He rested on the Tansy’s oars. On the day Deborah Harvey had visited the house, only to find none of them at home and then to find herself stranded by the apparent defection of her chauffeur, Luke had behaved commendably. For one thing, when he ran into her so unexpectedly at Nellie’s, he did not refer to her as the Wicked Witch of the North, and for another, when he found out why she was there, he sprinted off to the garage in Shooter’s Hill Road to find out what had happened to her chauffeur. By then, of course, Kate had escorted Deborah Harvey back to their own house. The two of them were so euphoric at the belief that at any moment they would be reunited with Matthew, that there were none of the tensions that usually existed between them.
Luke had returned with the news that Adams had suffered a heart-attack and been taken by ambulance to Lewisham Hospital. He suggested that if Malcolm Lewis, Mr Giles’s scoutmaster, became Deborah’s temporary chauffeur, driving her back to Kensington in the Bentley, it would solve the problem of how she was to return to her niece’s home and of what was to happen to her car, all in one go. And, as he had pointed out, there weren’t really any other alternatives. The only other car drivers in the square were Billy and Jack. The thought of Billy at the wheel of a Bentley made even Kate shudder, and Jack wasn’t the kind of bloke who had time on his hands for such good deeds, at least not for someone he didn’t even know.
‘Plus,’ Luke had said, gold-flecked brown eyes shining at the thought of riding in the Bentley, ‘if I go with them, Malcolm Lewis won’t be lonely coming back home on the bus!’
Later, of course, by the time Malcolm Lewis did chauffeur Deborah Harvey home, all euphoria had ebbed. Leon returned from the Tansy and Matthew was not with him. At that stage, the police had not yet given their grim opinion as to what they thought had happened to Matthew. Nevertheless, Deborah Harvey had crumpled in a way that was shocking in its unexpectedness.
‘She gave way at Nellie’s, as well,’ Luke said to him when out of Deborah’s hearing. ‘That was with relief, though, when she thought you were bringing Matthew home.’ He had frowned, obviously trying to come to terms with something he found difficult, saying, ‘I think the Wicked Witch of the North really cares for Matthew, Dad. I think she loves him, just like we do.’
It was a conclusion that Leon had had no option but to agree with. Since that night, a rather odd bond had been struck between Deborah Harvey and Luke. On the pretext that Malcolm would need company on his return journey, he had travelled to Kensington with her. When, exhausted both physically and emotionally, she needed help in negotiating the steps leading into her niece’s exclusive block of flats, he had offered it, as he would have offered it to anyone. He also helped her into the old-fashioned, iron-cage lift and, finally, into her niece’s flat.
‘Though it isn’t a flat like the flats in some of the big houses in Magnolia Hill,’ he said later, when he finally returned home. ‘It’s enormous. All the rooms have big doors that fold back on themselves and open out on to other rooms. And it’s filled with statues and dried flowers and overstuffed cushions.’
‘What was Matthew’s other nasty old aunt like?’ Jilly asked, intrigued. ‘Is she a wicked witch as well?’
Luke hesitated and then shook his head. Matthew’s Aunt Genevre had looked a little witch-like, being tall and thin and bony, but she wasn’t witch-like in the way Deborah Harvey was. ‘She was quite nice,’ he said truthfully, ‘but she was a bit embarrassing. She kept staring and staring at me as if she couldn’t believe her eyes and then she started asking me so many questions that Malcolm got tired of waiting for me and started off back home on his own.’
‘What kind of questions?’ Jilly was in her nightdress and had, until Luke’s return home, been in bed, supposedly asleep. ‘Questions about Matthew?’
Luke shook his head. As he told his mother later, some of the questions had been most peculiar. ‘She wanted to know what a Thames waterman was and she wanted to know what tiddlering was. Deborah Harvey had told her that Dad said Matthew used to like tiddlering down on the Surrey Canal towpath, and she didn’t have a clue what it meant. She even wanted to know if, ’cos Dad’s half West Indian, we ate funny food and if, when he was at home with us, Matthew ate funny food as well.’
It was the sort of question Leon had been asked all his life and which never ceased to test his patience. He was at the point where the Roding met the Thames and as the grey-green water slapped and gurgled round her iron sides he shoved on one oar and heaved on the other, bringing her head round up river.
Ever since Matthew had first disappeared, he had taken leave of absence from work, spending all day, every day, in looking for him. As the police had long since finished with their inspection of the Tansy, he took to conducting his searches of the Thames and its tributaries aboard her. For one thing, being aboard her made him feel close to Matthew. It was full of memories of the days when Matthew was small and they had spent such a lot of time on her together, and it was the last place that he knew, without doubt, Matthew had been. He looked out over Barking Reach. He’d promised Jack that tonight he’d call in at the gym so that he could give his opinion of how he thought Zac was going to shape up in the pirate fight that had been fixed for him, and to offer any thoughts he had as to fight tactics. At any other time it was a task he would have been looking forward to, but not now; not when Kate was crying herself to sleep every night; not when there wasn’t the slightest clue as to Matthew’s whereabouts.
When he was safely out of the main shipping lane he again shipped oars, staring sightlessly across to Greenhithe’s grey shoreline. Where was his beloved, adopted son? He had to be somewhere, but where? In the name of God, where?
Chapter Fourteen
It was a question Matthew could have answered only very approximately. He was somewhere on the North Atlantic, he knew that. And he knew that he was heading for the South Atlantic, but where his final destination was to be, he could only guess. Venezuela? Brazil? The Spanish crew aboard the Orion seemed to think it a great joke that he didn’t know and teased him unmercifully whenever he asked. ‘Perhaps around the world, amigo! Perhaps to the south pole!’
He eased himself into a more comfortable position on a heavy coil of rope. He wasn’t a willing passenger aboard the Orion. He had spent the first few nights after he ran away from St Osyth’s aboard the dear old Tansy, trying to sort out the complex emotions and anxieties that had suddenly descended on him like a terrifying black cloud. During the day he roamed his old haunts down by the docks, revelling in the familiar sights and sounds and smells, all the time trying to drum up the courage to return home and face up to, and explain, his having run away.
The Orion was berthed at Fresh Wharf and was busy unloading when he nipped aboard her for a look around. He found a nice quiet corner far aft and fell asleep and, through all the manoeuvring of the boat as it re-loaded and turned around, its captain eager to be away before lighterage fees dug into the profits, he stayed asleep. By the time he was found and rudely shaken awake, there was a scattering of buoys, the scanning flash of a lighthouse and, in the gathering darkness, no other sign of land. The Spanish captain had refused absolutely to return his ship to the estuary and to hand him over to the Thames river police. His unwelcome passenger wasn’t a small child. When he was a similar age, he’d been sailing the seas of the world as a deck-hand, and he saw no reason why, for convenience sake, Matthew shouldn’t now gain similar experience.
‘We back in Thames four, five weeks,’ he said when Matthew had protested, appalled. ‘No hay que llorar! One mustn’t cry! No harm done, eh?’
‘But no one will know where I am!’
At the thought of the scenes that would now be taking place at both his school and his home, Matthew grew dizzy with horror. When he was aboard the Tansy, no one knew where he was either, but that had been different. Then he was in familiar surroundings and only a half an hour away from home. Even more importantly, he’d known he was going to set his mum and dad’s minds at rest wit
hin hours or, at the most, within another day. But not to be able to let them know for another four or five weeks that he was all right! What on earth would they be thinking? They would be worried sick. They might even think he was dead!
‘Can’t you radio the Port of London authorities?’ he had pleaded. ‘Can’t you ask them to get a message to my dad telling him where I am and when I’ll be back? My dad’s a Thames waterman, they won’t mind!’
Captain Juarez had shaken his head. ‘No,’ he had said unequivocally. ‘No es posible.’
He hadn’t explained why. If his stowaway couldn’t work out for himself that the Port of London authorities would mind very much that a ship’s captain had overlooked the presence of a twelve-year-old boy aboard his ship and would want to know why he hadn’t immediately taken action to return him to land, then he wasn’t going to help him do so. If he docked in Rio within fourteen days he would receive a bonus. If he didn’t, and he certainly wouldn’t do so if he turned his ship about, he would not receive a bonus. The matter was as simple as that.
‘Lo importante es llegar a tiempo,’ he had said to his crew. ‘The important thing is to arrive on time.’
Matthew knew there had been some talk among the men of putting him ashore when they called at Lisbon. ‘He could go to the British Embassy,’ Jaime, a young crew member who had taken a shine to him, said. ‘That would be OK for him, eh?’ Matthew didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved when the general consensus of opinion was that this would not be OK as they, as well as their captain, might fall foul of the law for not having returned to port the instant they became aware they had an unintended passenger aboard. Matthew, too, didn’t know how, if he did turn up at the British Embassy, he would be returned to England. Would his parents have to reimburse the cost of his return journey? They wouldn’t be able to do so. Only his aunts had that kind of money, and at the thought of his aunts being approached by a government department with a demand for money to cover the cost of his fare from Lisbon to London, his heart nearly failed him. It would be much more straightforward to stay aboard the Orion until she returned, in four or five weeks’ time, to London. That way, though he would have put people through a lot of worry, at least he wouldn’t have put them to any expense.
With that decision made and with the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing he could do about the situation, he resigned himself to enduring it. It wasn’t hard. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the thought of how his mum and dad would be worrying about him, he would have been in seventh heaven. He loved being afloat. He knew every bend and loop of the Thames, but he had never been out to open sea. Not until now. Why couldn’t people understand that great rivers and seas were magical places? His dad did, of course. His dad had served aboard an escort ship in the war, sailing the very ocean he was now sailing, but doing so across to North America, not curving south as he was now doing, via Madeira and Tenerife. Later on in the war he had served on a ship protecting the Arctic convoys on their Murmansk and Archangel run and, off Norway, had been torpedoed and fished from the sea by the Germans to spend the rest of the War as a POW.
He hugged his knees, looking out over the glittering vastness of the ocean. He loved his dad. He was the best dad in the world. He wasn’t his biological dad, though, so he hadn’t inherited his love of being afloat from him in the way that people inherited the colour of their eyes or hair.
He clasped his hands around his knees a little tighter. Sometimes he thought things would be simpler if his dad were his biological dad and he, like Luke and Jilly and Johnny, was brown-eyed and dusky-skinned. That way he would never have gone to St Osyth’s and no one would have expected him to become a lawyer. His dad would simply have taken him down to Waterman’s Hall, near Billingsgate Market, and had him bound to him as an apprenticed lighterman. He would have had to vow an oath of loyalty to his ‘Sovereign, Present Company, Future Employers and Master’ and to promise to ‘Dwell and Serve upon the River Thames’ and to ‘Learn his Art,’ and his dad, who would have been his master, would have had to swear to ‘Teach, Instruct, Provide Meat, Drink, Apparel and Lodging for him for the next five years’.
He knew all the words, just as if he had already been apprenticed, and he knew lots of other things apprentices had to know, too. All things his dad had taught him. He knew the tide times and phases of the moon, the names of points, reaches, bridges, tidal sets, parts of a barge and how to get to all the different wharves, docks and watermen’s stairs. There were lots of other things to learn, too, of course, and he was looking forward to learning them. Ever since his dad had first come into his life, marrying his mum and becoming Daddy-Leon to him, he had wanted nothing more than to be just like him. And being like him meant becoming that most wonderful thing in the world, a prince of the river – a Thames waterman.
The trouble was that his real dad hadn’t been a Thames waterman. Until the war had broken out and he had joined the Air Force, his real dad had been destined to take over the family business, the Harvey Construction Company. And that was what his aunts, and his mum and dad, wanted him to do, also. They wanted him to become a lawyer first, for, as his great-aunt Deborah once said to him, a good grounding in law was an enormous advantage to a businessman. He hadn’t understood then that she meant he should obtain a good grounding in law. That realization only came in the lecture given by his school’s careers master, and it was so sudden, and so overpowering, he thought he was going to die beneath its weight.
Businessmen wore suits, collars and ties and ate formal lunches with other businessmen and worked indoors in stuffy offices. He didn’t want to do those things. He wanted to get up at the crack of dawn and to see, from the Thames, the sun rising over Barrow Deep and Mucking Flats. He wanted to wear a Guernsey and a duffel-coat and knee-high sailing boots. He wanted to eat doorstep-sized fried egg and bacon sandwiches for his breakfast and to have a lunch of boiled beef and carrots, or steak and kidney pudding, or pie and mash, in Sid’s Dining Rooms, Stepney.
He raised his face to a sun far hotter than any English sun. Though the Thames couldn’t possibly be in his blood and his bones, Harveys having no connection at all with the river and, until she married Leon, his mother having none either, he felt as if it were in his blood and his bones. And it wasn’t only this deep, deep feeling and longing. He wasn’t clever enough to become a lawyer and to run an international company. His mum and dad and his aunts didn’t know that, though, and he lived in dread of the day they would find out. Especially he dreaded the thought of his great-aunt Deborah finding out. So far at school, because he was quiet in class and because he always tried hard, he had been able to bluff things out and hadn’t, as yet, received any poor end-of-term reports. Things would change, though, when it came to school-leaving examinations and entry examinations for university.
A familiar feeling of sick helplessness churned in his stomach. He didn’t want to let anyone down – and yet, even if he was capable of not doing so, he didn’t want to take over his father’s family’s construction business. He just wanted to do what he wanted to do, what he enjoyed doing, what he was capable of doing and could do well. When they had docked in Madeira, Jaime had taken him ashore for an hour or two, to see Funchal. ‘Que paisaje tan hermoso!’ he had said, indicating a soaring backdrop of silver-green, silver-tawny, silver-violet splendour, gashed by ravines. ‘A beautiful landscape, eh?’
Matthew wondered if his dad had ever been to Madeira and if he, too, had seen gaily painted sledges being pulled up and down the steeply cobbled streets by oxen, and the odd-looking black fish many people carried, its body curled in a loop over their arms, its tail stuck conveniently through its mouth.
By the time the Orion called in at Tenerife, he and Jaime had become good friends. When he woke suddenly in the middle of the night to find a deck-hand he barely knew trying half-nakedly to get into his narrow bunk with him, it was Jaime who had woken at his cry of alarm and who shouted and yelled at the man in question, threatening to lay
violent hands on him unless he returned to his own bunk, pronto.
He squinted his eyes against the sun’s glare. There would be no more ports of call now; even though he didn’t know which part of South America they were making for, he knew enough about geography to know that. There was an increase in activity at the far end of the deck and he rose to his feet, knowing he was soon going to be asked to pitch in and lend a hand. Not for the first time it occurred to him that the scrape he had got himself into was one that would have been more typical of Luke. Not that Luke had any longings to run away to sea, it was just that if there was any trouble to be found, it was usually Luke who found it. He dug his hands deep in the pockets of his short school trousers, wandering in the direction of his shipmates, wondering why it was that no one in his family seemed to realize it was Luke, not he, who was the clever one. Perhaps it was because Luke didn’t do well at school, but that was only because he found everything so easy and got so bored. One thing was certain: it was Luke who should have gone to St Osyth’s, not himself. Luke would have enjoyed the prospect and the challenge of studying something complicated like law. His fists clenched in his pockets. Without a shadow of a doubt he knew that he would never do so. Not even to please his mum and dad. A tight knot of determination replaced the feeling of sick helplessness. Not even to please his great-aunt Deborah!
‘The cook wants helping peeling potatoes,’ Jaime said to him as he approached. ‘Sorry, amigo.’
Matthew gave a lopsided grin and shrugged. He didn’t mind peeling potatoes. If only his mum and dad knew where he was, he wouldn’t mind anything. He wondered if, when the Orion reached wherever it was she was sailing to, he would be able to go ashore and perhaps, with money borrowed from Jaime, send a cable home. That way he wouldn’t be worrying so very, very much about his mum and dad. That way they would, at least, know that he was all right.
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