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shaggy Sam, his Shitsu, off the passenger seat. He accelerates around the container stacks, dodges the container lifters and stops at an office block. This is a flood-lit, mechanised and intensely masculine world of bare spaces, functionality, lights which go on and off by themselves, easy-clean surfaces, concrete and echoing acoustics. It is an architect’s model precisely realised, complete with little men who can be picked up and set down and who leave no trace. Is this what earth would be like if there were no women? The trip to normality is a fast drive along deserted roads, through high gates and the reek of petrol from the storage tanks, over swing bridges and black water.
    Not so long ago the quays of Le Havre would have been a jostle of sailors. They are gone but Le Havre has not forgotten its heritage, its oceanic cachet. It is there on the wall of the restaurant, Le Grignot: a grand poster advertising a liner of the thirties, Companie Générale Transatlantique – French line – Paris-Havre-New York. It is in the conversation at the bar where a couple shake their heads with the proprietor over the pacbos, the passenger boats, which come in the morning and only stay the day. It is there in Bar Belge, Le Trappist, in the enthusiasm of François, serving beer, who used to be at sea.
    â€˜I was on oil tankers,’ he says proudly, with a shake of his head which seems to marvel that anyone should be so rash. He seems rueful, too. Perhaps he misses the order of seafaring, the routines which eat up the miles and months, and which are built around food. Breakfast is at eight, lunch at twelve and supper at five thirty.
    Breakfast is boiled eggs, cereal and fruit salad.
    â€˜Morning, Captain, morning, Chief.’
    â€˜Good morning!’
    â€˜Good appetite!’ says Sorin, cheerfully.
    He has just completed the dog watch, four in the morning to eight. He will sleep before he is on the bridge again at four this afternoon, but he is not done yet. At lunch and at supper he will load his plate with four raw carrots. He will eat each of them like this:
    â€˜Crunch – crunch – crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch!’
    We will share Sorin’s pleasure of carrots twice a day for the next two months.
    At meals I solicit stories from the officers. Usually the Captain will bark ‘What?’ when I begin a question, and furrow his expression like a Zeus with toothache. You can see him wondering what detail has caught my eye, what corner of the continent of my ignorance he is being asked to illuminate this time. His manner is not intended to be intimidating, I decide. A man of little small talk, he regards questions as problems to be solved. Mine must sometimes seem arbitrary.
    â€˜What’s this picture –’
    â€˜
What?
’
    The Captain looks like Beatrix Potter’s owl, Old Brown, when the squirrel tickled him with a nettle.
    â€˜I was just wondering about this picture, Captain? Is it an actual place?’
    On one wall of the dining saloon is a large blue and white fantasy of a rural, pre-industrial scene: a curving river, a church, a village, people on horseback.
    â€˜Yes yes yes that is Svendborg. It is supposed to be the home port of the ship but our home port is Dragoer. There was a mix-up – another ship has our picture and we have theirs. I had a chief officer who wanted to change them. She asks me if she can arrange for us to swap them over. She said she will contact the other ship . . . I said are you sure you want to do it? Is it worth this trouble?’
    We laugh. The Captain does mystification well.
    â€˜She says we will do it, we will leave ours in Algeciras and then they will leave theirs – but then she left the ship because she was pregnant. Maybe this is why she worries about these pictures . . .’
    Sometimes the Captain will talk to the chief engineer in Danish. Often we will comment on the food, which can be rich in