The Passion

Now.

Last winter, as Crispin strode down the High street, freshly cobbled by the council for the tourists, a voice called softly: 'fatal attraction'. As he swivelled round on the heel of his Plastimo deck shoe, a shadow disappeared down Captain's Alley. The voice was alto, the accent rich, west country. He had nothing more to tell me. Had it foresuffered all? 'The trouble with these damn prophets,' I said to him when he told me, 'is that they are always so ambiguous. It's traditional.' He chased the shadow down to the bank of the Dart. And found nothing. What did it all amount to? That is the question to be addressed as I sit before my Georgian bureau, its gothic arches bursting with the fragments of an untidy life, gazing at a blue plastic Parker as it winds independently across the paper. The spring sun fills the cottage with dancing light. I am purified by the hot water which poured out into the iron bath half an hour ago. I look up and notice a bloodstain by the light switch in the left hand corner of the sitting room. But I begin in the middle and I must replace myself in last summer to examine the question.

******

It is Wednesday the twenty-seventh of August. It is precisely seven o'clock by the black Roman numerals of the wall-clock above the fireplace. My sister, Anna and I are slipping into the Ferryboat for a quiet drink. Everything is under control. As we walk through the heavy oak door, there is a man standing by the bar wearing a blue reefer jacket, unusual for the time of year. I position myself next to him, curious. 'The usual? 'asks Diana, barmaid and gossip. I nod and study the new arrival abstractedly.

Herein my obsessions lie; any disruptive prospect, any Adonis, must be thoroughly examined until I have discovered his flaw. Then I can relax. Mere observation usually suffices: a unremitting taste for football, a slowness of wit, a marriage to drink. There is a book in his hand. What will it reveal? I crane my neck to read the title. The burgundy cover is beaten around the edges, the gilded lettering says: 'The Cruise of the Kate'.

'Raw eggs and sherry.' I say, smiling.

'The ideal Victorian diet for a voyage. Middleton discovered that the world is a flat disc with Greenwich at the centre of it.'

'An unassailable fact' I say, laughing.

'I'm Crispin,' he calls after me as I walk over to where Anna is sitting, having staked out our territory around a archetypal stained brown table.

'That must be nice.' I call back.

'How long are you going on like this?' says Anna. 'Think of a life without love, without children. Take a chance, Laura.' There is a chip in the red varnish on her index fingernail. Should I tell her?

'I just can't', I reply. She has been pestering me ever since she came down from London.

'I know how you feel.'

'I doubt it.'

'Three years.' Anna says . 'Nothing you can do will bring John back.' As she leans across the table towards me, she sweeps an escaped strand of hair behind her shoulder. Her hair is piled up, pinned into the kind of nest that a pernickety and elegant phoenix might build. I shuffle my Bally suede boots on the blackened oak boards and look at the scars in the floor's blonde centre. Behind the bar, Diana is pulling a pint, the sinews in her forearms tensed. She is wearing a black top which reveals tattooed antler horns. Is she some kind of priestess? An impulse shoots through my body. Envy? Desire?

Crispin stretches across the beer pools on the varnished elm bar, waving a banknote, a talisman. 'Yes please, love.' he says insistently, repetitively. Diana ignores him. He glances into the gloss surface while he waits. He is trim as a jib, the rolled over sea-boots long out of mode. I push myself up the green leatherette of my pew and see a gash, its innards bursting out. Anna looks irritated by my silence. In the seventeenth century, some wretched poet would have written her a sonnet sequence only to discover to his dismay that she is only too attainable.

'Why are you looking like a parody of a restoration rake?' she asks.

'Fashion. The buskined Amazon look suits me. I am inviolable.'

'It doesn't work. You can't avoid destiny. Look at that chap.'

'Not the Tarot pack again.' I reply and drain my glass, trying not to spill it down my foundation. The evening sun penetrates the grey window pane behind my right shoulder, piercing my glass, turning my palm to gold, sending silver dust into orbit.

'Think of Echo.'

'What ?'

'Turned into a shadow of her former self, then a voice which repeats what people say, all because she loved that bloke who only loved himself .'

'And?'

'There is always something….'

I break off in mid-sentence as Crispin comes over from the bar, his hands encircling the waist of a brimming glass. He looks pleased, mission accomplished. I stand up, saying: 'Back in a minute,' and walk towards the stairs, the layers of green and white paint on their pine treads worn with ancient feet. The blackened beams in the Ferryboat are so low that I have to stoop. Framed in the window by the stairs, the moored yachts strain to run with the ebb towards the mouth where salt and fresh mingle freely. Anna pursues me into the Ladies. There is no escape.

Crispin is on the table on his own. I sit opposite him. The more I try not to think, the more thoughts invade. Why is a riverside pub in the mildest part of England decorated with snow shoes? He rolls a cigarette from a blue and gold packet of Drum and puts it on the oak table between us. Placing the cigarette in the cleft between his fingers, near the palm, he lights it , suffusing his face with a warm glow, his left hand cupped against an non-existent wind. He leans his head back against the dark oak panelling.

'How did you know?' he asks.

'About what?'

'The book, it's one of the most obscure sailing books you can get.'

'Everyone knows about it , nobody's read it. All the best books are like that.'

The evening is drawing in, sending the light dancing across the rows of polished beer engines which advertise real ales called: 'Old Thumper,' 'H.S.B.', 'London Pride'. I look at him again. I realise that Anna has not returned. Treachery. I am going to give in. By the third drink it seems perfectly logical.

We launch the Avon, its black rubber beaded with dew and row out into the blackness. The harbour lights and riding lights cast restless paths towards us. My naked feet bathe a pool of muddy water which has collected around them. A low white shape appears out of the night like a ghost. 'Caribou, built by Mylne in 1910', he says, resting at the oars and looking over his shoulder. Her rigging stands out against the backdrop of the shore. She has no wire safety rails so I climb aboard easily.

Once below, her brass lamps swing softly in their gimbals spreading a soft glow around the white cave of her insides, her framing disappearing into the gloom of the forepeak like a ribcage.

'It must be like this in the womb.' I say, sitting on the port bunk.

'Except wombs don't have buggered engines.'

'In its lair the reasoning engine lies/ That was once so proud, so witty and so wise.'

'What?'

'Earl of Rochester. Remarkably prescient.'

He laughs, kisses me and turns to light the meths in the Taylor's paraffin cooker: 'it needs preheating', he says, giving me a sneaky, hard to interpret look. Later, we are elemental; fire, water, electricity. That is the moment where language fails.

Two days later, we sail to Frenchman's creek. The Helford is the most beautiful river in the world. In the dusk, the heat of the summer's day fading, we try to row up the creek. The tide is ebbing. It is shallow and muddy.

'Du Maurier was right', I say, 'I really can't imagine La Mouette in here. There isn't enough water.'

'You can be very literal at times.'

'I wanted it to be possible.'

Caribou is laid up for the winter at Philips on the eastern shore of the river. While the autumn gales shake the cottage, we light the fire, drink, make love, become interdependent. It seems as if it will go on forever. The relentless optimism of the person in love allows only living in the present. The cottage is strewn with entangled clothing. But things change. It begins with him staying out later, coming back late with beer on his breath. On December the twenty-third, I walk under a azure sky to the Ferryboat. The Ancients thought the sky was a tent; the stars, the light of heaven shining through tears in it. Diana is behind the bar.

'Alright, my lover.' she says.

'Alright, Diana.'I reply. I'm beginning to get the hang of the echo. It is a statement, not a question, one that doesn't allow for dissent.

'Crispin will be off soon, then.' she says. I think she is the source of the rumour about the summer's submission that spread like a virus around the town.

'What?'

'To Ireland.'

' Ireland?'

'Didn't you know, my handsome?' she says, looking increasingly satisfied, a well fed cat.

At this moment the door opens and Crispin walks in. The door has brass studs on it and a porthole in its middle. I stride over and say:

'Why didn't you tell me?'

He looks guilty. 'I didn't know how.'

'That is fucking pathetic.'

'Don't be melodramatic.'

'Do you mean everyone knew except me?' I can hear my voice increasing in volume as if it has taken on a disembodied presence of its own. A group of locals have turned to gaze at us, delighted by the entertainment.

'Not everyone.' He says, looking embarrassed.

In the cottage, I study the Gordon's gin bottle, the elaborate script on the white label. There are no mixers. I pour some into a tumbler and drink deeply. I pile his clothes and books in the back yard and set fire to them. The covers of his books twist as they are consumed in a most satisfying way.

There is a Gillette G2 in the bathroom. A long sleep seems a neat solution. My friend Crystal hanged herself from her new loft conversion; the thought has sent a shudder through me ever since. I am tense as a Vesalius anatomical drawing, sinews exposed. My blood is turning to poison in my veins. I am walking down a long white corridor. I take the Gillette and run it up my arm. Bloody railway tracks appear. There is a lump hammer in the hall. Using it as an anvil I dissect the G2 and go up to the bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I hold the blade between forefinger and thumb and run it slowly, firmly up my arm. Unfortunately it's blunt and rusty. What if I get tetanus? The thought makes me laugh. The sound seems to be coming from somewhere else. My right arm is perversely unwilling to hurt its sister.

But I hate it.

I am looking into my interior. An insight: Freud was right about the appearance of wounds. Flexing my wrist, its labia open and a pool of poison turns the black flecked grey of the carpet crimson. I watch it with interest. As it spreads, it has an aesthetic quality. I don't feel pain to begin with, then fire shoots up my arm. A printed line appears in my head like a photograph: 'To Carthage then I came, Burning Burning Burning…' Where does it come from? I must find out. I head for the door, full of new fire.

Kate Middleton 2002