“Try me.”
Her dark eyes challenged me. “Why is your boat called Sunflower?”
“I bought her from a Frenchman. He called her Tournesol. It’s bad luck to change a boat’s name, so I simply translated it. In other words, Miss Pallavicini, the name is pure coincidence.”
She stared down at me, evidently unsure whether to believe my explanation; then, without another word, turned away towards the town while I rowed back to Sunflower.
I sat in my wrecked cabin and tried to string a few explanations together. Sir Leon Buzzacott still wanted the painting; Sir Leon was convinced I had stolen it and could, therefore, betray its present whereabouts. My family had convinced him of that error by claiming to have proof of my guilt.
Fine, except I wasn’t guilty. No accomplice of mine could have confessed, because there had been no accomplices. I suspected that my mother, convinced of my guilt, had invented the tale.
Which didn’t explain the two men, or why the well-spoken thin man had wrecked Sunflower’s cabin. From what he had told Jennifer Pallavicini he clearly believed that I had the painting and was about to sell it. Had he believed I had the thing concealed in Sunflower? Did he think I’d hide twenty million quid’s worth of paint and canvas in a sea-locker? And who had told him I might have it? And what had he meant by saying that the painting wasn’t mine to sell? Jennifer Pallavicini had said the painting was mine, but Mother’s will evidently tried to deny me the ownership. The disagreement had all the makings of a fine lawyer’s stew, which meant that I should get the hell out of it. I’ve learned a few good lessons in life: always shorten sail when the first impulse occurs, never sail upwind unless desperate, and never, never, never give a lawyer a fingerhold on your affairs.
And this wasn’t my affair. I didn’t have the painting, didn’t want the painting, and didn’t care about my mother’s will. The thin man, Jennifer Pallavicini, and anyone else who believed I had the Van Gogh, was mistaken. So the best thing I could do was forget I’d ever been offered twenty million pounds and sail away to the blue waters.
But first there was work to do. I did a crude clean-up in the cabin, and began an inventory of what had been broken and what had not. Most of my tools and clothes, which had been stored with the spare sails in the forecabin, had been scattered about, though, blessedly, my visitor had not used his knives to search my sailbags. Undoubtedly he would have torn the sails to shreds, given time, but my unexpected return had frustrated him. The thin man had found no evidence of the Van Gogh, because there wasn’t any to find, nor, thank God, had he found my subsistence money. The cash, in a variety of different countries’ banknotes, was stored in a grease tin which, in turn, lay with other such battered and filthy tins in the tool tray next to the engine. No one would give the tin a second glance. But then, the thin man hadn’t been after money, just a twenty million pound painting, and he hadn’t found it.
But nor had he finished his search, and if he really did believe the Van Gogh was on board, then he might very well return to Sunflower. That thought gave me pause.
I decided that hunger was a great feeder of fear, so I found a tin of stew, a tin of new potatoes, and a tin of corned beef. I mashed the whole lot together, then heated the mixture over the stove. I sat in the cockpit and wolfed the meal down. It tasted wonderful. My gum was still tender, but the pain of the tooth was blessedly absent.
Yet the meal hardly diminished the scale of my problems. First, I had only a limited amount of money, and the repairs to Sunflower would take a great deal of that reserve. I’d be lucky to be left with fifty pounds, and that was not nearly sufficient to victual her for the long journey south. So, I needed a place where I could do most of the repairs myself and I needed a job to make some quick cash. I also wanted to hide from the two men; not because I feared them, but because I wanted no part of their hunt for the missing picture. Four years ago I had sailed away from all those complications, and I would be damned if I would let myself be sucked back into that maelstrom of greed and suspicion.
No one tried to board Sunflower that night. Which did not mean that either I or she was safe. I needed a hiding place, a job, and somewhere to make my repairs and, with the expedient neatness that sometimes characterises our unexpected needs, I knew just where I might find all three. I slept uneasily, woke early, and sailed in the dawn.
The weather had cleared overnight. The estuary, even at dawn, was filled with sails. Three Salcombe yawls, pretty little wooden boats, hissed past me as I hanked on the jib and staysail. A big French sloop, loaded to the gunwales with what seemed to be a dozen fecund families, made a noisily joyful exit. The sun was making the sails open on the water like unfolding white petals. My grey battered sails joined them.
The wind was back in the southwest. I motored Sunflower as far as the bar which, this morning, was a pussy cat. There was scarcely a ripple where, just a few days before, I’d plunged suicidally through the cascading white water. Once in the outer channel I turned off the motor and let Sunflower fall on to a starboard tack. The sea glittered under the rising sun. After the sordid events of the previous day it felt wonderful to be at sea again. A big white catamaran with a cabin the size of a townhouse passed me. A bearded man at her wheel shouted a genial “Good morning!” He had a startlingly pretty long-haired girl with him. She waved at me, and her friendly greeting suddenly curdled my high spirits like water poured into oil.
I like my life. I like the moment when, after departure, I can turn back and see nothing but the empty sea. Perhaps a ridge of cloud marks where the retreating land lies, but soon, I know, there will be nothing. From that moment on I am beholden to no one, responsible only to myself, and dependent only on my own boat and my own strength. There are no lawyers at sea; no accountants, no estate office, no family, no expectations, no tenants, no creditors, no tax assessors, no bank managers, no stockbrokers, no land agents. Those were the dark-suited creatures I had fled. After my brother’s death I had been called home to become head of the family and Earl and Lord of Stowey, but instead I had found myself trapped between my mother’s grinding ambitions and the dull, dull strictures of the men in suits. His lordship must sign this document, and his lordship should consider the tax advantages of deferring this dividend, and his lordship must meet urgently with the revenue or the bank manager, and on it went until his lordship told them that he didn’t give a monkey’s. To this day, when some petty bureaucrat gives me grief, I tell him to go to hell. The first Earl of Stowey was a Norman who took the land with the edge of his sword, and I would be damned if I would be hagridden to death by a pin-striped army of bores. I went back to sea to escape them.
And, till this return, I had avoided them. But there had been a price for that evasion, and the price was loneliness. I watched the pretty girl in the big catamaran and I felt a stab of self-pity. I hated that sensation. My God, but I’d chosen my path, and I had better stick to it, or else the world would mock my failure. That was pride, but I was a proud man. I might not like being called ‘my lord’, but the blood in my veins had been old when England was young. So damn the loneliness. It could always be assuaged. There would always be some empty-eyed girl, bag slung on her shoulder, waiting at a tropical quayside. It only took a nod, the girl would climb on board, and that was that till boredom or irritation dissolved the liaison. There were no ties in such relationships; no mortgages, no screaming children, no slow grinding tedium; just company.