventually persuaded me into a sort of unconsciousness, and at one o’clock I got into bed hoping that the heavy man above wouldn’t wake before breakfast. He lay in an oblivion that knew neither sun nor moon.
Friday, 16 June
I was too knocked up after the disturbed night to take in the impressive approach to Helsinki, so can’t describe it. As the boat docked a band on the quay played to receive our load of tourists who had kept up their high-stepping for all of the voyage back to their homeland. To similar tunes they filed down the gangway waving and laughing at waiting friends, a wall of noise loud enough for the ship to lean against, and so vibrating the eardrums that I too began to feel part of the welcome.
I stood on the quayside for a few minutes before the car descended, meanwhile studying a plan of the city. A girl from one of the oil companies asked if I needed any motoring information. Like an angel of light, though with dark hair (which maybe all angels have) she handed out maps and pamphlets. I’d noticed in Stockholm that the left and right blinkers of the Peugeot were not flashing when switched on to turn or overtake, a serious matter driving on the right side of the road and with the car seat in the English position. To lessen the possibility of accidents it had to be seen to as soon as possible, so I asked the young woman the name of the nearest Peugeot garage and what street it was on. She explained everything with the utmost economy of sweetness, before moving on to another dazed motorist.