‘We’ll have different words for things,’ Clifford said. ‘Port and starboard.’
‘They’ll be the other way round, won’t they, in France,’ said Johnny’s father.
Clifford said, ‘Just tell him to do what I say.’ He handed up a can of fuel, which Johnny took and stood holding with a looming sense of all the discipline of sailing, the shouting and blaming cutting through the fun.
The boys looked into the small sunken hutch of the cabin, with its two converging seats and Formica-topped table, then scrambled forward to explore, if that was the word – it wasn’t much bigger than the dinghy they’d borrowed last year, but it was to be their world, for the next hour or two, and seemed already made of tiny territories, occupiable surfaces. They stood clutching a diagonal cable with neither of them knowing what its name was or what it was for – but they were allies, brothers, it seemed to Johnny, within the narrow bounds of the boat and the trip. ‘Who is Leslie? This man’s wife?’
‘Leslie,’ said Johnny, ‘no it’s a man, it’s a man’s name too, like . . . well, you wouldn’t know him, probably, Leslie Crowther, on Crackerjack . . . no . . . Leslie Stevens is an MP.’
‘Oh,’ said Bastien and wrinkled his nose.
‘A Member of Parliament. He’s quite important,’ said Johnny.
‘You know Leslie?’
‘Me? No. Not personally,’ said Johnny. ‘He’s not our MP.’
‘And this man is a Member?’
‘Who? Mr Haxby?’ – he glanced round but Clifford and his father were caught up in some quiet-voiced routine of their own, business as well as sailing, business as usual. ‘No, he’s on the County Council, you know, very important too, Dad says.’
Bastien smiled, and scratched his balls. ‘All very important,’ he said.
The sun, that had been promising the past ten minutes, came out, a great distance of blue showed high over the cloud. Johnny swung on the cable, half seduced by Bastien’s mockery, but not quite ready to forsake so much reflected glory.
They were going to go out on the motor; a powerful one, only roused past the curt roar of the start-cord into continuous untroubled action when Johnny’s father nudged Clifford aside, strength hoarded all year for these rare and richly satisfying moments. Clifford pursed his lips in a funny way at this further show of muscle, nudging his way back, and when he’d done so revving up the engine in a quick smoking snarl as they cast off. In the estuary still, million-sided sunlight on water green as the woods above, a dazzle over weeded rocks, sudden dark drops below, they went out unhurriedly, responsibly cutting their wash as they passed children kayaking, a couple rowing a skiff with a terrier in the bows. Still, there was a sense of lurking mischief between the two men that Johnny was unsettled by. Threaded along the shore, barely followable, was the path they had taken, and then round the steep point past Parry’s yard the whole painted panorama of the town curled forward into view, Johnny not knowing if the daring and privilege of being out in a boat was worth more to him than the warm solid pleasure of going to the café and the pasty shop and watching the half-naked boys on the harbour wall. ‘I say, David,’ said Clifford, ‘when Archer Square’s done you’ll be getting something a bit bigger than this.’ It was a name out of the air of the recent months, the ‘really big job’ Johnny’s parents stopped talking about if he came into the room, though it wasn’t exactly a secret. A photo of the model had appeared in the paper, blank white cuboids surrounding a blank white tower, ‘the tallest building in the Midlands’, raised roads beside it, dotted with balsa-wood cars.
‘Well, we’ll see about that, Cliff,’ Johnny’s father said.
‘We’ll have a bloody shipshape crew too – not this schoolboy shower – eh?’ – Clifford beamed alarmingly at Johnny, who said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and looked down. The Falmouth ferry was coming past, turning in towards the harbour, and Clifford seemed to flirt with it, running in close, holiday-makers on deck looking down at them, and in a moment they were riding and smacking along the larger boat’s wake, among seagulls dropping and screaming and lifting off. A child at the back of the ferry waved. Clifford twisted the throttle and their bows rose by a few degrees as they curled out beyond the point towards the open sea. Bastien turned his head aside and stood down with Johnny in the step of the cabin. ‘All right, Cliff,’ said Johnny’s father, unruffled but not, Johnny felt, especially impressed.
The rhythmical jolts across the surface of the sea, the wind making you cry unconsciously and flipping Bastien’s cap off his head without warning (Johnny jumped and saved it where it wrapped for a second round a cable) were things he knew he was meant to enjoy, but almost made him long for the dreaded part, when they put up the sails. It wasn’t a speedboat, after all; he wondered what Leslie Stevens MP would think if he saw his friends using his Ganymede like this, Clifford grinning like a bully to show he at least was having fun. Then he turned the speed quickly to nothing, so they seemed to lurch forward where they stood; they settled down and back. Clifford told the boys to untie the cords that bound the sail to the long horizontal boom, and the other small sail that was in front of the mast. They got on with it, and there was something too interesting to look at closely in Bastien obeying orders, a sort of absent-minded competence worth more to him for an hour or two than his usual effort at showing he didn’t care.
When the big sail went up it was suddenly serious, and they were all responsible. The uncomfortable fun of the first bit was over, and now there was going to be tacking and being shouted at, hanging on the side with the sea always dashing to get you as you slid over it and giving you a wet slap now and then. Again Johnny’s father seemed more in his element than Clifford, it was a practical lesson in physics, whose laws he had long ago mastered; the two men stared and smiled at each other as the sail ran up in half a dozen hard yanks, hand over hand, and tautened as it had to. And it went as it was meant to, Johnny was proud of his father, watching the sail, which cut off the sun, a new presence among them and above them. Johnny had one of the two ropes to the boom, and after a while his father nodded and passed the other to Bastien. ‘Steady, young feller,’ he said. For two or three minutes they scooted on, sail curving, in their sound-world made only of the creak of the mast in the rush of air and the splash and concussion of the waves on the little hull, Johnny feeling the delight of it after all, and being able to do it – he grinned at Bastien, and looked back at Clifford, and away across the glittering sea at other boats sailing, crews out and about on courses of their own.
Without warning Clifford shouted, ‘Ready about!’ in a clipped hard tone that had been waiting for its moment – the boom swung across, the sail indecisive, robbed of all will for a moment and then jerking and filling out with a thump and a snap on the other side, as Johnny snatched at Bastien’s shirthem and brought him under. Still, they got in the rhythm of it, and again it wasn’t something Bastien saw any point in being bad at; though he had, once he’d settled in, a blank look on his face, as if tiring of his own obedience. Sailing required such effort and concentration that time itself speeded up and it was hard to enjoy the real beauty of what you could see as you went skimming along – the dazzle of the broken sea and the coast beyond all the while slowly turning, advancing, and falling away. Johnny thought Bastien himself was beautiful, half-unwillingly woken up and with a strength he perhaps didn’t know he had as he gripped his rope and held the boom firm and thrumming against the wind. The wind made the sunlight cold and shaped Bastien’s shirt tightly round him; it went for his cap again, and in the second he snatched for it he let the rope go, and in the second after that his plimsolled right foot caught Johnny in the ribs as he dropped, on his back, into the sea.