“There you are, then. But I should have gone with you, Johnny, I really should.”
“No regrets, surely?”
“I’ve made some money, I suppose.” He sounded rueful. He looked at his watch. “We’ve got an early start in the morning, you and I, so drink up.”
A week later Sunflower was taken to Kingswear where she was craned into the water. Next day Charlie and I drove to the marina where one of his mobile cranes was parked on the quay. “Lower it now!” Charlie took competent command as soon as he stepped out of the Jaguar’s driving seat. He shouted up at his crane driver, “You take care, Tom! Gentle with her now!”
We were stepping Sunflower’s mast; a brand new foil-shaped beauty of extruded aluminium. Charlie had paid for it, of course, just as he had paid to have all the sails cleaned, and a new trysail made. He insisted on glueing a silver sixpence under the mast’s foot for luck, but after that ritual he was content to let the riggers get on with their job while he and I moved to the greater comfort of Barratry.
Barratry was Charlie’s boat. A few days earlier, in anticipation of these days on the River Dart, he had moved her to the Kingswear marina. She was a fifty-four-foot motor cruiser with a flying bridge, twin monster diesels, and the hot tub which had so impressed Rita. Her name was a pun on Charlie’s surname, but the word also meant any fraudulent maritime act. To Charlie it carried overtones of piracy, which he liked. “Mind you, I’d have preferred to call her Wet Dream,” Charlie laughed, “but none of the girls liked it.”
At midday one of those girls arrived on Barratry’s pontoon. Charlie introduced her as a business colleague, but offered me a broad wink at the same time. Her name was Joanna and she was ordered to make lunch on board. “A proper dinner, mind you!” Charlie warned her. “No bloody salads, girl. Johnny here’s going to sail to the West Indies in a few days so he needs feeding up.”
Joanna was a redhead, lithe as a whippet in skin-tight jeans and an expensive shirt. She seemed not to resent Charlie’s unbridled caveman chauvinism, but Charlie had always treated his women thus. It worked for him.
We ate lunch on Barratry while the three riggers tensioned Sunflower’s stays and shrouds. Joanna had carved two cold roasted chickens. One was solely for Charlie who, though he had the appetite of a horse, never seemed to put on an ounce of fat. “Are you really going to the West Indies?” Joanna had picked at a chicken wing, and now painted her fingernails while we ate.
“Probably.” In truth I was too late for a good trade-wind passage, but I might yet make the crossing before the hurricane season. “I’ll go south first, then make up my mind.”
“When will you leave?”
“As soon as he’s provisioned,” Charlie answered for me. “And no difficulties there, eh, Johnny?” Charlie had opened accounts for me at a half-dozen Dartmouth stores. Whatever I or Sunflower needed, we were to have: food, equipment, clothing, anything.
“Where will you go in the West Indies?” Joanna persisted.
“Probably one of the French islands. The food’s better.”
“And the girls.” Charlie was in high spirits. The sun was out, he was well fed, and Joanna had changed into a wispy bikini. “I’ve got half a mind to fly over there and join you,” he said. “We could have some good sailing, eh?”
“Do you still remember how to sail?” I teased him. “My God, Charlie, to think you’ve bought a motor boat!”
“It’s less trouble than rag-hanging,” he shrugged. “Mind you, I miss the sailing sometimes, but there’s a lot to be said for a good motor yacht.”
“Tell me one thing.”
“The beds are wider,” he grinned. Despite his professed nostalgia for sail, he was clearly proud of Barratry. “She’s a good sea boat,” he claimed with a fervour that made me suspect it wasn’t true. He gave me the guided tour, proudly showing me her radar system, the twin state rooms with their king-size beds and television sets, the immaculate engine room, and finally the famous hot tub. “I hardly ever take the damn thing’s cover off,” he said apologetically, “because it’s a bugger to fill up, and there’s hardly room for two in it, but the bloody salesman sold me on it.”
After lunch we fired up the motors and took Barratry out into the Channel. It was a warm bright day and Charlie opened up the throttles so that the twin propellers whipped a path of cream across a sun-glittering sea. The boat banged across the small waves, jarring from crest to crest, but, despite the discomfort, it was still an impressive display of power. “What’s her top speed?” I shouted.
“I’ve had thirty-eight knots out of her.” He throttled back, letting the hull settle into the water. We were already out of sight of land, but the Decca repeater on the flying bridge offered us a course straight back to Dartmouth. Charlie let the big boat idle while he opened two bottles of beer. Joanna came out of the cabin beneath us and went to the foredeck where she casually discarded her bikini top before stretching out on deck.
“Not a bad looker, eh?” Charlie wanted my approval.
“Every boat should have one,” I agreed.
“She works for a construction firm I do a fair bit of work for. She tells me how much to tender, and if her boss wonders why she’s got the money to buy a BMW then he’s got too much sense to ask. I might bend the rules a bit, Johnny, but I provide a damned good service. Hey! Joanna! We can’t see you properly! Come closer!”
“Get lost, Charlie.”
He laughed. He looked immensely happy. He sat on the helmsman’s chair, stripped to the waist, and I could see that he was as muscled as ever. He had always been tough, with immense stamina, and monetary success had not softened him. His skin was flecked with welding burns and scars, making him look as strong and battered as one of his beloved hand-tools, but, in the days I’d worked with him on Sunflower, I’d seen a new wariness in his eyes. Some of Charlie’s toughness had become mental and I guessed he was now a ruthless man to do business with, but I was an old friend, so the ruthlessness was never turned on me. “I might just do that, you know,” he said suddenly.
“You might do what?”
“Fly over to the West Indies. I’ll need a break soon, and I could take a week or two with you. We’ll drink some whisky, find some women, sail some blue water.”
“Sounds good, Charlie.”
“Like old times.” He had taken his eyes off Joanna and was staring moodily at the southern horizon. “My God, but things have changed. Do you remember our first boat?” It had been a fifteen-foot clinker-built wooden dinghy with a gaffed main and a pocket-sized jib. Charlie laughed suddenly. “You remember those two scrubbers we picked up in Cherbourg? Bloody hell, but I thought we’d have to push them overboard to get rid of them.”
I smiled. “I remember their boyfriends chasing us.”
“We saw them off, though, didn’t we?” Or rather Charlie had seen them off. I’d helped, but Charlie’s strength was awesome. We’d been eighteen then, cocksure and cockfree, lords of the Channel. We’d crossed in the dinghy to France on a night as cold as charity and we’d been ready for mayhem when we arrived in Cherbourg. “It was a good weekend,” I said.
“We had lots of them, my friend. Lots of them.” He lit a cigarette. “And we had some bad ones, too. Do you remember the food poisoning?”
Charlie had nearly died after eating some fish we’d caught off the reefs in French Polynesia. I’d nursed him back to health, but it had been a close thing. He grimaced. “I haven’t eaten fish since.”
“You remember the Tasman Sea?” I asked. That had been another bad time, a bitter ship-killing storm which had threatened to overwhelm us, but Charlie’s extraordinary stamina had seen us through. I had been at breaking point, past it in truth, but Charlie had sung his way through.