“No,” I said, “she’s frightened of the future.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, John,” Elizabeth snapped. “She’s half-witted, so how does she even know what the future is?”
“She’s frightened that Nanny will die and leave her alone.”
“There’s certainly no point in her looking to you for any security if that happens, is there? What have you ever done for her?”
“Loved her?”
“Don’t be impertinent. We’ve all loved Georgie. But some of us have to be practical as well.” She looked at her watch, then grimaced at my dirty jeans and unironed shirt. “Are you flying back to the mainland now?”
“No.”
“Then I needn’t offer you a lift to the airport.” She sounded relieved. “Come along, Peter.”
I frowned. “You mean you didn’t come here to visit Georgina?”
“I came here, brother, to make sure that her funds are still adequate. As I said, some of us try to be practical. There really isn’t any point in wasting our time by seeing her; she doesn’t know me from Catherine the Great, but that doesn’t prevent me from worrying about her welfare. Now come along, Peter, we have a taxi waiting.”
Her high heels cracked and snapped over the parquet floor. I moved into her path, making her stop and provoking a look of utter disdain.
An alarm bell had rung faintly in my head. I did not trust Elizabeth when she spoke of Georgina’s funds. Elizabeth is constantly short of money, made so by her husband’s ineptitude as a farmer and his failures as an investor. “Are Georgina’s funds adequate?” I asked her now.
“Entirely. You don’t have to worry. Not that you ever did. Now stand aside, please.”
“Tell me something,” I said on a pure impulse. “Did you send two men to kill me?”
Anger blazed in Elizabeth’s eyes. “Peter. If John doesn’t move out of my way, then kindly remove him for me.”
Her husband loomed closer. He’s a big and burly man, but everything he touches turns to disaster. “Piss off, Tredgarth,” I said nastily, and he fell back, as I’d known he would. “Did you send them?” I asked Elizabeth again.
She paused, summoning her artillery. “You are a fool, John,” she said eventually. “You behaved disgracefully at Mother’s funeral, and now you’re accusing me of planning your murder. Try not to be so utterly pathetic and ridiculous. I’m quite seriously worried about you. Clearly there’s a strain of lunacy in our family. Georgina has it, and now it seems quite likely you do too. No, I did not send any men to murder you. I sometimes wish I had. Is there any other crime of which you wish to accuse me? No? Good. So kindly get the hell out of my way.”
I got the hell out of her way. And I still didn’t understand what had happened in England, or why, or who had set it all in motion. I only knew that I had a boat waiting at St Helier and an ocean to cross. So, with the questions still unanswered, I found my rented bike and pedalled off to find the world.
At noon the next day a good west wind whipped me through the Passage du Fromveur between Ushant and the French mainland. I should have stood much further out to sea, passing Ushant well beyond the horizon and thus avoiding the heavy merchant traffic that thrashes round Finisterre, but I had a fancy to run the headland’s tides and, as my life was now once more governed by fancy, I stood inshore and let Sunflower have her head.
I had an ebbing spring tide in the passage so that we shot through at close to fifteen knots. The wind was brisk enough to shatter the waves on the rocks about the Kereon light. Seabirds screamed above the islands that were bright with gorse in the sunlight. Another British boat was shooting the passage with me, but, once he had cleared the Pierres Vertes cardinal buoy, he turned due south towards the Raz de Sein while I held west towards the open ocean. At dusk, looking back, I could see the brilliant sweep of Le Cre’ach Lighthouse marking my last sight of land. Lisbon next, I thought, and then I wondered why, and supposed it was because the first time I’d sailed away from Devon I’d made the Tagus my first port of call. I had no need to go there now. Instead, I decided, I would go straight for the Azores. I would sail into Horta and there, at those hospitable quays, meet the first sea-gypsies again. Such gypsies rarely ventured further north than the Azores, and few even went that far towards the cold latitudes, but I knew there would be a handful of weather-beaten boats and I’d hear the first tenuous strands of gossip from the world I’d temporarily deserted. Perhaps I’d find a crew who wanted to cross the Atlantic. Or perhaps I’d change my mind and go south, round Africa, to head up into the paradises of the Indian Ocean. Nothing mattered any more so, at a whim, I decided to skip Lisbon.
Sunflower and I fell into our old routine. I slept mostly by day when other boats might be expected to keep a better watch than at night. I had a new radar reflector at the mast-tip, but I doubted whether any night-time crew on a merchant vessel would be watching their radar; more likely they’d be watching dirty videos and they wouldn’t even feel the bump as they drove Sunflower under. More yachtsmen die crushed under the bows of careless steamers than from their own mistakes, so at night, when the heavens were dazzling with stars, I stayed awake close to the self-steering gear. I’d doze at times. Sunflower was behaving beautifully, her newly cleaned hull making her sweet in the water. We were on a long windward beat, but the weather was good; lulling me to sleep and to reflection.
England already seemed like a bad and unreal dream. Had two men really tried to kill me? I knew they had, but now, where the memory had once made me wake sweating in the night, it seemed merely ridiculous. It had surely all been a mistake. The police had taken no interest in my return, and why should they? The only resentment had been from my family, and from Sir Leon’s staff who felt cheated of their glorious picture. Had they sent the two men? The possibility intrigued me, but a few moments of thought convinced me that the notion of Jennifer Pallavicini ordering my death was a nonsense. She had no motive that I could see. Elizabeth was a more likely candidate, but none of it seemed to matter any more. The whole episode was scoured clean by a northwest wind and the ocean’s long swell.
Charlie was right, I thought. The picture was long gone. It was in some Texan vault, or Japanese mansion, or Swiss strongroom. Whoever had bought it would take care to keep it safe, silent and hidden for generations. Perhaps, hundreds of years in the future, the picture would surface again and the art historians would recall that it had once been stolen from an obscure British family, but for now, for Elizabeth and me, the Van Gogh might just as well be on the dark side of the moon.
Not that I cared any more; I was back at sea, chopping my bows into the long ocean waves. I slept in the mornings. At noon, after the ritual sight, I made myself a meal. In the afternoons I found work to do. The new joinery in the cabin needed varnishing, and, day by day, coat by coat, the gleam deepened. I catnapped in the early evening, ate again, then read until the sun dropped. I had an old battered Shakespeare, Proust, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and Joshua Slocum’s account of his solo voyage round the world. There was meat enough in those four volumes to last a lifetime. All had been soaked when Garrard had dropped Sunflower off the grid, but the pages had dried out and, though crinkled, were still readable. When the light made the pages indistinguishable I would prepare the sextant for the first star sight of the evening, then just sit and let the time drift past.