Welcome to all the new subscribers who have joined me in the last couple of days! And for those here already who have stayed with me. I am so happy you’re here and grateful for your support. It’s an honour to share Ocean with you, and build this site with you on board!
I hope you enjoy this taster episode. You will hear some faint creaks in the background — these are the mooring lines of my boat which is also my recording studio! I think it really adds something.
Navigate forward to Episode One:
OCEAN SUMMARY
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger — or so they say. What if life carries on after the annihilating event? How do we live meaningfully in a world where meaning has been obliterated? In Ocean, one woman’s quest for answers takes her on a voyage from the tunnels of the Underground to the furthest reaches of the sea, to where, at life’s limits, the greatest force of all is love.
Ocean: Prologue
In which, we meet the narrator, Helen, and her husband Frank on the day a momentous change takes place.
Beauty in a wife is so essential that if it does not exist, it must be invented. I became quite a bit better looking as a direct result of being Frank’s wife. I was his prize, and my body remodelled itself to fit the pedestal. My accent improved. My hair thickened. Can you imagine? To be prized when you have never even really been noticed before? Who’d have thought that clunky old heteronormative marriage could have such transforming power. There is no woman its inferno cannot fire from plain Jane clay into porcelain Venus. And no woman it cannot contain, no matter how ship-launchingly lovely she may be, for marriage is a gallery of possessions; a display case, with the wife at the centre. Other men will look, and covet, and plot, but they will factor into their considerations that the wife belongs to another man. Of course I could not be Frank’s prize without being his possession, but I loved that too. Beauty in the wife reinforces the marriage
But beauty in the husband is a catastrophe. It’s a bomb rolling unexploded in the hull. The beautiful husband draws assaults on the marriage, and the assaults will not relent until either the marriage is extinguished or the beauty fades. Women, as Frank and I found, recognise no possessions of another woman, respect no marriage. The beautiful husband remains free and at large.
Frank’s catastrophic beauty came upon us so gradually, like a kind of weathering, or even a despoiling of the Frank I once knew, that I did not spot the moment of definitive change. But then, one day he accompanied me to nursery to pick up our son, Nicholas, and one of the other mothers stared at the baby, then at Frank, then sidled up to me to whisper, ‘That’s your husband?’ and I realised something momentous had taken place. I was confused because my husband was still shy dreamer Frank of the Innisfree in my mind. That night I observed him critically as he undressed to come to bed
.He had definitely filled out; he had hardened round the eyes and jaw; confidence inhabited his movements. If I squinted, he was still benign, still sweet to someone who had known the young man, but to someone who had not… I could see it now, the accumulation of masculinity, like a patina upon him. Instead of devotion, equality, fun – he radiated sex.
In that moment, as he casually threw his trousers over the chair, my husband, Frank, transcended us both, for now he held a monopoly over all the resources of the marriage. He occupied more space and seemed to have more weight than both of us put together. The beautiful husband recasts the physics of the marriage. He alters gravity
.
Perhaps a different woman would be delighted to see her partner of many years in a new and ravishing light. But Frank’s beauty did not ignite desire in me. It struck me dumb with fear.
Love does not alter when it alteration finds… the words turned in my head.
But what does it do when faced with a premonition?
The day Frank’s beauty announced itself was an anniversary more profound than the one we marked with cards and varying levels of ardour every year on April 29th. It was as if a countdown to a devastating event had begun, from which no amount of cultivated cynicism about marriage, trust in Frank, nor love for my child could save me. Sometimes I lay awake at night beside my beautiful husband and wondered if the devastating event had actually already happened, I had missed it, and I was wandering deluded in its aftermath.
For the truth of it was that I loved my husband, with all my heart. My love for Frank embarrassed me with its cheerfulness and its hope. When we married, on the deck of the Innisfree back then, I cried with happiness, and not because I was young and stupid.
I believed our marriage to be the most beautiful thing either of us had made, outshining even the child it contained. Even as it would come to splinter inside us and smash around us, still I could not fully imagine myself without it. And this was surely why I could not breathe a word to Frank about what I had glimpsed in our future. The survival of our relationship felt basic to my own survival, as vital a mechanism as thirst. My faith in what we had created made any journey comprehensible, every fire possible to withstand; without it there was only wreckage strewn all the way to the lonely horizon, and the slow collapse to the deep sea bed.
GO TO EPISODE ONE:
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All episodes appear in sequence in the Ocean the Podcast section of the homepage.
And finally…
Did you know that there is no direct jurisdiction over ships and boats once they are in international waters? A large container vessel, for instance, may be owned by one or more companies, operating out of more than one country. The crew may come from a plethora of nations, and the cargo too. Traditionally the Captain represents the law on board, which is why mutiny has always been treated more like treason than an ordinary uprising.
Open ocean is effectively lawless. In this valuable journalistic substack
The Outlaw Ocean Project goes deep into the crimes that occur in the open ocean. You’ll be amazed.See you soon for Countdown #4!
Polly x
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