Offshore. Alan Hollinghurst

Nenna admired him and would have liked to throw her arms round him.

      ‘No, I won’t come in now, thank you all the same,’ called Father Watson, whose flapping trousers could now be seen beside Tilda’s wellingtons against a square patch of sky. ‘Just a word or two, Mrs James, I can easily wait if you’re engaged with your friends or if it’s not otherwise convenient.’

      But Nenna, somewhat to the curate’s surprise, for he seldom felt himself to be a truly welcome guest, was already half way up the companion. It had begun to drizzle, and his long macintosh was spangled with drops of rain, which caught the reflections of the shore lights and the riding lights of the craft at anchor.

      ‘I’m afraid the little one will get wet.’

      ‘She’s waterproof,’ said Nenna.

      As soon as they reached the Embankment Father Watson began to speak in measured tones. ‘It’s the children, as you must be aware, that I’ve come about. A message from the nuns, a message from the Sisters of Misericord.’ He sometimes wondered if he would be more successful in the embarrassing errands he was called upon to undertake if he had an Irish accent, or some quaint turn of speech.

      ‘Your girls, Mrs James, Tilda here, and the twelve-year-old.’

      ‘Martha.’

      ‘A very delightful name. Martha busied herself about the household work during our Lord’s visits. But not a saint’s name, I think.’

      Presumably Father Watson said these things automatically. He couldn’t have walked all the way down to the Reach from his comfortless presbytery simply to talk about Martha’s name.

      ‘She’ll be taking another name at confirmation, I assume. That should not long be delayed. I suggest Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, since you’ve decided to make your dwelling place upon the face of the waters.’

      ‘Father, have you come to complain about the girls’ absence from school?’

      They had arrived at the wharf, which was exceedingly ill-lit. The brewers to whom it belonged, having ideas, like all brewers in the 1960s, of reviving the supposed jollity of the eighteenth century, had applied for permission to turn it into a fashionable beer garden. The very notion, however, ran counter to the sodden, melancholy, and yet enduring spirit of the Reach. After the plans had been shelved, the whole place had been leased out to various small-time manufacturers and warehousemen; the broken-down sheds and godowns must still be the property of somebody, so too must be the piles of crates whose stencilled lettering had long since faded to pallor.

      But, rat-ridden and neglected, it was a wharf still. The river’s edge, where Virgil’s ghosts held out their arms in longing for the farther shore, and Dante, as a living man, was refused passage by the ferryman, the few planks that mark the meeting point of land and water, there, surely, is a place to stop and reflect, even if, as Father Watson did, you stumble over a ten-gallon tin of creosote.

      ‘I’m afraid I’m not accustomed to the poor light, Mrs James.’

      ‘Look at the sky, father. Keep your eyes on the lightest part of the sky and they’ll adapt little by little.’

      Tilda had sprung ahead, at home in the dark, and anywhere within sight and sound of water. Feeling that she had given her due of politeness to the curate, the due exacted by her mother and elder sister, she pattered onto Maurice, and, after having a bit of a poke round, shot across the connecting gangplank onto Grace.

      ‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t go any further, Mrs James. It’s exactly what you said, it’s the question of school attendance. The situation, you see, they tell me there’s a legal aspect to it as well.’

      How dispiriting for Father Watson to tell her this, Nenna thought, and how far it must be from his expectations when he received his first two minor orders, and made his last acts of resignation. To stand on this dusky wharf, bruised by a drum of creosote, and acting not even as the convent chaplain, but as some kind of school attendance officer!

      ‘I know they haven’t been coming to class regularly. But then, father, they haven’t been well.’

      Even Father Watson could scarcely be expected to swallow this. ‘I was struck by the good health and spirits of your little one. In fact I had it in mind that she might be trained up to one of the women’s auxiliary services which justified themselves so splendidly in the last war – the WRENS, I mean, of course. It’s a service that’s not incompatible with the Christian life.’

      ‘You know how it is with children; she’s well one day, not so well the next.’ Nenna’s attitude to truth was flexible, and more like Willis’s than Richard’s. ‘And Martha’s the same, it’s only to be expected at her age.’

      Nenna had hoped to alarm the curate with these references to approaching puberty, but he seemed, on the contrary, to be reassured. ‘If that’s the trouble, you couldn’t do better than to entrust her to the skilled understanding of the Sisters.’ How dogged he was. ‘They’ll expect, then, to see both your daughters in class on Monday next.’

      ‘I’ll do what I can.’

      ‘Very well, Mrs James.’

      ‘Won’t you come as far as the boat?’

      ‘No, no, I won’t risk the crossing a second time.’ What had happened the first time? ‘And now, I’m afraid I’ve somewhat lost my sense of direction. I’ll have to ask you my way to dry land.’

      Nenna pointed out the way through the gate, which, swinging on its hinges, no longer provided any kind of barrier, out onto the Embankment, and first left, first right up Partisan Street for the King’s Road. The priest couldn’t have looked more relieved if he had completed a mission to those that dwell in the waters that are below the earth.

      ‘I’ve got the supper, Ma,’ said Martha, when Nenna returned to Grace. Nenna would have felt better pleased with herself if she had resembled her elder daughter. But Martha, small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world’s shortcomings, was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha.

      ‘We’re having baked beans. If Father Watson’s coming, we shall have to open another tin.’

      ‘No, dear, he’s gone home.’

      Nenna felt tired, and sat down on the keelson, which ran from end to end of the flat-bottomed barge. It was quite wrong to come to depend too much upon one’s children.

      Martha set confidently to work in Grace’s galley, which consisted of two gas rings in the bows connected to a Calor cylinder, and a brass sink. Water came to the sink from a container on deck, which was refilled by a man from the boat-yard once every twenty-four hours. A good deal of improvisation was necessary and Martha had put three tin plates to heat up over the hissing saucepan of beans.

      ‘Was it fun on Lord Jim?’

      ‘Oh, not at all.’

      ‘Should I have enjoyed it?’

      ‘Oh no, I don’t think so. Mrs Blake threw cheese straws into the stove.’

      ‘What did Mr Blake say?’

      ‘He wants to keep her happy, to make her happy, I don’t know.’

      ‘What did Father Watson want?’

      ‘Didn’t he talk to you at all?’

      ‘I daresay he would have done, but I sent him out to fetch you, with Tilda, she needed exercise.’

      ‘So he didn’t mention anything.’

      ‘He just came down here, and I made him a cup of tea and we said an act of contrition together.’

      ‘He wanted to know why you hadn’t been to class lately.’

      Martha