by T D Griggs
My father was seated once more on the front pew, his hands again locked around his stick. I took a step towards him as Sharif reappeared. The big west door crashed open again and the wind seemed to carry Kate in with it. She flew up the aisle towards us with raindrops spinning off her. She was filthy and scratched and frantic.
‘It’s not there!’ she shouted. ‘The boat! It’s gone!’ She stood with her fists clenched. ‘The boat is gone!’
I turned back towards Felix and saw bewilderment, suspicion, horror pass across his face. I grabbed him by the folds of his splendid vestments.
‘What have you done?’
His mouth came open and he began to breathe rapidly. I shook him hard. Sharif tried to step between us but I brushed him aside.
‘Serge is on the launch, Felix,’ I said. ‘He’s there right now, waiting for me. What have you done?’
‘I’ve cut it free!’ he hissed into my ear, as though the words had been forced out of him under pressure. He looked wildly at me, sweat running down his face. ‘I cut the moorings. I set it adrift.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’ I shook him again and heard his teeth clack together.
‘I thought the diaries were on board. I told you that... So I waited for the storm and I cut the moorings and I thought the damned boat would be on the Shoals in an hour and that would be the end of it, at last.’
‘What’s he saying?’ my father called. He got to his feet.
Sharif said: ‘I’ll get the coastguard.’ He pulled out his phone and snapped it open.
‘What did he say?’ my father demanded again, and grabbed my arm. ‘The little priest. What did he say?’
‘The launch is adrift,’ I told him in English. ‘He cut the moorings. The boy’s aboard.’
‘When? When did he do this?’
‘Since an hour.’ Felix spoke in English too, directly to the old man. He seemed to come back to his senses as he did so, as if the effort needed to communicate in a foreign language had focused him. ‘An hour ago. No, not so much. Three quarters, only.’
Kate looked wildly around the group of us. ‘He’s going to drown!’
Nobody answered her. She ran to my father and grabbed his arm with both hands. He did not look at her.
‘Don’t you understand?’ she shouted. ‘Serge is going to drown while we stand here!’
Felix stared dazedly from Kate to my father and back to me, perhaps realising for the first time what he had done. He said: ‘The currents. It will be… on the Shoals…’
‘Not yet,’ my father said. ‘Not with an onshore blow like this.’
Kate shook at his arm like a child trying to shake an oak tree. ‘Granddad!’
I released Felix from my grip and turned to her. ‘Kate, Inspector Sharif is calling out the coastguard right now.’
My father stared over the girl’s head at me. ‘From where?’
Sharif looked up from the phone and answered for me. ‘St Malo. They have fast ships. And…’ he circled his forefinger rapidly until he found the word ‘…helicopters.’
‘Not fast enough,’ my father said. ‘St Malo’s too far.’
He put his arm around Kate’s shoulders as if to shield her from this truth.
‘Please, Granddad,’ she whispered, and, burying her face in his coat, she began to sob. ‘Please. Please.’
She wanted more than mere comfort from him, I knew that, she wanted something that only he could give. I didn’t know what that something was – perhaps I didn’t let myself know it just then.
My father kept his eyes fixed on mine and there was silence in the church except for the moaning of the wind outside and the girl’s soft keening. Then with his free hand my father smacked his stick down hard against the paving.
‘Listen. Once the tide starts to ebb, the Vasse runs out at eight knots, maybe ten after this rain. It sweeps round until it comes up against the southern end of the Shoals. It’s like a living thing, that current. It tries to get over the Shoals. It tries to reach the open sea. With a storm like this, it’ll be a cauldron out there. Nothing can survive in it.’
Sharif looked at him. ‘You know this coast?’
‘If it hasn’t changed in the last sixty years,’ my father said. ‘That current will carry anything with it, and deliver it up to destruction on the Shoals sure as fate, and there’ll be an end to it. But with luck it will take some time, with this wind against it.’
Kate stopped sobbing abruptly and turned her stained face up to him.
‘How much time?’ Sharif asked my father.
‘Maybe long enough to get a boat out to her from St Cyriac before she strikes, if it put to sea now.’
‘That is not possible,’ Sharif said. ‘A man could never find it in this darkness.’
‘A man might,’ the old man told him. ‘If a man knew where to look.’
Sharif narrowed his eyes. I could hear his mobile squawking in his ear, demanding his reply. In the end he shook his head. ‘We have no vessel here. We have no…’ he groped for the word again, ‘we have no sailors. None who will go out in such a sea.’ He walked away up the aisle, talking rapidly into his phone as he went.
Beside me, Felix slid to the floor, his head in his hands.
‘Granddad,’ Kate said softly.
Her voice sounded odd to me and I looked sharply at her. I could not see her face.
‘There’s nothing to be done, my maid,’ my father said, not meeting her eyes. ‘Except perhaps to pray.’
‘But I love him, Granddad,’ Kate persisted in that same quiet voice, ‘I love him, and I can’t lose him again.’
A cold fingertip ran down my spine. For an instant it was as if someone else was speaking, not Kate, in a voice only half recognised from long ago. I saw that the same strangeness had touched my father too, for he looked down into her face for the first time, and as he did so his eyes grew distant and hollow.
I stepped up to them. I took Kate roughly by the shoulders and moved her to one side.
‘I can get us a boat,’ I said.
59
Henri felt inside his apron and tossed the leather key wallet onto the bar.
‘Like I told you,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how to make it… go.’
My father picked up the key.
I said: ‘He knows how to make it go.’
I turned to follow the old man and reached the door.
‘So I was right,’ Henri called to me. ‘It’s in the blood.’
My father was already moving along the quayside, the wind whipping at his coat. I hurried past him, hoping to outrun my fear, and jumped down onto the slatted walkway between the boats. They tossed and moaned each side of me, and the black water slapped eerily beneath my feet.
I stepped onto the deck of The Gay Dog before I could think twice and started to rip the tarpaulin cover from the cockpit. Even here, within the shelter of the harbour walls, the little antique cruiser heaved, jostling the boats to either side. I closed my mind to it. My father tossed down the keys and I fumbled through them until I found one that would unlock the cover over the control panel. I opened it and flicked switches at random. Lights sprang on, revealing the inside of the cabin with its polished timber and brass.
My father stepped into the cockpit beside me and checked the controls. He planted himself at the wheel, turned the key and the engine grumbled into life. I leaned forward and placed my hands on the cabin roof. I could feel sweat mixing with the rain and running down the sides of my neck and inside my clothes. I became aware of my father watching me, waiting, his hand on the throttle lever, his white hair plastered to his skull.
‘Get back up there and cast off,’ he said, ‘or we’ll take the dock with us.’
I went unsteadily to the edge of the cockpit. If I climbed off I didn’t think I could summon the courage to get aboard again. I could feel my father’s eyes on me. I heard the rasping of my own breath. I reached for the lip of the dock as it lurched up past me, got my hands on the wet timber.
‘Stay there,’ Felix shouted from above me.
He was crouched over the bollards, tugging at the mooring, his sodden robes hanging around him. I let go and fell back into the cockpit while he cast off the stern line and freed the bow rope. He walked forward a couple of steps, taking the tension in the line, guiding the bow out between the other vessels. He hesitated, and I knew it was in his mind to take that last small step down into the cockpit beside me. But then I saw him shake his head, defeated. He tossed the wet line down at my feet and stepped back. I met his eyes, and saw nothing but pain in them.
My father eased open the throttle. We slid quickly out between the rocking boats and in a moment were thudding through broken water at the harbour mouth, the beacons painting us alternately ruby and emerald. When we were clear the old man pulled back the throttle and the cruiser surged forward, chopping through the swells. The engine note climbed and the bow lifted and spume flew up in sheets.
I crouched in the cockpit, clutching the edge of the locker. I could smell diesel, and feel the juddering of the engine beneath me. The sky was wild with torn clouds and the moon plunged like a silver horseman through cannon smoke. The boat pitched and the world spun and my head beat like a drum and I retched a couple of times.
When I looked up again I saw that my father was standing braced against the wheel, gazing along the elegant curve of the cabin roof, his face creased against the spray which lashed over the low windshield mounted there. He took his eyes from the sea ahead and looked down at me, and I was conscious under that steady gaze of how I must appear to him, huddled here, sick and terrified. Some shackle in my mind abruptly snapped. I stood up, and gripped the rail on the cabin roof, and turned to face the bow, where the buxom figurehead was plunging in and out of the swell. I glanced back. The harbour wall was receding over black water, silhouetted against the lights of the village.
The wind burst open the cabin door. I heard glass smash and a rattan tray came clattering out between us and was whipped overboard. I dragged the door shut and latched it as the boat plunged again and green water sluiced over the cabin roof and mounded against the Perspex screen. The bow rose again, and I saw for the first time the line of white surf far ahead, luminous against a graphite sky.
I shouted: ‘How will we find her in this?’
‘If she stays afloat there’s a chance we’ll see her against the white water.’ My father gripped the wheel, glanced sideways at me. ‘It’ll be calmer here for a space,’ he called over the wind, and indeed the confusion of the inshore waters had settled a little and the boat was moving now to some sort of rhythm. ‘When we get close, it’ll grow rougher again. But we shall manage.’
I nodded. The wind buffeted me, and on the bow the figurehead plunged and rose, grinning idiotically.
‘It was Madeleine Rosen I heard,’ I told him.
‘What?’
‘It was Lena. I know that now.’ I raised my voice. ‘Out on the sea that day. I heard her as you held me, just the way you heard her. I was eight years old. I thought it was all in my mind.’
My father shook the water off his face. He stared forward over the cabin into the darkness and spray. A wave came rearing out of the blackness and broke like a bomb over the foredeck, sluicing over both of us as we clung on. I choked and spat out salt water. A second and larger wave smacked into us and for a second I was sure we were going over. As I clambered upright I saw that my father had slid down onto one knee under the force of the water and was gasping, struggling to haul himself up again, the wheel skidding under his grip.
I shouldered past him and took the wheel. He groped his way to his feet and clutched at it again but I shoved him roughly aside. ‘Get out of the way, you crazy old bastard.’
He stood back and gripped the rail, steadying himself, breathing heavily. ‘Take her up into the wind, then,’ he growled at me.
‘Do what?’
‘Starboard a couple of points. Take her starboard.’
I looked at him. ‘Left or right?’
Then the stars ahead were blotted out and I found myself fighting with the wheel, instinctively bringing the bow round so that we rose crazily up the wave and came over and corkscrewed and twisted through it into a few seconds of comparative calm.
‘Here,’ my father said, quite gently, and he placed his big rough hands over mine. ‘Here. Let me show you.’
I stared straight ahead into the wind. ‘You picked a fine time to start teaching me, Dad.’
‘I know it.’ His hands guided mine. ‘Maybe you wouldn’t have listened before.’
‘You never gave me the chance,’ I shouted, suddenly furious with him. ‘You pushed me away at every turn.’
The boat writhed under us, thudding forward into heaving water. His hands tightened over mine, edging the wheel round a fraction.
‘It’s true enough,’ he said at last. ‘I was wrong. I own it.’
‘Then why?’ Our lashed faces were just inches apart in the light through the cabin doors. ‘Why?’
‘It was Callum,’ he said, simply.
My anger evaporated in an instant and was replaced by bewilderment. ‘My brother?’
‘Your brother who was taken.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘That’s how it settled in my mind, at least. And perhaps it was so. Callum was taken from your mother and from me at his birth, that little child. That was my punishment. To suffer and to see your poor mother suffer, whom I loved better than myself.’
‘So you turned away from me?’
‘I couldn’t let you be taken from me as Callum had been. Don’t you see? Out on the water that day when you were little I so nearly lost you. I knew then you’d never be safe with me. No matter what it cost me, no matter what it cost you, I had to turn away from you.’
We both stared at one another in silence. The wind screamed around us, but it passed somehow unnoticed for those few moments, as if we were sealed inside a glass dome and its force could not touch us.
‘Left or right,’ he repeated at last, as if in wonder. ‘Jesus Christ Almighty!’ And all at once he began to laugh, a huge, booming laugh I hadn’t heard since I was a little child. ‘My son!’ he bellowed, and he turned his shining face up to the swinging stars and shouted again: ‘This is my son, who doesn’t know port from starboard!’
He wrenched back the throttle with one hand and swung the wheel with the other so that the boat sat down in the water and – his laughter still ringing out into the night – he took her in a long curve towards the bar of white.
The breaking water showed clearly now, not so far ahead, and my father throttled back. I heard and felt it too: the dull boom of the swells driving into the submerged banks. The moon rode free for a moment and in its light I glimpsed the floor of the sea, dark sand just a couple of metres below, a shadowy and alien landscape canting wildly beneath the boat.
The Gay Dog’s hull thumped from one roller to the next. I stared ahead into the moaning darkness. The boat yawed and threw us together, and my father’s arm came round me, and for a few seconds we clung there.
‘The light,’ he said gruffly. ‘We’ll only have one chance.’
He shoved me away from the wheel and I found the switch and the spotlight on the cabin roof shot a trembling finger of white light out into the spray. I gripped the handle and panned it. The sea ahead was a seething cauldron of white, with nothing but blackness beyond.
A sheet of surf broke clear over a bank perhaps a hundred metres ahead. My father throttled back and the cruiser rocked wildly in the creaming water. Twice the keel touched the sand but each time the old man twisted the wheel and blipped the throttle and she was clear again. There were more of them ahead, black humps of exposed shoal and acres of broken water.
I twisted the spotlight on its mounting. The beam bored into a wall of water which was suddenly there, hanging over us, and then it crashed down, throwing the cruiser so far over that I felt myself weightless and falling. The c
abin roof came up fast and clubbed me above the right eye and I tasted blood.
I shook my head, trying to clear it, failing. Beside me the old man was fighting with the wheel and losing the struggle while water sluiced over us. I was on the floor of the cockpit with my face against the cabin window. I could see seawater slopping from side to side in the ruined elegance behind it, a rocking tide of books, ornaments, sodden watercolours floating from their frames.
My father’s hand locked onto my shoulder. He was shouting, cursing, though I couldn’t make out the words. I got to my knees and tried to concentrate. I could see my blood dropping onto the cabin roof in front of me. Blood was running down my face and into my eyes too. There was a lot of it. I felt no pain, but I knew something was badly wrong.
I hauled myself up the side of the cabin and groped for the spotlight. The beam was poking uselessly at the sky. I fumbled it down again, until it lanced out over the black water, and I tried to remember what I was looking for in the darkness.
I heard it then. It was hard to be sure at first, my head was so full of noise and confusion. But there it came again. The steady and sonorous tolling of a bell.
‘You hear that?’ I grabbed my father’s arm. ‘There. Again. It’s over there!’ I flung out my hand. I could hear it clearly now, from slightly inshore of our course.
He looked at me strangely.
‘Can’t you hear it?’ I cried. ‘Can’t you hear that?’
I clutched for the wheel. I no longer quite knew what I was doing. He swatted me aside, but he swung the bow in the direction I pointed and pulled back the throttle and the cruiser ploughed forward between the banks, dangerously fast. The keel cracked against something beneath us and the boat canted and slid free and churned onward again.
2548 lay silhouetted against the white water. She had been driven hard up onto the shoal, and her back was broken, but most of her hull was out of the sea and tilted to one side, so that she looked almost as she had the first time I had ever seen her. Her stern was still in the water and the breakers were smashing against her and pouring in through the splintered hull, but she was resisting bravely, stubborn to the last. Beside her, just clear of the bow, the boy stood chest high in the sea, one hand hooked through the launch’s riven planking, the other stretched desperately towards us.