Coasting by Jonathan Raban Read Free Book Online Page A

always something absurd and disproportionate about any boat seen out of the water. The most graceful craft go dowdy and frumpish when you see them in the nude. This one looked gross—a huge and flabby Amazon. Her bottom had come out in an eczematic rash of limpets. The blue paint on her superior parts was bleached and peeling. Scabby, trussed, leaning heavily on her crutches, she looked incapable of ever putting to sea again.
    My shadow scared a sunbathing family of fiddler crabs in the muddy pool which the boat had dug for herself as she grounded with the tide. They shuffled away across the pool floor and hid in the dark under her flounced bilges.
    I found a boarding ladder under a dusty tree and climbed ten feet up onto the deck, which was the usual jumble of anchors, buckets, boathooks, ropes and things. A herring gull was taking the usual leisurely crap on the wheelhouse roof, and the neat deck planking had gone a furry green with guano and disuse.
    Inside, the trapped air had a pleasant bruised-apple smell. The antique binnacle compass in the wheelhouse was locked on a course of 045°, northeast, bound for Devon, Somerset and the glum Midlands. The wheel itself was a proper ship’s wheel, brass-banded with varnished spokes of a size that demanded horny, capable seaman’s hands as big as dinner plates. I tried swinging it myself and heard heavychains rumbling in the cellarage as the rudder ground on mud, stones and dead crabs.
    When I got below decks, I knew I’d found the right boat to run away to sea in. Brass oil lamps hung tilted in their gimbals. The dusty paneling of mahogany and teak, the red leather cushions on the settees, stuffed with odorous horsehair, the smoky overhead beams, the brass-bound charcoal stove, the rows of fiddled bookshelves (Hammond Innes next to
Admiralty Sight Reduction Tables, Volume 3
), made the place warm and clubbish. It was the Reform and the Travellers’ reduced to matchbox scale: a fine setting to go gaga in, to mutter reactionary nonsense over the port or snooze away the afternoon like a blubbery dugong in an easy chair. Secure behind its bolted portholes, one could remove one’s hearing aid, tell one’s old stories, live on one’s memories and be a ripe old bean.
    I bought it that afternoon, and all winter the boatyard men chiseled and painted it to rights: scraping off the barnacles until the bare wood showed as pink as ripening plums; hacking out unwanted bunks from the fo’c’s’le; doing oily, indescribable things down in the engine room. I didn’t want a yacht; I wanted a one-man floating house, with a study-bedsitter up in the front, complete with library and writing table, a comfortable paneled drawing room in the middle, a kitchen, a shade cramped but sufficient for my elementary cuisine, and a proper flush toilet and washroom.
    The boatyard took much the same attitude to my plans as R. T. McMullen might have done himself, had the sun’s rays ever shone on Polruan that winter. I put a long-haired sheepskin rug, bought years before in the Aleppo souk, down in the saloon.
    “
He
’ll stink, when he gets the saltwater in he.”
    “He won’t, because there’s not going to be any saltwater down there. I’m going to be a fair weather sailor.”
    An Olivetti typewriter was set up on the writing table.
    “
He’
ll go to rust.”
    A portable television set was screwed down among the bookshelves in the saloon.
    “He’s going to be off Land’s End, sick as a pig, watching
Dallas
.”
    But I wanted to coast, not to sever myself completely from the land. I wanted to keep up with whatever gossip was going. A television set was just as necessary as a suit of sails.
    I put pictures up on the walls: a Rowlandson cartoon called “Pleasures of Bath,” a nineteenth-century View of Damascus, a precious watercolor of Conway Castle by moonlight, framed photographs of friends and family, and another photograph, cut from a newspaper, of Margaret Thatcher in full and furious