More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  One night I dissolved into tears of frustration. ‘It’s just one of those things,’ she said. Then she shuffled into the kitchen and returned with a cup of tea for me. I knew how much effort it had taken her to do this and I watched her set down the cup with a trembling hand. We had never talked properly to each other, but this simple gesture expressed more than words ever could.

  Night after night I watched her staring up at the clock on the wall. Whatever time it showed, she would make the same remark. ‘Is that all it is?’

  Finally, the clock stopped ticking.

  I managed to get my mother admitted to hospital, where doctors belatedly diagnosed an aggressive lesion to the brain. My bosses at work were sympathetic and I was given compassionate leave, which meant I was able to visit her every day. Due to the dementia, she became childlike in the last months of her life. I would feed her from a spoon and try to interest her in the magazines she had always loved to read. But when I gave them to her, after looking at the pictures she would put them to her mouth and chew them like a teething baby.

  One day, sitting down at her bedside, I noticed that her watch was missing. I searched her cabinet but couldn’t find it anywhere. She had no need to know what time it was, or that it was running out for her, but I felt the loss on her behalf. The watch had been given to her by Kardomah and on the back were engraved the words: ‘In gratitude for twenty-five years’ faithful service’. I had no option but to take off the rings she was still wearing on her fingers. She protested but I couldn’t stand the thought that these, too, might be stolen from her in the night.

  My mum always wore her wedding ring and another single gold band that had belonged to her mother, Julia Shea, the Irish grandmother I had never known as she had died when I was just a month old. I put the rings on to my own fingers for safekeeping and there they would remain for many years.

  My mother finally faded away in December 1984 and after her funeral, friends rallied round to help me clear out the flat. I gave away all but one volume of The Book of Knowledge, but kept the photographs my mum and I had pasted into albums: snapshots of me as a baby, crawling across a lawn in Kew Gardens as my father laughs behind me. Two pages later, I’m standing by a tree, again at Kew, in a knitted hat, double-breasted coat and reins. Then come summers spent at Pontin’s holiday camps, my mother in her long sleeves in the sun. I found certificates for weddings, births and funerals; a black-edged card commemorating my Uncle Johnny’s cremation. And a council rent book.

  Someone commented that I should keep on the flat—council flats were like gold dust in those days—but I knew it was time to move on. I had spent ten years trying to live my mother’s life for her; now I wanted to live my own.

  At first I felt a sense of relief that my mum had been released from her suffering but that was soon replaced by a sudden, piercing grief. For months I’d been worrying about her health, fearing that I might have to move back into Gullane House—perhaps for years. As I hadn’t known what was wrong with her until so late in the day I’d had no idea how long she might go on living, deteriorating all the while, in that terrible twilight. Having sustained her for so long with the events of my life, now, every time I had some snippet of news to tell her, I would automatically reach for the phone before remembering that she wasn’t there any more. I thought of all the conversations we’d never had, and never would have, and wished we’d been more open with each other, about everything, before it was too late.

  One positive to come out of my loss was that I had grown closer to Aunt Bett, who had been a great help since my mother had first fallen ill and had stoically made the journey into Westminster on the District Line from Becontree to visit her regularly when she had gone back into hospital. I kept loosely in touch with Bett for the rest of her life, ringing her from time to time, sending her postcards from abroad and making sure I remembered her birthday.

  Aunt Bett wasn’t able to shed much light on the enigma that was my mother but she did supply a few additional details. She confirmed what my mum had told me about her marriage to George Townsend, and the big house with the piano. George and my young mother had been besotted with each other, according to Bett: ‘If you ever went round to visit them she’d be sitting on his lap, gazing into his eyes.’ George, I learned, had been broken-hearted when my mother had left him and had apparently suffered some kind of nervous breakdown. Nobody was sure whether he had ever really recovered.

  After my conversation with my mother about George I had understood how the memory of the more gracious surroundings that had once been hers must have tortured her in the nineteen long years of coping with Lefevre Road. Having talked to Aunt Bett, I also began to reflect on what a huge event this early marital break-up must have been for my mother. Not only had divorce been rare in working-class marriages then, but her family were, for the most part, incredibly strict Catholics. Apart from my mum and Uncle Johnny. No wonder they had been close. Johnny must have been disillusioned by his terrible wartime experiences and my mother, in all probability, by being branded—or at least perceiving herself to be—a scarlet woman. They both drank and smoked all their lives to help them deal with the stress. I heard her voice echoing down the years. ‘There’ll be no place in heaven for me,’ she would joke with my father. ‘I’ll be damned for marrying you.’ Perhaps a part of her had actually believed that.

  The odd piece of the puzzle was slotting into place. I saw why my mother had been so much older than all the other mini-skirted East End mums of my childhood: she had a history. She had been walking another path before our family had even existed. Like me, she had reached a fork in the road and chosen the path less travelled. But what she felt about that, and the inner life she led, had always been a mystery to me and would now remain so forever.

  The realisation that I was a thirty-two-year-old orphan came as something of a jolt. My closest blood relative was Sarah Louise, who was even more of a mystery to me than my mother. When I went back to do a last sweep of the maisonette at Gullane House before surrendering the keys to the council, I found a tiny plastic wristband at the back of a drawer in my bedroom where it had lain for fourteen years.

  The letters have faded but I know what they spell. Sarah Louise is out there somewhere—a teenager now, almost a young woman. What does she look like? Is she straightening her hair? Does she clash with her teachers as I once did? Can she talk to her mother in a way I never could to mine? Perhaps she doesn’t even know the circumstances of her birth. But I cling to the belief that one day she will read my name on a certificate and we will see each other again.

  I take a last look around me and make a decision. I put the bracelet back into the drawer and close it. I need no reminders of Sarah Louise. She lives in my heart and I take her with me wherever I go. I walk out of my teenage bedroom—the room where she grew inside me—down the stairs and out on to the balcony, locking the front door behind me.

  Having been tied to my mother for so long, now that the cord had been cut I felt as if I were in freefall. I acknowledged that I needed to look for positives in my loss and see this release as a liberation. When a friend mentioned to me in passing that a man she knew was looking for crew for his yacht and asked me if I fancied going sailing, I saw only a new opportunity. Why not? Since my father’s death I had spent no more than a few weeks out of the country—seven days in Ibiza, a fortnight in Greece, a few holidays in Spain—but now I was free to do whatever I liked and to go wherever I liked.

  I took the number I was offered for ‘the Captain’ and plucked up the courage to dial it. When I could make out what he was saying—he had an almost impenetrable Glasgow accent—I discovered that he was in fact a friend of a friend. We agreed to meet when he was next in London.

  Knowing nothing whatsoever about sailing, I turned to the Dewey classification system and set out purposefully for my local library. There I found a book packed with aerial views of a bullet-shaped vessel attempting manoeuvres in what looked like a choppy sea. A section headed ‘Be
ating’ explained how a yacht could sail into an opposing wind. It was perhaps no coincidence that the next chapter was entitled ‘Man Overboard’.

  A few weeks later I walked into the Portobello Gold pub and immediately spotted the Captain standing at the bar. He wasn’t hard to identify since he was wearing a reefer jacket thick enough to weather a hurricane. As he turned, I saw that his face was half-hidden by a nautical beard. He was somewhere in his late forties, very rugged, with fiery red hair, though a little grey was creeping into his whiskers. His eyes were a startling sea blue.

  ‘You must be Julie,’ he smiled. As he ordered me a glass of wine, I watched him knock back a large Glenmorangie as though it were a glass of water. Pulling over a bar stool, he invited me to take a seat and I clambered on to it, a little clumsily owing to my high heels. He was looking down at them with an expression that suggested he had never before seen a pair of women’s shoes.

  ‘What the hell are those?’

  I stretched out a foot to show off a pair of brand-new black stilettos with dainty ankle straps. I’d bought them in Shepherd’s Bush market but they had the look of something far more expensive. I always wore high heels, even when cycling to work, which I did most days. The bike ruined the shanks on a lot of them. But I just couldn’t reconcile myself to being five-foot-four and a precious half-an-inch. I felt like a tall person in a short person’s body.

  ‘Nice, aren’t they?’

  The Captain turned up his nose as if I had a couple of stale halibut on my feet. ‘Get shot of ’em,’ he commanded. ‘And buy yourself a pair of these, or you’ll be over the side at the first tack.’ He raised his own foot. I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t worn wellington boots since primary school.

  The Captain asked how old I was.

  This did not seem to me altogether polite, but I took it in my stride. ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘Thirty-two and you’ve never set foot on a sail boat before?’

  I explained that I’d never had the chance before. He fixed me with a steely look and inquired about my health. I told him it was fine and inquired about his.

  ‘Oh, I’m fit and healthy,’ he said. ‘But then, I lead a different life from you London people, cooped up in offices and drinking clubs.’

  He downed another Scotch. Thus fortified, he seemed slightly more subdued. He sighed, blue eyes narrowing as if he were staring off at some far horizon. When he spoke his voice was quieter. ‘There’s a beautiful world out there for those who want to see it. And the best way to do that is from a boat.’

  I asked him about the places he’d been and he began to count off countries on calloused fingers. Having covered most of Europe, he started on the Far East.

  ‘…Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia. My old father was a bandsman in the British Army, played the trumpet in Burma. He’s spent the rest of his life in Ayrshire but he’s never settled to civvy life. Still tells me all his stories, paints pictures of the places he went to. The one he missed out on was somewhere called Sulawesi. Ever heard of it?’

  I shook my head. Geography had never been my strong point.

  ‘Well, we made a bargain. I’d make the visit for him. Proxy, you might say.’

  The Captain threw another whisky down his throat and bought me another drink. Slowly, circuitously, his story emerged. I gathered that as a young man he had spent several freezing seasons fishing the Arctic waters of the Barents Sea before building up a business buying fishing boats in Norway, selling them in Scotland and sailing them down there. Britain’s entry into the EEC had somehow affected the economics of this enterprise so he had shut up shop and ploughed some of his profits into making the trip to Bulukumba in south-west Sulawesi—not just for his father’s sake, but because he, too, harboured a dream: of owning a vessel called a phinisi, an Indonesian copy of an eighteenth-century sailing boat.

  The Captain cleared his throat. ‘It was a romantic notion,’ he admitted. ‘The boats are crude, to put it mildly, and the government makes it hard to get them out of the country unless big money changes hands. So I got myself a job in Singapore. I’m a Rolls-Royce engineer by trade and managed to find a good position with an oil company while it was possible for foreigners to make a living on the oil patch. After a while I did get myself a boat—not a phinisi, but a yacht that was good enough to sail away in.’

  All the while the Captain was talking, he was making sketches on a series of beer mats. When he had finished, he handed me two diagrams of boats. The first, a phinisi, did indeed look like ‘a romantic notion’—a majestic galleon, keeled over under full sail—while the other seemed a smaller, more conventional vessel.

  He introduced her as the Hei Lung. ‘That’s the one I bought in Singapore,’ he explained. ‘The name means Water Dragon. Or at least, I think it does.’

  Knowing nothing at all about boat design, I made appreciative noises. The Captain, however, was still dreamily considering the boat’s lines, as though he was admiring the curves on a beautiful woman. He spoke about her in the same way. ‘A crazy American fell in love with her just as I was running low on money. When I told him I wasn’t interested, he kept offering more and more. In the end, he simply made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’

  His hand wandered to another beer mat and the sketching began again. He hadn’t yet asked me a thing about my credentials as possible crew. Instead he just kept passing me beer mats, like a man far from home sharing family snapshots.

  ‘This boat’s by the same designer as the one I have now but you can see the difference: the Vertue’s a classic design but she’s only eight metres with one mast.

  ‘That’s a sloop,’ he went on, ‘whereas the boat I have now is a ketch—two masts with mizzens stepped forward of the rudder post.’

  I greeted the explanation of each new nautical feature with a businesslike nod of approval. He had ordered me a new glass of wine for every Glenmorangie he had swallowed, so maybe it was the alcohol but, even though I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, I was becoming increasingly enamoured of the idea of a life on the ocean wave. Especially after his tales of peeing on a whale and sailing the Malacca Straits more than a dozen times without ever seeing a single pirate.

  As the bell rang for closing time, the Captain picked up his loose change from the bar, drained his final glass of whisky and glanced at a huge submariner’s watch.

  ‘The boat’s on the Isle of Wight. Golden Sunset. Easy enough to find. Come down in a week’s time. It’ll be a shakedown cruise to Norway first to see my kids and my ex-wife.’

  ‘Right. And, er…can you tell me how long you expect we’ll be away?’

  The Captain shrugged. ‘If the weather’s fine, a couple of weeks, but if we’ve got storms to wait out, make it three. Hell, give it a month. You never know, you might just want to stay on for another trip.’

  By now, more than a little tipsy, I was swaying. I felt my foot slipping out of its stiletto heel.

  ‘Where to?’

  The Captain smiled. ‘Somewhere warm, dry—’ the barman suddenly broke in, bellowing something about whether or not we had homes to go to ‘—and away from English licensing laws.’

  The Captain smiled and held out his hand to me. It was like shaking a friendly loofah. ‘I’m looking forward to sailing with you, Julie. I think we’re going to get along fine.’ For maybe the first time all evening, his voice was mellow. ‘See you next week.’

  My vision slightly blurred, I followed his progress to the door. He paused for a moment and looked back at my shoes. ‘And make sure you leave the deck-staplers behind.’ With that he was gone.

  As I weaved my own way home, stepping out of the way of a handful of drunks brawling on the Portobello Road, rain had begun to fall, but it didn’t bother me unduly. With a head full of dreams and a pocketful of beer mats, a week seemed a long time to wait.

  Chapter Eleven

  Tramontana

  I soon discovered that the Captain was always on the look-out for people to go sailin
g with him. Although one or two mutual acquaintances had crewed for him, nobody seemed to enjoy it much, for some reason. But it was too late for anyone to talk me out of it: I was already hooked on the idea. The Captain was clearly one of life’s eccentrics, but I’d also found him strangely engaging. All the same, I had the sense not to go alone. On the phone he had agreed to another ‘shipmate’ coming with me on the voyage and I knew just the right person to take along.

  I’d originally met Maggie at work. A couple of years older than I was, she had been to drama school and oozed confidence. Between acting roles, she was an occasional secretary and sometimes demonstrated such items as miracle ironing-board covers at posh department stores, where she always managed to sell more than anybody else because she threw herself wholeheartedly into the task at hand. She was also smart, practical and game for a laugh. I couldn’t think of a better companion to have at sea.

  A week after my first meeting with the Captain, having taken practically all my holiday leave, I travelled down with Maggie to Cowes one evening. By the time we found the marina it was dark and the weather was atrocious. We walked up and down quay after quay, in driving rain, searching for the boat until Maggie finally shrieked above the wind: ‘Over here!’

  I hurried across to where she was standing, waving at me. I could just about make out the words ‘Golden Sunset’ on the stern of the boat Maggie had pointed out. On her mooring, the fifty-foot ketch looked bigger than I had imagined. We knocked gently on the hull, then clambered aboard with our sopping-wet parachute bags. We waited, full of trepidation. A few moments later, a door swung open to reveal the Captain, wearing nothing but a sarong.

  ‘Welcome!’ he boomed, and quickly turned to go back inside. Maggie shot me a worried glance. I hoped this wasn’t a sign of things to come. Down in the Golden Sunset’s broad saloon, the Captain explained that his inappropriate attire was due to him having been in the shower. Handing us each a glass of beer, he stepped into his cabin to get dressed. ‘Sorry about the weather.’