Bernard Cornwell

by Wildtrack

  After the lawyer was gone I lay back and stared at the ceiling and wished it had a hairline crack. The pain was insidious. By holding my breath and lying very still I could trick myself into thinking that it was going away, but as soon as I breathed again it would surge back. I felt at rock bottom. An ambulance siren wailed and a trolley rattled in the hall outside. I wondered how long I would have to stay here. The doctor had said I might limp again, but he had not prophesied how long it would take.

  I closed my eyes and thought of Sycorax broken and beached, lying dismasted on a hill, with her hull rotting. The damage would be blamed on Fanny Mulder, and he was gone. I'd lashed out at him with the law, but that was a puny weapon, and there was no certainty that he would ever be found or that, even if he was, he would have funds that could rebuild Sycorax . The repairs, I knew, would be up to me. I thought of my small bank account. I could patch the hull with salvaged iroko and slap marine ply on the coachroof. I could make new masts if someone would give me the trees. I could replace the stolen lead with pig iron, but it would all take time, so much time, and the sailing season would slip by and Sycorax would not be ready for the water till the winter gales were filling the channel.

  And even then she would not be ready. I knew I could not afford the blocks and lamps and propellor and sails and sheets and wire and instruments. She would take a fortune and I knew I was trying to stretch a few hundred pounds to fill a bottomless pit. The crane fees to lift her on to legs would half break me. I couldn't even afford a new VHF radio, let alone the seasoned oak for her rotted frames. I'd have to sell her for scrap value and I'd be lucky if I saw five hundred pounds. Or else I could whore to the newspapers and sell my story. I wouldn't do that.

  So if I wouldn't whore I would have to sell Sycorax. I knew it, and I tried to fight the knowledge. She was a rich man's toy, not a penniless man's dream. I could not afford her, so she would have to go.

  The door creaked and I opened my eyes.

  A tall man stood watching me. I did not recognize him immediately. I should have done, but his long jaw was slightly jowlier than it appeared in photographs, his blond hair less glossy, and his tanned skin more pitted. It took a second or two before I realized this really was the famous Anthony Bannister, but Anthony Bannister without either television make-up or the kindly, flattering attention of a photographer's airbrush. He looked older than I had expected, but then he smiled, and instantly the imperfections were overwhelmed by an obvious and beguiling charm. "Captain Sandman?" His familiar voice suggested dependability and kindliness.

  "Who the hell are you?" I wanted to resist his charm and shatter his confident assumption that I would instantly recognize and trust him.

  "My name's Bannister. Tony Bannister." There were nurses standing behind him with silly looks on their faces; they were excited because the great Tony Bannister was in their hospital.

  It was like a royal visit, and the staff seemed struck mindless by the occasion. Bannister smiled on them in gentle apology, then closed the door, leaving the two of us alone. He looked fit and trim in his superbly tailored tweed jacket, but as he turned from the door I noticed how his shirt bulged over his waistband. "I think we have a mutual problem," he said.

  I was surprised to detect a nervousness in him. I'd expected a man like Bannister to stalk through life with an insouciant and unconquerable confidence. "My only problem is a boat"—I could feel the insidious seduction of his fame and wealth, and I fought against it—"which your Boer wrecked."

  He nodded in immediate acceptance of the responsibility. "My fault, but I was assured the boat was abandoned. I was wrong and I apologize. Now, I imagine, you want it restored to perfection?"

  He'd stolen the wind clean from my sails. I stared up at the famous face and, despite my reluctance to join the world's uncritical admiration of the man, I found myself feeling sympathetic towards Bannister. He had shown honesty, which was the quality I admired above all things, but I also felt flattered that such a famous man was here in my room. My belligerence faded. "I can do the work on her myself," I said, "but I can't buy the materials. I'm a bit skint, you see."

  "I, fortunately, am not skint." He smiled and held out his right hand. He wore a gold bracelet, a gold wristwatch and two heavy gold rings.

  For some reason I thought of one of my father's favourite sayings: that principles are very fine things, but are soluble in cash. But for Sycorax's sake, only for Sycorax, I shook the golden hand.

  "You have to understand," Matthew Cooper said, "that it's a rough cut."

  "A rough what?"

  He gestured energetically with a right hand that was so stained with nicotine that it looked as if it had been dipped in ochre paint. "It's just scraps of film we've assembled." He frowned, seeking an image I might understand. "We've hammered it together instead of dovetailing it." Matthew, a nervous man in his mid-thirties, was a film director sent to visit me by Anthony Bannister. He had chain-smoked ever since he'd walked into the house.

  "And the film isn't dubbed," Angela Westmacott said flatly.

  "Dubbed?" I asked.

  "The sound isn't polished," Matthew answered for her, "and there's only ten minutes. The final film will probably run at sixty."

  "Or ninety," Angela Westmacott said, "but it's a risk." She did not look at me as she spoke, which gave me the chance to look at her. Bannister, when he had telephoned me from London to tell me that Matthew was coming, had not mentioned this girl. If he had I might have looked forward to the meeting with more enthusiasm. Angela was a tall, ethereal blonde, so slender and seemingly fragile that my protective instincts had been immediately roused when she had walked in. Her hair was gathered by combs and pins from which it escaped in cirrus wisps of lightest gold. Her jacket was a shapeless white and pink padded confection from which loops and belts and fasteners stuck like burrs, while her trousers were baggy white and stuffed into pink ankle-length boots. She was fashionably unkempt and devastatingly, even disturbingly, beautiful.

  Two years in hospital had sharpened that particular appetite into a ravenous hunger. I could not resist watching her, thinking how vulnerable and delicate her face was in its cloud of gold untidiness. She wore, I noted, neither wedding nor engagement ring. Her clothes, so deliberately casual, were clearly expensive and I had decided, when she first came into the house, that she must have been a television presenter. I had said as much and she had shaken her head dismissively. I now wondered whether Anthony Bannister's television company had sent her as bait. She made good bait.

  "It's a risk," she said again, "because without your agreement then the footage we've already shot is wasted."

  "Already shot?" I was puzzled.

  "The rough cut," Matthew explained. "Tony thought you would feel happier if you could see what we had in mind."

  We were in the new front room of Bannister's house. The house had all changed, and how my father would have loved it. This new room must have been seventy-five feet long and every foot of it offered a splendid panoramic view of the river which curled about the garden beneath. Three carpeted steps climbed to the top half of the room where, rippling gently, there was now sixty feet of indoor swimming pool. Between the steps and the windows was a raised fireplace built as an island in the centre and topped with a massive copper hood. White leather sofas were scattered to either side of the fire while at the northern end of the room there was a space-age array of sound and vision equipment. There were radios, cassette players, CDs, record-players, speakers, video-disc players, VCRs and a massive television; the largest TV in a house filled with TVs.

  On to which television screens Anthony Bannister now planned to put me. He wanted to make a film of my life, my injury and my recovery, and he had sent Matthew and Angela to seek my co-operation. Matthew Cooper took the video cassette from his briefcase. "Shall we watch it now?" he asked.

  I had gone to stand at the window and was gazing at an aluminium-hulled yacht which was running under main and jib to the moorings in the upper poo
l. The only person on deck was a man in a black woollen hat and I admired the exquisite skill with which he picked up his mooring buoy. It looked easy from up here, but there was a deceptively gusting wind blowing against a flooding spring tide and I knew I had just witnessed a marvellous piece of seamanship. I watched the boat rather than betray my self-torturing interest in Angela Westmacott. It was unfair, I thought, to be tantalized by such careless beauty.

  "Are you ready?" Matthew insisted.

  "That's a French boat." I spoke as if I had not heard his question. "First I've seen this year. He's probably run over from Cherbourg. He's good, very good."

  "The video tape?" Angela said. I assumed now that she was Matthew's assistant, and I wondered if she was also his lover. That thought made me jealous.

  Matthew pushed the video tape into the slot. "It's a very rough cut indeed," he said apologetically.

  "Fine." I spoke as if I was content, but in truth I was struggling not to show my annoyance. I'd spent months avoiding the press, and now Bannister was trying to make me the subject of a television film, and I could only blame myself. Bannister, coming to the hospital, had offered me everything I wanted. A refuge, security and the means to repair Sycorax. No legal tangles, no unpleasantness, just peace and forgiveness. I should have known what the price would be when, the next day, the papers trumpeted Bannister's generosity. 'TV Tony Rescues VC Hero'. There had been no mention of Fanny Mulder. One paper claimed I had been attacked by vandals who had been damaging my boat, while the others blandly reported that my attackers were unknown.

  None of the papers had connected the attacker with Anthony Bannister. Bannister had come out of the stories like driven snow; odourless and white. Something nasty had happened in his boathouse while he was in London, and he was now putting it right. I'd left the hospital to come to Bannister's house where, in these last three weeks, I had mended fast. I was attended by Bannister's doctors, swam in Bannister's pool and was fed by Bannister's housekeeper. Sycorax had been lifted out of the trees and stood in cradles on Bannister's lawn. The materials for her repair were on order, and they were nothing but the best; mahogany, teak, mature oak, copper, spruce and Oregon pine. TV Tony had worked his magic, but now the price for all that kindness was being exacted.

  "Here it is," Angela said sharply, chiding me for being insufficiently attentive to the television screen on which numbers counted down, then the picture changed to show a wild and bleak landscape darkened by dusk and edged by a pink-washed sky. Plangent music played as the title appeared: 'A Soldier's Story, a film by Angela Westmacott'. I glanced at her with surprise. Clearly I had appraised my visitors wrongly, imagining Matthew to be in charge.

  "It's only a working title." Matthew seemed to think my glance was critical.

  "It's just to give you an idea." Angela was irritated by Matthew's interruption.

  The titles went and the picture changed to a night skyline. Tracer bullets flicked left to right, arcing in their distinctive and deceptive slowness. There was an explosion in the far distance and I recognized the sudden flare of white phosphorus. Our 105s, I remembered, firing from Mount Vernet. Or was it a cocktail round? High explosive and phosphorus lobbed through a mortar. They were nasty bloody things. I looked away.

  "The Falklands"—Anthony Bannister's distinctive and warm voice was redolent with a grave sincerity—"fourteenth of June, 1982. British troops were closing on Stanley, the battles of Goose Green and the mountains were behind them, and there was a sense of imminent victory in the cold South Atlantic air. Captain Nick Sandman was one of the men who—"

  I stood up. "Do you mind if I don't watch this?"

  There was not much they could say. I limped to the window and stared down at the cradled Sycorax. She'd been drained of water, cleaned out, and the patches of rot had been cut out of her hull. The old copper sheathing, oxidised to the thickness of rice-paper, had been stripped off and the nail holes plugged with pine. The stumps of her masts had been lifted out like rotten teeth and her coachroof stripped off. Now she lay swathed in a tarpaulin and waiting for the new timber that would be patched and scarfed into her old hull.

  I looked upstream to the French yacht just in time to see the skipper take off his hat. He was a she, shaking out her black hair. She went to the foredeck to bag the jib and I envied her the simple task. I remembered the sweet luxury of arriving on a mooring and knowing that once the small chores were done there would be time for a drink as the tide ebbed. Behind me Bannister's famous and sonorous voice was telling my story. I tried to block it out, but failed. I turned despite myself, to see my own photograph on the screen. It was a photograph taken five years before and had once stood on my wife's dressing-table. I wondered how the television people had come by a copy. It did not look like me, at least I did not think so. My rattail mouse-coloured hair was unnaturally tidy, suggesting that a cheap wig was perched on my ugly, long-jawed face. "We'll replace the caption with film, of course." Angela saw I had turned from the window.

  "Caption?"

  "The photograph. We'll have film of you instead."

  My face was replaced by Sergeant Terry Farebrother who looked nasty, brutish and short in his combat smock. He had been filmed at one of the Surrey exercise grounds where thunderflashes smoked in the far distance to lend the screen a suitably warlike background. Farebrother had cleaned up his accent and language for the camera and the result was a bland and predictable tribute to a wounded officer. It was as unreal as reading one's own obituary. I remembered that Terry still had my kit in his house. Someday I should go and fetch it. He described the moment I was wounded; the same moment that had led to the medal. I did not recognize the description. I had not felt heroic, only bloody foolish, and instead of expecting a medal I thought I would be reprimanded for breaking orders.

  Doctor Maitland's pink and plump face filled the screen. "Frankly we were surprised he hadn't died. The body can only stand so much shock, and Nick had been very badly mauled. But that's our specialization here, you see. We make the lame to walk."

  The picture changed to one of the physiotherapy rooms.

  "We'll cover these pictures with wildtrack," Angela said, "describing how they treated you."

  "Wildtrack," Matthew helpfully explained, "is an unseen voice."

  "Like God?"

  "Exactly."

  Doctor Plant appeared and said I had an unnaturally high quotient of bellicosity that was more usual in a criminal than in a soldier. Most army officers, she said, were conformists, but it was undoubtedly my pugnacious traits that had forced me to prove the hospital wrong by making myself walk. Somehow it did not sound like a compliment. She added that my bellicosity was tempered with very old-fashioned conceptions of honour and truth, which did not sound like a compliment either. I saw how Matthew and Angela were intent on the film, staring at it like acolytes before an altar. This was their work; a rough-cut film which told how I had been written off as a hopeless casualty of a bitter little war in a lost corner of the Atlantic. A West Indian nurse described how galling it had been to watch me trying to walk. "Nice to have the ethnic input," Matthew murmured to Angela, who nodded.

  "He'd be bent over," the nurse said. "I know he was hurting himself, but he wouldn't give up."

  "Nick Sandman wouldn't give up," Tony Bannister's voice broke in, "because he had a dream." The picture cut to Sycorax as she had been when I first saw her lying abandoned in the trees. "He had a boat, the Sycorax, and he dreamed of taking her back to the Falklands. He would sail in peace where once he had marched in anger."

  "Oh, come on!" I protested. "Who makes up this garbage?"

  "We can change anything," Angela said dismissively. "We're just trying to give you an idea of what the final film could look like."

  The film described how the Sycorax had chafed her warps and been driven on to a mudbank in the river. "That's a bloody lie!" I was angry. "Bannister wanted my berth! He had his bloody Boer move my boat."

  "But we can't say that." Angela pre
ssed the pause button and her voice intimated that I was being unreasonably tiresome. "What happened was a regrettable accident, for which Tony is making amends." She released the button and the film showed the caterpillar-tracked crane which had lifted Sycorax out of the trees and on to the front lawn. "Boat and man," Bannister's wildtrack intoned, "would be restored together, and this film follows their progress." The screen went blank. They had been ten bad minutes, and now they wanted my co-operation to make the rest of the film.

  "There," Angela switched the set off. "That wasn't too painful, was it?" She used the same patronising inflection that had so grated on me in hospital.

  "What's painful"—my anger made me forget just how attractive I found her—"is getting a bullet in the back. That's not painful." I waved at the set. "That's rubbish. Bannister took my boat and my wharf. Now, because he doesn't want the bad publicity, he'll foist that gibberish on the public!"

  "Tony rented Lime Wharf from your wife in good faith," Angela said primly.

  "My ex-wife," I corrected her, "whose power of attorney expired when she walked out on me to marry that soggy MP."

  "Tony didn't know that. And you have to admit he's trying to put matters right, and very generously, I would say."

  "At least your bloody film didn't mention my father," I said.

  "We wanted to talk to you about that." Matthew, clearly made nervous by the animosity between Angela and myself, lit a new cigarette from the stub of his old.

  "Bloody hell." I turned to stare out of the window, but the French girl had gone down to her cabin. I limped to the far end of the room where Bannister had hung a whole slew of pictures of his dead wife, Nadeznha. The photographs showed Nadeznha at sea, Nadeznha in Rome, Nadeznha and her brother at Cape Cod, Nadeznha and Bannister in Sydney, Nadeznha in oilskins, Nadeznha at a fancy-dress ball. Nadeznha had been a very beautiful girl, with dark eyes and a happy smile which made me presume that no one had ever tried to coerce her into being an unwilling TV star. I turned back to Matthew and Angela. "Just out of interest," I said, "who exactly is paying to repair Sycorax?"