Free Debatable Land by Candia McWilliam Page B

several sampled cans of sticky drinks left around the saloon, even on the chart table. An open fridge is a dying engine, she thought. He has often told me that on his patrols of the house for spilt electricity or overblown light. She shut the door of the small inset cabinet fridge, allowing herself one deep draught of its delicious artificial cool. She would have to dispose of the cans later and alone or the waste would be discovered.
    When it was not lonely, the sea could provide an imprisoning gregariousness of heightened bourgeois anxiety, Elspeth knew, except for those free spirits who either had nothing or held things as nothing. The tiring appetite to collect and possess, that should be swilled away at sea as it is in the desert, could sometimes become a terrible itch, especially among wives who were losing heart for the life and children who had not asked for it.
    ‘She’s gorgeous. Just gorgeous.’ Elspeth smiled at the mother of the two children in thanks. Perhaps if it was a long time since they had been in England the children would like biscuits too. The serious-mindedness of British biscuits is not accurately reproduced by any other nation. She brought from the lead-lined dry-goods store some digestive wheatmeals and a roll of ginger snaps.
    ‘These two here were just one and two when we left, you see,’ said the husband. Elspeth could not see the shell, but did not like to ask. She put down the tea tray in the shade of the awning. Now she saw that the mother had red curls too, but something had caused them to lose spirit.
    ‘We teach the kids at sea, away from bad influences. Milk and two sugars. When in Romania, I always say.’
    ‘And they learn a lot from places we visit,’ said the wife. ‘Plus there’s a school on the air.’
    Elspeth pictured a shoal of flying fish in the sky.
    ‘The radio is truly excellent in that respect. All over the two great oceans are little children at their lessons. Magnificent service. On the same lines as the system in the outback. Of Australia.’
    ‘Only wetter,’ she said.
    The wife looked at Elspeth. It was a look between admiration and fear. Elspeth knew how that look felt on her own face.
    For some time the husband discussed radio frequencies. At the end of periods of talk, receiving no response from either his hostess or his wife, he set springs for himself. ‘You will say that I am dogmatic perhaps in saying that . . .’ ‘Contrary to what is generally thought to be held to be the case . . .’
    Elspeth made two more pots of tea. The two children had joined Sandro up in the bow where they did what they were told among the swathes of folded sail. She could hear Sandro instructing them to fold the sails, and saw the soft geometric dance sixty feet from herself and the excruciating tea party she was holding in spite of herself as something ideal and free, an abstract epitome of what was mysterious, childlike and full about life under sail as against the life of occasion and adult ceremonial.
    ‘You may not agree here . . .’
    Elspeth did not like to be rude, was not normally so, but she thought she heard the Zodiac and she knew that she feared more to irk her own husband than this one. She interrupted.
    ‘That beautiful shell. Where is it?’
    ‘I’ve set it up for you, never worry, just off the stern.’
    ‘Set it up?’
    ‘You’ll be wanting it for a trophy. It’s not after all the stuff of which pets are made.’ It was the facetious voice. His wife laughed. Elspeth didn’t. She was short of time.
    ‘I got the bugger to stick its head out and I hooked and weighted it. Sooner or later it’ll part company with its shell, you can flush the thing out with a strongish scouring substance. I often as not use soda crystals. And there you are, a conch to call your own.’
    Off the stern rail, sure enough, Elspeth saw a line hanging, from which must be dragging the shell and its ever more taut body, losing suction with every minute.
    He sensed not her