Curtain Call

by Graham Hurley

  ‘Impressive,’ I say quietly.

  By now we’ve finished our main course. Malo insists we call for the dessert menu.

  ‘Dad says to fill your boots,’ he says. ‘And he’s paying.’

  I order a salted caramel fondant but only manage half of it while Malo tucks into Bramley apple crumble pie. There’s an actress at a nearby table I haven’t seen since we were both in a Tennessee Williams in Newcastle and on the way out I pause by her table and have a brief chat. She’s much taken by Malo, whom I introduce as my toy boy. She looks him up and down with frank approval and hopes he knows how to make an older woman very happy. All three of us know it’s a joke, and even Malo laughs.

  We say goodbye on the street outside. This is the first time for a while that I’ve had my son to myself and I’ve loved every moment. Seeing him like this from time to time, dipping into his busy, busy life, I’m aware of him maturing in front of my eyes.

  He gives me a hug and turns to leave but then stops. His hand goes to his jacket pocket.

  ‘I nearly forgot. You have to fill this in, especially the medical bits. It’s for the insurance.’

  He gives me a form and I skim-read it quickly. All the usual questions – name, gender, DoB, contact details, then some more pointed stuff. Do I know how to swim? Am I currently under medical supervision? Is there any other health reason why I shouldn’t embark on the voyage?

  ‘You had this drawn up specially?’

  ‘Yeah. Dad said not to take the medical bits too seriously. We don’t want you to be turned down for the insurance.’

  ‘You’re asking me to lie?’

  ‘Not me. Dad.’

  He gives me a peck on the cheek and leaves me with the form. I watch him loping away down Litchfield Street, a moment – on my part – of real pride. When H took me to the pub that first time, and talked of the need to enrol our son in some project or other, I never dreamed it would be something as complex and challenging as this. At Malo’s age I would have had neither the raw nerve nor confidence to put myself in front of all these people, to confect knowledge I probably didn’t have, to make sophisticated judgements about their personalities, about their preparedness to take a risk or two, about how well they’d adapt to each other in what might turn out to be testing conditions.

  Then, as he disappears round the corner at the end of the street, I tell myself I’m wrong. At seventeen I’d begun to think seriously about being an actress, a performer, downstage in front of hundreds of people, or – even more daunting – in front of a camera and a director and a technical crew. That took nerve, too. Plus the guile to play a part, to inhabit someone else’s skin, someone else’s persona, and all in the cause of making people laugh or cry or maybe just think a little bit harder.

  That, in a sense, is what my boy is doing. The bravura, the chutzpah, the sheer cheek, he gets from H. But some of the rest surely comes from me. This is a thought I can live with for a while, a conclusion that makes me very, very happy, and as I head for the bus stop, still clutching the insurance form, it takes me a moment or two to realize that I haven’t once thought about Sayid, or Mitch, or fucking Brexit for at least two hours.

  Happy days, as H would say. From the top floor of the 94 bus, I send him a text. I thank him for The Ivy, trail five kisses across the screen, and then add a postscript. We should both be very proud of Malo, I text. Just look what we’ve done.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Sayid is discharged from hospital two days before we’re due to set sail. Beware of Pity is a long book – 454 pages – and once we know when Sayid is to go home I speed up the readings a little and spend longer at his bedside. We get to the final page on the eve of his departure and a relative of one of the group of fellow listeners turns up with a home-baked cake, suitably iced and decorated, to mark the occasion. A single toy soldier guards the lone candle. Sweet gesture.

  By now, Sayid is on his feet, fully mobile. He won’t be running for a while but he’s learned to put a sentence together through his broken teeth and still-wired jaw. Mitch, he says, will be coming in the morning to take him back to Hither Green. I hold him for a long moment. We’ve shared a lot these past few weeks and I know he’s grateful for me coming to the hospital so often, but as ever he’s thinking not of himself but of me.

  ‘Have fun on that boat of yours,’ he says.

  I’ve told him all about the voyage, and our complement of paying guests, and I’ve shared my misgivings about crossing the Channel. I’ve had a peek at the Met Office advance forecast for the next few days and although I’m no expert it doesn’t look great. The surface pressure charts show a whorl of isobars in mid-Atlantic, a sign of strong winds, maybe even gale force. This depression – an interesting word – is coming our way and there appears to be another one brewing up behind it. On the phone, Malo has been dismissive when I played the feeble mum. Boats like Persephone, he told me, can live with any kind of weather. This may be true, and I didn’t say anything on the phone, but it isn’t Persephone I’m worried about.

  Sayid accompanies me to the door at the end of the ward. He wishes me God speed and tells me to take care. Then he touches his own head.

  ‘You’re OK in there?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘And in here?’ His hand slips down to his chest, covering his heart.

  ‘In there is fine, too.’

  I mean it. After the Guardian shitstorm and everything that followed, my daily visits to Sayid’s bedside have achieved what a true penance should. I feel rested, calmer. I feel comfortable with myself. On an especially good day I can even see myself crossing the Channel without spending most of the voyage throwing up.

  I leave the hospital and take the bus home. After consulting with Persephone’s skipper, Malo has circulated an information pack for all our guests plus myself and H. Among the items I need to take on board are a heavy-duty wind-and-waterproof jacket, trousers made of the same Gore-Tex, plenty of insulating layers for underneath, slip-proof footwear, and heavy woollen socks. A lifejacket will be waiting for me in my cabin.

  We’ll all be meeting on the morning of 9 November at the Camber Dock. Onboard safety and house-keeping brief. Pre-lunch drinks in the saloon with a lightish meal to follow. Visits to the D-Day museum and Southwick House in the afternoon followed by dinner in a local pub and a very special screening of The Hour of Our Passing. Moi to introduce the movie.

  Persephone, Malo has written, loves to put herself in the hands of first-time matelots. She can be a challenge to sail – lots of sweat and effort – and once we’ve left Portsmouth on the following day there’ll be plenty of opportunities to teach us novices exactly what to do. The skipper plans to slip from the Camber Dock in the late morning to make the most of a hefty spring ebb tide. Nautical twilight is expected around 17.01. Dawn, at 08.02 French time, should find us within thirty miles of landfall. With a fair wind and a measure of luck we should be berthing in Ouistreham in time for lunch. Bon appetit!

  The information pack goes on to detail the schedule once we’ve arrived in France. Courtesy meetings with various civic dignitaries. Un vin d’honneur with members of the Caen/Portsmouth Twinning Association. A promising succession of meals. Our second day, 11 November, is to feature a wreath-laying on a beachside memorial at Arromanches, followed by a visit to a war graves cemetery for the benefit of Ruth. In the evening we shall be dining in a top local restaurant, a must for seafood buffs. At first light on the twelfth, weather permitting, we’ll be slipping our moorings in Ouistreham and putting to sea for the return leg to Portsmouth. Home safe in the Camber Dock in time for breakfast the next day.

  This was a lot to digest in one sitting and I remember being impressed yet again by Malo’s attention to detail. The sheer precision of the schedule. His apparent mastery of time differences and tide tables. Phrases like spring ebb and nautical twilight. Just where did all this stuff come from? And how come my clever, clever son is such a quick study?

  Back in Holland Park I com
plete my packing and re-check the train times for tomorrow. An early departure from Waterloo should put me beside Portsmouth Harbour by nine o’clock. Plenty of time to make my way to Persephone, meet my new shipmates, and join the trip to the D-Day museum and Southwick House. I book an Uber for 5.45 next morning and retire early. Malo texts me just after nine. He’s laid hands on some new seasickness pills the skipper swears by. Dors bien. A demain.

  Sleep well. See you tomorrow. His message makes me smile. My precious boy thinks of everything.

  Next morning another text awaits me. It’s Sayid this time, wishing me bon voyage. I take this as the best of omens and struggle downstairs in the darkness to throw my bags in the back of the waiting Uber. By half past nine, in a thin drizzle, I’m paying off another taxi driver down in Portsmouth on the very edge of the Camber Dock. Persephone rides easily below me, nudging the harbour wall. I appear to be the first to arrive.

  I’m struck at once by Persephone’s good looks. Sturdy? Yes. Workmanlike? Definitely. But graceful, too, a lyrical poem in carefully varnished timber. Gifted shipwrights, I tell myself, must have evolved the shape of boats like these. Chosen the wood, laid down the keel, made her ready for the ocean and the decades of heavy-duty fishing that will follow. Malo has already blitzed me with dozens of sepia shots of trawlers like Persephone in their prime, wallowing down-Channel, hauling huge nets, the trapped fish attracting clouds of quarrelsome seagulls. In those days, he told me, the three-man crew had nothing but sails to see them through. No engine. No navigation aids. Just raw muscle and the kind of inbred knowledge that passes from generation to generation. These days, looking at the array of aerials on top of the mast, I suspect it must be a whole lot easier and for that I’m duly grateful.

  I’m still debating how to get out of the rain when a slight, diminutive figure appears below. It turns out to be the skipper. Her name is Suranne. She’s barefoot on the wetness of the deck. She’s wearing patched jeans and puffer gilet over a black T-shirt. She has an elfin haircut, a strong jaw line, and is sucking on a thin roll-up. I throw her my bags and then, under her direction, clamber down the iron ladder.

  ‘Welcome.’ She’s laughing. ‘Haven’t I seen your face before?’

  She takes me through the doghouse where she says all the important stuff happens and then down another set of steps to the saloon. The key word here is cosy. There’s a tiny galley and a biggish dining table lapped by leather-covered banquettes. There are two cabins at the back of the boat, another midships, and four berths in the bow. The crew, all four of them, live somewhere else.

  The next hour or so, as crew and guests gather, is a blizzard of names I dimly recognize from conversations with Malo. Malo himself is in the very middle of it all, working the crowd, pressing the flesh, carefully deferring to the skipper. At first glance, Suranne might be in her late twenties. However, given the responsibility she carries, she must be a good deal older. She’s direct, and likes to share a joke or two, but she’s learned the knack of establishing the pecking order without a hint of pulling rank. Clever. And impressive.

  Persephone’s first mate is taller, and fuller, also a woman. Fresh-faced and super confident, Georgie divides us into smaller groups and walks us through a list of dos and don’ts. The key location are the two loos. She calls them heads. There’s a pump arrangement for disposing of the effluent and she squats on the toilet seat in this sentry box of a lavatory and demonstrates exactly what we’re expected to do. Numbers are evidently the key to a happy boat. Twenty pumps to fill the bowl. The flick of a switch. Twenty more to empty it. Alex, the ex-civil servant, happens to be in my group. Like all of us, this is his first brush with onboard authority.

  ‘Not a motion more, not a motion less,’ he murmurs.

  I think it’s funny. I’m not sure Georgie even heard the comment but one thing is already uncomfortably clear. In any kind of weather, or ‘blow’ as Georgie calls it, spaces like these will quickly become somewhere you’d probably best avoid.

  By midday, after a full safety brief up on deck, we return to the saloon. The cook, a cheerful teenager called Esther, is making what she calls a winter soup. The fourth member of the crew is Jack. He’s a strapping gap-year youth with hands the size of plates and a winning grin, and his pre-lunch job is to make sure we all have drinks. The soup is delicious and the rolls that come with it are hot from the oven.

  By now, we’re starting to get to know each other. Sadie the Telegraph scribe has yet to turn up while Alex and Cassie tend to hang back a little. Ruth, petite, pretty, has an icy smile and clearly dislikes direct questions. Whether this comes with being a CPS lawyer, I’ve no idea, but I make a mental note to avoid anything too playful or light-hearted. Amit Iyengar, the man the media have dubbed Mr Hot, does his best to hog every conversation and will clearly become a pain. Meanwhile Rhys, the Welsh roustabout, earns my undying affection for having exactly the same pre-voyage reservations as me.

  We find ourselves side by side at the table, dunking rolls in the soup. He’s taking a long look round, sizing up this cluttered space we’re about to call home. Then he beckons me closer.

  ‘Not a lot of room to throw up,’ he says in his Welsh lilt. ‘Best to kip on deck.’

  We spend the afternoon being grown-ups at the seafront museum and later at Southwick House. We learn about the five invasion beaches and everything else that followed on behind. Floating harbours. Oil pipelines. And a huge July storm that did almost as much damage as the marauding Germans. The latter, at Southwick House, offers our university friend a chance to analyse the 1944 weather in detail. His PowerPoint presentation features surface pressure charts that shaped the forecast on 5 June. To me it could be a duplicate for what we might expect tomorrow. Except that tomorrow is November. And then was sunny June.

  By now, Rhys and I are bosom buddies. He, too, has seen the latest pressure charts. Back in the day, Eisenhower called a twenty-four-hour delay. Why can’t we do something similar?

  ‘Fuck knows.’ He looks resigned. ‘That was a war. This is for charity. You tell me the difference.’

  That evening we all eat fish and chips together at a harbourside pub. Sadie, the Telegraph scribe, has at last arrived and it’s obvious at once that Amit is besotted. He games the seating arrangements so they’re sitting side by side. Judging by their conversation, they’re old mates. When it comes to any excuse – the ketchup, the salt, the vinegar – he can’t keep his hands off her.

  Later, when I say a word or two ahead of the screening of H’s favourite movie, I’m aware of Amit trying to canoodle in the half-darkness and I’m wondering when Sadie’s going to do something violent. Then the lights go down and the movie begins and I watch H bend quickly and have a word in his ear. It takes less time than the brief exchange of dialogue in the opening scene, and after that Amit doesn’t lift a finger.

  That night I share a cabin with Sadie. She must be ten years older than me but she’s managed to preserve her looks. I’m wondering how much of that is down to money and careful exposure to cosmetic surgery when she confesses that this assignment might be her last chance to live the dream.

  ‘Dream?’

  ‘Telly. Channel Five are looking for a presenter. It’s a travel show. Your son’s offered to shoot a trial piece to camera. Lovely boy that he is.’

  A trial piece to camera? My son? I shake my head in wonderment. To my knowledge Malo has never done anything like this in his life but I’m sure that wouldn’t stop him for a moment.

  Later, once we’ve put the lights out, I mention Amit. She’s obviously met him before. Nice guy.

  ‘Wrong.’ I hear her rolling over in the bunk below. ‘Amit is an arsehole.’

  We set sail next day earlier than planned. Our skipper has spotted what she calls a window in the onrushing weather and wants to be in Ouistreham at first light tomorrow. Accordingly we sail at high water, missing the ebb tide that Malo has promised. We slip out through the harbour narrows with the thump-thump of the engine beneath o
ur feet. A gauzy sun is visible through the blanket of high cloud and the sea is the colour of pewter. There’s a whisper of wind coming up the Solent from the west but Suranne decides to wait until we’re off the Isle of Wight before hoisting the sails.

  I sense we’re all aware that this will be our first real test. Suranne eases the engine into neutral and we all gather beside the main mast for instructions. This is a totally new world, the realm of jackstays and Samson posts, of lizards and cleats, of scuppers and deadeyes and something – improbably – called ‘baggywrinkles’. I’ve come across some challenging scripts in my life but this is the most bizarre.

  We split into two-man teams. Georgie shows us how to hoist the sail up the mast by hauling on the main halyard, a thickish rope, one big tug at a time. This isn’t as simple as it looks. Most of us are game enough but it’s heavy work. Even H tries to lend a hand but his shoulder is still far from perfect and it’s Malo who gently tells him to stand aside. I, thank God, am teamed with Rhys. He’s done all this before, understands exactly where to put his weight, and our sail races up the mast.

  By mid-afternoon, with the light beginning to die, we’ve cleared the Isle of Wight. There’s a biggish swell from the south-west and Persephone wallows along at a stately five knots. It’s cold in the freshening wind but most of us have preferred to stay on deck rather than go below. We huddle in little groups, white-faced, slowly getting to know each other.

  I spend a couple of hours with Alex and Cassie, gladly sharing some of my experiences on various movies. Cassie is very astute when it comes to particular films of mine. Her judgements are more than sound and she’s keen to understand what led to this interpretation or that. Like H she rates The Hour of Our Passing very highly, though probably for different reasons, and she’s especially keen to know whether I had any input into the original script. When I say no she seems disappointed but all three of us agree to meet for drinks before we eat.