His London room felt more like home than Clara’s flat. Five years ago he had seen an advertisement at a tobacconist’s, went to look, and rented it. He sat back in the taxi. Cars flashed by on Park Lane. He felt free, lost in space, without a ship and with nothing to do, too disorientated to know whether or not he liked it. The nearest human being seemed as far as the closest star. No one could reach him. Neither could he touch them. He didn’t want to. Some hardly visible being ran across the road, and the driver braked: ‘Did you see that meshugge?’
He slid the window a few inches open. ‘I did.’
‘Drunk.’
They turned into the Bayswater Road. ‘It seemed like it.’
He looked for a star, to reassure himself that he existed, but the sodium orange lights made a ceiling that hid them. Beryl had telephoned some days after the funeral. ‘What about tonight, sailor?’
‘Tonight?’
‘My boy-friend’s away.’ Her tone clashed with the shield that covered his grief.
‘I’m busy,’ he said.
The intense feeling of loss surprised him. Except to shop for food he didn’t leave the flat till the time to go back to his ship. He looked at the changing sheet of sea during the day, and paced at night with all lights on. He could not say what he thought. Hours of dark and light passed as if the time they spanned did not exist. His life had no meaning. He tried to understand the tenuous connections that held one person to another, and knew that if he didn’t find an answer in the place where Clara had lived he would not be able to do so when he went back to sea.
The pull of luggage told him he was alive and fit. The taxi driver carried one case to the kerb and offered to help him upstairs, but Tom said he could manage. A ten-watt bulb on the top landing gave more shadow than light. There was a glow under next door and he wondered who was there, before turning to sort among his wad of keys. He pushed the cases across the threshold with his foot, then hauled in the hold-all. The damp wallpaper smelled as if some occupant had rotted there. He unscrewed the release on the Rippengilles stove and heard the reassuring bubble as paraffin went down into the burner ring.
His only secure space on shore was tidy but needed heat. Before going back to sea the floor was swept and books placed on the shelf. Dishes were washed and put away, and bedclothes folded on to the mattress as neatly as any recruit’s. A small wooden box on the table contained rations of coffee, tea, soda biscuits and sardines. There were matches in a plastic case, a two-ounce tin of tobacco, a packet of pipe cleaners, a quarter-bottle of whisky and some cigars. A pile of cheap classics lay on top of his record player. He plugged in the radio, and tuned to the nearest caterwauling transmitter so that the room would have a voice to which he need not listen.
Until the heat took hold he kept warm by unpacking. He put his uniform and spare suit into a shallow cupboard which did for a wardrobe, remembering how an otherwise taciturn old captain once said: ‘A good mariner wants for little, and needs little. Necessaries are luxuries, but no luxury is necessary’ – a habit of speaking which caused Paul the wireless operator to refer to him as Captain Epigram.
He looked along the spines of his books: a set of Gibbon, all of Dickens except A Tale of Two Cities which someone had taken a fancy to, odd compendiums of geography and travel published donkey’s years ago, a Bible lifted from some hotel, his old seamanship and navigation manuals, a few maps and novels brought back from various parts of the world. There was no reason to keep them, yet they were the capes and pinpoints of his recollections, each marking an otherwise empty log of a dead-reckoning plot, and never to be replaced by Clara’s inherited library of leatherbound editions. If his own motley books had been packed in a watertight container and floated to the beach of a desert island on which he was stranded he would want for little in the way of reading till a banana boat came to his rescue.
The radio broke into his thoughts, and he diminished its noise before turning to make the bed. Tripping against a shoe reminded him that it was time to sleep. He asked what he was doing here, and answered that he needed refuge from Clara’s flat where no reflection seemed to be his own. Between these four walls he had never known anyone but himself.
His eyes obstinately fought the dead weight of the body pushing against them. Braying music was halted by the rattle of news and weather: frost was coming, cold and clear, a Force Nothing easterly with chilly sunshine to get the black dog off old Beaufort’s back. Water jiggered in next door’s tap, though the place was quieter than when a student and his girl-friend used to hammer each other under the sound-umbrella of a pop group that shook the windows.
He screwed down the Rippengilles to bubble itself out, but left the wireless on in case silence should disturb his peace of mind while going to sleep. On a ship, engines rattled the bones for weeks at a time, and there was a vigorous thudding of water to go with it. He needed noise in order to sleep, as if he were still on board and had to wake up in four hours.
The easiest way to attain unbroken repose was to drink alcohol till he was unconscious, but he was no longer willing for such dynamite to blow down the walls that separated him from peace. His patience would get him there in its own good time, and if it baulked at the task then he would lie there till it did.
Clara had never suspected his occasional indulgence in alcoholic blackouts – as far as he knew, though she was a realistic woman who was perhaps more familiar with the world’s ways, and those of men who went to sea, than he realized. Even so, she certainly did not imagine the depth of his occasional severance from reality and decency. On wondering whether she had died in order that he could reform, he felt the light of morning behind his eyelids.
PART THREE
Meeting
1
The system of forethought by which he lived made sure that on the next watch, or by the morning after, he would find all necessary items for life and duty laid out in perfect navy order. Such drill, when working with a thoroughness too ordinary for him to admire, made existence easy, for sufficient preparation meant less to think about when the moment of necessity came, though he didn’t doubt that if assailed by an unexpected happening his training and intuition would channel him into the right actions. There was no other way of doing things.
Yet despite this eternal striving for perfection there were times when the mind had so much to think about that one essential item was missed in the too rapid litany of the restocking procedure. When he got out of bed and looked in the provision box he didn’t even curb the foul old clichés of the sailor’s trade used whenever something went wrong, that acted like a pinch of snuff to clear the head before remedial thoughts came in.
There was everything necessary in the box except sugar. The blue tin with the fancy lid was empty but for enough discoloured grains stuck to the side to show what the tin was for, but not sufficient to sweeten the coffee that he craved.
He switched off the moaning radio, and scratched his head at this contemptible proof of what ought to be feared as no less than an attack of premature senility. The habit of being prepared had come from a time when every happening could signify the difference between life and death. Such thoroughness didn’t matter any more, so perhaps he would stand easy and leave things in future to chance. All he had to do was walk to the nearest shop and buy sugar to put in his coffee, or go next door and ask whoever lived there to let him have a few spoons of the stuff till he replenished his larder.
He had done that sort of thing on a ship only occasionally, careful to indulge as little as possible, but on shore there seemed something lacking in a person who knocked on a stranger’s door to borrow sugar when he could easily go out and buy a pack from a shop, the inconvenience a way of paying for a trivial mistake.