‘People want to be happy,’ she said, ‘and they’re persuaded it costs money.’
He was as close to bitterness as she had so far seen him. ‘But happiness never comes. They’re poor, duped fools. When you have it, you don’t want it. Often you don’t even notice if you do have it. That’s probably the best sort. But as soon as you think to want it, it goes out of the window if you already have it, and becomes unattainable if you don’t. It’s a tricky kind of balance, all in all.’
‘I’m happy now,’ she said.
He held her hand. ‘So am I. But it doesn’t come by pursuing it. Nor by going on strike for more money.’
She had to agree, though after a while asked: ‘Do you want to go back to the world of your grandfather?’
‘Not really. It only led to the one we’ve got now. But I do feel there are values one ought to hold on to. When I wake in the morning I thank God I’m alive. Every birthday I’m grateful for another year of life. I was brought up to believe that if you didn’t work you didn’t deserve to eat. When the sea was calm and empty there was time to mull on things. You were blessed with two minds, one concerned for the safety and progress of the ship, and the other taken over by thoughts of what was going on in the world, but rarely with what turmoil might lie within yourself. It’s very effective to contemplate the state of the world from the bridge of a well-run ship. But things can happen at sea, all the same, and you live with the thought that your life is not your own, being divided between the company you work for and the sea itself. Your life only belongs to you when you set foot ashore. Not even then, for if there’s one thing certain it is that our life doesn’t belong to us alone. Get to thinking that it does, and someone else then assumes he has a right to take it over. Self-assertion comes before slavery. If every man believes in God, or at least has infinite respect for a humane and unassailable system of ethics, then no other man has the moral power to subjugate him.’
It was more agreeable when he talked than to be caught in the singular deadness that dominated his silence. The evening was pleasant now that the aura of the nurse’s disturbance had gone. But she wondered what was the beginning and end of all he was saying, for didn’t he belong to himself, rather than to something like God? She certainly did, and especially so in the last couple of months when she had moved from a lifetime of torment after having been attached body and much of her soul to somebody else. Even in the most enduring union you had to be your own property first, before any satisfaction was to be got out of allowing part of you to belong to someone else, she told him during dessert.
‘Without wanting to seem unduly religious,’ he said, ‘we all belong to the unknown, which I call God. By believing in God we are given the authority for our equality with regard to each other. That’s all I mean.’
She didn’t like the word ‘equality’. ‘Everyone is different, not equal. If they were equal you wouldn’t have been an officer.’
He smiled. ‘They may not be equal in everyday life, but they are in the sight of God. It’s vital for everyone to think so, for the proper running of society. Under God and under the law we are equal, and that’s as it should be, otherwise you get the barbarism of dictatorship, as in Russia, where people can’t even leave the damned place until their spirit’s broken, and mostly not even then. Law on its own can be tyrannical, but if you have God then His law, which we must assume to be good and beneficial for humanity, helps to keep human laws civilized. It hasn’t always worked out, but it’s still the only hope we have. And in the best countries it has more or less done so.’
He was embarrassed. ‘I’m talking too much. Sailors are known for it, once they get ashore, though Jonah talked on board ship till he got himself thrown into the sea, and then talked in the whale’s belly till God got him spouted out again. Not that he was a sailor.’ He tapped the empty bottle. ‘There’s time for another drop.’
She put her hand on his arm. ‘I’ll get tight if I have any more. Let’s go.’
He signalled for the bill.
‘I’ll pay half,’ she said.
‘You bought the food yesterday.’
She looked astonished. ‘Yesterday?’
He laughed. ‘Yes – yesterday.’
He was right.
‘We ought not to get too particular about such things.’ He picked up the chit. ‘I shan’t go broke over a few quid.’
At the seafront he looked up the Pointers to Polaris. There was no more rain. The wind was backing north-easterly. ‘We’re in for a change to dry and cold, so the train drivers will stay snug in their beds with toast and tea, and who can blame them, unless it’s those poor chaps waiting on platforms for non-existent transport?’
They walked a mile towards Shoreham, then turned back. Lights twinkled in the Channel. ‘Do you wish you were on one?’
He held her hand. Why did everyone assume so? ‘I see no point in thinking about the past. Life on shore makes my existence out there seem emptiness itself. After what I learned about my family I suppose I’m still the same person who worked his whole life at sea, but the connection feels slender at the moment, walking along the front with you. I expect the two lives will merge sooner or later, but it’s amazing to think I lived so long as someone I wasn’t.’
‘Maybe you didn’t,’ she said.
‘I agree. It’s hard to be final about it. But if I’d been brought up in that kind of family I imagine I’d have gone to a prep school as a boarder, and then to a public school as a boarder. Being passably bright, and with a bit of luck, I’d have made some sort of university, and become an engineer like Uncle John. By the time I was fifty my mother and Clara would have died, and I’d be where I am now, living in the flat with the money they’d left. On the other hand I might have been an idler, and broken my mother’s heart – or some such thing.’
‘I don’t think you would,’ she said. ‘And yet – you might have done!’
He stood by the rail. Light reflected from behind, as breakers thumped and grated at the shingle. ‘I still think it’s all a dream.’
She wanted to hold him and kiss him. ‘Is it a bad one, though?’
Where was the calm impassive sailor she had thought him to be? He looked at her in the half light. ‘While I was in the kitchen this afternoon I remembered an incident from just after the war that I’d not thought of until today. It was the sort of thing that might happen to any sailor in a foreign port. My ship had docked in the East River in New York, and I had a day to spare so walked into town. I got something to eat in a Chinese place, then went up Fifth Avenue towards Central Park. I’d been there before, so knew my way. Passing a Moorish-looking synagogue near 43rd Street I saw a tall old man with a long beard, wearing a black broad-brimmed hat. He was shouting a greeting to somebody behind, as I thought, but he came up to me, and babbled in a language I didn’t know from Adam. He held my hand and called me by a name, and seemed to be asking questions, his eyes glittering with smiles, and I thought what the hell does this silly old bugger want? What’s he trying to tell me? I was young and all stuffy-English, and wanted to push by him and carry on walking, but he was so amiable and familiar that I saw he had taken me for someone else, though it never occurred to me to wonder who it would be. I only wanted to make the most of my day in New York. He realized he’d made a mistake, so waved his hands in the air, almost pushed me out of the way, and walked on. Bumping into someone in a town of millions of people happens all the time, but what I didn’t know then, yet know now, was that that wise old man, even in his understandable error, saw more closely into me than anyone else. And when I suddenly recalled the incident his face was so vivid and close that I could have touched him. I was about to say something, but realized I didn’t know his language. I thought it a pity that we couldn’t understand each other.’