Married Love by Tessa Hadley Page A

docks every day but that’s different – still and filthy.
    — I won’t drown, he says sturdily. — I’m lucky.
    — Ellen’s a nice girl. You could have a good life here.
    But he’s only just seventeen, it’s too soon for him to be thinking of getting wed. Girls are always wanting to talk about weddings. There’s no one else in their compartment; the little train dawdles through the evening rain. — Look what I found on the beach, Connie says, fishing in the purse she carries. — Close your eyes. Open your hand.
    She used to give him sweets like this when they were children.
    He closes his fingers around it. It’s nothing much – just a bit of sea-washed glass, smooth to the touch, a frosted blue. She tells him to keep it safe when he goes away, says it’s her luck added on to his.
    The
Trojan Prince
, carrying a general cargo of manufactured goods and foodstuffs, goes aground on rocks off the west coast of Canada, one evening of storm and fog in February 1923. Two men row heroically to shore, running a line from the davits of the trapped lifeboat, making it fast around a tree when they reach land. One by one the crew crosses to safety, the Captain last, hand over hand along the rope. Clinging on to that rope, sometimes the men are dangling fifteen feet above the waves; sometimes they’re plunged fifteen feet deep beneath. The wind screams. Black walls of water pick up a ghostly illumination from the swirling snowflakes.
    When it’s his turn, apprentice James McIlvanney can’t get rid of the idea that everything is happening in a story, to someone else whose role he seems to be carrying off convincingly. To his relief it turns out that this someone is not a coward: he’s resourceful and determined and strong enough. Here he is, swinging above the terrible sucking water, above his certain death if he falls in. There’s a rhythm to it – if you let the rhythm take you, then you know how to let go of the soaking slippery rope with one hand, twisting and lunging your body forward in mid-air, then clapping your hand on the rope again, farther along. He learned this when he was a boy climbing trees with his mates. He’s hanging on for dear life. There ought to be somebody to see it. Then he’s plunged under the water and his lungs are bursting. He loses his left plimsoll in the crossing, also the bit of blue glass Connie Chappell gave him.
    Somehow they all hang on. It’s a wonder that there is no loss of life among the forty-two crewmen. But the ship can’t be saved: it breaks up on the rocks over the next few days while they wait for rescue. Where they have got ashore is an uninhabited outcrop west of Vancouver Island, covered in scrub and stunted trees. They make a fire, and boil hot water to drink by melting the snow. The wireless operator didn’t manage to signal their position before the wreck, and they can’t find anywhere now to launch a distress rocket. The next day, when the storm subsides, the men go back on board to rescue what supplies and foodstuffs they can – mostly canned fruit. James finds a spare black boot, among the clothes they bring. Some of the men break into the bonded store, to get at the spirits.
    The Captain sits apart from the rest of them, inconsolable at the loss of his ship. No one takes any notice of the four apprentice boys. James has time to think about the enormity of the task he has undertaken: acquiring the necessary knowledge to navigate the ocean using the stars. He makes up his mind to draft a table of all the subjects he needs to know, setting out the period of time he will dedicate to each. He resolves to adhere to this timetable even while he’s in port, instead of going ashore with his shipmates.
    James imagines telling all this to Connie when he gets home.
    He’s sorry that he lost the little token she gave him, which he kept in his pocket through all the first hard months of his apprenticeship at Dartmouth, but it doesn’t matter. She won’t care, it was