Debatable Land Read Free Page A

temper of everyone eating breakfast. The relief at leaving hot, expensive Papeete was considerable, like at last having a drink of water or a shower, two things paradoxically rationed at sea.
    The berth at Papeete was no more than a busy road, noisy at night and heavy with the fumes of traffic, beer, fast food, so that living on the boat felt more cramped than it did out at sea, where their accommodation was not exposed to the curiosity of all strangers. At night in their urban berth, a glaring lamp was set up in Ardent Spirit ’s shrouds, to discourage drunks from coming aboard to sleep in her sail bin. The hatches had to be shut, or pranksters would creep over the deck to drop cigarettes or worse in on sleepers, so it was suffocatingly hot below. The harbour water had a skin of oil that made the water move slowly and left black smears of dead rainbow on the white hulls of the boats lolling, tied stern-to up to the pavement along which roamed tourists in various stages of disillusion with the place, a paradise handled.
    Only when approached as any other colonial town did Papeete begin to reveal such charm as it had. The decontraction associated with earthly delights withers when it is a question of affording the water or the apple, but not both. The dissension in the saloon of Ardent Spirit , that first morning for all six together at sea, concerned cheese.
    The cheese was from Paris, the city that administered Tahiti. Plastic Port Salut, flown to New Caledonia and brought on a cargo ship to Tahiti from Noumea, with such tropical essentials as heated rollers, fake tan, artificial flowers, pineapple juice and the hair accoutrements known as rats.
    ‘Ten pounds for a piece of cheese that has travelled the world by three different forms of transport, signed all the relevant forms, hung about in at least two warehouses and remains absolutely unchanged by its experiences. It is a narrow-minded cheese,’ said Gabriel, ‘for narrow-minded French consumers.’
    Unpleasant emotions about the French are unleashed by French colonies in some sorts of Briton. In Papeete, it was not hard for the most Francophile to see things reflecting badly on the administrators of the island. Among sights more glancingly combining the best of the cultures here melted together, the stately transvestites walking abreast punctuated in their reined-in strides by a little black poodle, the green pharmacy cross nicely medicinal in a street of boulangeries selling sorbets like frozen inks, in the sheer shade of mountains ribboned with silver waterfalls, there was to be seen a Frenchness that was less seductive and that did not include the people colonised except as they were of use.
    Logan Urquhart was not wholly for spirited opinions in women unless voiced with concision and consonant with his own feelings on the matter. In this case he agreed to the extent that he found the French greedy and pusillanimous while admiring some superficial aspects of their culture. He was wary of going too far this early in a voyage when he had to live so closely with his wife, a Scot who keenly felt the Auld Alliance of blood and philosophical speculation with the French. Elspeth often expressed feelings about the English similar to those Logan held about the French. He wondered sometimes if her talk about the French was not worn like costume jewellery to make herself interesting at little expense. Since, anyhow, he imagined he could predict what Elspeth might say, he prepared himself for a period in the conversation during which he anticipated she might speak; so he began to think of other things, a uxorious habit even more practical on a boat than on dry land.
    It is odd, thought Alec, that this boring conversation is no less boring because we are tipped up in the Pacific Ocean by a miracle of wind and water, moving through their agency to another place we shall fail to understand, discuss clumsily, forget, and then, as time builds lies into beauty recollected, recall