He started the car and drove out of the car park. He would go and see the Braintrees. They would still be up and glad to see him and besides he needed to talk to someone. Behind him on the building site his notes on violence and the Break-Up of Family Life drifted about in the night wind and stuck in the mud.
Chapter 7
‘Nature is so libidinous.’ said Sally, shining a torch through the porthole at the reeds. ‘I mean take bullrushes. I mean they’re positively archetypally phallus. Don’t you think so, G?’
‘Bullrushes?’ said Gaskell, gazing helplessly at a chart. ‘Bullrushes do nothing for me.’
‘Maps neither, by the look of it’
‘Charts, baby, charts.’
‘What’s in a name?’
‘Right now, a hell of a lot. We’re either in Frogwater Reach or Fen Broad. No telling which.’
‘Give me Fen Broad every time. I just adore broads. Eva sweetheart, how’s about another pot of coffee? I want to stay awake all night and watch the dawn come up over the bullrushes.’
‘Yes, well I don’t,’ said Gaskell. ‘Last night was enough for me. That crazy guy with the doll in the bath and Schei cutting himself. That’s enough for one day. I’m going to hit the sack.’
‘The deck,’ said Sally, ‘hit the deck, G. Eva and I are sleeping down here. Three’s a crowd.’
‘Three? With boobs around it’s five at the least. OK, so I sleep on deck. We’ve got to be up early if we’re to get off this damned sandbank.’
‘Has Captain Pringsheim stranded us, baby?’
‘It’s these charts. If only they would give an exact indication of depth.’
‘If you knew where we were, you’d probably find they do. It’s no use knowing it’s three feet–’
‘Fathoms, honey, fathoms.’
‘Three fathoms in Frogwater Reach if we’re really in Fen Broad.’
‘Well, wherever we are, you’d better start hoping there’s a tide that will rise and float us off,’ said Gaskell.
‘And if there isn’t?’
‘Then we’ll have to think of something else. Maybe someone will come along and tow us off.’
‘Oh God, G, you’re the skilfullest,’ said Sally. ‘I mean why couldn’t we have just stayed out in the middle? But no, you had to come steaming up this creek wham into a mudbank and all because of what? Ducks, goddamned ducks.’
‘Waders, baby, waders. Not just ducks.’
‘OK, so they’re waders. You want to photograph them so now we’re stuck where no one in their right minds would come in a boat. Who do you think is going to come up here? Jonathan Seagull?’
In the galley Eva made coffee. She was wearing the bright red plastic bikini Sally had lent her. It was rather too small for her so that she bulged round it uncomfortably and it was revealingly tight but at least it was better than going around naked even though Sally said nudity was being liberated and look at the Amazonian Indians. She should have brought her own things but Sally had insisted on hurrying and now all she had were the lemon loungers and the bikini. Honestly Sally was so authora…authorasomething…well, bossy then.
‘Dual-purpose plastic, baby, apronwise,’ she had said, ‘and G has this thing about plastic, haven’t you, G?’
‘Bio-degradably yes.’
‘Bio-degradably?’ asked Eva, hoping to be initiated into some new aspect of women’s liberation.
‘Plastic bottles that disintegrate instead of lying around making an ecological swamp,’ said Sally, opening a porthole and dropping an empty cigar packet over the side, ‘that’s G’s lifework. That and recyclability. Infinite recyclability.’
‘Right,’ said Gaskell. ‘We’ve got in-built obsolescence in the automotive field where it’s outmoded. So what we need now is in-built bio-degradable deliquescence in ephemera.’
Eva listened uncomprehendingly but with the feeling that she was somehow at the centre of an intellectual world far surpassing that of Henry and his friends who talked about new degree courses and their students so boringly.
‘We’ve got a compost heap at the bottom of the garden,’ she said when she finally understood what they were talking about. ‘I put the potato peelings and odds and ends on it.’
Gaskell raised his eyes to the cabin roof. Correction. Deckhead.
‘Talking of odds and ends.’ said Sally, running a fond hand over Eva’s bottom, ‘I wonder how Henry is getting along with Judy.’
Eva shuddered. The thought of Henry and the doll lying in the bath still haunted her.
‘I can’t think what had got into him.’ she said, and looked disapprovingly at Gaskell when he sniggered. ‘I mean it’s not as if he has ever been unfaithful or anything like that. And lots of husbands are. Patrick Mottram is always going off and having affairs with other women but Henry’s been very good in that respect. He may be quiet and not very pushing but no one could call him a gadabout.’
‘Oh sure,’ said Gaskell, ’so he’s got a hang-up about sex. My heart bleeds for him.’
‘I don’t see why you should say he’s got something wrong with him because he’s faithful,’ said Eva.
‘G didn’t mean that, did you, G?’ said Sally. ‘He meant that there has to be true freedom in a marriage. No dominance, no jealousy, no possession. Right, G?’
‘Right.’ said Gaskell.
‘The test of true love is when you can watch your wife having it off with someone else and still love her,’ Sally went on.
‘I could never watch Henry…’ said Eva. ‘Never.’
‘So you don’t love him. You’re insecure. You don’t trust him.’
‘Trust him?’ said Eva. ‘If Henry went to bed with another woman I don’t see how I could trust him. I mean if that’s what he wants to do why did he marry me?’
‘That,’ said Gaskell. ‘is the sixty-four-thousand dollar question.’ He picked up his sleeping bag and went out on deck. Behind him Eva had begun to cry.
‘There, there,’ said Sally, putting her arm round her. ‘G was just kidding. He didn’t mean anything.’
‘It’s not that.’ said Eva, ‘it’s just that I don’t understand anything any more. It’s all so complicated.’