He smiled at the memory, but didn’t comment. Instead he shook his head wistfully. “I do envy you, Johnny.”
“I can’t think why.”
“Of course you can.” He lightly punched my upper arm. “Free as a bird, aren’t you? No kids, no wife, no accountant. Just wall-to-wall Joannas wherever you go.”
“Not always, Charlie.”
“But enough, eh?” he asked seriously.
“Enough,” I reassured him.
“You’re a lucky bastard.”
“Meaning you’re not?” I gestured at the near-naked Joanna on the foredeck.
“Responsibilities,” he said darkly. He tossed his empty beer bottle overboard and lit a cigarette. “I don’t know, Johnny. I like making money, but the more you’ve got, the more the bastards try to take it away from you, so the more you have to work to hang on to it. I work bloody hard now, and it’s beginning to interfere with my pleasures. But when you and I sailed together it seemed to be nothing but beer and bare bodies.”
“That’s because I was doing all the work.”
He laughed. A mile off Barratry’s port beam a big ketch was close-hauled on a course for France. She looked like a proper boat, one that could take the blue water and Charlie watched her wistfully. “If I could make two million tomorrow, Johnny, I’d jack it all in. I’d follow you.”
I smiled. “It doesn’t take two million, Charlie.”
“But it does, Johnny. It does. I have to settle with the banks, you see. And I can’t just abandon Yvonne and the kids. I’ll have to leave them with some money. But if I had two million now I’d pay the debts, sell the company and never work again. In five years’ time I might just be ready to do it, but now? Now I’d need two big ones to be really safe.” He opened another bottle of beer. “Those two blokes, Johnny. They’ve scarpered.”
The change of subject was so abrupt that for a few seconds I couldn’t think what he was talking about. In the last few days I had become so absorbed in Sunflower’s repairs that I had almost forgotten Garrard and Peel. “How do you know?” I asked.
“Because I’ve been pulling in favours, Johnny. Asking questions. But no one knows where they are. Mind you, on the principle that most shit ends up in a cesspit, it’s likely that they’ve gone to London, but I’ve put the word around that if they show their scabby faces in Devon again, I’ll bury them.” He punched me lightly on the arm. “Forget ’em, Johnny. Just worry about getting back to sea.”
Which was all I was worrying about now. The memory of that bad night in Cullen’s yard was fading. At first I’d wanted to find Garrard, and repay him, but I’d been humiliated when I went to ask Jennifer Pallavicini for help, so now they could all get on without me.
“Charlie?” Joanna sat up On the foredeck. “Put some lotion on my back, will you?”
He winked at me, offered me the wheel, then went forward. He stayed with Joanna, evidently lotioning more than her back, while I climbed to the lower wheelhouse where I hunched down so that I couldn’t see what was happening. I was suddenly jealous.
I supposed that my mistake had been to come home. Till that moment when I had plunged through the broken water of Salcombe’s bar I had been a happy man. Now, suddenly, inexplicably, I was frustrated. One part of me did not want to go back to sea. It was not that I would ever abandon sailing, so long as I lived I would need blue seas at my boat’s cutwater, but I wanted something else now. I wanted a place to come home to. I wanted someone.
But there was no place, and no one. I was unwanted, except by my sister Georgina, and she was mad, so I would go back to nowhere because, for me, there was nothing else.
I sailed a week later. I’d provisioned in Dartmouth but, before leaving England, I sailed round the corner into Salcombe to say goodbye to Charlie. I moored alongside Barratry off Frogmore Creek and Charlie brought Yvonne and the children out to the boats. He also brought two bottles of champagne, one of which we broke over Sunflower’s bow fairlead, and the other we drank. Charlie insisted his children both took a glass, even the two-year-old. Yvonne seemed determined to disguise her dislike of me and to enjoy herself, or perhaps she was just glad that I was sailing out of her life again. She’d brought a picnic of cake and sandwiches and made tea in Barratry’s galley. Charlie filled the hot tub on the bows and let the children splash around as we talked about old times. We laughed at the memories of Charlie’s poaching expeditions, and Yvonne shyly recalled how he’d once stolen my father’s Bentley and parked it outside the house of a notorious local whore. It was a happy afternoon, and I was glad, for I didn’t like to think of Charlie and Yvonne embittered.
They all went ashore at tea-time. I held Charlie back before he joined Yvonne and the children in his dinghy. “I want to say thank you, Charlie.”
“For nothing.” He was embarrassed. He glanced round to make sure Yvonne was well out of earshot. “I’ll see you in the Caribbean, right?”
“Right.”
“Maybe I’ll bring Joanna. Unless you tell me there’s a surplus of crumpet over there?”
I smiled. “There always is, Charlie.”
He punched me on the arm. “See you, Johnny.”
“Be good, Charlie.”
He paused, then roughly embraced me. “You’re a lucky bugger,” he said, then he climbed over the guardrails and dropped into his dinghy’s stern. His outboard coughed into life as I untied the painter. Charlie waved, then steered away. The tide was on the turn, about to ebb, and I was alone again.
I was provisioned, I had filled in the Customs’ form, I was ready. I had one port to visit, then I would be free. There didn’t seem any purpose to be served by waiting so I pulled my new rigid tender aboard and stowed it aft of the liferaft on the coachroof. I opened the motor’s seacock, gave the stern-gland a turn of grease, then started the engine. The wind was coming dead from the harbour entrance, so I’d need to motor out to sea. Once at sea there would be no hurry, ever again, so I’d let the sails do the work. I cast off the lines which held me to Barratry, pulled in the fenders, then turned Sunflower’s bows to the wind and let the motor idle as I hoisted the big main. I let her drift on the slack water as I hoisted the foresails. The red ensign, battered from a hundred foreign gales, lifted at the stern. I turned to stare ashore, but Charlie’s dinghy was already lost among a host of other little craft. There was no one to bid me farewell.
I put the throttle forward.
I’d been home just over a month. My mother had died, my sister had spurned me, two men had tried to kill me, and now I was leaving. I should have felt some regret, but I didn’t. Neither regret, nor sadness, just the excitement of another voyage beginning, and when I felt that small familiar excitement I knew that the self-pitying disease that had made me want to stay ashore was gone. I was cured. My spirits rose as the boat gathered speed. The engine thudded happily. The sails, sheeted in tight, flapped desultorily and the compass shivered on its lubber line.
I turned due south at the fairway and let the wind belly the sails. I throttled back, allowing the wind to share the engine’s load. There was a shudder in the sea as we crossed the bar, then the bows dipped to the first real wave and a shred of white foam spattered back on to Sunflower’s gunwales. The tide was beginning to help me so I leaned down and cut the motor, silencing my world to everything except the noises of water and sails and ropes. Sunflower heeled to the wind, and the tiller stiffened in my hand.