Debatable Land Read Free Page B

transformed. Why did I come here? Why did I think I could change things in my life without changing myself?
    As the tropical day began with its misleading purity to steal into and refresh them all, so they each saw ahead in this early heat of ill-temper the real danger of anger in a confined space and each, without knowing he or she did so, made a delicate concession and turned words through the uncomfortable degrees of angry argument to the pleasant pastime of exchanging differing opinions. The two women, Elspeth and Gabriel, led in this, conceding repeatedly and denying their own seriousness, until each danger was past and every person on board was returned to the position most conducive to peace, forward movement, and the maintenance of the status quo.
    Having come to this extreme place to assess his own life among strangers, Alec felt his misgivings weigh him down. Had he not simply recreated, in farcically condensed form, the difficulties he wished to sort out? Was the extremity of the situation, shut up in a pretty husk with five other souls between planets and sea monsters, not just a newer nightmare, more vulgar because so rich in psychological archetypes?
    Suppose he were casting the play of his own life. Logan, the wooden but powerful rich man, would have to be his father, the fishmonger. Elspeth, who seemed to Alec alternately garrulous and blank, and with something insincere lying in her, was unlike his mother in every way he could think of. It was not possible to think of her saving milk-bottle tops in a heavy silver ball or taking the washing to the steamie in a pram. Neither the stern rectitude of saving, nor its dignified rewards, he thought, could ever have struck so pampered a character as Elspeth.
    Nonetheless she was a diligent housekeeper, if that was what you called a woman who cleaned a boat inside as though the polish and rubbing would cause the thing to grow roots off its keel, flip upright, sprout a chimney and turn into a house. Could Elspeth have undiagnosed hydrophobia? He would try her, perhaps, later.
    Alec’s mother rose at four-thirty to clean the house and his own and her selves. The water she heated up in grey pans you could boil a sheep in, on the old Raeburn fed with coke from a metal scuttle. The noise she made pouring the coke was the noise of steeply dragged shingle under surf. She riddled it with a rod that glowed like a tiger’s tail. Soda crystals fizzed as they went into the water, down the lavatory pan, down the bends of the double sink. He heard her flushing out the house’s dirty secrets, before she came to get started on his own.
    Alec being a landlubber and a bohemian prude took Sandro and Gabriel to be lovers. He was that bit older than they were so that he suspected all young people of falling on one another when he was not looking. He thought that they, having so much he feared to have lost, must have everything he had not. He could not see that they were fleeing, often, from the trivial shape of their own thoughts and might wonder what he might have to tell them. Their handsome appearance and physical ease with the ropes and the wheel made Alec feel weighty and exposed if new sails were hoisted when the wind changed. At home he had sailed in small boats; the scale of this one made him afraid of accidents. He was the last to join this company and already he was wondering behind what false exterior to shelter. He had not yet properly left the land.
    For the present, he thought it best to hang like a mackerel does in the water, not visible from below because its silver belly is only a floating mote against the paleness of the sky, not visible from above because its black-mapped blue back is incorporated with the contoured surface of the blue-black sea.
    He continued to cast the central characters in his life from the people he was confined with on Ardent Spirit . If he had met almost no one, he thought, as spoilt as Logan and Elspeth Urquhart, he had met almost no one as