Wildtrack

by Bernard Cornwell

  Or to end one, I thought, but did not say as much.

  She was distraught, but I was too cold and famished to be a gentle listener. I made myself eggs, bacon, coffee and toast that I ate at the kitchen table. Angela sat opposite me and I noticed the thick gold wedding ring on her finger beside her diamond. She shook her head despairingly. "I tried to talk to him."

  ".but he wouldn't listen." I finished the sentence for her.

  "He thinks you put me up to it. He thinks you want him to fail." She stood and paced the floor. She was restless and confused, and I did not blame her. She only had my word, and that of Micky Harding, that her new husband was sailing to his death.

  For a time she tried to convince herself that it was untrue. I let her talk while I ate. She talked of Bannister's belief that he could take the coveted St Pierre, and of his happiness because she had walked up an aisle with him. She spoke of the programmes Bannister would make in the new season; she spoke of the future they had discussed and, because that future was threatened, it only seemed the brighter and more blessed to her now. "Tell me it isn't true." She spoke of Kassouli's threat.

  "As far as I know," I said carefully, "it is true."

  She shook in sudden anger. "How dare they say he murdered Nadeznha?"

  "Perhaps because they believe he did?"

  "He didn't! He didn't!"

  "You know that?" I poured myself more coffee.

  "For Christ's sake!" She was still angry. "Do you think I'd have married him if he'd killed her?"

  "Why did you marry him?"

  She lit a cigarette. She had been chain-smoking ever since I'd come back. "Because I love him," she said defiantly.

  "Good." I hid my disappointment.

  "And because," she said, "we can make a decent life for each other. I give him the security he wants, and he gives me the security I want."

  "Good," I said again.

  "And," she said even more defiantly, "because I couldn't marry you."

  I smiled. "I'm not a very good prospect."

  She drew on her cigarette. "You've caught the sun." It sounded like an accusation.

  "I've been working. Real work. Sawing and planing and getting paid for it. I didn't get much money, but I've finished the boat. All but for a radar-reflector. And some fenders. And one or two other things."

  "Have you found a girl?"

  The question surprised me, for it implied a jealousy that I had not expected. "No. I kept seeing your picture in the papers and I'd cut it out, keep it for ten minutes, then throw it away. I got drunk once or twice."

  She smiled, the first smile she'd given me. "I watched you in the film rushes. I used to go to the cutting rooms and run loops of your ugly face." She shrugged. "You screwed up my lovely film, Nick Sandman."

  "I'm sorry."

  "No, you're not." She shrugged. "I've given up the business, though, haven't I? That was one of the promises I made to Tony. No more telly." She looked at her watch. "Where will he be by now? Off southern Ireland?"

  "Yes."

  She had begun to cry very softly. "He can't give up, can he? He's got cameras watching him, so he has to be a big, brave boy. Men are so bloody stupid." She blew her nose. "Including you, Nick Sandman. What are you going to do now?"

  I shrugged. "I'm going to provision Sycorax. I shall go to town, visit the bank, and spend a fortune on supplies. After that, on tomorrow's tide, I shall sail away. I'll make a landfall at Ushant, then head for the Azores."

  She frowned. "Just like that?"

  "You think I should lay on brass bands and cheerleaders?"

  She gave me a flicker of a smile. "I'd want seasick pills."

  "Goldfish get seasick."

  She laughed. "They don't!"

  "No, it's true. If you take them to sea as pets, they get seasick." I poured the last of the coffee. "I wouldn't mind a cat."

  "Truly?" She sounded surprised.

  "I've always liked cats," I said. "You're a bit cat-like."

  She stared down at the table. I'd thought our last few moments had been too relaxed and, sure enough, her mind was still with Wildtrack. "I've thought of phoning the coastguard. But it won't do any good."

  "No. They'd just laugh at you."

  "I've tried the radio-telephone again, but he just gets angry.

  He thinks I'm trying to stop his moment of glory. And the last two times I tried, it was Fanny who answered."

  "I'm sorry," I said. We'd been through this already, and there was nothing I could do. "Pray that he lives," I said.

  She stared bleakly at me. "Perhaps I should go to Canada?"

  I smiled. "What can you do there?"

  "I can try and stop him. I could go with the film crew."

  "What will you do?" I asked. "Ram him? And how do you know the film crew will even find him? I know they'll be in radio touch, but have you ever seen the fog in those waters? Or perhaps Wildtrack will make her turn at night. What will you do then? Crash the camera helicopter on the foredeck next day? Or do you think you can persuade him to give up there when you couldn't do it here?" I suddenly realized that my pessimism was doing her no good. "I'm sorry. Maybe you should try. Anything's better than doing nothing."

  She sighed. "Tony may not even reach the turning point. God knows."

  "He'll reach St Pierre," I said.

  "He will?" She was puzzled by my certainty.

  I stared in silence at her, thinking of something Kassouli had said to me. Jill-Beth had not been specific when I tape-recorded her words, but Kassouli, I now remembered, had wanted me to steer a certain course on the return leg. "Jesus wept," I said softly, "I've been so bloody stupid."

  "What do you mean?"

  "They're going to take him to the exact place where Nadeznha died! Don't you see? On the outward leg he'll have to go much too far north, but coming back he can run the great circle with the gales! That's why they'll let him turn, because the perfect revenge has to be at the same damn place!"

  "What place?" Her voice was urgent.

  I couldn't remember. The only places I'd seen the coordinates were on the frame of Nadeznha Bannister's portrait in Wildtrack's after cabin and on the papers that Kassouli had shown me. "Forty something north," I said helplessly, then shrugged to show that my memory had failed me. Then I remembered the inquest transcript.

  Angela ran from the kitchen, and I followed her. She went to Bannister's study where she pulled open drawers to spill old television scripts, letters and diaries across the carpet. She found the transcript at the back of a filing cabinet. She turned the pages quickly, then seemed to freeze when she came to the evidence she wanted. "Forty-nine, eighteen north," she read aloud, "and forty-one, thirty-six west." She turned to me. "Where is that?"

  I used an atlas to show her. I took one of Bannister's pencils and I showed her how, on the mercator projection, Wildtrack would have to sail an arching parabola westwards, then a shallower curve back home. I put a cross on the point where Nadeznha Bannister had died. Angela used a ruler to work out the distances. I watched her thin fingers and I knew, in the room's silence, what would come next.

  "Nick..."

  I had gone to the window. "It's about three thousand nautical miles for Wildtrack," I said. That was the distance from Cherbourg to the turning point at St Pierre, then back to the pencil cross.

  "And from here. By the fastest route?" I could hear hope in her voice.

  "Seventeen hundred?" It was probably fractionally less, but there was no such thing as a 'fastest route'; not against headwinds and the North Atlantic current. "Say two thousand land miles."

  "How long would it take.?" She did not finish the sentence, but she really did not need to. She wanted to ask me how long it would take Sycorax to reach that cross on the map.

  I could see the trees on the far bank heaving in the rising wind. It was odd weather; a quick succession of winds and calm, but tonight would see another stiff blow. "Sixteen days," I guessed.

  "Nick?" Her voice was tentative, even f
rightened, but she was pleading with me. She wanted me to go into the North Atlantic to save her husband.

  "It would be faster," I said brutally, "if I had someone to crew for me."

  She shook her head, but so abstractedly that I thought she had not heard properly. "But could you.?" she started, then seemed to think of something that drained the hope out of her face. "It's your leg, isn't it? You're frightened that it will collapse."

  "It hasn't happened for weeks," I said truthfully, "and even if it had, it wouldn't stop me."

  "So." She could not bring herself to ask the favour directly.

  "Yes," I said. Wildtrack had a day's start, but Wildtrack had much further to go. Yes, I could reach the killing place, and yes, I would try.

  I've never victualled a boat so quickly, nor so well. Angela used her car and credit card to go to the town, while I raided Bannister's larder and boathouse.

  "I can't let him die!" she said to me as she pushed a wheelbarrow of food down to the wharf. She said it as if to justify the insanity of what I did.

  I didn't care to discuss the motives; it was enough that I'd agreed to go for her. "What's in the barrow?"

  "Coffee, dried milk, eggs. Tins of everything."

  "The eggs need to be dipped in boiling water for five seconds. It preserves them."

  She took the eggs back to the house while I stored the tins in freezer bags to keep the bilge water from rusting the metal and obliterating the labels. I stored packet soup, fresh bread, fruit, vegetables, biscuits, baked beans, more baked beans, Irish whiskey, still more whiskey, margarine, tinned fruitcake, salt, sugar, tinned ham, and corned beef. I'd finished my rough list of perishable stores and hoped I'd forgotten nothing essential. Teabags, washing powder, compass alcohol, rice, oatmeal, disinfectant, multivitamins, cooking oil, lamp oil, soap. I wasn't victualling only for a North Atlantic run, but thinking of what would follow. My own suspicion, my own certainty, was that I would never find Wildtrack. I went on a quixotic search because I did not know how to say no to a blonde, but once I had failed I would turn Sycorax's bows southwards, and so I provisioned for a long dog-leg voyage that would take me from England to the Canadian coast, then southwards to where the palms and slash pines grew. Fruit juice, nuts, stock cubes, more whiskey, spare light bulbs, lamp wicks, loo paper, washing-up liquid that could also serve as salt-water shampoo.

  The wind was still rising, and the glass dropping. By nightfall there would be a half gale blowing. Bannister had what he wanted, a fast start, and I would share it.

  Angela brought the parboiled eggs and I gave her more errands. "I want some coal or coke. Firelighters. I want sweaters, socks, warm weather gear. I want the best bloody oilskins in the house. I need a sextant, charts, the best sleeping bag you've got. I want an RDF and a self-steering vane."

  "Whatever you want, Nick. Just look for it."

  I ransacked the house for things I might need. I borrowed a set of Bannister's spare oilskins that were so much better than mine. I borrowed a sextant so I would have a spare. I found charts of the North Atlantic and the Canadian coast. I stole the battery from the Peugeot to supplement the two already on board Sycorax. From a drawer in Bannister's study I took a fancy hand-held radio-direction finder and a pack of spare batteries, then scooped an armful of paperbacks from his shelves. More whiskey. I took the fenders off Wildtrack II. I crammed provisions into Sycorax's every locker. Angela helped, piling stores higgledy-piggledy on the cabin sole. Half the time I didn't know what she was stowing below, but I could sort out the whole mess on the voyage. I used the boathouse hose to top up with water, then craned three extra cans of diesel fuel on to the foredeck. I lashed the big cans down, though I doubted if the bloody engine would ever run long enough to need them. There was some broken self-steering gear in the boathouse and I put it all aboard. It could be mended and rigged at sea.

  I still needed medical stores. Angela drove her Porsche into town and came back with bandages, butterfly clips, plasters, hypodermics and painkillers. I'd told her to go to the doctor and get a prescription for painkillers, local anaesthetics, tranquillizers, antibiotics and Benzedrine. I scribbled a note to the doctor explaining my need and Angela brought everything back. More whiskey. Potatoes, flour, crispbread, Newcastle Brown Ale, chocolate bars, razor-blades, bacon, fishing-lines, antiseptic cream, sunglasses.

  By six o'clock it was almost done. The wind was blowing hard now, coming from the south-west. If the weather pattern held then I'd have a stiff beat out of the river and a wet blow down to the Lizard, and a rough sea to the Mizen Head, but after that, off the shelf waters, I'd be reaching fast into the high latitudes. From there I'd drop down to the rendezvous.

  My tender was still in the boathouse. As Angela took the last two boxes down to the cabin I hoisted the dinghy on to Sycorax's coachroof where I lashed it upside down. The dinghy was my only liferaft; there were not even lifejackets aboard. As I tied the last lashing to the starboard handrail it began to rain and suddenly there was no more to be done except to say goodbye.

  I kissed Angela. We stood in the rain beside the river and I kissed her once more. I held her tight because a part of me did not want to leave. "I can't promise anything," I said.

  "I know."

  "You just have to wait now," I said.

  "Yes." She was embarrassed that I was doing this for her, but it was the last desperate throw, and I could not deny it to her. I'd planned to sail away whatever happened, and all I did now was make a northerly detour to where the seas would be cold, grey and bleak.

  "Time to go." I wanted to stay with her, but the falling tide beckoned. There were no bands or cheerleaders, just an overloaded boat on a river pecked by rain and squirled by wind. "I'll write," I said. "Someday."

  "Please do." She spoke stiffly.

  "I love you," I said.

  "Don't say it, Nick."

  It was a miserable parting; a miserable departure. The engine wouldn't start, but the jib tugged Sycorax's bow away from the wharf. Angela let go my springs and warps as I hoisted the mainsail and mizzen. Water swirled between the hull and the bank as I coiled the ropes.

  "There's a present for you in the cabin!" Angela shouted. Sycorax was moving fast now, snatched by the ebb and the river's turbid current. Angela thought I had not heard her, so cupped her hands and shouted again, "In the cabin, Nick! A present!"

  I waved to show that I'd heard, but I couldn't go below to find the gift until I had Sycorax settled into the main channel. Once there I pegged the tiller, went down the companionway, and found the last two boxes that Angela had loaded. One was filled with catfood, the other contained a small black female kitten that, as soon as I opened the box lid, greeted me with needle-sharp claws.

  I went topsides. I looked back, but the rain had already driven Angela away from the wharf. The kitten, astonished by its new home, glared at me from the cabin steps. "I'll call you Angel," I said.

  Angel hissed at me. The hair on her back bristled. I hoped she was a sea cat. I hoped she'd bring me luck.

  I passed the pub and wondered when I would see it again. Someone, recognizing the boat, waved from the window, and I waved back. I knew that in far-off seas I would remember that bar as a place of idle talk and lustrous beer, but then I had to tack in the village's narrow reach and the manoeuvre took my mind off the anticipated nostalgia. I saw faces watching me from the holidaymakers' cars which were parked on the riverside. The tourists saw a businesslike boat loaded for a voyage. There was nothing glossy about Sycorax now; she was lashed tight in the evening's rain and her beauty was that of a functional craft ready for the ocean. The kitten scrambled up to the cockpit and bared its tiny teeth at me. I scratched her under the chin, then watched as she leaped up to the coachroof where she began to sharpen her claws on the dinghy's lashings. "Angel," I tried out the name. "Angel."

  I hadn't filled in my Form C1328, Part One, to inform Her Majesty's Customs and Excise that I was travelling abroad. Bugger Form C1328. I didn't have Sycorax's
registration papers, the lack of which would mean bureaucratic aggravation in foreign ports. Then bugger the bureaucrats, too; the world had too many such dull killjoys and Sycorax would sail despite them. Ahead of me now were the town quays, then the river's entrance where the half-gale was smashing waves white across the bar. The clouds were bringing an early dusk beneath which the homely lights gleamed soft from windows in the town. The blue-neon cross on the gable of the Baptist church flickered like lightning and I said a prayer for my small ship that was going down to the big seas. Rain slashed down at us, and the kitten protested to me from inside the cabin's hatch.

  Car lights flashed from the stone jetty by the town boatyard. As Sycorax drew closer I saw the blue Porsche parked there and knew that Angela had come to see us off. She ran down to the fuel pontoon and waved both arms at me. I waved back and I wondered why the farewell was suddenly so enthusiastic when, a half-hour before, it had been so cool. "I like the cat!" I shouted as loud as I could.

  "Nick! Nick!" Then I saw she was beckoning. I pushed the tiller over, sheeted in on the new tack, and let the boat glide up towards the pontoon. Two big motor cruisers were moored there and I watched as Angela climbed over the poop of the larger boat. She stood outboard of its guardrails, holding on to a stanchion. She carried a bag.

  I put Sycorax's head to the wind and let the tide carry me alongside the cruiser. Angela threw the bag on to the foredeck, waited a second, then caught my hand and jumped into the cockpit.

  I pushed the tiller to starboard and sheeted the jib across to turn our bows. I saw that Angela had left her car door open and its lights still burning.

  "Are you sure?" I asked her.

  "Of course I'm not sure, but." She sounded oddly angry with me.

  "But what?"

  Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. "It's your leg. You're going to kill yourself out there, Nick."

  "I'll be fine, I promise."

  "And you said it would be quicker with two people on board."

  "That's true." I let the sails flap. "But not if one of them is seasick." I wanted her to come more than I could possibly say, yet I was using arguments to make her stay behind.