‘The Lookout’ opened in front on to a patio and steeply dropping lawn, with a broad view of sea above the roofs of the town below; but at the back it was half quarried out of the shaly hillside. The boys’ bedroom looked over a narrow gully at the side wall of the garage of the next house up the hill; so far they’d found it best to keep the curtains closed. Their beds were bunk beds, kids’ beds which Bastien, a year older than Johnny, was already too big for. The spindly structure shuddered and lurched when he clambered in and out of the top bunk, and when he turned over. Johnny was condemned to lie under the low meshed ceiling, under Bastien’s shifting weight, staring upwards for long minutes in the first dawn light at a dangling sheet or sometimes an unconscious left hand, dimly pulsing inches from his face as Bastien slumbered on his front and Johnny listened, hypnotized, to the tone of his breathing. Bastien didn’t have pyjamas, he slept in his underpants – Johnny lay beneath him picturing him from above. Whenever he finally got to sleep the light would be on and Bastien would be going to the lavatory. Yesterday his mother had suggested not flushing at night, she’d broken the rule and used French words to explain. ‘I don’t mean “rougir”,’ she said, and did so, to Bastien’s sly fascination. She was the person he paid most attention to, and he followed her from sunroom to kitchen and almost into the lavatory with fixated courtesy.
Johnny went along the landing with a gloomy feeling, but when he opened the door the room was bright: there were the unmade bunks, Bastien’s open suitcase covering half the floor, and Bastien, up, dressed, and lacing up his plimsolls. Johnny checked what he was wearing in one oblique glance: the tight dark-blue jeans with frayed hems, a red polo shirt; now he stood and stroked back his hair and pulled on his ‘Coq Sportif’ cap, with the peak angled high, and there being no mirror in the room he turned to Johnny for approval.
On the narrow path Johnny fell behind, glad no one would be looking at him for a minute or two. His father was some way in front, moving faster, with a coil of rope round one shoulder, as if about to scale a cliff; Bastien scrambled after him, carrying the two oars; and Johnny came last, clutching the slippery life jackets.
The path was romantic, twisting, up-and-down, thrown sideways by large stones and the roots of the thorns and hazels that closed it in for much of the way, with glimpses here and there of the weed-covered rocks below. It was a sequence Johnny was still learning – the fenced-off stretch where it turned inland round the back of Parry’s yard, the dip where a rising tide forced you up into the hedge if you wanted to keep dry, the five or six back gates with the names of houses that were hidden in high trees above the estuary, some broken, blocked and overgrown, some giving glimpses of exotic Cornish gardens climbing the slopes. To him the names blurred, ‘Pencawl’, ‘Pencara’, but each gate had its different magic. Now called-out words were heard behind a hedge; here a tumbledown gateway was choked by dank elder, with fox-paths through the nettles. Ahead of him Bastien stopped to look at something Johnny’s father had of course ignored, scattered parts, a wing, stray feathers, a knot of grey gristle, of some not quite nameable bird. Johnny peered at him warily before he pushed against him and as they stooped to examine it he found the warmth of him so painful both to feel and to resist that he was glad when Bastien stood straight again with a sickly smile and moved suddenly ahead. The short oars lodged aslant over each shoulder kept Johnny at a distance all the way to the kissing-gate at the end; here last year he had always claimed a forfeit from his mother, until the day when she told him not to be daft. He burned with the memory of it. Now Bastien edged into the narrow pen of the gate, the paddles tilting and banging on the wall as he tried to hold them with one arm and swing the gate back with the other. Johnny hovered behind, his freedom neutered by the armful of life jackets. ‘Merde!’ said Bastien – Johnny threw down the jackets, leant forward to swing the gate through its tight quadrant, and watched his friend step free. He picked up the jackets again, with a dismal sense of the slavery to tasks that was his father’s ideal of a holiday, and said, ‘You’re meant to kiss me before you let me through.’ But Bastien by now was some way ahead, at the top of the Club’s concrete slipway, where Clifford Haxby was waiting for them.
2
First they had to put on their life-jackets. ‘You can all swim, I hope,’ said Clifford as he passed them round.
‘You mean you can’t, Cliff?’ said Johnny’s father, with a concerned little smile, at which Clifford tutted scornfully.
‘Only in the bloody Navy, wasn’t I.’
His father looked puzzled for a second – ‘The Navy . . . ? Oh, didn’t I hear something about them once, in the War?’ and he winked at Bastien, who stared blankly and then, alarmingly, winked back.
Johnny pulled the cord through and tightened it. He retained a subliminal sense of his father’s strong hands holding him, above and below, then pushing him away, the fluid sequence of security, cold fear, freedom, but he couldn’t remember not being able to swim. And Bastien was all right – Johnny pictured him at the big public baths in Nîmes last summer, smashing around, with no fear and not much skill, then surging up out of the pool so fast that his trunks were half torn off by the water. In fact he’d pictured it quite often. Today Clifford was in dark shorts tight across his backside, revealing lean white hairless legs; he had a blue sailing cap pushed back, his oiled forelock fell over his left eye in a ragged comma. He might have been in the Navy in the War but he seemed to be play-acting more than Johnny’s father, in his old khaki running shorts and blue windcheater, taking up the oars Bastien had thrown down and wading into the sea in his deck shoes to get to the little tender. In a minute they were all in, riding low down under their joint weight, and moving off now with the first thrust and quiver of being out of their element. Heavy in the centre, held steady by the boys, lay the motor, sleek white body and two long screws. Clifford watched Johnny’s father rowing, seemed to take the measure of his neatness and power. ‘It’s not the bloody Boat Race, you know, David,’ he said.
Johnny’s father smiled and raised an eyebrow. ‘So which one is she, skipper?’ There were fifty boats out there at least, different sizes and ages, sleek floating homes one or two of them, riding high above little brown craft that felt more homely and more loved, Doris, Jeanetta. Leslie Stevens’s boat was moored way out beyond the biggest one of all, Aegean Queen, all closed up, curtains drawn, sinisterly private.
‘It’s just like Thunderball, Dad,’ said Johnny.
‘All right, there she is,’ said Clifford, as they came round, clear of her anchor cables, stretched out by the outgoing tide. Johnny construed the strange word Ganymede in white on the blue strip above the white hull – the letters strange though he knew the name and hoped Clifford didn’t know the story, he was bound to harp on about it if he did.
‘Is this what they call a destroyer, Cliff?’ said his father – he was terribly humorous today. Clifford found it more captainlike to ignore him.
‘She’s just a pocket cruiser,’ he said, ‘twenty-five foot,’ and looked approvingly at the little boat, which as they clambered on to it from the tender had a comparative stability and even a slightly worrying size. ‘Leslie had her out with his boys at the weekend.’ Bastien seemed nervous as he stepped up on to the narrow edge of it and groped forward for a hand-hold as the tender pushed up and bobbed away. ‘Has he sailed before?’ said Clifford.
Bastien shrugged and said, ‘Yes,’ and looked away, which Johnny assumed meant ‘No’.