The Shape of Clouds Page 16

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Hello.’ She stretched and yawned, and her hair lay on her shoulders. I passed her a cup of lemon tea, and sat next to her on the bed. She put her hand on my knee and said, ‘You’ll have to get some music up here.’

  ‘I was thinking about it.’

  ‘Get a CD player.’

  ‘I was reading about CDs. They sound very good.’

  ‘They are,’ she said, and she sipped her tea.

  I reached behind my ear and took the wren’s feathers, and held one out to her.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s for you,’ I said. ‘It’s the second luckiest thing a sailor can wear. I found it outside your mother’s cottage.’ I twirled it. ‘Jenny’s feather. You wear it in your cap. Or your hair.’

  ‘Jenny’s feather?’

  ‘It’s from a wren. I should have found it on New Year’s Day, but…’

  ‘Don’t…’ She held up a hand. ‘… explain,’ and she brushed it against her lips. ‘It’s a sailor’s charm?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s all I need to know.’

  That was all you needed to know? I think you needed to know more but I couldn’t tell you, I couldn’t explain. Do you remember what I did instead? I went downstairs.

  ‌23

  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?’

  ‘Th
an 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.

  ‌24

  I took my last voyage in the spring of 1991, the MV Spanish Key out of Felixstowe to Gydnia via Copenhagen. A mixed cargo, a Polish crew, the clouds impossible to read. Nothing but lowering stratocumulus.

  I remember — the crew were sympathetic. They kept out of my way, they gave me the run of the bridge. I ate alone in the day cabin, and didn’t raise my voice.

  Through the gas fields of the North Sea and the cloud broke. Past the nervous coast of Denmark, Helsingør Castle floodlit in the night, crates of beer stacked on the quay at Copenhagen, the sound of the crew cheering a woman as she waved from the deck of a sail training ship…

  The Baltic… it was calm and blue, and with the Spanish Key on automatic pilot I sat back in the helmsman’s chair. The ocean spread before me, the sun above, seabirds drifting. The crackle of the radio, the sweep of the radar, the blink of a dozen lights. The horizon dulled into the sky while Poland grew to the south.

  I was experienced, trusted with twelve thousand tons of cargo ship and a crew of eighteen men. I had money in the bank and luck drifted in my wake. Some women had remembered me; dogs liked me. I had no unsavoury personal habits, and I did not hold grudges. I did not believe in God but I read at least one book a week. I had never been unemployed but I had never worked on land. The sea owned me, and as it washed by I wished it would tell me what I was going to do. Where could I go? Would I die without it; would my luck dry up? Had I made a mistake; should I have bought a yacht and sailed the islands of Polynesia? Should I buy a dog?

  I got down from the helmsman’s chair and stood over the chart table. I picked up the dividers and checked the position. Perfect. I looked outside and checked the clouds. Exactly fourteen nautical miles off Rozewie, entering the Gulf of Danzig.

  I spent my last run ashore in Gdansk. I drank coffee and ate a pastry in a main street café, an expensive place with huge tables and carved chairs. The smell of a sweet perfume hung in the air.

  I went to the cinema and saw a Polish film about an apple picker, a piano player and the rites of spring. I didn’t understand a word but I enjoyed it, I enjoyed the dark. I felt slow and as I watched the credits I wanted to stay where I was, I did not want to go home.

  ‘I retired on the first day of May.

  ‘I took a train from Felixstowe to London, and visited my mother’s grave. It was raining. Her stone and the earth told me nothing. I laid some flowers on the grass, but as I was doing it I felt bad and empty. I wanted to talk to her, to tell her that her cap had protected me, and I wanted to ask her what I should do. I wanted to get down on my knees but I couldn’t bend, the words broke, the thoughts faded away. I walked away with no idea.

  ‘I had a niece in Liverpool. I phoned her and she invited me to stay, but when we met I didn’t recognise her and we had nothing to say. She watched television during the day and stayed out all night, every night. She didn’t have a book in the house, or any pictures on the walls. So I packed my sea-bag, left a note on her kitchen table and began to voyage through the country.

  ‘As I travelled, I followed the direction of clouds. When I left Liverpool they were drifting north-east, so I walked towards the Yorkshire Dales, and I got work building a wall. Later the clouds blew to the west, and I blew to the Lakes. I loved the Lakes. You’d love the Lakes…

  ‘I worked for a boatman at Coniston. It was my job to take money from tourists who wanted to rent rowing boats on the lake. I enjoyed that. I stayed for the summer. I let the clouds drift without me.’

  ‘Then…’

  ‘One foot in front of the other.

  ‘The autumn came and I followed a flight of cirrus south. I think I ended up in Wales. I remember painting a farmer’s caravan and playing with his dogs on the beach. Or maybe he only had one dog… I remember the place, though, in Dyfed. It was along the coast from Fishguard.

  ‘I became a story sailors tell, the one about the old captain who travels the earth looking for the comfort the ocean used to give him, reading the shape of clouds as he once read the swell of waves. He stands at crossroads and can hear waves as they break a hundred miles away, and he always heads towards them. He carries a shell in his pocket and wears a cauled cap on his head.’ I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out a shell. I put it on the bed. ‘That’s it.

  ‘One day a cloud drifted here and stopped, and it chose this place for me. West as feet can follow, the sea a pool of tears… It told me to rest and I thought, I’ve done enough walking. That’s enough. The cloud moved on but I stayed. I bought the house, I started the garden, I f
rightened the natives and then…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You came.’ I took her hand and she rested her head on my shoulder. ‘You came.’

  She said, ‘I almost didn’t.’

  I had put glass in the windows. A single cloud crossed the face of the moon. Its shadow caught the side of the house and spilled into the bedroom. We watched it cross the floor and spread up the far wall before fading.

  ‘But you did.’

  ‘I did,’ she said, as another cloud shadowed the room.

  I lay back and listened to the sea rustling along the shore, and the call of a distant bird. I shifted my legs and she shifted towards me, and when I closed my eyes I heard the darkness sing, and the clouds gathered in chorus.

  This was in the night of the late spring. The air was cool but had begun to sense summer. The bird’s call was returned by a cry from the ruins, a single note that held itself for a moment and then faded away.

  ‌

  ‌Also available by Peter Benson

  ‌

  Peter Benson’s new novel

  OUT IN AUGUST 2012

  David Morris lives the quiet life of a book-valuer for a London auction house, travelling every day by omnibus to his office in the Strand. When he is asked to make a trip to rural Somerset to value the library of the recently deceased Lord Buff-Orpington, the sense of trepidation he feels as he heads into the country is confirmed the moment he reaches his destination, the dark and impoverished village of Ashbrittle. These feelings turn to dread when he meets the enigmatic Professor Richard Hunt and catches a glimpse of a screaming woman he keeps prisoner in his house.

  Peter Benson’s new novel is a slick gothic tale in the English tradition, a murder mystery, a reflection on the works of the masters of the French Enlightenment and a tour of Edwardian England. More than this, it is a work of atmosphere and unease which creates a world of inhuman anxiety and suspense.