Wildtrack

by Bernard Cornwell

  "I don't know." Angela frowned. "Tony hasn't said much, but he wouldn't. I mean, it would have been a terrible blow to his pride if she'd walked out. Marrying her was a great coup, after all. But he's sort of hinted at it. He thinks she was having an affair, but I don't know who with. He gets angry if I talk about it now."

  "Does he often get angry?"

  "Only with people he thinks he can bully. He's a very insecure man."

  I leaned my backside on the sill and watched her angular body on the rumpled sheet. Her unbound hair hung to the base of her spine. The bedclothes, all but for the bottom sheet, had fallen in a heap on the carpet. It was time, I thought, to delve into yet another layer of truth on this wet afternoon. "Do you know what people say about Nadeznha's death?"

  She looked up at me. "I know, Nick."

  "And?"

  She shrugged. "No."

  "No, impossible? No, he didn't do it? No, you're not saying anything?"

  She stared down at the sheet for a long time. "I don't think he's got the guts to kill someone. Killing someone must be horrible. Unless you're so angry that you don't know what you're doing. Or in self-defence, perhaps?" She shrugged. "You must know, Nick. Aren't you the expert?"

  "Good God, no."

  "The Falklands, I mean."

  "It wasn't the same. It wasn't easy, either." I thought about it. "Afterwards is the worst, when you're clearing up. I mean, it's one thing to pull a trigger when you know the bastard is pulling his, but it's quite different when you see his body a few hours later. I remember there was one who looked just like a fellow I used to play rugby with."

  "Was it really bad?" she asked, and I heard a trace of her television producer's interest in the question. She was wondering whether I would talk like this on her film.

  "Just mucky," I said.

  She heard the evasion and made a face at me. "But could you murder someone in cold blood? Someone you'd loved? Could you murder Melissa?"

  "Good Lord, no!"

  "What makes you think Tony could, then?"

  "I don't know what I think." I paused. "Could Mulder?"

  "For God's sake, Nick!" So far she had patiently indulged my interest in the subject, but now, in a flash of the old Angela, she became annoyed. "You think Tony would keep Mulder around if he'd murdered Nadeznha? Tony keeps Mulder as a bodyguard. He knows Kassouli has threatened to stop him winning the St Pierre. Why do you think we won't take any strangers into the crew?"

  "But you asked me."

  She ground the cigarette into the ashtray. "We know what kennel you crawled from, Nick. You're not one of Kassouli's people. He's trying to make you into one, though, isn't he?" The question was a challenge.

  "Yes," I said honestly, "but he didn't succeed. And I'm sorry I asked you all these horrid questions about Bannister."

  "Tony isn't a murderer," she said flatly.

  "I'm sorry," I said again.

  "Don't even speculate about it," she said firmly, and with another trace of impatience. "The last thing I want is for the gutter press to start on Tony's last marriage. Can you imagine the mud they'd sling if they thought he might have murdered Nadeznha?"

  I could imagine it, and I'd already triggered the process by talking to Micky Harding. Now, however truthful I wanted to be with Angela, I did not think I had better mention Harding to her.

  She lit another cigarette.

  "You smoke too much," I said.

  "Piss off, Nick." It was said gently enough; nothing more than irritation at being criticized.

  "And can I give you some more advice?" I said.

  "Try me."

  "Don't let Bannister go on the St Pierre. Keep him ashore. I don't know what Kassouli plans, but it's more than just preventing him from winning the St Pierre."

  She looked at me for a long time. "He wants revenge for his daughter's death?"

  "I think so, yes." I wondered why I was being so solicitous of a man who was now my rival for this girl. Good old chivalry.

  "Male pride. Old bull, young bull." Angela swung herself off the bed and walked to the window beside me. The thick clouds were bringing on an early dusk. "Tony's very proud, Nick, and he won't back down. He's told the whole world that he's going to win the St Pierre this year. He wants to become a hero for Britain on television; he wants to be the man who tweaked the noses of the French. Bloody hell, Nick, he wants a knighthood! Other telly people have got it, so Tony wants one, and he thinks that winning the St Pierre will help."

  "So you'll be Lady Bannister?"

  She smiled, but didn't answer, and I thought how she would love the title.

  "Don't let him go," I said. "Does he know how determined Kassouli is?"

  "Would you give up a dream just because you were threatened?" "It would depend on who was doing the threatening," I said fervently. "I'm much more likely to repent for a Soviet armoured division than for the Salvation Army."

  "He won't give it up, Nick." She took my arm and leaned against me. "That's why I want you to go with him. Because you'll be another bodyguard."

  "Not for the ratings?" I asked.

  "That, too, you fool." She laughed, then threw her cigarette out of the window.

  I fell over.

  It had not happened for days, but suddenly my right leg had switched itself off and I lurched sideways, grabbed the windowsill, then sprawled heavily on the thick carpet. Panic coursed through me. I felt stupid, frightened, and suddenly very helpless. The pain was in my back again; not the usual dull pain that I had learned to live with, but a sudden streak of hard and frightening agony.

  "Nick? Nick!" There was genuine alarm in Angela's voice.

  "It's OK." I had to force my voice to sound calm. I tried to stand, and couldn't. I heard myself hiss with the pain, then I managed to roll over, which helped, and I pulled myself across the floor towards the bed.

  "What is it, Nick?" Angela tried to lift me.

  "Every now and then the leg crumples. It'll be all right in a minute." I was hiding my fear. I'd thought that because the leg had stood up to my American trip then perhaps the sudden weakness had mended itself, but suddenly, and foolishly, I was a helpless cripple again. I managed to haul myself on to the rucked bed where I lay with eyes closed as I tried to subdue the pain.

  "You never mentioned it before," Angela accused me.

  "I told you, it'll be all right in a minute." I forced myself to turn over, then began to pound my knee in an attempt to force pain and feeling back into the joint.

  "Have you seen a doctor?" Angela asked.

  "I've seen millions of doctors."

  "You Goddamned bloody fool." She strode naked across the room and seized the telephone.

  "What are you doing?" I asked in alarm.

  She fended off my clumsy grab for the phone. "You're going to see a doctor."

  "I'm bloody not." I lunged for the phone again.

  She lifted the phone out of my reach. "Do you want to go to bed with me again, Nick Sandman?"

  "Forever."

  "Then you bloody well see a doctor." She paused. "Do you agree?"

  "I told you," I insisted, "it'll cure itself."

  "I'm not discussing it, Nick Sandman. Are you going to see a doctor or are you not?"

  I agreed. I'd found Angela now and I was not going to lose her and I'd even see a quack for her. I lay back on the bed and willed my leg to move, and I thought, as I listened to her quick, competent voice arranging my appointment, how very nice it was to be cared for by a woman again. I was Nick in love, Nick in La-la land, Nick happy.

  PART THREE

  The doctor turned out to be a woman of my own age, but who seemed older because of her brusque and confident manner. She was a neurologist whom Angela had met during the filming of a medical documentary. Doctor Mary Clarke had a hint of humour in her green eyes, but none in her voice as she briskly put me through her various tests. At the end of the performance she led me back to her private office overlooking a rose garden, where Angela had waited for u
s. Doctor Clarke asked me to describe the exact nature of my wound. She grimaced as she took notes, while Angela, who had not heard the full story before, flinched from the gory details.

  "I wish," Mary Clarke said when I'd finished, "that I'd had you as my patient, Mr Sandman."

  "I rather wish that, too," I said gallantly.

  "Because"—she pointedly ignored my clumsy compliment—"I'd have kept you strapped down in bed so you couldn't have done any more damage to yourself."

  Silence. Except that a nearby lawnmower buzzed annoyingly.

  "What do you mean?" I asked eventually.

  "What I mean, Mr Sandman, is that your do-it-yourself physiotherapy has undoubtedly aggravated a fairly routine and minor oedematose condition. There's no medical reason why you shouldn't be walking normally, except that you forced the pace unreasonably."

  "Bollocks," I said angrily, with all gallantry forgotten. "The bastards said I'd never walk again!"

  "The bastards usually do." Mary Clarke half smiled. "Because a spinal oedema routinely presents itself as a complete severance. Naturally, if your spinal cord was cut, you'd be paralysed for life. It's only when some degree of mobility returns that an oedema can be diagnosed."

  "Oedema?" Angela asked.

  "A bloody swelling," I answered too caustically, and immediately regretted the tone. I might have lived too long with the doctors and their vocabulary, but Angela was new to it.

  "Very literally a bloody swelling," Mary Clarke said to Angela, "which presses on the spinal cord to induce a temporary paralysis, but which can usually be expected to subside within a matter of weeks."

  "Mine didn't," I said stubbornly, as though I was proving her wrong.

  "Because you'd been severely traumatized. There was extensive burning as well as the bullet damage. In essence, Mr Sandman, you have a permanent oedema now." She paused, then gave a grin that was almost mischievous. "The truth is that you're a very remarkably scrambled mess. When you die they'll probably put your backbone in a specimen jar. Congratulations."

  "But what's to be done?" Angela insisted, and I was touched by the look of real anguish on her face until I realized that she was probably just terrified for the future of her film.

  "Nothing, of course," Mary Clarke said happily.

  "Nothing?" Angela sounded shocked.

  Mary attempted a nautical metaphor; explaining that my body had somehow lashed together some kind of nervous jury-rig that gave me control of my right leg. The problem was that the jury-rig sometimes blinked out and, though further surgery might help, the risks were too frightening. "Are you determined to sail round the world?" Mary asked me at the end of the bleak explanation.

  "At least to New Zealand, yes."

  "You shouldn't do it, of course. If you had any sense, Mister Sandman, you'd apply for a disabled person's grant, find a bungalow with a nice ramp for your wheelchair, then write your memoirs." She smiled. "Of course, if you do that, then you'll become a completely helpless cripple, so perhaps you should go to New Zealand instead."

  "But..." Angela began.

  "There's nothing I can do!" Mary said sturdily. "Either the leg will function, or it won't. All any doctor can do now is experiment on him, which I rather suspect won't meet with Mister Sandman's approval?"

  "Too bloody right," I said.

  "But supposing he's alone in the middle of the Atlantic when the leg fails!" Angela protested.

  "I imagine he'll cope," Mary said drily, "and so far there's always been a recovery of function. The muscle tone is good"—she looked at me—"but if you detect that the numbness is lasting longer each time, or if you see a withering in the limb, then you'd better seek medical advice. Of course they won't be able to do anything, except slice you up again, but some people find the attentions of a doctor reassuring." She stood up. "My fee will be a bottle of Cote de Beaune '78, chateau-bottled."

  That was a good year for Burgundy, and Mary Clarke was a good doctor who knew that sometimes, maybe most times, the best thing to do is nothing. With which treatment Angela had to be content, and I had to live, and so we went back to Devon.

  The good times began then. Anthony Bannister was commuting between his London house and the Mediterranean where Wildtrack had been entered for a series of offshore races. Fanny Mulder was with the boat, so I had Devon to myself. I also had the non-sailing Angela.

  Matthew and the film crew must have realized what had happened between Angela and me, but they said nothing, and they were happy for me that Sycorax could make such progress. Her rigging wire arrived and, for the price of a dozen pints of beer, we borrowed a buoy barge so that its onboard derrick could lower the varnished masts into their places. Before stepping the mainmast I carefully placed an antique penny in the keel chock where the mast's heel hid and crushed the silver coin. It was a traditional specific to bring good luck to the ship, but love brought better fortune as Angela freed all the materials for Sycorax . Suddenly there were no more conditions, only co-operation. I even gave the camera a limping description of what had happened on the night I won the medal. I heard nothing from Jill-Beth, and I let myself think that Kassouli's threat was a chimera. Micky Harding phoned me a few times, but I had nothing to report and so the phone calls stopped.

  Day by day the rigging took shape. Wire, rope, timber and buckets of Stockholm tar were hoisted aloft and turned into the seemingly fragile concoction that could withstand the vast powers of ocean winds. It was slow work, for if any part of the rigging was to fail then I would rather it failed on the berth than in an Atlantic force eight. I cut the belaying pins out of lignum vitae and rammed them home in oaken fife rails that were bolted to the mast beneath cheek pieces. The film crew gave up trying to understand what was going on; they said I was becoming nautical, which just meant that the vocabulary had become technical as Jimmy and I worried about deadeyes and gantlines, robands and leader cringles, worming and parcelling. The cameraman retaliated by presenting me with a dictionary, while Angela made Sycorax a gift of some antique brass scuttles. She called them portholes.

  "Scuttles," I insisted. They were beautifully made, with thick greenish glass and heavy brass frames. They had hinged shutters that could be bolted down in bad weather.

  I screwed and caulked the scuttles home. Beneath them I was rebuilding the cabin. I made two bunks, a big chart table and a galley. I turned the forepeak into a workshop and sail locker. I built a space for a chemical loo and Angela wanted to know why I didn't put in a proper flushing loo like the ones on Wildtrack and I said I didn't want any unnecessary holes bored in Sycorax's hull. Why bother with a loo at all, she asked tartly, why not just buy an extra bucket? I said that the girls I planned to live with liked to have something more than a zinc bucket. She hit me.

  The sails were repaired in a Dartmouth loft and came back to the boat on a day when the film crew was absent. Jimmy and I could not resist bending mizzen and main on to their new spars. The sails had to be fully hoisted if they were to be properly stowed on the booms and I felt the repaired hull shiver beneath me as the wind stirred the eight-ounce cotton. "We could take her out?" Jimmy suggested slyly.

  I wound the gaff halliard off its belaying pin and lowered the big sail. "We'll wait, Jimmy."

  "Put on staysails, boy. Let's see how her runs, eh?"

  I was tempted. It was a lovely day with a south-westerly wind gusting to force five and Sycorax would have revelled in the sea, but I'd promised Angela I'd wait so that the film crew could record my first outing in the rebuilt boat. I lifted the boom and gaff so Jimmy could unclip the topping lift and thread the sail cover into place.

  He hesitated. "Are you sure, boy?"

  "I'm sure, Jimmy."

  He pushed the cover on to the stowed sail. "It's that maid, isn't it? Got you right under her thumb, she do."

  "I promised her I'd wait, Jimmy."

  "You keep your brains in your trousers, you do, Nick. When I was a boy, a proper man wouldn't let a maid near his boat. It means bad luck, letti
ng a woman run a boat."

  I straightened up from the belaying pin. "So what about Josie Woodward? Who put her in the club three miles off Start Point?"

  He laughed wickedly and dropped the subject. I promised him it would only be a day or two, no more, before we could film the sequence I had dreamed of for so long; the moment when Sycorax sailed again. Two months before, I reflected, I would have taken Jimmy's hint and we would have taken the old boat out to sea and debated whether ever to come back again, but now I was as committed to the film as Angela herself. I had even begun to see it through her eyes, though I still refused to contemplate sailing on the St Pierre, and Angela had agreed that we'd devise a different ending for the film; one with Sycorax beating out to sea.

  I telephoned Angela at her London office that afternoon. "She's all ready," I said. "Sails bent on, ma'am, ready to go."

  "Completely ready?"

  "No radio, no navigation lights, no stove, no barometer, no chronometer, no compass, no bilge pumps, no anchors, no radar reflector, no..." I was listing all the things Fanny Mulder had stolen.

  "They're ordered, Nick," Angela said impatiently.

  "But she can sail," I said warmly. "Sycorax is ready for sea. She awaits your bottle of champagne and your film crew."

  "That's wonderful." Angela did not sound very pleased, perhaps because I was finishing a boat that would take me away from her, which made my own enthusiasm tactless. There was a pause. "Nick?"

  "There's a train that leaves Totnes at twenty-six minutes past five this afternoon," I said, "and it reaches London at—"

  "Twenty-five minutes to nine," she chimed in, and did sound pleased.

  "I suppose I could just make it." I made my voice dubious.

  "You'd bloody well better make it," she said, "or there'll be no radio, no navigation lights and no stove."

  "Bilge pumps?"