by Stuart Woods
“Mark and me or just me?”
“You, first.”
She smiled. “Oh, I’m a Londoner, born and bred. Daddy was a barrister; good one, too. He died last year. My mother is still there, thriving on her own. We spent our summers on the Isle of Wight—not Cowes, the other side, Bonchurch. Boys used to ask me sailing from Cowes, though, that’s where I started.”
“School?”
Grammar school in London. Took my degree at Oxford in literature. Worked in an advertising agency in London afterward. Bored me silly.”
“Is that where you met Mark? In London?”
“Nope. Cowes, during Cowes Week, two years ago. Where else? He was a captain in the Royal Marines and was skippering a service yacht in the racing. Very dashing, he was.”
There was something sad in her voice. “Still seems to be,” I said. “When did you marry?”
“Not long after. Whirlwind courtship and all that. He took leave and we went to Italy together. Incredibly easy to get married in Italy. We did the deed in Florence, that’s why the yacht got named Toscana.”
“Sounds romantic.”
“Oh, it was.” Still the sadness.
I didn’t have to ask why Mark, at thirty, was no longer in the Royal Marines. He came on deck with a bottle of cold wine and three plastic glasses, wearing only a pair of khaki shorts. He had an extraordinary physique, heavily muscled, but well- balanced, except that his left knee was a mass of pits and scar tissue, and the calf was only half the size of the right. Seeing it, I was astonished that he had never shown the slightest sign of a limp, had never favored the leg at all.
Mark poured the wine, and as I was about to sip from my glass, he threw up a hand. “Not yet, mate, not ‘til the sea has had his.” He tipped his glass over the side and spilled a dollop of the clear, golden liquid into the salt water. “Can’t be mean with Poseidon,” he grinned. “Give him his sip of your wine, and maybe he won’t want you.”
It seemed a small price to pay for this golden, summer afternoon, sailing down the English Channel into a setting sun with these two attractive people. I could not know then how very much more the sea would demand from me.
“What happened to the leg?” I asked. It was four o’clock in the morning. I had come on deck to relieve Mark at the helm; he stayed on in the cockpit to get me settled with the boat and didn’t seem anxious to get below and into a warm bunk. A brilliant night sky burned over us. In the distance, Start Point lighthouse flashed three times every ten seconds.
“A shotgun happened to it,” he said lightly. “Sawn-off, twelve gauge, double-naught buckshot.”
I was about to ask if it were a hunting accident when what he had said sank in. “Sawn-off?”
“Just a pleasant evening with the lads in a pub. Trouble was, the pub was in Belfast.”
It took me a moment to add it all up. “You were stationed there with the marines?”
“Right.” He smiled. “Only war we’ve got, you know. Bit like your Vietnam.” From anyone else his tone would have been too like the way the British sound in old movies. From Mark it seemed offhand, natural, even shy.
“I guess if you’re a professional that’s what you want.”
“Not want; need. Careers are made in a war, not least because a number of one’s competitors drop out of the competition. I welcomed the opportunity, even enjoyed the work.”
“What was the work like?”
“Street patrols, searches for weapons caches, an occasional patrol in the countryside around the border. Very tense, very exciting. Snipers out there all the time. One kept one’s flak jacket buttoned to the chin. The old adrenalin was constantly pumping. Except in the pub.”
“What happened?” Talking about this didn’t seem to cause him any pain; if anything, he sounded nostalgic. I wanted to know.
“It was early on, after the thing blew, in sixty-nine. We felt safe in some of the Protestant pubs. Dreary places, but one had to get away from it, you know. We’d got outside a few pints, some of the lads were singing; I heard car doors slamming outside—if I’d been sober that would have made me sit up and take notice—it was the singing lulled me, I think.” He slouched, propped his feet up on the opposite cockpit seat and gazed at the millions of stars. “They kicked the door in and opened up on us. One of my platoon sergeants was sitting next to me; the first rounds fairly cut him in two. Fortunately, my cowardly streak surfaced through the booze and I dove over the bar. I think I must have been in midair when I was hit.”
“Did it hurt a lot?” I had to know everything.
“Not a lot, not immediately, anyway. I was spun around sideways by the blast; it was like being hit in the knee with a punch. I landed on top of the landlord, who’d quite smartly hit the deck behind the bar. He had a weapon back there—an American army forty-five, it was, and I grabbed it and got off four or five indiscriminately aimed rounds. Hit one of them.” He looked up. “Watch your course.”
Held rapt by this horrible story, I was now sailing the yacht directly at the lighthouse. I quickly came back on course. “Did it kill him?”
“Yes. The landlord had loaded the thing with dum-dums. It blew a very large hole right through him; he practically exploded. I got a look at him as they were getting me out. He was a boy. Thousands marched in his funeral procession; a proper hero, he was. He was fifteen. The bastards sent a fifteen-year-old boy to do that. I’d been in Northern Island four months, commanding a commando company through all of it, but I don’t think I knew until that moment how completely ruthless they were, how little they cared for even their own.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Funny thing, I have a lot of sympathy for the Catholics in Northern Ireland; it’s their country, after all. We took it from them and kept it for three hundred years. We still have that fragment, the six counties, and we don’t know how to let go. I despise the IRA, though, especially the Provisionals, the terrorists, simply because they’re willing to indiscriminately kill as many of their own people—men, women or children—as it takes to get the British out. I can understand their wanting to kill us; I can’t understand their sending a fifteen-year-old to do it. It’s all so stupid.”
He was sounding melancholy, now, and we sailed along for a few minutes in silence, with nothing but the sound of the water slipping past the hull. I thought perhaps I knew, now, why Annie had sounded sad.
“Did you like the Royal Marines as a career?” I finally asked.
He smiled broadly. “It was bloody marvelous, it was. Terrific training, you know. I was really fit; five miles every morning, all that. We did the lot—parachuting, diving under the arctic ice cap, exercises off submarines—it was like something out of boys’ fiction. Bloody marvelous.”
“You got a medical discharge, then?”
“No other choice, I fear.”
“Pension?”
“Yes; not much, but I’ve got the family farm in Cornwall; I rent that. Gives me a reasonable income.”
“You ever intend to farm it yourself?”
“Oh, yes, I love it down there, but I’ve a few things to do before I settle down to that. You’ve farmed a bit, Annie tells me.”
“Oh, sure. Grew up on one. Cattle, mostly.”
“Are you good with your hands?”
“How do you mean?”
“Machinery, tools, that sort of thing.”
“Fairly good, I guess. I maintained the tractors, learned my way around a car engine. I took all the shop courses in school. Two negro farmhands and I built a small house for one of them; wired and plumbed it, too. It was good experience.”
“Interesting,” he said, getting to his feet. “I guess I’ll turn in for a bit. Call me when you see the Eddy stone Light. Flashes twice every ten seconds; it’ll be off your port bow. Before that, you’ll pick up a buoy, flashing red, pretty much on your nose. That’s the only fixed object between you and Plymouth. Don’t hit it. There’ll be the odd fishing boat or yacht, so keep a sharp ey
e out. If you see anything you aren’t sure about, don’t hesitate to call me. Better to turn me out for nothing than to bump into something.” He started down the hatch, then stopped and turned. “Pick out a star,” he said, “and steer for that. It’s a lot easier than watching the compass. The moon moves too fast to sail by, but a star will keep you on course.”
Then he was gone, and the yacht was in my hands. Start Point light flashed its signal off the starboard beam, the moon was there off to port, the stars were as thick as clouds; I picked one and sailed for it. Oddly, for the first time since I had left Delano, maybe for the first time ever, I felt truly free.
7
I SAW THE Eddystone Light just before dawn and called Mark. As we came closer to it in the new light of day, Mark said, “That light sits on a rock out there, but it isn’t the first Eddystone. The first one was swept away in the last century by a single, giant wave.”
I looked at the three-foot seas around us and wondered what sort of wave it would take to wipe out a lighthouse more than a hundred feet tall.
As we approached Plymouth a huge stone wall seemed to rise out of the sea. This was Plymouth Breakwater, which protected the harbor from the rough seas outside. As we sailed past the eastern end of it I got my first real look at Plymouth. We sailed across the harbor and, under sail with Mark at the helm, picked up a mooring in front of the Royal Western Yacht Club, a low structure built on a shelf of rock just above the sea. As Mark took up on the line and the boat settled with her nose into the wind, I looked to the right and above the clubhouse and saw a familiar figure. I stuck my head inside the hatch, took the binoculars from their rack, and scanned the railing along the street, but no one was there.
“What are you looking at?” Mark asked as he came back from the foredeck.
“I just thought I saw someone I knew. Must be seeing things.” I put the binoculars away, almost certain that I had seen Blunt Instrument, Derek Thrasher’s chauffeur, leaning against the railing watching Toscana pick up her mooring. Then, as I watched, the skinny man from Cowes appeared on the street above the railing, got into an old car, and drove around a corner. I was bloody well not seeing things, and my curiosity was mounting.
While Annie made breakfast Mark and I busied ourselves with odd jobs. The logbook showed the engine oil ready for changing, so I changed that and the filter and tightened the alternator belt, aware that Mark was watching me closely as I worked.
Mark and I sat in the lounge of the Royal Western Yacht Club, sipping a pint. Annie had gone off in a taxi to do some shopping for the boat. Mark pointed out the open doors past the terrace and flagpole to the harbor. “Looks peaceful, doesn’t it? What with the breakwater and all. But in a storm, with the wind from the south, the tides can get ferocious.” He nodded at a portrait of Prince Philip hanging on the opposite wall. There was a brown line running across it at about the Prince’s knees. “That’s the high water mark in this room,” he said. “I was here when it happened. We shoveled a lot of mud back into the sea.”
We laughed about that and sat quietly for a few minutes, sipping our beer. “Well,” I said, finally, “I guess I’d better check on the ferry schedule.”
Mark held up a hand. “Hang about,” he said. “Look here, Willie [I seemed to have got stuck with that name], I have a proposition for you: I could use some help on this project. In fact, I’ve got that built into the budget in my agreement with Thrasher. We’re building the new boat in Ireland, at a little yard in Cork Harbour; there’s a lot of work in that, and when we finish, the work really begins. A boat of this size takes a lot of maintaining. You know your way around a diesel engine ….”
“Well, the boats I sailed on in the states all had gasoline engines, but your diesel isn’t much different from a tractor engine, really.”
“Right, and you’ve had some pretty good experience with woodworking and tools, right?”
“I guess so, right.”
“It won’t be all work, mind you. “It’ll be November before we start the actual building—the yard has another boat to finish first—so we’ll be doing some cruising in Ireland in Toscana. And when the boat’s finished we’re going to race her out to the Azores; I’ll sail her back singlehanded to qualify for the big race. You’d get the best sort of blue-water experience, a bit of everything.”
I started to speak, but he held up a hand.
“I know you want to travel, but there’s travel in this, too, although we won’t get to Paris, and I think you’d have a terrific experience with us, learn a lot, the sorts of things that will stay with you. I could pay you, say, twenty quid a week, cash, and your meals and board, and, of course, any travel expenses involved. Annie and I have taken this marvelous cottage up a little river from Cork Harbour, at a place called Drake’s Pool, and there’s a spare room. The three of us seem to get on well enough.”
I found myself breathing faster. I realized that I had been dreading leaving these two people. Suddenly, instead of a year of wandering there was a plan, a real involvement with something exciting. “You’re sure I can hack it?” I asked him. “You don’t know me very well, we’ve only spent a little time together.”
“No, but you don’t know us all that well, either. If you come aboard you can jump ship anytime you feel it’s not working out; just give me a bit of notice. I’ll feel free to kick you overboard if you aren’t ‘hacking it,’ as you put it. What do you say?”
If I had needed another reason to accept, it entered the club lounge at that moment. Annie Robinson strode in, carrying a box of groceries, wearing her tight jeans and her bright yellow sweater. She sank into an armchair, grabbed my pint, and took a long draught from it. Oddly, for a woman who had just come off a yacht and gone straight to a supermarket, she seemed freshly groomed and made up. “Sorry to be so long,” she said breathlessly. “There was a long queue at the market. Have I missed lunch?”
“No,” said Mark. “You’re just in time, too, to hear whether Willie is going to join us.”
“Oh, Willie,” she cried, reaching over and squeezing my hand, “please do!
“God, I’d love to,” I said. Where do I sign?”
Mark smiled broadly and stuck out his huge, rough hand. “A handshake will do.” I shook, and we all stood up to go in to lunch. “Annie, will you get us a table while I settle the bar bill?” Annie put her arms around me, kissed me firmly on the ear with a loud smack, and hugged me tightly.
“Mark,” I said, when Annie had left us, “I don’t want to start this whole thing off by making you think I’m crazy, but if this were a movie, I’d say we were being followed.”
“Eh?”
“When I got out the binoculars at the mooring, it was Derek Thrasher’s chauffeur I thought I saw. He was gone when I looked again, but then I saw another man I had seen in Cowes, who seemed to be paying a lot of attention to us when we came out of the restaurant with Thrasher.”
“And you saw him here, too?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it. It was almost as if the chauffeur was following us and the other guy was following the chauffeur.”
Mark laughed. “Well, I suppose Derek’s chauffeur could be down here on some sort of errand for him—God knows, he seems to have business interests everywhere—and as for the other fellow, well, we’ve just gone from one hotbed of sailing to another, and it’s not unusual to see a familiar face; you’ll probably see a couple more at lunch.” He clapped me on the back. “Come on, we’re not in the movies. Let’s get something to eat.”
As we walked toward the dining room, my feet seemed hardly to touch the ground. I was off on a true adventure, something I realized now I had been looking for all along. I was off on something else, too. My elation was pushing a Southern Baptist upbringing into a far corner of my mind; I felt almost no guilt at the realization that, for the first time in my young life, I wanted another man’s wife.
I have often wondered how things might have turned out if I had taken the ferry to France that afternoon. Mark migh
t be farming in Cornwall, now, Annie with him. I have a lot to answer for.
8
PEARCE WAITED until he was satisfied the girl had gone into the club for lunch. He had followed her to the Mayflower Post Hotel, waited for her outside for an hour, then followed the Mercedes to the supermarket and back to the Royal Western Yacht Club. He got out of the car and walked back to the railing where he had stood earlier. The yacht still bobbed at her mooring, in plain view of those inside the club. Below him was a stone enclosure holding a number of dinghies. He walked down the steps toward them; perhaps if he could get one out into the harbor he could circle and come up on the yacht from the other side. He was about to untie one when a man in uniform came out of the club.
“Can I help you, sir?” Pearce knew that tone. The man didn’t want to be helpful at all.
“Uh, no, I was just looking at the boats.”
“Are you a member, sir?” Same tone. Pearce didn’t reply.
“I’m afraid this is club property, and only members are allowed. You can reach the street up the stairs, there.”
He retreated up the steps and stood at the railing again. He thought about waiting until dark, but he had to start back to London well before that time. He did not understand Thrasher’s relationship with these people, but he knew that the younger of the two men had ruined the effort in Cowes, and that they were at least Thrasher’s friends. That was enough for Pearce, but now he was out of time. He had to be at the office.
He got back into the old Wolsley and drove back to the Mayflower Post. The Mercedes was gone. He turned back toward the A30 East, toward London. This was not working out, this following Thrasher; he was not getting the right chances, although he had come close in Cowes. Thrasher was too unpredictable, and Pearce had still not been able to find out where he lived, not even from his coworkers at the office. He would have to find another way.
There was time. And money. With the insurance and the bit his mother had left there was nearly £6,000. He would be patient; he would find another way. He would find it for his mother.