Charlie read her mind.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said.
It had been arranged that Henry’s driver would pick Charlie up at Topsham, take him to the Mendip Hotel, more than an hour away, then drive him home afterwards. That way he could have a drink if he wanted, said Henry.
Charlie had muttered dissent, telling Joyce it was against his principles as a communist to ride in a chauffeur-driven car. But he said nothing of this to Henry, meekly accepting the arrangement.
Joyce spent an anxious afternoon awaiting his return. It was a sunny autumn day and there were any number of jobs on the boat she could have been getting on with, but she was too restless to settle to any task. Instead she threw a blanket on to the well-worn deck, lay back and tried to concentrate on the modern espionage thriller she was reading whilst enjoying the sun. But she was on edge. She so wanted this lunch between her two men to be a success. Maybe she was getting things out of proportion, but she couldn’t help feeling her whole life depended on a successful outcome.
It was well gone six before Charlie appeared, weaving unsteadily along the tow path. She waved a greeting. Charlie managed a half wave in response, gave her a weak smile, then lurched to his left and was sick in the water.
‘Good lunch then,’ Joyce remarked, more to herself than to him.
‘Oh God, I feel terrible,’ mumbled Charlie as he staggered towards her.
‘I should have warned you about the flow of booze at Dad’s lunches,’ said Joyce.
Charlie groaned.
‘Well, aren’t you going to tell me what happened? I want to know all about it. Are you friends for life or what?’
Charlie responded with another groan, his body swaying precariously as he stepped on to the gangplank. Convinced he was going to fall, Joyce hurried towards him, grabbed a flailing arm and pulled him on to the boat.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you to bed — I can tell I’m not going to get any sense out of you until you’ve slept it off.’
She’d never seen Charlie so drunk, but Joyce remembered that, far from being unhappy at the state he was in, she’d taken it as a good sign. If things had gone badly with her father he would have returned much earlier and stone-cold sober. And what she wanted more than anything was for the two of them to become friends. Lunching and drinking buddies had to be a good start.
Impatient for Charlie’s account of the lunch, she’d hovered close by as he descended to the lower deck after throwing up spectacularly over the rails. Then she’d climbed into the double bunk alongside him, but he fell instantly into a deep sleep and showed no signs of waking. Resisting the urge to wake him, she told herself she would have to be patient and wait till morning.
But when the morning came and Charlie emerged with a major hangover, he was no more forthcoming.
‘You know what, Joycey baby, I got so pissed I can’t remember a thing,’ he told her, running long fingers through his unruly hair.
No matter how much Joyce pressed him, Charlie persisted in dodging the issue. He remembered what he had eaten — seafood platter and roast beef — but next to nothing of the conversation.
Joyce couldn’t understand it. She had been to any number of parties with Charlie where the pair of them had drunk far too much, and on sobering up afterwards he’d always seemed to have total recall. Sometimes embarrassingly so.
Joyce called her father. Henry Tanner was equally evasive.
‘Oh God, darling, I don’t know what we talked about. This and that. Told me all about that blessed boat he lives on...’
Henry paused. As far as Joyce knew, her father was unaware that she too lived on the Shirley Anne. She wondered if he suspected, and whether he’d grilled Charlie on the subject.
‘Oh, and how much he cares for you,’ Henry continued. ‘But then I knew that, didn’t I?’
‘Come on, Dad, you can do better than that,’ Joyce urged, trying to make her voice light and teasing. ‘I want to know exactly what the two men in my life have been plotting. So come on. Spill!’
‘We haven’t been plotting anything,’ Henry answered quickly. Perhaps too quickly.
‘Trust you to be so bloody nosy,’ he laughed. ‘I can tell you, however, that I think you have a fine young man there.’
Joyce did a double take down the phone.
‘You’ve given every impression you couldn’t stand the sight of him from the first time I brought him home,’ she said.
‘Rubbish,’ responded Henry. ‘Like I said, I just needed to get to know Charlie a bit. And, anyway, I couldn’t be sure in the beginning whether or not he was going to stick around, could I?’
There was, Joyce realized, some truth in that. She told herself she should stop being such a control freak — a trait which ran in the family — and be thankful that a friendship appeared to be blossoming between the two men.
But over the next few days Charlie became progressively more withdrawn. The Charlie she had fallen in love with had been an energetic young man with a lively and active mind, who never stopped talking, and was seldom capable of sitting still for more than five minutes. Following the lunch with Henry, it seemed to Joyce that he’d become uncharacteristically quiet and introspective. And instead of seeking out every opportunity to be with Joyce, as he had always done before, he seemed to seize upon any excuse to be apart from her.
No longer did he hover outside her lectures, ready to whisk her off for a coffee or a chat. No longer did he study alongside her. A couple of times he ate alone in the refectory while she was busy studying, something he had never done before. And when they were together aboard the Shirley Anne he contrived to be on deck while she was below and below deck when she was up top.
They still slept together. They still had sex. Satisfying sex. But — and Joyce had never been able to explain this to herself — it wasn’t the same. Even in their most intimate moments, they were no longer really close.
JC, it seemed to Joyce, was no more.
Naturally she’d confronted Charlie. Told him she was hurt and puzzled. Asked him what was going on.
‘You’re imagining things,’ he responded, kindly enough. But he wouldn’t give her a straight answer or say anything to put her mind at rest.
Meanwhile Henry began to take Charlie out to lunch and dinner on a regular basis. The Mendip Hotel was their usual haunt, but there were also trips to London venues like the Savoy and the Ritz. Once the two men stayed over — at Henry’s club, they said.
Joyce continued to be surprised, because her father and her future husband didn’t seem to have much in common, apart from her. And both were frustratingly unforthcoming when asked about their meetings. She was accustomed to her father keeping his nearest and dearest in the dark; talking things through was not something Henry did. But Charlie was different — or so she’d thought.
There were other changes too. Charlie suddenly announced that he was giving up smoking; not just cigarettes — he had a fifty-a-day habit — but marijuana too. Though she knew she would miss the mellowing and sometimes aphrodisiac effect marijuana had on them both, Joyce was glad. She didn’t mind the odd spliff but had never cared for cigarettes.
Then, about four months after what Joyce came to regard as his fateful first lunch with Henry, Charlie had his hair cut. Joyce returned to the boat one evening, having not seen him all day on campus, to find that her wild and hirsute young man now sported a short back and sides. With a parting too.