25

When Niall left the dining room at Farthings he went straight up to his room and threw his remaining things into his suitcase, and then he went down again and out of the house, and round the corner of the drive to the garage. He had enough petrol to take him to the coast. It had always been a convenient thing that Farthings was placed strategically between London and the place where he kept his ramshackle boat.

Now it was more than convenient. It meant salvation of the spirit. Always an indifferent driver of a car, Niall became worse through the years, because he became progressively more vague. He never noticed signs and symbols, Turn Left or One Way Street. He shot traffic lights, not with intention but because momentarily he would confuse green with red; or alternatively he would stay waiting, over time, when the colors changed; so that only the infuriated hooting of drivers in the rear, behind him, would startle him from a temporary dream into instant, and often fatal, action. It was a miracle to Maria, to Celia, to all who knew him, that he had never yet been warned or summoned.

It was for this reason, knowing his deficiencies as a driver in the turmoil of daytime traffic, that Niall liked to drive by night. He was safe by night. No one could oppose him. Driving by night had glamour, like Dick Turpin on Black Bess. Doing anything by night was always better than doing anything by day. A song composed at three in the morning was often better than one composed at three in the afternoon. A walk by moonlight made a walk by day seem drab. How good a kipper tasted in the small hours, how potent a hunk of cheese. What energy flowed from the body to the brain, what power, what quicksilver. Whereas the late mornings and the afternoons were created surely for siesta. For lying in the sun. For sleeping behind drawn curtains. For leaving the spirit fallow.

As Niall drove through the silent country roads on his way to the coast, he planned, with characteristic calm, the days to come.

At the moment there was nothing he could do to help Maria. In the immediate future she would swing north and south, east and west, like a weathercock to the winds of thought that blew upon her.

There would be the mood of anger, the mood of resignation, the mood of gay defiance, the mood of the hurt child. When she had worked through the whole gamut of emotion, she would begin again perhaps, in another key. Some fresh interest would come along to blow her to another compass point. Nothing, the gods be praised, would hurt for long.

Maria’s mind was like her body in that it would not scar. A sudden flare-up in her side, some years before, had been diagnosed as a grumbling appendix, and the appendix was removed. The wound healed in about three weeks. In three months nothing showed upon her body but a thin, white line. Whereas with other women… purple weals, and blotches. How often, too, the performance of bearing children tore the guts out of a woman. Not Maria.

It was almost as if Maria was favored by the gods, and she had been permitted through her life to get away with everything. Had she committed murder, she would never have been caught. Nor would her conscience trouble her. Even if the day of reckoning should come, and it was possible that day was dawning now, her guardian angel would see to it that the day was not too long. The day could be turned to good account. It was true, Niall decided, that the Almighty loved a sinner. He loved no one else. The good, the gentle, the uncomplaining, the self-sacrificing, had a raw deal every time. He washed His hands of them. And somewhere Niall had read that the only happy creatures in the world were idiots. Statistics proved it. Psychologists swore to it. Children born into the world with vacant minds, children with small eyes and blubbing lips, overflowed—so doctors said—with joy, with happiness. They adored everything they saw, from eggs to earthworms. From parents to parasites. To parasites… Here we are then, mused Niall as he banked a corner; back to parasites. So what does it all prove? That the Mind who controls the universe has the mind of the idiot child, and has a tender spot for parasites. Blessed are the parasites, for they shall inherit the earth. The parasites shall grow rich, and multiply. Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven… It wanted an hour still to midnight when he reached the saltings. The clock in the village, hidden by the elms, struck eleven. He had made good time. He swung off to the left, and followed the narrow rutty lane that finished abruptly by the water’s edge.

The tide was low, the mud banks were exposed, and the tall, green rushes that shivered in the months of summer stood bleached and still under the winter sky. The night was dark, the air nippy cold.

Niall left the car, unlit, drawn to the far side of the road; and, taking the suitcase that held his few possessions, he walked down a muddy path that ran parallel to the mud flats. He came to a rough wooden pontoon, jutting into the water.

The tide was still ebbing. He could hear the water suck away from the mud, and it ran fast, swirling round the post of the pontoon. There was a small dinghy tied to the handrail by the post. Niall lowered the suitcase into the dinghy, and climbed in after it.

He began to row downstream. It was less cold upon the water than on the land. As he dipped his hand to try the temperature, it struck warm, without the chill he had expected. The paddles creaked in the rowlocks, and the sound echoed in the still, quiet air, sharply persistent. There were other boats moored on the right bank of the stream, in deep water below the flats. Niall passed them one by one, muffled shapes in the darkness, lying to rusty chains, left by their owners for the winter months until the spring.

His own boat was the last one of the line. He pulled alongside and, shipping the paddles of the dinghy, climbed into the narrow cockpit and made fast. He took the key from its hiding-place in the locker, and opened up the hatch into the cabin. The smell of the cabin was warm and friendly, it held none of the musty darkness of disuse. He struck a match and lit the lamp suspended from the mast. Then kneeling beside the little bogey stove he lit the fire. This done, he stood up, humpbacked, because the boat lacked full headroom for his height, and, pottering about the small, confined cabin, set things to rights.

As usual, he was hungry. A tongue, sent by an unknown admirer of his songs from Illinois, and not as yet acknowledged, made easy eating; so did a tin of still more dubious origin marked “Halibut, tasty on toast.” The toast was not forthcoming, but biscuits from Illinois, wrapped in cellophane, served the same purpose. There were figs with Christmas greetings from a “Buddy in Baltimore” who rang no bell, and, find of all finds, a jar of ginger. He poured the ginger syrup into a glass and laced it well with brandy, then, after stirring, warmed the brew in a saucepan on the bogey stove. The mixture tasted like the smell of gorse on a hot day, and had a curiously lightening effect, a carefree, soporific influence, so that Niall, kicking off his shoes onto the bunk, felt as a bumblebee would feel who emerged, limp-winged and dizzy, from the belly of a foxglove.

He propped two pillows behind his head and, reaching for his notebook, stretched himself full length upon the bunk, and began to rough-out the plan of the concerto. It was irritating to find, after two hours of work, that the predominant theme, which should be classic, stark and plain, linking the three movements all together, eluded discipline. The imp who fed his brain, and who crouched in a cell of matter, tongue in cheek, would not be harnessed to solemnity. Dignity and poise swung into melody, and the melody itself, unfettered, uncontrolled, soared to a silly, sensuous ecstasy. At first Niall blamed the ginger syrup and the brandy; he blamed the drive, he blamed the winter air, he blamed the pull downstream upon the limpid water. Then he sat up and threw the notes aside.

It was no use. Why beat the brain to feats it could not do? Accept the status in the underworld of sound; leave magic to musicians. Lisp in numbers when the numbers came. To hell with the concerto.

He tucked the blankets around him, and with his hands upon his shoulders, his knees drawn to his chin, he slept as he had always slept, like an infant still unborn.

The next day passed in work, in idleness. In flashes of inspiration. In moments of apathy.

He ate. He drank. He smoked. He walked along the flats, he pulled about the creek. He painted one quarter of his boat a dusty gray. This is the only answer, then, to be alone. This is the ultimate reply. Dependent upon no soul but your own self. Dependent upon the sounds that flood the mind. Creator of your world, your universe.

That night, with the labor pains of a schoolboy in examination, he wrote down clearly, in a fair, round hand, the score of the elusive melody that had haunted him all day.

No mighty composition this, no grand concerto; only another fragment for a fortnight, to be whistled by an errand boy and drummed upon the air. But he had written it down without the piano’s aid, which for Niall was great achievement. When it was all over and the work was done, the aftermath set in. He felt bleak and strangely lonely. And he wanted Maria… But Maria was many miles away in travail, with her own sins and her own omissions, and the thought of Maria lying in the cramped bunk of his small ship made him laugh aloud.

She had consented to sail once with him for a day. Her one sail and her last. Knowing even less of sailing than he did himself, she accused him, violently, of pulling the wrong ropes. They became becalmed and he, and not Maria, was sick. The wind, when it did come, came from the wrong quarter and, scudding out to sea, they were just lost to land until a motorboat, large and complacent, ran beside them in the lopping swell and took them in tow. Maria lost a favorite cardigan outboard. She also lost her shoes. Niall, cold and wet, caught a chill. They drove back to Farthings in silence, and Charles, when informed of the fiasco, shrugged his shoulders, saying to his wife, “What else did you expect?”

Celia was an easier boat companion. Handy in a galley. Useful in swabbing decks, but always with an eye to tragedy. “I don’t like the look of that dark cloud.” “How about turning back while it’s still fine?” “Is that a rock I see in the distance, or a poor dead dog?”

She put a damper on adventure. No, it was by far better to sail a boat alone.

The day after he had written the song dawned fair and fine, with a good sailing breeze offshore. Niall pulled up the river to the pontoon, and walked back along the path to where he had left the car, two nights before. It was as he had left it by the side of the lane. He got in and set off for the village. He bought bread and a few provisions, and then he went to the post office and wrote out a telegram. After he had written it he spoke to the girl behind the barrier. She was young and pretty, and he smiled.

“I want you to do something for me,” said Niall.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’m going for a sail,” he said, “and I don’t know when I shall be back. It depends upon the wind, the state of my boat, and ultimately upon my mood. I want you to keep this telegram until, shall we say, five o’clock this afternoon. If I am back by then I will come and retrieve the telegram and possibly send another one instead, depending, as I have said before, upon my mood. If I am not back—then you may send the telegram, this one here, to that name and address.”

The girl looked doubtful and pursed her mouth.

“It’s against regulations,” she said. “I don’t think I can.”

“Many things in life,” said Niall, “are against regulations. Haven’t you discovered that yet?”

The girl blushed.

“It would be against regulations,” said Niall, “if, when I came back, I asked you to have supper with me on my boat. But if the supper was good enough you might accept.”

“I’m not that sort of girl,” she answered.

“A pity,” said Niall, “because that sort of girl has fun.”

She read through the telegram again. “What time do you want me to send it off?” she said.

“If I’m not back,” said Niall, “send it at five o’clock.”

“O.K.,” she said, and turned her back on him.

Niall read through the telegram again, and paid his money.

It was addressed to Maria Delaney, and then the name of the theater, London: “Darling, I love you. I’m going for a sail. I have written you a song. If you get this telegram it will mean one of two things. Either I have reached the shores of France or the boat has sunk. I love you again. Niall.”

Then, whistling his own tune, he climbed back again into the car, with a loaf of bread, some carrots, and a few potatoes.

It took him quite two hours to get his ship under way, because as he hauled his mainsail the rope became entangled in a block and hung suspended, like a man in chains. In some sailing book that he had read in an idle moment, Niall recollected that a sail, when it did this, was known as scandalized. The name was apt. Scandalized it was. Shamefaced and shy, the sail swung about in the wind, and Niall was forced to climb the mast to get it down, after which the process was repeated, without the scandal. Then the dinghy had to be left upon the buoy, always a difficult maneuver. The chain invariably seemed too heavy for the small boat, and weighed it down, bows deep in the water.

Alone, adrift, and launched upon the tide—ebbing, thank God!—Niall seized the tiller and broke the jib. The little headsail was reluctant, and wrapped itself, protecting, round the stay.

Niall was obliged to leave the tiller and climb over the deck to free it. By the time he returned to the tiller, his ship was heading for the mud. He swung her downstream in the nick of time.

What a lamentable figure he must cut from the nearby shore, he thought, and how angry Maria would be.

His course downriver to the sea passed without incident. The ship moved with the wind and tide, and nothing stopped her. Niall would not have known how to stop her had he wished.

Outside, the wind was fresh; but the sun shone and the sea was calm. One of those cold, bright days of winter when the land slipped by unnoticed, and the sharp line of the horizon was like a pencil drawing, firm and clear. Niall steered his ship on what seemed to him a favorable course, the smudge of a distant steamer. Forgetting that it moved even as his own ship moved, he lashed the helm in a knot that came undone, and went below to cook himself a luncheon.

Some of the Illinois tongue heated in a frying-pan, with chipped potatoes and diced carrots, made a passable meal. His lunch cooked to his liking, Niall climbed with it to the cockpit, and sat eating from the frying pan, one hand on the tiller. The land astern of him was a soft, gray blur, but this did not worry Niall because the sea was smooth. A gull followed him doubtfully, hovering in midair, and Niall threw scraps of frazzled tongue to appease his greed. When the tongue was finished, he threw a carrot top. The gull swallowed it and choked; then flew away, screaming, like a vulture, skimming the water with its wings.

Niall went below and fetched a cushion, and propping it on the coaming under his head he stretched himself out in the cockpit, with one leg over the tiller, and closed his eyes. This, then, was the peak.

In London, in Paris, in New York, men were in offices, seated at desks, ringing bells, speaking on the telephone; men were pouring out of Undergrounds, swarming up bus stairs, standing behind shop counters, hewing rocks in mines. Men were fighting, quarrelling, drinking, making love; men were arguing about money, politics, religion.

Everywhere, all over the world, men were in a ferment somewhere, about something. They had anxiety. They were troubled. Even the people that he loved had turmoil of the spirit. Maria and Charles had to make up their minds about the future. Celia had to make up her mind about herself. The problem, “What now?” stared them in the face.

For Niall, it did not matter. Nothing mattered. He was alone upon the sea. And he had written a song. He was at peace.

If he wished, he need never return. The boat could sail forever. The wind was fair, the water still, and somewhere across that gray expanse of sea was the coast of France; the smells, the sounds of France. What Pappy used to call, in moments of emotion, “Niall’s low French blood” still simmered in his veins, if lazily, if now a little slow. England was only home through force of circumstances, because of events, because it happened that way, because of Maria.

Easy enough to sail to France. To send a telegram to Maria from France: “I am here. You come too.”

The trouble with Maria, she liked her comforts. She wanted beds and bath-essence. Crêpe-de-chine against the skin. And well-cooked food. She would not want to lie with him like this, her head upon a coaming, her legs over a tiller. Besides, she had ambition.

Maria, he considered, would live to a grand old age. She would become a legend. White-haired and ruthless, she would shake a crutch at ninety-nine, and put the fear of God into all who knew her. And when she died, she would die surprised, indignant. “Death? Not if I know it. There’s still so much to do.”

Celia would accept the end with patience. Letters would be filed, the bills paid, the things unpacked from the laundry and put away. Otherwise such a nuisance for people who found the body. But she would have her little, anxious frown between the brows. “What should one say to God, if He should be there?”

Niall laughed and stretched himself and yawned. He wondered if it would be a good idea to finish the brandy and the ginger syrup. He stared idly down into the cabin. It was then he noticed, for the first time, the long trickle of water on the cabin floor. He stared at it, puzzled. There was nothing to upset. No spray had come in through the ports; and, anyway, the ports were closed. No rain had settled in the bilges, because no rain had fallen for the past two days. Why then the water on the cabin floor? Niall went down below to inspect the trickle closer.

He put his fingers in the liquid. It was salt. He looked about him for a screw-driver to lift up the floorboard. He found one at last at the back of a locker. The search had taken time, and when he knelt down to lift the board, the trickle had become a stream.

He jerked up the board with his screwdriver, and he saw that the bilges were full of water, salt like the stream upon the floor. In some part of the boat, whether forward or aft he had no notion where, a leak had sprung. He supposed that it must be a bad leak because of the rate at which the water was entering the boat.

He wondered what to do. He took up more floorboards, with the idea of finding the leak and plugging it with something, but when he did this the water came up more quickly and lapped over his feet.

He hastily put back the boards, so that the water became a stream again. But the trouble was that it became an ever-widening stream.

He remembered vaguely a phrase from boyhood books, “All hands to the pumps,” and he knew there was a pump in the locker aft of the cockpit. He found the pump. It was rusty, he had not used it for some time. He assembled it clumsily and placed the nozzle in the socket on the deck. It made a curious hissing sound, like the pump on a child’s bicycle that would not work. It felt much too light. He took it out of the nozzle and examined it. The rubber washer round the base had perished, and there was a hole that should have had a screw inside it, but the screw was missing. The pump, in fact, was useless. Nor had he a baler, he had left the baler in the dinghy at the moorings. There was an old jug below that would have to serve instead. He went below again to get the jug, but by now the water covered the boards of the floor. He started baling the water with the jug. After five minutes of this, kneeling, with cramped back, and throwing the water from the porthole, he realized that he was making little if no impression on the rising stream. To bale was wasted effort. He went up again on deck.

The wind, if anything, had lightened; the sea was slaty smooth. There was no steamer smoke now on the horizon, and no sign of any ship. The land lay astern, about seven miles distant. Even the gull had gone. Niall sat down in the cockpit once again and watched the water rising on the cabin floor.

His first reaction was relief to be alone. He had not the responsibility of a second person. But swiftly upon this thought came a feeling of melancholy, of sadness. It would have been nice, at such a moment, to talk aloud. Someone like Charles would have been invaluable. Men who had fought in wars, who ran estates, who were efficient, would be sure to know how to cope with a leaking boat. Charles would have found the leak. Charles, if he had not found the leak, would have known how to make a raft. He would have busied himself lashing boards together. Niall did not know how to do any of these things. He only knew how to write songs. Thinking of his song, he looked down again into the cabin, and he saw that the notebook in which he had written down the score had fallen from the ledge beside his bunk, and was now floating, face downwards, in the rising stream. Already it was brown and sodden. He rescued it and brought it back, and kept it beside him on the cockpit seat. There was something sinister and inevitable about the swishing water in the cabin, and he closed the hatch, so that he need not watch it rise. He set a course for land, but now that the breeze had fallen away the ship had very little way under her and hardly moved. The sails lapped softly, scandalized no longer, it was true, but ill at ease. Niall had never installed an engine in the boat because he had always known that he could not make an engine work. He was glad the wind did not come in gusts to rattle him. Had it done so the odds were that something would have carried away, some rope, some shroud, some vital piece of tackle.

He was glad too that the sea was still so smooth. To swim about for hours in rough water would have frightened him, made him catch his breath and choke and lose his head. Whereas in the water that lay about him now he need not even swim; he could lie upon his back and float.

One thing at any rate was certain. Maria would get his telegram.

As Niall sat in the cockpit, waiting, and watching the sun go down upon the land, he found himself thinking, not of Maria, not of the songs he had written, not even of the lost, faded image of Mama; but of Truda. He thought of kind, comforting old Truda, and of her broad, safe lap. He thought of the gray stuff dress she used to wear and of how he had rubbed his face against it as a little boy.

And it seemed to him, sitting there in the cockpit, alone, upon the sea, that the sea itself was calm and comforting, even as Truda had been long ago. The sea was another Truda, upon which he could cast himself when the time came, without anguish, without fear.