A slight blip arose in Floyd’s plans when, in early September, his job at Waterworld—which he had presumed would be there for as long as he wanted—suddenly came to an end.
It was one of those times when a severe dip in the national economy had hit a good many businesses—even Floyd’s parents had been muttering about falling orders and having to cut back to weather the storm—and the news that the Chief no longer had the funds to support a loss-making aquarium was not entirely a surprise.
The Chief himself was in the hospital at the time, recovering from a heart bypass operation, and it was the Chief’s wife who gave Floyd the news. She told him that, sadly, there was no choice but to close Waterworld and that she hoped Floyd would stay on for a couple of weeks to help relocate or sell the stock that had been so carefully acquired over the last three years.
Two weeks later, finding himself without work but still with diving lessons and his flight to America to pay for, Floyd found that the same dip in the economy that had forced Waterworld to close made even the lowest paid part-time work difficult to find. It was in a mood of deep discouragement that, after a morning spent delivering copies of his résumé to hotels, restaurants, and shops without receiving a flicker of interest, he was walking back to the bus station when he saw Mike sitting on a bench in Leopold Square.
He beckoned Floyd to come over and join him.
“I don’t suppose,” said Floyd, speaking out of the side of his mouth in the hope that no one would notice, “that you’re here with a suggestion about what I can do to earn some money?”
Mike smiled but did not answer.
“Only I could use some help on this one,” said Floyd. “If I’m going to get to America, I need to—”
“You should talk,” interrupted Mike, “to Mrs. Drickett.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Drickett,” Mike repeated.
It was still several seconds before Floyd realized who he meant.
“Sandra’s mother?” It had been some time since his brief relationship with Sandra, and Floyd had not seen her, or her mother, for at least a year. “Why?”
“She works at the Job Center now.”
“I’ve already tried the Job Center,” said Floyd. “They don’t have anything. Not for people like me. If I was an IT expert or a bricklayer …”
“Floyd?”
Floyd looked up to find an attractively dressed middle-aged woman gazing down at him, a look of concern on her face.
He recognized her at once.
“I don’t mean to disturb you,” said the woman, “but I was a little worried. You seemed to be talking to yourself. Is everything OK?”
“It’s very kind of you to ask, Mrs. Drickett.” Floyd glanced to the side and was not surprised to see that Mike had vanished. “But no … No, everything’s not OK, really. I’ve been trying to find a job and I’m not having much luck.”
“A job?” Mrs. Drickett sat down on the bench beside him. “What sort of job?”
“Anything, really. I just need to earn some money to go to America next year. I’ve tried everywhere. Today I’ve been handing out these …” He held out the sheaf of copies of his résumé. “But no one’s interested.”
“Could I see that?” Mrs. Drickett reached across for a copy of his résumé and started reading. “I work at the Job Center these days and there’s quite an art to writing a good résumé. I always tell people …” She paused. “It doesn’t say anything here about your tennis. Is there a reason for that?”
“I don’t play tennis anymore,” said Floyd.
“I know you don’t play competitively, but it’s a skill you could use in other ways, isn’t it? Like coaching or something? With your reputation, I’d have thought they’d be lining up for that.” Mrs. Drickett gave a shrug. “Still, if you’re not interested …”
She went back to studying the résumé.
“If I was interested,” said Floyd slowly, “in coaching tennis, how exactly would I go about getting that sort of work?”
“Your dad would be the one to answer that, I think,” said Mrs. Drickett. “He knows pretty much everyone in the tennis world, doesn’t he?”
That evening, a little hesitantly, Floyd asked his father if he thought there was any chance of his getting work as a tennis coach and was relieved to find that Mr. Beresford did not seem to be upset at the suggestion. He listened carefully while Floyd explained what Sandra’s mother had told him, nodded, and said that he would ask around.
Two days later he took Floyd to a small private school four miles outside Sheffield that needed a temporary replacement for a gym coach who had gone on maternity leave. The headmaster, a grizzled-looking man in his fifties, took Floyd down to the courts—which Floyd’s father had built—and asked him to start coaching a twelve-year-old boy who was already standing there, waiting.
Floyd had not expected things to happen so fast and was not exactly prepared. He had not touched a tennis racket for over three years and wasn’t at all sure he could still make the ball do anything if he did, let alone teach the principles to anyone else. Putting these worries aside, however, he began by getting the boy to do the sort of warm-up exercises that his father had done with him every day for ten years and found, as he did so, that he fell almost automatically into his father’s easy and encouraging style. He did his best to keep it fun, to explain one thing, practice it, then move on to something different before his pupil had time to get bored … From the start, the whole thing felt remarkably natural and easy.
Fifteen minutes later, the headmaster came across to tell the boy, whose name was Freddie Stripes, that it was time he got back to his class. Then he turned to Floyd.
“So when can you start?”
“Well … any time, really,” said Floyd.
The headmaster looked at his watch. “If I gave you six children, the same age as Freddie, could you look after them for an hour?”
“What, now?”
“Yes. There’ll be a member of the staff down here with you in case you have any problems. But I can see you won’t.”
“OK. Yes. Yes, that’s fine.”
“Good.” The headmaster was already turning to leave. “Your dad says he’ll be back to pick you up after lunch.”
Dr. Pinner laughed when he heard. “I told you there was no need to worry,” he said.
Floyd enjoyed the coaching. Most of the time it hardly felt like work at all, and it reminded him of all the things he had enjoyed about tennis while he was growing up—the being outdoors, the pleasure of physical exertion, the satisfaction brought by acquiring a new skill. And the job not only paid three times what he had been earning at Waterworld, it also quite unexpectedly began to heal the rift that had opened between Floyd and his parents after Roehampton.
It did so firstly because, in teaching others, Floyd came to appreciate how good his parents, and particularly his father, had been at teaching him. It seemed only natural that he should start asking his father’s advice when it came to planning lessons or talking about why something hadn’t worked the way he had hoped and asking how he could do it better. At supper his parents would want to know how his day had gone and, for the first time in years, the evening meal became what it had been for so much of his life—a time when they all came together to discuss what had happened during the day and to share their plans for the next.
But there was one other equally unexpected offshoot from the coaching job. For most of the boys Floyd taught, tennis was a sport they chose because it was fun. Some of them were good athletes, and the tennis team next year would be a strong one, but for one of the boys the game was clearly something more.
Floyd had noticed the difference that first day. Freddie Stripes wasn’t just a keen player—there was a hunger about him. He was always early for practice, seemed to eat up any coaching, and was to be found on one of the courts at any spare moment he had during the day. It was toward the end of the semester, after a class, that Floyd found Freddie’s mother waiti
ng outside the gym when he had finished.
“Mr. Beresford?” she said. “Could I have a word?”
“Yes, of course.” Floyd was beginning to get used to people calling him “Mr. Beresford.”
“Freddie has very much enjoyed his lessons with you,” said Mrs. Stripes, “and he’s been asking if we could organize some extra instruction for him.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” said Floyd. “He’s an excellent player.”
“Thank you. We wondered if you would be prepared to coach him. On weekends, perhaps? Or early mornings? We would pay you, of course.”
“I’m sorry,” said Floyd, “but I’m only here for this semester. After Christmas, I’m going to America.”
“Ah … Freddie will be disappointed to hear that.” Mrs. Stripes paused briefly before continuing. “But I think he needs someone, don’t you? I mean, it seems to us he has a lot of talent.”
“I agree,” said Floyd. “He does.”
“So who would be the best person to teach him, do you think? Is there anyone you could recommend?”
Floyd thought about this.
“I don’t know if you can get him,” he said eventually, “but the best person would be my father.”
Three weeks later, Floyd found himself standing on a dockside on Jeffries Point in Boston, looking up at the ship that was to be his home for the next three months. The name on her bow said she was the We’re Here and, despite his jet lag, the sight of her triggered in Floyd the curious sensation that he had somehow arrived at exactly the place he was supposed to be.
As if to confirm that feeling, he became aware that Mike was standing beside him, with a smile on his face very similar to the one he had had that first day on the beach at Bude, sitting on a rock and looking out to sea. He even made the same admiring gesture with his arm that seemed to say, Isn’t that fantastic!
“She’s beautiful,” said Floyd. “Really beautiful!”
“Glad you like her,” said a voice. “Kind of fond of her myself.”
Floyd turned to find that the figure beside him was not Mike, but a young man with straggly hair trailing several inches over his collar and a beard carefully woven into three plaits.
“Name’s Gosta,” said the man. “I’m one of the scientists.”
“I’m Floyd,” said Floyd. “I think I’m the gofer.”
Gosta grinned, put a hand on Floyd’s shoulder, and led him toward the gangway.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you around.”
The We’re Here was a vessel of some two hundred tons, with a crew of four and accommodations for six scientists. Officially, Floyd was on the books as a scientist but, as is often the case on small boats, the difference between the two categories was fluid. Three of the scientists were also licensed to keep watch, while all of the “crew” were experienced divers, and Floyd was as frequently asked to take a turn at watchkeeping as he was to help dive for the samples and specimens that were being collected. The reason he looked as if he was enjoying himself doing either was because he was.
Much of the work he did as a member of the crew involved, as Dr. Lamont had warned, doing whatever anyone asked him to, but he didn’t seem to mind. Whether he was being a “wiper” down in the engine room, a cook in the galley, or standing watch at night, Floyd always gave the impression that he was not only happy doing whatever it was, but thriving on it.
The work he did for the scientists was mentally more demanding, but he thrived on that as well. Part of the research involved recording which species of fish were still surviving in the oxygen-depleted waters, and Floyd found that, in this area, his value was much more than that of a gofer. Three years working in an aquarium in Sheffield had given him an easy familiarity with most of the species they encountered and a confidence in identifying them that was at least the equal of anyone else on board. As a result, he was asked to do a good deal of diving. Which he loved.
His diving partner was usually Gosta, a man everyone referred to as “the Bear,” because of the remarkable quantity of hair that covered his body. Gosta talked a good deal about the environmental doom that he was convinced would shortly overtake the planet, in distinct contrast to Floyd’s more optimistic outlook, but for some reason the two of them rapidly became friends.
And it was the people on the We’re Here that Floyd loved best. The hypoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is the second biggest in the world, and the most probable cause is the amount of fertilizer used on farms along the Mississippi that gets washed into the river and then down to the sea. Dr. Lamont’s research was aimed at determining which levels were the most dangerous and how the damage could be reversed. There was nowhere he would rather be, Floyd thought, than with the people who could analyze such problems and work out a possible solution.
Most of them were considerably older than he was, but they were all interested in the same things, they all wanted to achieve the same results, and they all had the same concerns. Floyd found that being with them, listening to their stories, hearing them argue, and asking them questions, gave him the feeling for the first time in his life that he had found a place within his own tribe. As he later said, the moment he stepped on board, he did not simply feel at home, he felt that he had come home.
At the end of the commission, the We’re Here returned to Boston, and Dr. Lamont invited Floyd to stay at his house on the university grounds for a few days before flying back to England. Charity was there, fresh from her second semester at Cornell, and she took him, as she had promised, on several trips to see the sights of Boston. The first of these was in a dinghy, which the Lamonts kept at Rowes Wharf, to see the views from the waterfront.
Sitting in the little boat while Charity steered it skillfully through the other traffic on the water, Floyd found himself less interested in the view than in telling Charity about his time in the Gulf of Mexico. He described the extraordinary diversity of marine life he had seen there, told her about his admiration for the crew of the We’re Here and his friendship with Gosta, and then about that curious feeling he had had of “coming home,” and being with his own tribe.
And Charity listened, in the same way she had listened on the beach at Holacombe in Cornwall, without interruption.
“So what do you do now?” she asked when he had finished.
“Well, your dad’s invited me to come on the next trip he’s doing—to the Caribbean.”
“That’s good,” said Charity.
“But it’s not till the summer. So I thought, between now and then, I’d try and get some qualifications. Maybe a watchkeeping certificate, learn some navigation …”
“So that one day you could join as part of the crew?”
Floyd nodded. “That’s the plan. I think it’s the sort of job that would suit me.”
“Yes …” Charity frowned.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Well, I just thought …” Charity tightened a sheet and steered them around a party of children in kayaks. “From the way you talk, it’s obvious how much you enjoyed doing all the science stuff, as well. And Dad says you were really good at it. Couldn’t you do that too?”
“I’d need to have done university before I could do any real work on the science side,” said Floyd.
“Yes,” Charity agreed. “I suppose you would.”
“And I’d have had to apply months ago if I was going to do that. I’ve kind of missed the boat on that one.”
“Have you?” said Charity. “That’s a shame.”
Her parents, when the subject came up at supper that evening, agreed that it was indeed a shame and, when the meal ended, Dr. Lamont got up from the table and disappeared into his office. He came back half an hour later with the news that he had been talking to his friend Dr. McKinley, who ran what was probably the best marine biology course in the U.K. at the University of Exeter. When Floyd returned to England, he said, there would be a place for him if he wanted, starting in September.
In early
July, Floyd flew back to Boston to join the We’re Here as she set off to spend eight weeks investigating the decline of reef-building corals on the Mouchoir Bank in the Caribbean. And it was there, some forty miles to the east of the Turks and Caicos Islands, that he saw Mike for the last and undoubtedly the strangest time.
Dr. Lamont had warned everyone before they sailed that this was possibly going to be their final voyage on the We’re Here. A large part of the funds that had financed the boat and its research had been provided by a trust set up by a man who had made his fortune in the tuna trade. Unfortunately, that funding would soon be coming to an end and as yet no new sponsor had been found.
It was a disappointment, especially to those members of the team who had worked together for a good number of years and formed strong friendships in the process, but it was, despite that, a particularly happy voyage. For Floyd, there was the added bonus that, to his surprise, Charity had joined the ship as well. It seemed her course at Cornell required that she do a number of weeks of fieldwork, and that two months on the We’re Here fit perfectly.
It was in their fourth week out that Floyd saw Mike. The We’re Here was anchored in about sixty feet of water while its divers collected mollusks. The aim was to gather a series of samples from layers excavated on the seafloor, to find out exactly when and how the recent changes to the marine environment had taken place. Floyd and the Bear were diving together that morning, collecting shells from a pit that had been started the previous day, and the Bear was carrying a tray of them up to the boat when it happened.
While the Bear swam to the surface, Floyd had stayed on the seabed, making a start on excavating the next layer of shells. At least that’s what he would have done if he hadn’t suddenly noticed Mike, standing on the seabed a few yards away. He was dressed exactly as he had been on the tennis court at Roehampton and the street in Wimbledon, and had the same thoughtful look on his face as he gave his usual nod of greeting.
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