I left this awkward tableau and kicked my heels along the shore. I was thinking about Pertinax and Barnabas. I was thinking about Crispus. I was wondering why I had started to feel that Crispus and Barnabas had me constantly struggling at some tangent to the truth…
After that, I was thinking about other things, irrelevant to work.
I hunched irritably on the tideline, playing with a desiccated dogfish eggcase, until I gradually began to feel like Odysseus in Polyphemus' cave: a huge single eye was watching me balefully.
It was painted on a ship. Scarlet and black, with the shameless elongation of a painted Egyptian god; there was presumably a matching one around the vessel's haughty prow but she lay sideways to shore, so without a tame dolphin to tow me out behind there was no way I could check. She was riding at anchor, safely beyond the reach of holiday-makers' curiosity. Apart from reeking of the kind of happy affluence that loves to be viewed by wide sectors of the public while supposedly enjoying its privacy, she was not the kind of precious toy to be brought in and belted against the ratty bales of straw which formed a rough-and-ready bump rail on the Oplontis mooring stage.
Whoever designed this nautical beauty had a statement to make. There was money written all over his ship. She was forty feet of blatant artistry. She had a short, single bank of red ochre oars which were perfectly aligned at rest, dark sails, a mainmast for her square rig plus a second for a foresail, and lines so suave they hurt. Somehow the shipwright had managed to combine a slim keel like a warship with enough cabin and deck space to make life aboard a pleasure for the financier who possessed the stupendous capital that had created her.
At a slight shift of the incoming evening breeze, the gilding on her duck tail stern and her masthead goddess flashed restlessly. There was a nippy little bumboat trailing behind in a perfectly matching rig-identical steering paddles, identical toy sail, and the same painted eye. While I gawped, the bumboat was pulled closer and after some distant activity I watched it set off shorewards, sculled at a fast and elegant pace.
Cheered by this happy accident, I walked onto the landing stage and waited my chance to introduce myself to what I was convinced would be the Crispus menage.