| s-2
| My father had bought it for my mother in a grand gesture of love and pride. |
| s-3
| Not for her a poky terrace with a dog kennel and an outside toilet. |
| s-4
| The garden shrubbed and green had a noose of trees all round it and in the centre of the rolled lawn was a Victorian sun-dial of granite and slate. |
| s-5
| At the bottom of the dial was the hooded figure of Time scything the hours, but at the top, over the position of the twelve was an angel with a trumpet bearing the inscription 'Aliquem alium internum'. |
| s-6
| I did not know what this meant and when I was able to translate it I did not understand it. |
| s-7
| Later it came to mean a great deal to me but that is not yet. |
| s-8
| His own family were Liverpool limeys; had always worked the docks, the boats, in the Navy or as Merchant seamen. |
| s-9
| The women had worked in the clutter of cargo offices up and down the quays. |
| s-10
| His mother, my grandmother, had been the Official Polisher of Brass Plaques and some said that when she had finished her Friday round the shine of it was so bright that it tipped the waves like a skimming stone and could still be seen in the harbour of New York. |
| s-11
| 'The other way round.' |
| s-12
| He had been made a Director of the Line. |
| s-13
| Yes. No. The clock ticking and the smell of buttered kippers. |
| s-14
| The young man out of his mother's body and wearing his father's clothes. |
| s-15
| Be someone. Be someone. |
| s-16
| Redeem history. |
| s-17
| Make our lives not an endless sacrifice but a gathering of energy, the strength to jump, but we fall, until you who leap and do not fall. |
| s-18
| Then we see what we were for, the single stuttered words gain the momentum of narrative. |
| s-19
| This is the story of a humble family who became a name. |
| s-20
| My son David whose father grandfather and great-grandfather unto the sixth generation worked the docks. |
| s-21
| My son David, rich, respected, powerful, a man. |
| s-22
| My son David whose eyes have the shine of them. |
| s-23
| My son David pulling history home. |
| s-24
| When she was eleven, Papa died. |
| s-25
| Within three months Mother in a little black suit, child in black warm coat, took ship to Hamburg and re-settled in Berlin. |
| s-26
| The books and the bookshop had been sold and the secret room was empty. |
| s-27
| My grandmother was singing a hymn, essentially praising God but effectively preventing my father from hearing what was happening. |
| s-28
| It was a quick birth and when I was laid on my mother's breast, my grandmother ate a sandwich and went to tell my father that he had the pleasure of a daughter. |
| s-29
| It was what Jove had said a few months ago when he had been holding my wrist, too tightly, across a restaurant table. |
| s-30
| She was still holding my hand and what I did was outside of anything I had imagined I would do. |
| s-31
| I leaned across the narrow table and kissed her. |
| s-32
| My head was engaged and I was pushing out of my mother's chthonic underworld into my father's world of difficulty and dream. |
| s-33
| I never expected to go back down again. |
| s-34
| When she ate her scones she left a snail-trail of soot along her upper lip. |
| s-35
| Her neighbour called her 'Blackmouth'. |
| s-36
| My grandmother called her neighbour 'Stinkpad' but otherwise they were friendly, exchanging handkerchiefs and soap at Christmas. |
| s-37
| Cowardice bedshares with arrogance. |
| s-38
| I was afraid and I wanted to bluff my way out. |
| s-39
| The kiss was a smoke bomb to cause confusion and distract attention. |
| s-40
| I thought she might slap me. |
| s-41
| I thought she would rush away. |
| s-42
| In fact she did nothing. |
| s-43
| Asked her question and did nothing. |
| s-44
| I started to re-eat my cold pasta. |
| s-45
| I would have been glad to climb into the plate and cover myself in clam sauce. |
| s-46
| I was at the age of making lists but the lists I made were correspondences, half true and altogether fanciful, of the earth the sea and the sky. |
| s-47
| Perhaps I was trying to hold together my own world that was in so much danger of falling away. |
| s-48
| Perhaps I wanted order where there was none. |
| s-49
| As the QE2 floated so confidently on the waters I thought of the Titanic, ghostly and abandoned beneath, and somewhere above, in the secretive blackness, the Ship of Fools navigating the stars. |
| s-50
| Was it the comet? |
| s-51
| Accordingly, my father put on his Jolly Jack Tars and my mother wrapped herself up in her mink coat. |
| s-52
| In those days their car was a three-litre Rover, really, a leather three-piece suite and cocktail cabinet on wheels. |
| s-53
| My father purred down to the docks looking like a criminal, while my mother fixed herself a strictly forbidden gin and tonic in the back. |
| s-54
| Page of Cups. |
| s-55
| Young hopeful of the Tarot deck. |
| s-56
| My identity card. |
| s-57
| When Stella kissed me I remember thinking, 'This is not allowed.' |
| s-58
| I was glad of the fog and the dark because I knew that if anyone saw us, the totality of our lives; history, complexity, nationality, intelligence, age, achievement, status, would be shrunk up to the assumptions of our kiss. |
| s-59
| Whoever saw us would say, 'There's a couple of ...', and this kiss, tentative, ambivalent, would become a lock and key. |
| s-60
| 'David,' she said. |
| s-61
| She was wearing a black oilskin that had been her husband's. |
| s-62
| It hung on her from head to foot, so much so that she seemed less to be wearing a rainproof than to be in the grip of a monster from the Deep. |
| s-63
| She and I would be approaching the place from opposite ends of town. |
| s-64
| I imagined her, angry, confident, ready to match me and beat me at my own game. |
| s-65
| This was the big fight and Jove the prize. |
| s-66
| When I told him she had written to me he had decided to visit friends for the weekend. |
| s-67
| At the same time I realised that I would like to do much more kissing if it were not so complicated. |
| s-68
| So complicated. |
| s-69
| My first serious emotion was for a married man. |
| s-70
| My first experience of authentic desire was with a married woman. |
| s-71
| You see, I did want to kiss her. |
| s-72
| That was what surprised me most of all. |
| s-73
| As he gossiped and lounged the noise of the Remington stopped. |
| s-74
| His secretary came out from the low line of offices that huddled to the waterfront. |
| s-75
| There was an urgent call for him. |
| s-76
| Would he step inside at once? |
| s-77
| My father loved the sea and should have been an active seaman but there were more opportunities indoors for a bright boy who had a way about him. |
| s-78
| He compensated by wheedling his way onto the tugs, and because there was still an apprenticeship mentality about the Company, his oddity was tolerated. |
| s-79
| What harm could it do and wasn't all experience useful? |
| s-80
| Besides, he did it in his own time and it made him popular with the men. |
| s-81
| Meanwhile, in a maze of soggy sheets and copies of Woman's Weekly, my father speared my mother on his manhood. |
| s-82
| It was a shining morning, he was leaning on the harbourside rail, watching the cranes load the ships. |
| s-83
| The world poured through his fingers; spices, wine, tea, green bananas, coconuts, American golf clubs, blankets made of wool with satin hemmed round the edges. |
| s-84
| Today they were loading nylon stockings, Monroe look-alikes stamped all over the cardboard boxes. |
| s-85
| 'I came here to meet ...' |
| s-86
| He had risen in the world and now he was going to prove it. |
| s-87
| On board my grandmother unpacked her carpet bag. |
| s-88
| She set out a pile of clean rags, the ones she used for polishing the brass plaques, a bottle of cooking brandy, a bottle of iodine, a primus stove, a cylinder of water, a kitchen knife, a packet of sandwiches, a little blanket from the dog's box, her spectacles and the Bible, now open towards the end of the Psalms. |
| s-89
| This done, she took off her oilskin and pegged it over the hatch. |
| s-90
| I had her letter in my pocket. |
| s-91
| The careful handwriting. |
| s-92
| The instruction to obey. |
| s-93
| 'I will meet you on Wednesday the 12th at 6:30 p.m. in the bar at the Algonquin Hotel.' |
| s-94
| He knew the gangmen and the loaders and the truck drivers and the harbour pilots, and as he leaned on his rail, watching, sometimes waving, other men joined him, lit a cigarette, told him the news and with a slap on the back, moved on. |
| s-95
| The easy fraternity of working men was comfortable to him. |
| s-96
| No one here asked him what school he had attended. |
| s-97
| 'Is something wrong?' said my father. |
| s-98
| My father used to tell me I had an octopus-complex. |
| s-99
| 'Must you try and do eight things at once?' |
| s-100
| I used to imagine that there was an octopus, hooded, ancient, floating in the limp waters of my body, reaching out, dark and blind, using the tentacles to probe what stood outside it. |
| s-101
| Analogies fail, but I am capable of behaving like an eight-armed cephalopod while protesting the innocence of my two hands on the table. |