Coasting by Jonathan Raban Read Free Book Online Page B

flood. With her clenched fist, her three strings of pearls, her chin thrust forward, her face cast in an expression of theatrical resoluteness under its wiry halo of swept-back hair, her eyes blazing with what might ambiguously be construed as either compassion or plain scorn, she was there as a reminder that this voyage wasn’t going to be a holiday from life. She glowered down from the paneling, England’s latest painted figurehead.
    Books went aboard in boxfuls, and my predecessors began to look increasingly ill at ease in the company they were keeping. Hilaire Belloc was bunked up with Saul Bellow. R. T. McMullen found himself next to the poems of Louis MacNeice, and John MacGregor was squashed between Ian MacEwan’s short stories and Machiavelli’s
The Prince
. Everything by Evelyn Waugh, even his unreadable life of Saint Helena, was signed on for the voyage, and so were the complete works of Laurence Sterne, in the ten-volume calf-bound 1780 edition. Novels by Trollope, Thackeray and Dickens … poems in fat, broken-backed anthologies … The arrival one morning of
Valmouth
and
Prancing Nigger
by Ronald Firbank drew identical scowls from the mariners.
    But it was an explorer’s, not an exile’s library; with books on British history, British geology, British birds, British flora, books on the making of the English countryside and on the sociology of modern Britain. I wanted to find out what, on earth or sea, made my peculiar country tick: Cobbett might yield a clue, so might Defoe—and G. M. Trevelyan,and Nikolaus Pevsner, and Arthur Mee, and a whole rack of books with oppressive titles like
The Development of the British Economy, 1914–1950
,
Rural Depopulation in England and Wales
,
1851–1951
and
The Labour Government’s Economic Record, 1964–1970
. Even if one couldn’t read them, at least they’d serve as ballast and keep the boat sailing squarely on its waterline.
    The boat was ready on February 24. It was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent—just the right moment for even a disbeliever to take to the wilderness. High tide was at seven in the morning and it was still almost dark when the tubby hull was cranked down the slip into the water. It looked less like the launching of a boat than the eccentric submersion of a thatched tudor cottage. There was no champagne about. The wit from the boatyard yawned, shrinking himself as far as possible into his furry parka. “Give her five minutes, and all you’ll see will be the bubbles.”
    She floated. By lunchtime she was fully rigged as a working ketch, with two stocky masts, her heavy sails sagging on their booms. Shackled to a mooring buoy in the middle of the estuary, she turned to face the incoming tide with a broad-beamed dowager’s stateliness. It was not that she waddled, exactly; rather that her age and bulk took automatic precedence over the younger, slimmer boats on the water.
    I rowed away from her feeling house-proud as I’d never felt house-proud before. She looked like home. Up till now, home had always been a rented or a mortgaged box in someone else’s freehold, an unstable affair, floating adrift high in London plane trees. This big white boat, with her trimmings of (as yet) unscuffed white and blue, her books and pictures, her oak beams which had been approvingly described by the surveyor as “massive,” looked so much more solid and steady than any of the flats in which I’d recently capsized.
    No flag wagged at the back of her. Whatever the rules said, I didn’t intend to sail under the British ensign. When Icrossed over the border from territorial to international waters, I was going to go there as a private person—in the Greek word, an
idiot
.
    The boat had one visible defect: her name. The Gosfield brewer who had originally registered her as a British ship of 10.39 Gross Tons had called her the
Gosfield Maid
. This would be a fine title for a frowsty aunt who keeps cats and smells of camphor balls, but as the name of my