by Rachel Green
“Yes, a gun, so I can shoot myself.”
At least the swelling in his eye had gone down, though his bruises had thickened and darkened somewhat. He turned to give her a phlegmatic look.
“I’ll be all right, don’t worry. Just so long as I haven’t lost my good looks.”
Margot smiled. “I’m sure they’ll come back. One day.”
She cooked him a breakfast of bacon on toast and brewed a fresh pot of coffee. She had no appetite herself and was content to sit and watch him eat, although every chew had him cringing in pain.
Afterwards, she helped him up into the deck salon and had him lie down in the shade. Like a good nursemaid, she made up another cold pack with a flannel and ice. When she’d finally got him comfortable, Margot crashed on the opposite side and with the excitement of the past few days quickly catching up on her she fell into a deep exhausted sleep.
***
When she next came to, Margot found Raul staring at her from his sick bed, their eyes level across the top of the table.
“Is your bug working?”
She pulled herself upright. He must have been up whilst she’d been asleep because two bottles of water had appeared on the table. She took one and drank thirstily. “There’s not a good enough signal out here.”
She waited, hoping he might suggest they move closer to the coast, but he said nothing. She wasn’t going to push.
“Can you believe Paolo reacted the way he did?” she said.
“I wouldn’t like to be a guest in their house right now. Can you imagine the atmosphere at breakfast?”
Margot smiled.
“There was nothing I could do,” Raul said, taking a more serious tone.
She looked at him enquiringly. “When?”
“When they came alongside. There was two of them. They had guns.”
“You weren’t to blame. And thank God you hid my phone.”
“I saw you make it to the beach. After that I couldn’t keep track; the boat was moving around too much. I was afraid they’d found you.”
“They very nearly did.”
She gave him a brief recap of events at the house and how she’d hidden behind the door when Paolo had come into the office. “He must have known I was there. Yet he obviously didn’t tell his brother.”
“I hope you’re not feeling any sympathy for him.”
Margot looked away. No, she had no sympathy for him. He was the one who’d killed Aswan’s father, yet exactly how it had happened was something they would probably never know. She looked back at Raul. “I couldn’t believe it when I swam back and found you’d gone.”
A glimmer returned to his eye. “Did you think I’d deserted you?”
“Just for a moment.”
He smiled warmly. He sat up on the cushions and reached across the table for her hand. Margot leaned out to let him hold it.
“I would never willingly have left you, Margot.”
A tingle passed through her, the likes of which Margot had not experienced for some time. It was nice to feel that sensation again.
***
In the afternoon, Margot fussed around below deck – tidying things that had already been tidied, cleaning things that had already been cleaned – and then went back up and did a circuit of the deck. She sat down in the cockpit salon and folded her arms, sighing heavily. The contrary side of her wasn’t sorry when her blundering around made Raul wake up.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said, cranking open his eyelids.
“Bastards stole my smokes.”
“What?”
“When they boarded the boat. I left them in my drawer.”
He pulled himself up and had an old man’s chuckle. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you with that.”
“Hmm,” Margot said and stared miserably into the distance. She’d been smoking since the age of sixteen and right now didn’t regret a single one of the little white coffin nails.
“Perhaps this would be a good time to quit.”
“This would be the worst possible time to quit, trust me.” She became conscious of her foot tapping the floor and made herself stop.
Unable to go back to sleep, Raul got up and tidied his sick bed. When he faced her across the table he looked a little more human.
“So, what do you want to do now?”
“How long can we stay out here?”
He shrugged. “Pretty much as long as we like. The freezers are fully stocked, the water-making system just keeps going. Carpe Diem was designed for crossing oceans.”
“We need a phone signal.”
“Shouldn’t we just go to the police?”
Margot shook her head. “We need to catch them in the act. If we find out when their shipment’s coming in I can call Pierre. He can have the drugs brigade waiting.”
“Enzo’s hardly likely to just blurt it out.”
“Maybe not, but my bug’s the only hope we have.”
The look on Raul’s face betrayed his scepticism, but he moved to one of the consoles and sat down at the wheel. He spent a few minutes tapping away at the touchscreen. “We could go down to Menorca. There’ll be a phone signal there.”
“Won’t it be busy?”
“Not on the northern side. The coastline’s pretty rocky.”
Margot joined him at the console and looked at the chart. “How far is it?”
“Seventy kilometres. If we set off now we could be there by dusk.”
It seemed a good idea, though the only problem was it meant moving further away from Marseilles which was where Enzo’s shipment was most likely to come in. But if it meant she could listen to her bug it would at least be progress. She retrieved her yachting cap and pulled it onto her head.
“Very well, skipper. Let’s go to Menorca.”
***
They set off under power of the engines. When the wind did pick up, Raul raised the mainsail and Carpe Diem moved along at a steady four knots. Within three hours they sighted land. Raul altered course, tacking through a patch of choppier water, and then steered them towards the island from the east. Green-topped craggy white cliffs came into view and the island steadily grew larger. They furled the sail and steered into a bay where the water was as clear as crystal.
Two other yachts had already staked out a claimed so they moved on. The next bay was deserted, but Raul passed it in favour of their third option which turned out to be a perfect U-shaped inlet, perhaps fifty metres wide at its mouth. Rocky headlands screened it from the sea, and the sandy beach was so pristine it looked like it had not once suffered the trample of human feet. When they dropped anchor in the middle of the bay, the rest of the world seemed very far away.
“I’ve heard there are some particularly good nudist beaches along this stretch,” Raul said when he’d finished securing the ropes. “It would an excellent place to go skinny-dipping, don’t you think?”
Margot rolled her eyes. “I take it someone’s feeling better.” She gave him a haughty look and they went below.
Her phone signal had crept up to three bars. She opened the app and was stunned to see sixteen notifications pop up. Raul came into the salon and sat down beside her.
“Any good?”
Margot showed him the phone while the files were downloading. When it was ready, she put it on speaker. Most of the recordings were one-sided conversations – Enzo on the phone, making what sounded like routine calls to his shipping company. Another was the tail end of an argument he was having with someone, presumably his wife. Another started off as a jumble of muffled sounds which quickly developed into noisy love-making. Squirming, Margot fast-forwarded. In the final recording he appeared to be talking to himself, grumbling about something or other. But there was no mention of anything relating to the shipment.
Margot switched off the phone in disappointment.
It was starting to get dark so Raul closed the canopy and they turned on the lights. He seared some salmon fillets for dinner, and with her appetite restored, Mar
got ate greedily and cleared her plate before Raul was even halfway through.
“My, you were hungry.”
“Withdrawal symptoms.”
As soon as he’d finished, she cleared away all the dishes.
“It’s a good job they didn’t take any of the wine,” she said as she went for a raid on the booze cupboard.
“They were barbarians. They wouldn’t have known a good bottle of wine if you’d hit them over the head with it.”
She chose a bottle of Côtes de Thongue and poured herself a large one. When Raul went to take a shower, Margot went up on deck with the bottle for company and sat at the table, peeling an orange. Her hands had to have something to do.
Ten minutes later Raul joined her, towel-drying his hair. “Are you going to eat that?” He indicated the naked orange she’d left on the table.
“No. I just like peeling them.” Margot started on another.
He took it away and came back a few minutes later with two bowls of fruit salad. He’d segmented the orange, added some kiwi and pineapple, drowned it all in Limoncello – Margot was pleased to see he’d brought the rest of the bottle for good measure.
When they’d finished eating, they turned off all the lights and went to relax on the sun loungers. The sky turned from indigo to black, and they gazed in awe as a million stars came out. The darkness was so encompassing they could have been part of the void themselves, though the alcohol had gone straight to Margot’s head and the ‘firmament’ seemed a poor choice of word for what they were looking at. More and more pinpricks of light kept appearing, filling in the black spaces.
“So many stars,” she said dreamily.
“My wife was into astronomy,” Raul said, inches away on other side of the mast. “I bought her a telescope for her birthday one year. We used to go up into the mountains and look at the Milky Way.”
“That’s nice.”
For a long while they enjoyed a companionable silence. The warm Balearic air was so soporific Margot could have happily fallen asleep.
“Did you and Hugo ever try for a baby?”
Margot’s brain slowly retuned. She turned her head to face him, though it seemed he was still looking up at the sky. “Yes, but it never happened. The doctors never really found out why.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Maybe it was a blessing. I might have been a lousy mother.”
“I don’t believe that.”
That was nice of him, but maybe some people weren’t cut out to be parents. “What about you? Do you think you’ve been a good father?”
“It might sound big-headed but yes, I do. Of course, my kids might not agree.”
“Maybe I’ll ask them one day.”
“I would need to forewarn them first.”
Margot smiled.
“How old were they when your wife died?”
He cocked his head as he worked it out. “Eleven, twelve and fifteen.”
“And you’ve brought them up on your own since then?”
“We all helped out. My eldest became like a mother to the other two.”
“And you’re still close?”
“Yes. Very.”
“That’s nice.”
A shooting star flashed by, closely followed by another. Weren’t you supposed to make a wish? Trust in the gods to make it all good again? Instead, Margot felt only sadness. Some things could never be repaired, no matter how hard you tried. But she drew in a deep breath and propped herself on one elbow, determined not to fall into melancholy. “Did you bring the Limoncello?”
“I left it on the table.”
“Be a lamb and go and fetch it.”
He tutted. “What did your last slave die of?”
“Insubordination.”
He rolled off the lounger with a groan and a wheeze. Margot felt guilty and went after him, and they both stumbled along in the dark which perhaps was not such a good idea given they’d drunk so much and were surrounded by ropes and guard-wires, any one of which could have caused them trip and fall into the sea. But with a little comical fumbling they made it to the safety of the deck salon where they crashed down on the benches. Raul switched on the lights while Margot reached for the Limoncello.
“You know,” he said, smiling like a drunken old man, “when I was growing up on the farm, my grandparents were our rock, the centre of everything. In those days we all lived together in one big house. But when Grandad died I got very upset. I was only a boy. I couldn’t see how we could ever be happy again. But as time went by things got better. My father took over the farm; he showed me how to look after the trees. Eventually I couldn’t even remember how things were in Grandad’s day, but we were just as happy.”
“And your point being?”
“My mother used to say that life is like a snow-globe. Most of the time everything is settled and the world looks fine. Then once in a while someone comes along and shakes it all up. When you’re in the middle of the snowstorm you think your world is utterly destroyed. But then everything settles back down. It’s not the same as it was before but it can be just as good.”
Margot thought about that for a while. Then something struck her funny bone and she spluttered with laughter. “That’s a terrible analogy.”
Raul took a moment to catch up, but then he spluttered, too. “It is, isn’t it?”
They both fell about laughing, and in the confusion the Limoncello got knocked from the table. They stooped in unison to pick it up, and then somehow Raul’s face was moving steadily towards hers. Margot froze, eyes on his lips, but then quickly turned away. When they came back up, all they shared was an embarrassed smile.
***
The next morning Margot delayed getting up. She stayed in bed for an hour after she’d woken, listening to the sound of water lapping against the hull. She checked her phone and refreshed the app, but no new notifications came through. Bright sunlight shone onto her window, and when she looked out she saw that it was another serenely beautiful morning. She put on her Speedo and went out.
There was no sign of life from Raul’s cabin so she went up on deck to find him sitting at the stern, a huge fishing pole in his hand. Margot retrieved his sunhat from where he’d left it on the bench and placed it on top of his head.
“Morning, skipper,” she said brightly.
“Good morning,” he replied flatly.
She could tell by the way he merely glanced at her that they were not going to talk about the attempted kiss. She wasn’t cross it had happened, but neither was she going to be the one to bring it up.
The silence continued so Margot stepped up to the guard wire and gazed out to sea. The bay was bathed in bright golden light and there was barely a breath of wind. She scanned the green-topped cliffs, looked across at the sandy beach; nowhere could she see a single human being. It was bliss. She moved back to the stern.
“How are your bruises?”
“Better, thanks. What about you?”
“I had a bit of a headache but I’m fine now.”
“Are you going for a swim?”
“No. I dress like this when I’m doing the housework.”
Margot hoped it might coax a smile out of him but he wouldn’t play ball. She moved a little closer, her bare thighs level with his head. His desire to turn and look was almost palpable, but he somehow found the strength to resist.
“What are you hoping to catch?”
“According to the fish-finder there’s a shoal of bass nearby.”
“Fish-finder?” Margot queried.
Raul nodded. “It’s an app on the radar. You’re not the only one who knows how to use tech.”
She looked down into the water. It was so crystal-clear there was hardly any need for radar; if a shoal of fish swam by he’d surely have spotted it with his naked eye. “Isn’t that rather like cheating?”
Raul twitched his shoulders into a small shrug. “I suppose you’re going to quote Samuel Johnson at me.”
Margot frowned. “Am I?�
��
“A fishing rod: ‘a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.’”
She smiled. “That’s not what I was thinking.” Though it was rather apt.
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“An hour, maybe.”
“Don’t you get bored?”
“What’s the matter – have you run out of oranges to peel?”
Margot regarded him in consternation. Did he think she’d rebuffed him? Was that what this was about? She filled the silence by putting on her swimming cap. “You could come swimming with me.”
Now he turned his head. Margot watched his gaze travel slowly up over her middle and settle somewhere short of her neck. She didn’t mind him looking, but he still wasn’t smiling.
“No thanks,” he said.
“You can swim, can’t you?”
“Of course I can swim.”
She planted a hand on her hip and exhaled. “Then what’s your problem?”
He turned sulkily back to the fishing pole. “You’re so graceful in the water,” he muttered. “Next to you I would be like a walrus.”
“Now who’s feeling sorry for themselves?”
He didn’t respond at all this time and Margot’s patience ran out. “Fine. Suit yourself.”
She made her way round to the prow and then dived in over the handrail.
***
He’d cheered up by dinner time. He’d managed to catch three decent sized bass and seemed pleased with his efforts. Margot left him filleting them in the galley while she went for a shower.
Her mind was on other things and when she stepped out of the cubicle it didn’t occur to her that she’d left the cabin door wide open. She didn’t bother to close it when she crossed to the chest of drawers. Getting dressed in front of the mirror, it took her a few moments to realise it but Raul’s reflection was also there in the mirror. He was still in the galley, but the way the mirror was aligned meant he had a straight-line view. And from the look on his face Margot could tell he’d been watching.
She swallowed. The moment became a bubble in time, both of them aware the other could see and doing nothing about it. But then Margot unfroze her limbs. She carried on dressing, and when she was done, calmly closed the door.