Offshore - Alan Hollinghurst

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hour, when darkness lifts off darkness, and from one minute to another the shadows declare themselves as houses or as craft at anchor’.

      The elusive glimpses back through the history of the river and its people are most memorably captured in the ‘bricking’ expedition of chapter 6, where Martha and Tilda trundle off over Battersea Bridge with their handcart to mudlark on the foreshore by Old St Mary’s Church. Here at low tide, by the wreck of a brick barge sunk before the war, they may sometimes still find ruby-red lustre tiles by William De Morgan – whose ‘very last pottery’, as Martha knows, ‘was at Sands End in Fulham’. These fabulous fragments plucked from the mud – a sinuous-tailed dragon, a ‘delicate grotesque silver bird’ – are trophies too from the world of William Morris and of Pre-Raphaelitism that Fitzgerald herself had so sensitively explored. In a piece on De Morgan written nearly twenty years later she recalled the artist’s sister-in-law Wilhelmina Stirling, a keeper of the flame who died in her hundredth year in 1965, a ‘valiant … even heroic’ figure, whom she (like Martha and Tilda after her) had visited at her Battersea house, where the ‘walls and recesses glowed with colour’. ‘Mrs Wilhelmina Stirling … ninety-seven if she’s a day,’ declares six-year-old Tilda, explaining her precocious knowledge and establishing their link across a century. The girls get £3 for their tiles, in a King’s Road antique shop, and go off to buy a Cliff Richard record with the proceeds.

      Offshore is set in 1961 or ’62 (the internal evidence is inconsistent, as our memories of an epoch often are more than fifteen years later), so that when it was published in 1979 its present day was already a bygone period and mood. Heinrich, the well-connected Austrian teenager who comes to visit Grace and dazzles Martha, is keen to taste the excitement of the newly swinging city. She takes him off down the King’s Road, then in ‘its heyday … like a gypsy encampment … A paradise for children, a riot of misrule.’ Antique shops coexist with boutiques ‘breathing out incense and heavy soul’, and with coffee bars, ‘something new in London’, where ‘the shining Gaggia dispensed one-and-a-half inches of bitter froth into an earthenware cup, and for two shillings lovers could sit for many hours in the dark brown shadows, with a bowl of brown sugar between them.’ It’s a world ‘fated to last only a few years before the spell was broken’, and it is one that the older novelist acknowledges as the playground of her own children, by now of course grown-ups themselves. We see, very delicately touched in, the overlapping pattern of the generations, and feel that tension of latent change which always fascinated Fitzgerald, and bore such magnificent fruit in her late quartet of historical novels.

      Alan Hollinghurst

      2013

       1

      ‘ARE we to gather that Dreadnought is asking us all to do something dishonest?’ Richard asked.

      Dreadnought nodded, glad to have been understood so easily.

      ‘Just as a means of making a sale. It seems the only way round my problem. If all present wouldn’t mind agreeing not to mention my main leak, or rather not to raise the question of my main leak, unless direct enquiries are made.’

      ‘Do you in point of fact want us to say that Dreadnought doesn’t leak?’ asked Richard patiently.

      ‘That would be putting it too strongly.’

      All the meetings of the boat-owners, by a movement as natural as the tides themselves, took place on Richard’s converted Ton class minesweeper. Lord Jim, a felt reproof to amateurs, in speckless, always-renewed grey paint, over-shadowed the other craft and was nearly twice their tonnage, just as Richard, in his decent dark blue blazer, dominated the meeting itself. And yet he by no means wanted this responsibility. Living on Battersea Reach, overlooked by some very good houses, and under the surveillance of the Port of London Authority, entailed, surely, a certain standard of conduct. Richard would be one of the last men on earth or water to want to impose it. Yet someone must. Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment. Fortunately he did not have to define duty. War service in the RNVR, and his whole temperament before and since, had done that for him.

      Richard did not even want to preside. He would have been happier with a committee, but the owners, of whom several rented rather than owned their boats, were not of the substance from which committees are formed. Between Lord Jim, moored almost in the shadow of Battersea Bridge, and the old wooden Thames barges, two hundred yards upriver and close to the rubbish disposal wharfs and the brewery, there was a great gulf fixed. The barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water, would have liked to be more respectable than they were. They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where, in the early 1960s, many thousands lived with sensible occupations and adequate amounts of money. But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway.

      Biologically they could be said, as most tideline creatures are, to be ‘successful’. They were not easily dislodged. But to sell your craft, to leave the Reach, was felt to be a desperate step, like those of the amphibians when, in earlier stages of the world’s history, they took ground. Many of these species perished in the attempt.

      Richard, looking round his solid, brassbound table, got the impression that everyone was on their best behaviour. There was no way of avoiding this, and since, after all, Willis had requested some kind of discussion of his own case, he scrupulously collected opinions.

      ‘Rochester? Grace? Bluebird? Maurice? Hours of Ease? Dunkirk? Relentless?’

      Richard was quite correct, as technically speaking they were all in harbour, in addressing them by the names of their craft. Maurice, an amiable young man, had realised as soon as he came to the Reach that Richard was always going to do this and that he himself would accordingly be known as Dondeschiepolschuygen IV, which was inscribed in gilt lettering on his bows. He therefore renamed his boat Maurice.

      No-one liked to speak first, and Willis, a marine artist some sixty-five years old, the owner of Dreadnought, sat with his hands before him on the table and his head slightly sunken, so that only the top, with its spiky crown of black and grey hair, could be seen. The silence was eased by a long wail from a ship’s hooter from downstream. It was a signal peculiar to Thames river – I am about to get under way. The tide was making, although the boats still rested on the mud.

      Hearing a slight, but significant noise from the galley, Richard courteously excused himself. Perhaps they’d have a little more to contribute on this very awkward point when he came back.

      ‘How are you getting on, Lollie?’

      Laura was cutting something up into small pieces, with a cookery book open in front of her. She gave him a weary, large-eyed, shires-bred glance, a glance whose horizons should have been bounded by acres of plough and grazing. Loyalty to him, Richard knew, meant that she had never complained so far to anyone but himself about this business of living, instead of in a nice house, in a boat in the middle of London. She went home once a month to combat any such suggestion, and told her family that there were very amusing people living on the Thames. Between the two of them there was no pretence. Yet Richard, who always put each section of his life, when it was finished with, quietly behind him, and liked to be able to give a rational explanation for everything, could not account for this, his attachment to Lord Jim. He could very well afford a house, and indeed Jim had been an expensive conversion. And if the river spoke to his dreaming, rather than to his daytime self, he supposed that he had no business to attend to it.

      ‘We’re nearly through,’ he said.

      Laura shook back her dampish longish hair. In theory, her looks depended on the services of many employees, my hairdresser, my last hairdresser, my doctor, my other doctor who I went to when I found the first one wasn’t doing me any good, but with or without their attentions, Laura would always be beautiful.

      ‘This galley’s really not so bad, is it, with the new extractor?’ Richard

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