by Stuart Woods
9
WE SPENT THE NIGHT moored in Plymouth, and by the time we continued west, down the Cornish coast, my relationship with Mark and Annie had changed. Before, I had been a new acquaintance invited for a sail, a passenger; now I had been taken in, made a part of what they were doing. We had become friends.
The weather remained glorious. We got a spinnaker up in a light following breeze, and the brightly colored sail filled and drew us down the green coast line, a mile or so offshore. I had grown up in a place where the coastal region was flat and sandy and, to my mind, rather dull. But here, in the lower left-hand corner of England, rolling green meadows swept down to high cliffs, with the sea crashing at their feet. It was like something out of Daphne du Mau-rier.
Mark went forward, curled up on a sail on the foredeck and slept soundly. I steered, and Annie kept me company in the cockpit. “Willie …” she said hesitantly. There seemed to be something she was having trouble saying to me.
“Yep?”
“I think you ought to know about … Mark’s … injury.”
“Oh, he told me about that a couple of nights ago, on the sail down to Plymouth.”
She looked at me in surprise. “He told you about that?”
I nodded. “About Belfast and the pub.”
“About the boy?”
“Yep, the whole story.”
She looked relieved. “I’m glad. Do you know you’re the first person he’s ever told about it, except for me?”
“Really? He seemed pretty relaxed about it.”
She looked toward Mark, sleeping on the foredeck. “Thank God Thrasher came along,” she said.
“You said he’d been looking for sponsorship for a long time.”
She nodded and sighed. “Oh, yes. He was pretty near the end of his tether … and so was I.”
“What would he have done if he hadn’t got the money? Gone back to the farm?”
“He would have been a caged animal on the farm.”
“The way he talks about it, he seems to love the place.”
“Oh, he does; but this new boat has loomed large since he had to leave the service. He began drawing it when he was still in … hospital. He must have done a hundred drawings—every detail. He read every book available on yacht design … he took a mail order course, bent every professional designer’s ear, showed the plans to anybody who could make a suggestion.”
“Why didn’t he go to a professional for the design?”
“He wouldn’t. He couldn’t have borne the idea. He had to do it himself. It was sort of … therapy, I guess.”
“I gather he loved the Royal Marines.”
“Loved it? He was obsessed with it. He lived and breathed it, and when he found out he couldn’t do it anymore … well, he withdrew into himself, stayed shut in his room for weeks, barely talked to me. He never once spoke about what had happened—a friend had to tell me about it. I think the boy’s death, on top of having to leave the service, was almost more than he could stand. And then one day he came into the kitchen with this drawing of a boat and started to talk. He must have talked for six hours straight, making notes and sketching. It became frightening after a while, and I wanted to call a doctor, but then he seemed to get it all out and went to bed and slept like a baby, with no nightmares.”
“He’d been having them a lot?”
“Constantly, when he could sleep at all. I had to sleep on the living-room sofa for a long time.”
“And he’s been okay since?”
“Well, not entirely. The obsession with the boat replaced his obsession with his career, and that was fine until it began to look as if he might never find a sponsor.” She looked out over the water into the distance. “I think that if Thrasher hadn’t… come into the picture when he did I would have had to leave Mark… or go ‘round the bend, myself.”
“But he’s okay, now, isn’t he?”
She looked forward at Mark again. “God, I hope so. This project isn’t going to be easy, I think you ought to understand that. Things are bound to go wrong, and I just hope Mark can handle them when it happens.” She turned back to me. “I’m going to need your help with him, Willie. If he could talk to you about Belfast, that means you have his trust.”
“Well, sure, whatever I can do. I’m glad he told me the whole story.”
She turned and looked at me. “I’m not sure that he did,” she said. “I’m not sure he knows the whole story, himself. The officers he served with told me as little as they could get away with. They were … uncomfortable discussing it; there was something there that I never got to the bottom of … and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure I want to.”
We sailed on in silence.
We had a week’s sailing that is still, all these years later, the standard of pleasure by which I judge a successful cruise. We moved west from Plymouth down the coast to Fowey, where we drank at the Royal Fowey Yacht Club and ate lobster in the village; we looked in at Mevagissey and Polperro, timing the tides to be sure we had water under our keel; we drank our pints outdoors at the Rising Sun in St. Mawes, called at the Royal Cornwall Yacht Club in Falmouth for a drink and motored up the lovely Helford River for a spectacular dinner at a tiny restaurant called the Riverside. I slept alone on the yacht that night, while Mark and Annie stayed in a room above the restaurant. I envied him and missed them both.
We had a good day’s sail around the Lizard, the last big promontory in the Channel, to Hughtown, in the Isles of Scilly, some thirty miles from Land’s End. We had supper ashore and listened to the local fishermen’s choir sing in the pub—not in performance, but for the sheer joy of singing. Early the next morning, with their voices still ringing in our heads, we motored through a narrow cut at high water and were in the Atlantic, bound for Ireland. By lunchtime the Scillies had slipped below the horizon, and we were well and truly at sea.
After my conversation with Annie about Mark I watched and listened to him more closely. He went in stops and starts, I noticed. He would be talkative, almost garrulous for a time, then fall silent. I imagined he was thinking ahead about the building of the boat, but I couldn’t be sure. Still, he was calm, a reassuring presence on the boat, an aura of utter competence about him.
Annie worked her considerable charm without seeming to humor him, but I could see her concern and her relief. Oddly, she did not seem to me to be in love with him, simply to like him a lot, but I had to admit to myself that that was what I wanted to believe. There was an attraction between us, something palpable. She conveyed affection in small ways—a quick hug, a cool hand on the back of my neck when it was sunburned, an arm draped casually over my shoulder as we sat in the cockpit. She did this even when Mark was present, and he seemed, somehow, to approve. They might have been brother and sister, as I had once hoped they might be. I felt almost like an old beau. I liked it.
Out of sight of land I experienced a curious sense of self-sufficiency that was all out of proportion to the reality. There we were, the three of us, dependent only on the boat and ourselves for comfort and survival. There was a kind of comfort and compan-ionability in that.
Within a few hours we were in a forty-knot gale, with seas running in two directions after a major wind shift. Under short sail we took watches in turn, wet and cold, while those below handed up sandwiches and hot drinks. During that day and night we became more than friends, we became a team, each responsible for the others.
We raised Roberts Head outside Cork Harbour late the following afternoon, delayed some hours by the gale. There was still more than thirty knots of wind blowing, but we had up more sail and kept it until we were abeam of Roches Point Light, where we stopped and put the yacht in order, above and below.
“I like to be shipshape when I enter a port,” Mike said. “Makes it all look easy to those ashore.”
We started the engine and motored up the Carrigaline River into Crosshaven and tied up at the water dock of the Royal Cork Yacht Club, a neat, white building at the top of a short
expanse of very green grass a few yards above the water. Crosshaven stretched along the river in both directions and up the hillside, as well. There were, perhaps, three dozen yachts of varying sizes moored in the river off the club. The tiny settlement of Currabinny lay directly across the water from the club. It was a very pretty place, one I had not visited during my earlier stay in Ireland, even though it was less than fifteen miles from my grandfather’s farm. A man in foul-weather gear on the dock looked the length of Toscana and said, “She looks very tidy to have come in out of that.” He nodded toward the harbor entrance.
Mike winked at me. “Oh, she stands up very well, she does,” he said, smiling broadly at the man. “She likes a bit of weather.”
We trudged up the ramp to the clubhouse in the light rain, dumped our oilskins on a bench outside, and went into the bar. Warmth and the smoky scent of burning turf greeted us. The bar was just opening for the day, and the club was deserted, except for us. Mike ordered Guinness for the three of us. “We’ll ring Coolmore from here,” he said. “He’ll want to know we’ve arrived.”
“Who?”
“It’s Lord Coolmore, actually. He owns the castle that our cottage belongs to. I should ring Thrasher, too. He’ll want to know we’re still alive.” He got up and went to look for a phone.
“You’ll love the cottage,” Annie said. “It was built as a gamekeeper’s house—must be more than four hundred years old.”
We chatted idly for a few minutes, the fatigue of the night before beginning to catch up with us. Mark returned. “All set,” he said. “Coolmore’s meeting us with a key; we’d better be off up-river.” We gathered our oilskins and walked back to the water dock in the rain. As we cast off I looked up to the road at the club’s gates and saw someone step into a telephone booth. I had only a glimpse before he was obscured by the rain on the booth’s glass panes.
I turned to Mark. “Did you reach Derek Thrasher?”
“Yep. He was relieved to hear we’d made port safely. Apparently, there are a couple of yachts missing out there.”
“In London?”
“What?”
“Did you reach Thrasher in London, or was he somewhere else?”
“In London.”
He revved the engine, and we began the last mile of our passage. I looked back toward the phone booth, now hidden by a wall. I could see only part of a car that might have been a Mercedes. I turned back to coiling lines and found Annie looking at me oddly.
10
WE MOTORED UP the Carrigaline River, heeling slightly in the sharp gusts that came at us across the water and slapped little waves against the hulls of the moored yachts and fishing boats. We came around a bend to the left and another to the right, and it seemed that the river was about to peter out. Still, we continued and rounded yet another sharp bend to come to a placid anchorage, sheltered by heavy brush on one side and an extensive stand of large trees on the other, and by hills on both sides. Carved into the forest on our right was perhaps half an acre of grass surrounding a large stone cottage. A tall, lean man who looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties walked from the cottage to a stone jetty, got into a dinghy, and began to row toward us.
Mark handed me the boathook. “Stand by to pick up that mooring.” He pointed to a florescent red buoy dead ahead. As we secured to the mooring the man in the boat came alongside and clambered aboard. He greeted Mark and Annie warmly and turned to me with an outstretched hand.
“And you’ll be Willie, I expect,” he said, grinning at me broadly. “I’m Peter-Patrick Coolmore.”
“Will Lee,” I replied, taking his hand while inwardly saying goodbye to my preferred name. It was a losing battle. He came below and admired Toscana’s interior layout, then we and our gear made it ashore in two trips. We entered the cottage for the first time to a scent mixed from new wood, old furniture, paint and other building materials.
“Oh, it’s lovely,” Annie exclaimed, walking about. “So much improved since we first saw it.”
“You didn’t arrive a moment too soon,” Coolmore said. We’ve just got it together. Joan picked out what furniture she thought you’d need. We’ve a couple of rooms full of unused things at the castle if you need anything more. Your things arrived yesterday,” he said, indicating several large packing crates in an adjacent room. “I’ll leave you to it, then.” He shook hands all round and departed.
“Let’s get at it,” Annie commanded.
“Haven’t we time for a glass of wine?” Mark complained. “It’s the cocktail hour, you know.”
“I’m cooking dinner in this cottage tonight,” Annie replied firmly, “And I’m not cooking until everything is in its place.”
We fell to work and, in an hour and a half, under Annie’s close supervision, we had transformed the cottage into something resembling a home. There was a good-sized living room with a dining table at one end and a large fireplace at the other, two bedrooms, one large and one small, a kitchen, and a newly constructed bathroom. Annie had a talent for nestbuilding. I remembered, now, that Toscana had the same look about her, one of lived-in comfort. What had been a bare collection of rooms was now cozy and inviting. By the time another two hours had passed, we had all showered and had a good dinner and some wine and were scattered before a cheerful fire. Shortly after that they shook me awake and sent me to my bed. Before sleep overtook me, I had a moment to reflect on where I was and what I was doing. My father’s comment to my mother came back to me, about the model airplanes I had never finished. When reciting my list of manual skills to Mark, full knowing why he was asking me, I had neglected to tell him that I had never finished my shop projects in school, either, or the building of the small house on the farm. There was something in me that, once I had learned about something, made me lose interest. I had no staying power, and I knew it. I resolved, with as much resolve as I could muster in my sleepy state, that I would finish this one; that I would make up for my lack of candor with an enthusiasm I would find somewhere. Somewhere.
Next morning, after a huge breakfast that included my favorite Irish foods, smoked bacon and soda bread, Annie set about doing still more to the cottage, while Mark and I paid a visit to Cork Harbour Boatyard.
We borrowed Lord Coolmore’s Land Rover and motored down a bewildering series of country lanes until we came upon a creek running up from Cork Harbour. As we turned and drove up its banks the water receded until there was nothing but steep banks and a bottom left dry by the receding tide. Shortly, a very large tin shed appeared. There was a rudely shingled addition attached to one side and an old, stone quay running along the dried-out creek-bed. A little railway ran from the creek’s edge into the large shed. Half a dozen yachts and boats, in varying stages of disrepair, perched on cradles scattered about the yard. We parked the Land Rover and entered the shed through a small, hinged door cut into a huge, hangar-type sliding door.
The scents of wood shavings and some sort of glue struck me, and a hammering from a nearly finished fishing boat that nearly filled the shed was temporarily deafening. A short, dumpy man detached himself from the crew of half a dozen working on the boat and shambled toward us.
“Captain Robinson,” he said, sticking out the hand not holding a hammer. “Been looking for you to turn up.”
Mark took the hand. “Good to see you, Finbar.” he turned to me. “This is Willie Lee, who’ll be working with us. Willie, this is Finbar O’Leary, the best boatbuilder in Britain and Ireland.”
Finbar O’Leary blushed and seemed astonished at the same time. I would learn that he had an astonished expression fixed upon his face at all times, in all moods. “Mr. Lee,” he said, “Glad to have you aboard. I understand you’re handy. We can use the help if we’re to give Captain Robinson the boat he wants.” He turned back to Mark. “Got some news for you. The little yacht we were to build after this one ….” he nodded over his shoulder at the fishing boat, “has been canceled. The owner opted for something in plastic.” There was a touch of scorn in his
voice at the mention of a glass-fiber boat. “That means you’re next; we should be laying your keel in ten days or so.”
Mark’s face spread in a huge smile. “That’s news indeed, Finbar. Will we have materials by then?”
“I came upon a nice load of good Honduras mahogany last week and took the liberty of placing an order. We won’t be needing the teak decking for a while, and I’ve already the oak. I’ll put a man to ripping the mahogany as soon as I can free one from this job. We’ll make a start on, let’s see …” He screwed up his face in figuring and managed to look even more astonished. “The first of September; how’s that for you?”
Mark clapped him on the back, rocking the smaller man. “That couldn’t be better.” Mark produced a notebook and they began to compile a list of other materials for the new yacht. I walked a few steps toward the incomplete fishing boat to have a closer look and then stopped in my tracks. A man who had been painting the hull had stopped and was staring at me. We stood for several seconds like that, then with no other sign of recognition, he turned his back and began to paint again. I glanced up to the deck high above the shed’s floor and saw an identical man looking at me. He nodded amiably and turned back to his work. Connie Lydon may have told me that the O’Donnell twins, Denny and Donal, were boatbuilders, but, if so, I had forgotten. I felt unaccountably disturbed to see them, like a boy who had unexpectedly come upon the schoolyard bully away from the schoolyard. This time it had been easy to distinguish Denny from his brother, merely by the hostility of his gaze. I rejoined Mark and Finbar.
We went into Finbar’s office—the addition to the shed. The plans for Mark’s yacht were pinned to a wall, and the two men went over them carefully. They agreed on a list of materials to order and Mark gave the boatbuilder a check to cover the initial order and open an account. We made our goodbyes, and as we turned to leave, I found Denny O’Donnell staring at me again.