He had wound it, nevertheless. Face down in its gimbal ring, he turned the tipsy key gently four and three-quarter turns, and the sound of the ratchet calmed him. The odour and movement of the sea was not to be thrown off so easily. Habits die hard – if ever – in a man of fifty, but in the process of change he felt more adrift than ever, and it was with relief that he heard a faint knock at the door.
5
She sat by the table, and he poured wine. ‘I don’t suppose a drop of this will hurt.’
She wore lipstick, eye shadow, face cream. That stuff on women does more harm than good, Judy had said before going out to the shops. I know, she answered, maybe it does. I feel better, though. I haven’t used it for a month. She wore no bra – don’t need one – a white blouse with an open beige cardigan, and a skirt. A change of clothes might give a new start in life. Anything was worth trying.
She looked at his pale face, freckles, tonsure of red hair, uneven teeth when he smiled, broad nose, well-shaped but pronounced lower lip, firm chin slightly squared: an attractive ugliness, a determined intelligence. Why him, and not somebody else?
He put smoked fish on to their plates, and observed her by glances, unwilling to embarrass by staring. With so much to look at, there was something to hope for, and a long time was necessary to take in what lay behind those angled, intriguing blue eyes. She laughed. ‘Do you think I should be starving because I tried to do something daft?’
‘I didn’t really think, except that you can’t have eaten since last night.’
She drank the wine. ‘You’re right, though.’ I don’t want to get drunk in front of a stranger. ‘I’ll give up my room and go back to Nottingham.’ She had nothing to say, but the silence, even for a few seconds, alarmed her. ‘I’ve got to do something.’
He refilled both glasses. ‘If you’re uncertain, don’t. Whatever’s going to happen will, without you interfering in the process. My experience suggests that it’s just as likely to be good as bad. The time to do things is when they start doing them to you, and until then the only worthwhile course is to take your mind off what problems you have, by eating something, for example.’
He spoke unhurriedly, a slight pause now and again as if to let her know that at least he thought before opening his mouth, a mannerism which made him sound very right indeed, and also wise, since each phrase touched similar words in her mind. He lifted his glass. ‘Let’s drink to a long life.’
She sipped.
Neither did he give her time to agree nor disagree with whatever he said. ‘In my job I learned that you could anticipate problems, but never create them. They came right enough – how they came, at times! – but it never did to brood about them.’
The room had a timelessness that only an unmarried man could create. The stove gurgled, and they were warm. The ticking of his special clock made it even more timeless. She was sincere, almost fearful. ‘I left my husband, and don’t manage well on my own.’
To have shelter in a fair haven, provisions and clothes, was certainly a start. ‘Do you have any money?’
‘Enough to be going on with. But is that everything?’
He put food on her plate. ‘Perhaps not. I’ve always lived by myself, but I suppose it’s difficult if you never have.’
‘It might not even be that,’ she said.
What the hell is it, then? ‘You have to ride a storm day after day, sometimes for a week or more. In life it can last months, but eventually it goes.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘everything goes.’ He didn’t understand, though his words were true enough, and comforting. It was all right for a man. The depths below her seemed immense, as if she still had a long way to fall. Beyond the room there was an emptiness which she couldn’t bear to think about, and whatever lurked out there wanted to annihilate her hopes and expectations.
He touched her hand. ‘Nobody understands anybody, but if you can look and listen and talk, and even laugh, then a glimmer of a solution might come through the mist. The only person I ever understood was my aunt, and I had little enough information to go on. In everybody’s life there can’t be more than one or two people they’ll ever understand, or be understood by. More than that is too much to wish for.’
She felt numb. ‘I suppose so.’ She hoped he was wrong. She had come from a land of big families, and couldn’t live like that.
‘The only reason for staying alive is so that sooner or later you’ll understand one person. Those who try to kill themselves do so only because they have given up hope of trying to understand one person in their lives. Or they don’t know anyone who wants to try and understand them. They may have tried, and think they’ve failed, and don’t have the heart to make another attempt. There are lots of duties in life that you’ve got to look sharp about. The only thing I was brought up on was duty, and I don’t regret it now. It often saved me from despair, and stopped me doing much harm to others. Or so I like to think.’
She nodded, content to listen, and wondered why he was trying to send her back to George.
‘But the main duty, bigger than all the others, is to go on living even when you can’t bear the thought of facing the world a minute longer. When you feel that way, just grit your teeth and live it out till the threat goes. It’s the one duty that matters. If you survive that, whatever else you want will come.’
He only ever spoke in such a way to himself, and feared he was being pompous, but words were taken from his control, and though he didn’t like it, neither did he regret it when he saw how she seemed absorbed by what he was saying. When the heart gave out its own words in the form of advice for someone else, that advice could also be meant, he knew, for oneself.
‘Put your decisions off for a while.’ He was glad Judy wasn’t at their lunch to accuse him of self-interest. ‘And get out of London for a day or two.’
‘You don’t need to be anxious about me.’ She hadn’t left George’s prison to walk blindfold into another. ‘I’ll be happy enough living on my own when I know what I’m going to do, and what I’m not going to do.’
He once met a second mate who, he told her, being dead drunk, related that when at home with his wife he always peeled her fruit. He called for a plate of Jaffas to demonstrate, and Tom observed that stripping an orange of its skin was like taking a globe of the world to pieces: cutting off the two poles, scoring with great precision along the meridians of longitude about sixty degrees apart, then pulling each segment off intact, much like an instructor at a navigation class demonstrating a theory of map projections. At the third orange the second mate fell on to the floor and had to be carried back to his ship, smelling as much of citrus fruit as whisky. Even though dead drunk one could be precise, though it was wise not to push the spirit too far.
She smiled, and watched his fingers dextrously working as he peeled her an orange in the same neat way. ‘You spoil me.’
‘You’re my guest.’ Responsibility for any other person but himself had been shunned, unless within the hierarchy of a crew. His relationship with Clara had been possible because she had been equally responsible for him. Half a packet of coffee went into the pot, and he stood while the grounds settled. It was a day for staying awake. One must never ask questions, but he’d got her back from the dark, and his curiosity was intense.
‘I’ll wash up, at least.’ She smiled, and thought he probably had a pinafore hidden in the cupboard.
‘We once had a steward,’ he said, ‘who threw the dishes overboard after meals. By the time we discovered it, we were eating off bare boards and old newspapers. He was flown home in a strait-jacket, poor chap.’