Free Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge

yachts, after first blowing their whistles, to lower boats stocked with biscuits, salt and oil, and deposit such supplies, weather permitting, on the rocky outcrop below his dwelling.
    ‘Legend has it,’ I further informed Beatrice, ‘that he came from Athens, where he was once a wealthy ship owner. Rather like yourself, his love of the sea’ - here she flashed me one of her looks, of the sort guaranteed to turn a lesser man to jelly - ‘was so great that he always commanded a ship of his fleet. On three occasions, the vessel he steered spun off course...due to vagaries of the wind...and foundered on the rocks off Cape Malea.’
    ‘What rocks?’ she said. ‘I don’t see any rocks.’
    ‘They’re out there somewhere,’ I assured her. ‘In despair, and to do penance for his drowned men, he vowed to retreat from the world.’
    ‘Why the whistles?’ she asked. ‘If he does nothing but stare at the horizon, surely he can see the ships.’
    ‘The word hermit,’ I reproved, ‘from the Latin eremita, defines a secluded place, a desert. He needs time to hide himself. A hermit cannot be forever hob-nobbing.’
    ‘Well, he’s certainly in retreat now,’ observed my impatient wife, shivering at the rail and squinting out across the misty waters. Shortly after, she complained the salt spray stung her lips, and made to go below.
    ‘Do stay,’ I implored her. ‘It gives me pleasure to have you stand at my side.’
     ‘I won’t,’ she retorted crossly. ‘I’m thinking of becoming a hermit,’ and with that parting shot, she left me.
    I never caught so much as a glimpse of land, though I stayed at my post for an hour or more, watching the racing sea and dwelling nostalgically on my long-gone bachelor days.
     
    *
     
    There are many things in this life capable of throwing people off course - the death of someone close, the loss of income or health, the realisation that cherished hopes cannot always be fulfilled. With regard to myself, nothing has affected me quite so brutally as that manifesto of the new sciences, Principles of Geology by Mr Lyell. I was twenty-two years old when I first read it. Result -1 have not been the same man since. Echoing the sentiments of Mr Ruskin, I have often lamented to Beatrice, Those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them through every cadence of the Bible verses.’
    It was not so much Lyell’s shattering of the fairy tale of Creation that plunged me into mental turmoil, rather his assertion that the interchange of land and sea is perpetual. Thus, our northern hemisphere, once a vast ocean sprinkled with islands, must, he argued, return to its original state, albeit in the remote future. It is not a comforting notion. Man himself is so buffeted by shifts of thought and mood, not knowing from one day to the next what he truly feels, that a shifting earth is well-nigh the last straw.
    I was never more conscious of my tenuous hold on the ground beneath my feet than during our first weeks in Constantinople, for nothing would satisfy the women other than to engage in a constant round of expeditions, luncheon parties and late night suppers. I exclude Myrtle, of course, who was diligent in taking the children to the sea-shore morning and afternoon, though this may not have been as good for them as she imagined. When we sailed into port it was Beatrice who noted the murkiness of the atmosphere. I was told that the Sultan had issued orders for all steamers to consume their own smoke - if true, its effect was negligible. ‘One is reminded of Liverpool,’ is how Beatrice put it, ‘seen from the opposite side of the Mersey.’
    It was astonishing how quickly the women adapted to their unusual surroundings. Conditions which would have had them in a faint at home produced no more than a reference to quaintness. Once it was established that the shrill humming which heralded each sunrise was not, as feared, the persistent whine of a giant mosquito but merely the muezzin’s call to