Jacob Green, mad as a kick and twice as hard, arrived to collect his mother from Port Juliet at half past twelve in the afternoon. Angie Kihn, a blonde woman, was with him. She was first out of the car. He sat behind the wheel for a minute, looking for me. I was in the vegetable garden with Elizabeth. We were hoeing and raking, and I was showing her how to sow a straight line of cabbage seed. I had stretched a line, trampled the soil and drawn the edge of the hoe from one end to the other. When I heard the car I went to the corner of the garden, watched for a moment and said, ‘They’re here.’ I went to a corner of the garden and stood where I could watch but not be seen.
‘Screw them,’ she said, not angrily, but quietly, as if she’d hoped they’d forgotten or the world was no longer turning and no one cared any more. Silent stars, a blank sea, the final cloud. A desperate look.
I watched Jacob get out of the car. He slammed the door and called to Angie. She had already stumbled in her shoes, and was standing on one leg, holding the shoe in one hand, trying to straighten the heel. Their voices carried to where we were, but nothing distinct, I couldn’t understand a word. Angie cupped her hands over her mouth and yelled, ‘Hello! Elizabeth!’
‘I’d better go down.’ Elizabeth was standing next to me, holding a rake. I was wearing my wren’s feather in my cap; she was wearing hers in her hair. We could have been a painting by an artist whose name I can’t remember. I smelt her and she smelt me, and when the wind blew it blew our hair together.
Angie shaded her eyes and yelled louder. ‘Elizabeth! Where are you?’
‘I know what’s going to happen,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘When you go down there you’re not coming back.’ I put my hand on her arm. ‘I know…’
‘What?’ she said.
What? You know. I don’t believe in stories, I don’t believe in tales; you haven’t got a hammer, I didn’t bring the nails.
I said, ‘I’ve got less than a minute left with you.’
‘You think so?’
‘What else can I think?’
‘Would you believe me if I told you I was scared?’
‘Of me?’
‘Please…’
‘Of them?’
‘Michael?’ She narrowed her eyes at the ocean and the sky, and sighed. ‘It came back to me, all that stuff I felt in Baja, and then yesterday. Yesterday, in my mother’s cottage. I thought — I’ve come back for her. That’s my cottage.’ She looked down at it. ‘I missed the chance once.’ She tapped her chest. ‘It’s something in here, something strong. I want to learn to grow vegetables. I still want a life like this. I’m scared of leaving.’ She pointed towards Jacob. ‘And I’m not the crazy he thinks I am.’
‘But?’ I smiled.
‘Are you laughing at me?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Never. Only with you.’
Angie called again, ‘Elizabeth!’, and started walking towards the house. Jacob said something we couldn’t hear, but she waved him away.
I said, ‘Can I tell you a story?’
‘Sure.’ She gave me a nod.
‘When I was a young man I studied navigation. European navigation. That means bearings and soundings. Mathematics. Longitude, latitude, angular distances and great circles. The course of the stars. The critical element was always precision. My instincts fought precision but lost. My heart was ruled by numbers.’
‘So?’
‘So in 1982 I met a man called Mak. Mak Dolu. He was from Papua. He’d been taught Polynesian navigation. He told me to forget my charts, drop my dividers, lose my compass, forget the numbers. He pointed at the sea and said, “Read it, not a piece of paper. The swells, the colour of the water, the smell of it. The flight of birds…” ’
‘The colour of the water?’
‘Yes. I didn’t believe it, but he had more.’
‘What more?’
‘The shape of clouds.’
‘Clouds?’
‘He had used nothing but the shape of clouds to navigate an open boat from Fangataufa to Yokahama, via Vanuata and the islands of the Coral Sea. That’s thousands of miles. The shape of clouds telling you that you were twenty-eight nautical miles off the coast of Guadalcanal? We argued. I said it was impossible. He smiled. I told him that an open boat was different to eighteen thousand tons of cargo vessel, but he shook his head and said, “It is exactly the same sea. The same sky…” ’
Elizabeth said, ‘It’s a nice story, but what’s it got to do with us?’
Us.
‘He was right. I was right too, my navigation was more precise, but his had a fix on something else, something more important than precision. Something elemental.’
‘He was right? You were right? Cut to the chase, Michael.’
‘At the time I thought about leaving the merchant navy. I’d been a captain for ten years. I’d achieved my ambition but I was missing something.’ I spread my arms. ‘Something like this. I dreamed of quitting and moving to Polynesia and buying a yacht. I was going to live another life. Live on the boat and run charters between the islands. Pleasure trips, anything. I was going to do what you almost did in Baja. I regretted not taking the chance, not as much as I regret some things, but you think, don’t you? You wonder how your life could have been.’
‘You bet.’
‘The sea stole me. I had a lot of catching up to do. I wanted to learn to read the shape of the clouds.’
She pointed at the sky. ‘That one looks like a horse’s head. See?’
‘But what does it mean?’
‘I don’t know…’
I interrupted, took her hand and said, ‘We’ve wanted the same thing all our lives.’
‘Michael…’ she said, and her eyes dulled and she had to turn away. ‘Staying’s not as easy as thinking. Or dreaming.’
She had said that before and I had told her not to think about it but now all I could manage was, ‘Go to them. No goodbyes.’
‘I can’t just…’
‘Don’t keep them waiting.’
‘What do I say? What do I tell them?’ She looked up at me and I wanted her eyes.
I whispered, ‘I love you.’
She shook her head. ‘You don’t know me.’
‘I do.’
‘How can you?’
‘I’m an old man, Elizabeth. Old enough to know whatever I want. And that cloud…’ I pointed. ‘That’s not a horse’s head…’
‘Tell me.’
‘What?’
‘He thinks I’m mad.’ She looked down at Jacob. ‘Is he right?’
‘He doesn’t know anything.’
‘Am I old enough to know better than this?’
‘Than what?’
‘I’m having doubts,’ she said.
‘About what?’
She said, ‘Tell me you love me.’
‘I do love you.’
She reached out and stroked my face. ‘You mean it. You mean what you say, don’t you?’
I nodded.
‘I don’t think anyone’s meant it before.’
‘Should I be pleased? Is there hope for me?’
‘Of course there is,’ she said, and, ‘You’re right. I have to go to them.’ She passed me the rake. It was warm where she had held it. Our fingers touched, and then she turned from me and walked away from the vegetable garden, down the path to the house.
I walked to a place on the cliffs, a pulpit of grass with a view of the ruins, the beach, the offshore stacks and the distant point. I sat down and watched Elizabeth strolling away from the garden, down to the house and into her agent’s arms. They kissed and I heard a yelp of excitement, then nothing. Jacob stood to one side, and when the two women began to walk, he kept up with them, but at a distance.
I felt like the captain of a ship with a shifting cargo, high above a crew I could not control. A crew with ideas of their own, talking a language I did not understand. They crossed the yard, disappeared behind the cottages and emerged on the beach, and began to walk away from me. The sea sucked, the wind blew, I forgot that I was holding the rake. Lonely as hell, lost as a small animal that lived in the garden wall. Sunk. I took my cap off and held it to my chest, and I recalled the times when it had protected me. I whispered to it as I watched them walk to the end of the beach, stop and turn. I held it to my ear, I listened to it, I fingered the stitching and then I began to pick at it. First one strand of cotton broke, then another, then another, then another, then another, another and I had half the inside lining in my hand. Inside the lining was a circular envelope of padding, also stitched. I pulled this out and picked at the cotton that bound it. Then I was tearing the cotton and the padding was shredding and then I had my own caul in my hand and the cap was in bits on the ground.
It was brown, translucent in the middle, darkening to the edges, crinkled at the edges, smooth in the middle. It could have been one of those hide chews you can buy for your dog. I held it to my nose. It smelt of bedtime as a child, salt and hair. Chocolate and dust, envelopes and the backs of bottom drawers. When I tapped it with my fingernail it sounded as hollow as I felt, and echoed with voices from years back. There was the midwife clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and there was my mother telling the daft woman to wrap me in something dry and not be so slow. Here, in a boom, was the bomb that ripped a hole in the side of the SS Filles de Kilimanjaro, and here was Miss Joyce of Shadwell saying, ‘I think you should take him to the country.’ Here she was, thinking she knew best, everyone thinking they knew best.
The last brush of my mother’s lips, the letters she wrote, the cap she gave me pressed against my skin in the Baltic storm. The news of her death. Was I protected from that? Was I protected from anything? Was my great luck something I imagined, nothing but something to weigh against misfortune?
For a moment, a dead second, I almost threw the caul to the wind. I was turning it over in my hands, holding it to the light, listening to it again, watching the figures on the beach disappear, hearing the voices in my head fade. But I stopped myself, I put the thing in my pocket, picked up the remains of the cap and went back to the garden.