The colour is not a lie.
I want to say that first, because I came here half expecting it to be one. Everything else on this coast has been arranged by somebody, and I had assumed the water had been too, in the photographs at least, the way the sky gets deepened and the sand gets warmed. It has not. You come round the end of an island and the boat crosses from dark blue into something pale and lit from underneath and the whole hull seems to lift, and nobody on board says anything for a second, and then everybody says the same thing at once in four languages.
I went north to Palau to get the early boat. Forty-five minutes of driving, which everyone tells you not to bother with, and which is the correct thing to do. The parking machine takes coins and nothing else. I had no coins. A woman going to the same boat gave me two euros and would not take anything back for it, and that was the first good thing of the day.
There is a park fee you pay in cash on board. Two euros fifty in September. A man comes round with a tin while the engines are still warming and it is the least glamorous transaction on this entire coastline and I enjoyed it enormously.
The islands themselves are low and pink-grey and worn smooth, scrub and rock and almost nothing else, and after an hour of them I stopped looking at the islands.
The water between them is the thing.
We stopped somewhere with white sand under about three metres of it and the boat sat there apparently floating in air. You can see your own shadow on the bottom. You can see fish that have no interest in you at all. Somebody’s sunglasses went in off the back and we all watched them go down for what felt like a very long time, turning over, perfectly visible the whole way, which somehow made it worse.
I had a black swimsuit and a white linen shirt over it and I took the shirt off and went in without doing the thing where you sit on the ladder deciding.
It is cold. Nobody mentions this. There is a band of it about a metre down that has come from somewhere else entirely, and it takes the breath out of you, and then it does not matter.
I am better inside my body than looking at it. That has been true since I was a child and it is truest on a horse, but water is close behind. Something about being held and having to work at the same time. On land I know where my hands are. In the water I stop keeping track.
And this is the part I have been turning over since.
Everybody on this coast is dressed. Not overdressed, that is too easy and it is not what I mean. Arranged. Every person on the quay at Porto Cervo has thought about how they will read from ten metres, and they are right to, because that is the transaction and everyone has agreed to it. I do it as much as anyone. I would be lying if I said otherwise and I have the receipts.
In the water none of it survives.
Thirty people went in off that boat and came out looking like thirty people. Hair flat, shoulders red, everyone slightly ridiculous on the ladder. The very beautiful ones were still beautiful and it had stopped being the point. Nobody was being looked at. Everybody was just in it.
I thought about Camille, who worked this out at fourteen and never had to think about it again.
We were at school together and she was the least self-conscious person in that building. Coming back from the showers she would carry on a conversation about a book while I was doing the whole complicated business of getting dressed inside a towel. It was not defiance. She simply had not been issued the anxiety. She has never once in her life ranked a room by looks, and if I described this coast to her she would want to know what I was reading on the boat, and whether the food was any good, and nothing else.
We can go weeks without speaking. Then one of us sends something and it picks up mid sentence.
I sent her a photograph of the water and no words, because there was nothing to add, and she replied about eight hours later with the name of a book.
They take you past the pink beach and you are not allowed to land on it. There is a rope and a warden and everyone photographs it from the boat, which is exactly as silly as it sounds, and it is also the only empty beach in Sardinia in the first week of September. I took the picture like everybody else.
By four the wind had got up and the sea had gone dark and choppy and everyone was quiet and sunburnt and holding their bags on their laps. The engines are loud. Nobody talks on the way back. A German boy had fallen asleep against his mother with his mouth open and she had not moved her arm in half an hour.
I got back to the car with salt drying in my hair and the shirt stuck to me, and drove south, and the coast came back up out of the scrub all lit and expensive, and I stopped at the first place I saw and ate a plate of fried things standing up.
Four euros for the ticket hut earlier in the week. Two fifty in cash on the boat today.
I am aware of what the rooms up the road cost. I am not making a point about it. It is only that this week the two best things have both been cheap, and both times the good part was the bit where nobody was performing.
V.
More images from the Costa Smeralda
This is a diary from the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. The practical version of this day, which port to sail from and how to choose a boat, is in my guide to the La Maddalena boat trip, the swimming itself is in my guide to the best beaches on the Costa Smeralda, and the coast as a whole is in my complete guide to the Costa Smeralda.
