Seagulls in My Soup (13 page)

Feeling better, I said, “Careful, it might swing across again.”

“Ah, accidents will happen in the best-regulated families.” His voice was somewhat pained and a mite lower in volume now, as he quoted Queen Victoria.

“Are you all right, dahling?” yelled Sissie.

“If pain did not exist, we should never experience happiness,” roared Willie.

“Ai say, how simply
brave
of you,” Sissie screeched. “How simply
splendid.
Just a jiffy, old cheppie—Ai'll have tea ready in a tick or two!”

Forward, Nelson heaved and sighed; then, as if fascinated by Willie's performance, he nestled his head once more onto his paw and stared at the bishop, blinking every now and then. I looked around me.
Cresswell
was stopped stone dead. The sails hung like a sailor's pockets after a night ashore. The sky above and the water around us looked as if the world had decided never to turn again. Halfway up the hill, brazen morning sunlight shone on the Old Town walls, which reflected rosy-gold above the jumble of white cottages of the lower town. Seaward there was not a sign of any whiteness on the sea—no crests, no troughs, no undulations of the horizon. Everything seemed to have stopped in adamant indignation at the sound of Willie's voice.

It was like charity flag-day in Aberdeen. It was like five minutes before opening-time in a London pub, with
Cresswell
, Nelson, Sissie, Willie, and me the waiting, shaking, desperate patrons, gazing in despair through the gloomy Edwardian windows at the far wall of the saloon, trying to see if the pub-clock hands were indeed moving, or if it was merely a mocking, painted face that stared back at us, begrudging our very existence.

I turned back toward the companionway to see Sissie's Sheffield-steel-blue eyes now melted in utter sympathy. “Oh,
deah
Tristan—tea?”

The mainboom swung again. Willie ducked again. The clatter and squeak of the mainsheet block jeered and made sport of my frustration. The dull thud of the working jib up forward poked malicious fun at my hand on the wheel. The houses on the hill, the tower of the cathedral, the fishing boats alongside the town quay, the leaden water, the deadened sky, and the sound of the bishop's voice as it hollered and squalled, yelled, belled, and vroomed, all chorused accusingly the twelfth commandment of the sailorman:
“Thou shalt not take to sea with thee the man in black!”

Willie by now was onto a subject obviously close to his heart—Cheerfulness. As I glowered at the sails and the sky, he roared on. “Of course we must thank the good Lord for any little blessings we have? When we count them we must remember that we do, in fact, suffer along with the rest of mankind? We must not think it is a sin to be cheerful?”

Sissie cooed as she handed me my mug of Lipton tea. “Why don't we start the jolly old engine, dahling? At least we shell get out of this
dreadful
harbor.”

On
Cresswell
it was an unpardonable sin to initiate talk of the Iron Judas which lurked below. But now, with the burden of sin safely on Sissie's shoulders, I perked up.

“I've only got a gallon or so of diesel left,” I told her, “But at least we've got enough to get us outside the seawall. We might just find a bit of breeze out there.”

“
Jolly
good idea, dahling. Shell Ai start the dratted thing, or shell you?” Sissie stood there like a tense messenger before a Spartan general at Thermopylae.

I cocked an eye at the bishop, who for once was silent. I certainly didn't want him to know that I let Sissie swing the obstinate little bastard of a starting handle in the impossibly confined space below the weatherdeck. It was to me as if she had asked if she should let an imaginary idiot brother, drooling, out of the forward dodger, and thus divulge a dark family secret. But the bishop was still beaming at me, and God, whom I had thought had gone away for the holidays, was back in heaven.

“No, we'll do it like we always do,” I growled, giving Sissie a look which would have silenced Kublai Khan. “You take the wheel. Head for the entrance. I'll start the fuc . . . fucated engine.”

“Fucated engine?” roared Willie.

“Yes, it means painted . . . We painted it the other day, in Formentera.”

I heaved up the engine hatches. Almost in tears with shame, humiliation, and frustration at not having sailed
Cresswell
out, and with the old schooners still only yards away, I stared round my boat again, like a madman trying to figure out which way he should head after climbing over an asylum wall.

Now that she had her hands on the wheel (a rare treat), Sissie was becoming romantic again. “Oh,
deah
Willie,” she gushed, “I
do
so wish that Miss Benedict were heah! She would have enjoyed herself so
bally
much. Oh what a
rotten
shame. I do hope she wins the tournament.”

“I'd rather not talk about croquet just now,” boomed Willie. “After all, we are out here to enjoy a rattling good sail, aren't we?” He watched me in silence—the miraculous silence that always falls just before a sailing boat's engine is started and after it has been stopped.

I spitefully rammed oil into my old enemies, the two cylinders. I pushed down viciously my old antagonist, the decompression lever. I attacked with brute malice my old adversary, the starting handle, even as Willie roared the words, “Reminds me of the good old days, out with Algernon and Bertie, punting down the Thames at Windsor. . . .”

“
Deah
Algernon, how awf'ly sweet he was . . . He used to dandle me on his knee . . .
awf'ly kind,
” Sissie screeched.

As I attacked the handle for the third time, sweat now pouring from me, the engine sensed my fury and decided to surrender to my wishes. With at first a sort of burp, almost apologetic, then a cough, it spluttered to life. I dropped the now-free starting handle. I leaned over and hissed at the loudly exploding engine, “Now you bastard, if you stop before half a bleedin' hour's up I'll unbutton you and you're for the deep-six!”

The engine missed a stroke, as if it were swearing that it wouldn't dream of letting me down, then roared away again.

“And I don't want to hear that bloody voice up there for at least half an hour! Understand?” I kicked the front casing of the engine, then poked my head above the hatchway. Unbelievably, Willie's voice could still be heard. I bent down again, and with a spanner soon unslipped the throttle-limiting attachment so that I could get more power and, hopefully, more noise out of the engine.

It was to no avail. Even with the throttle wide open and the hatches left gaping,
deah
Willie boomed out still over the very best the engine could do. Resigned to defeat, I made my way up to the foredeck, where I sat alongside Nelson and let the working jib flap away at my head. Its noise, combined with the engine, the spattering mainsail, the creaking sheet-blocks, and the slapping of loose halyards, helped to drown Willie's, but not quite. His voice, like an aura, like an odor, penetrated everything.

Willie was now lecturing Sissie on Art. She must have mentioned the visit to Elmyr's villa the day before. “ . . . And of course works of art are the only means whereby we can truly communicate with one another, completely and unhindered?”

I stared aft as
Cresswell
slid through the glassy harbor. Sissie was replying to her brother, tilting her head to one side and squinting. Her lips moved, but I couldn't hear her.

Then his voice chanted on. “Well, of course, the problem of art and morals . . . the relationship between them, my dear Cecilia. . . .” (
Cecilia?
) “is that it's too often mooted that the problem only exists on the side of art? Our type of people too often assume that our moral standards are satisfactory and appropriate, at least in the theory if not in the fact? We seem to question only in what ways art should conform to our ideas of morality?”

Willie droned on and on. I lay down and buried my head under Nelson's neck. He lifted his head and licked my ear. I groaned. I lifted my head and grinned at him. He grinned back. I groaned again. Nelson whimpered in reply. Even the passing harbor water looked exhausted.

When
Cresswell
was a mile offshore the sea was still as flat as a baker's tray. It was obvious there would be no wind all day. There would be no lifting to the sea-swell, no zizzing of the wind in the shrouds, not even any crafty jiggling to a soft breeze. There would certainly be no beating into the wind, with spray whizzing into our intent eyes; no sudden gusts to frighten Willie into startled silence, even momentarily, as had been my hopeful consolation until now.
Cresswell
would feel no ground-swell, nor the proud wonder of her first heaves over them, the same every time it happened, now as the very first time, way back in 1908. Today her hull would not tremble as she ran out from the protection of the jutting headland. Today she would stay a dead, inanimate collection of bits of wood and metal, put together by men's hands, like a house ashore. Today there would be no sense of heart and spirit, the soul and dream which had been built so truly and honestly into her. Today she would not send the spit of the seas playfully over her shoulder, hosing spray aft at us. She would not communicate to us the soaring
praise of life
from the sea and every living thing in it.

I stopped the engine.
Cresswell
sorrowfully slowed down and stopped dead in the dead water. She wallowed.

“No point in going any further,” I mumbled, as I crawled up out of the engine space. “We've only got enough diesel oil to get us back in again. . . . Unless you want to row.”

Willie was now in the midst of a descant on Satisfaction. “ . . . And the amount of satisfaction that we get from life largely depends on our own ingenuity?”

“Oh, dahling, not to fret one teeny bit.
Deah
Willie's
awf'ly
heppy.”

“ . . . Those of us who sit around waiting for satisfaction to overtake us. . . .”

“Well, we'll have to sit here. It's not too bad. Maybe you can talk him into going over the side for a swim.”

“. . . . usually find only boredom instead?”

“Oh, Ai say, what a
splendid
idea!”

“Yes, if I were you I'd get him over the side as soon as possible, just in case a wind comes up. You never know.”

“ . . . And, although one can be satisfied with one's circumstances, of course one can never be satisfied with one's attainments?”

Willie was in the ideal circumstance of a preacher who has achieved his highest earthly attainment: He had a captive congregation. The only escape was over the side. Either me or him. It wasn't going to be me—I can't swim.

Soon Sissie, in her black one-piece swimming suit, which made her look as if she were a contender in a 1922 beauty contest, and the bishop, who had doffed his shirts, socks, and tennis shoes, were clambering down
Cresswell
's rudder as Nelson and I watched them gleefully. Once in the water, Willie, although he spluttered at first some declamation on how fine and good it was, spoke little, and then in low tones to Sissie. For an hour or so, after I had told them there were shoals of all kinds of exotic fish by the headland a mile to the east of us (which there weren't), they stayed over there, well out of earshot, and I lay down in the sun on the weatherdeck to relax my frayed nerves. After a while there came a soft padding on deck and Nelson lay down beside me. And so we spent a sunny, calm forenoon.

As the sun reached the meridian, the rolling, vrooming voice, like a slow-moving squall, relentlessly approached
Cresswell
again, and, to Sissie's occasional murmur of comprehension and approbation, lectured to her and five wheeling seagulls on Disappointment. Presumably they had searched hard for the exotic fish.

“ . . . And Belloc wrote that he had a friend who told him in early life that he was determined to expect the worst always? For thus he would receive no . . . (splutter) . . . disappointment? Belloc wrote that he watched his friend living by that doctrine and finally discovered his friend to be abominably disappointed?!”

Sissie crowed a laugh. “Oh,
deah
Willie . . .” Her head rose over the rudderpost simultaneously with my heart dropping into my deck shoes. “ . . . So very clevah, so terribly,
awf'ly
funny!” she said as she passed by, dolloping seawater from her thick, dimpled thighs onto the decks and over me.

There was consolation, though, on that windless day off Ibiza. Willie handed up the hamper he had brought with him. Sissie opened it and revealed an Aladdin's treasure of culinary delights. There was
pâté de foie gras,
which we smeared on some bread that Sissie had made only two days before; a fine Wiltshire ham, applesauce from Warwickshire; cheddar, Lancashire, and Caerphilly cheeses; Keiller's marmalade and Robinson's jam; clotted cream and Eccles cake—all of which we washed down with real scrumpy cider from Cornwall. It was an epicurean tour of the cathedral towns and cities of England, Scotland, and Wales, and we all ate in precious, almost absolute silence, except for Willie's thundered comments on Appetite.

“It is somewhat humiliating for me . . .” (another large ham sandwich disappeared into the maw of the cathedral organ) “ . . . to realize what a controlling influence the intestines have on the thoughts and ways of humanity?”

As I handed Nelson a long string of ham fat I reflected that heaven might or might not be for Sissie and Nelson and me, but that this world was certainly for the clergy. And I thought of what an ancient fisherman had once said to me in Ireland: “It's a strange priest, beJasus, whose pig dies of starvation.”

After lunch
Cresswell
was still floating absolutely still in the water, as ashamed as an abandoned bride, so Sissie and Willie took off again swimming over the side for a pair of hours. This time they did not swim far, so instead of sleeping in peace I was treated to commentaries on various subjects.