It was a disaster, a fall from a far greater height, in Johnny’s mind, staring back, heart racing, knees locked straight against the new strain on the sail, imagined injury and death all condensed in the few dilated seconds it took to happen – in his life-vest Bastien barely went under, he shouted once, beat the water with his arms as he twisted round, left behind in their long wake, and the cap now twirled and hurried away, far off beyond it. Clifford yelled, Johnny’s father leapt up and in just a few seconds tore the main sail down in armfuls, as if tackling and smothering it; and somehow then they brought the boat about. Bastien, in the water, doggy-paddled towards them, waited, sploshing about over the light swell, and with a strange look as if he wasn’t in communication with them. Johnny thought he was reconstructing his dignity, the idiot emerging as the hero of the story. Then his father threw out a pink lifesaving ring on a rope, it splished into the water close to him, and he bobbed his way in a few strokes towards it and clutched it and was pulled steadily in as the Ganymede twisted and threatened to swing round again. Johnny joined his father to tug him up, leaning down and reaching out a hand, which Bastien grasped with the fear he was hiding behind a distant attempt at a smile. Very heavy, a big fifteen-year-old boy was, in saturated clothes – it was as if by a magical expansion of his own strength that he saw Bastien rise almost vertically from the water in his father’s two-handed grip on his other arm.
‘Well done, laddie,’ said Clifford harshly. Johnny stared at Bastien, wanted to hug him and kiss him with relief as he laughed at him, streaming beside him, the cause of concern, and the public menace, the soaking wet person among the still dry. Bastien laughed too, but he was trembling as he undid his life jacket, and took off his shirt. It was a crisis, dealt with by David Sparsholt in swift wordless actions, over almost at once – in a minute the fall was repeating in Johnny’s mind as allowable excitement, even comedy, the interest of talking about what had happened flooded in to replace the fright itself. Bastien, dripping, wiping himself with his hands, pushing his hair out of his eyes, seemed to know and not to know. He didn’t thank anyone for saving him, and it was Johnny who said, ‘Well done, Dad!’
After a while Clifford started up the motor again – it took a couple of goes. ‘Tell him to take his fucking trousers off,’ he said, ‘we’re all men here’ – with an odd cut-off laugh, Johnny tense at the sound of that word in his father’s presence. He looked nervously at him but he seemed, blank-faced, to allow it. Bastien turned away as he unbuckled his belt, and prised the clinging jeans over his buttocks and down his thighs. His wet underpants hinted at transparency, a flesh-tone through white cotton grey with water, but were decent still. To Johnny it had the hot-making magic of those sudden but longed-for moments when sex ran visibly close to the sunlit surface. Bastien snapped down the hem at the back and gave him a quick smirk from the summer before – which seemed now to throw the scene on the boat in a colder light, Johnny no longer his secret friend but one of the three watching Englishmen. ‘And don’t forget your . . . bloody life-vest,’ said Clifford under his breath, turning the throttle and taking the Ganymede round in a long arc.
It wasn’t clear what they were doing now – sailing, at least, seemed safely to be over. They were perched out here in the middle of the sea with a worrying new lack of purpose. ‘Dad, shouldn’t we go in?’ said Johnny.
‘We’re still OK, aren’t we, David?’ said Clifford – Johnny looked from one to the other, the uncertainty about who was really in charge more serious now. Johnny’s father shook his head and shrugged. ‘Then we’ll catch something, shall we, something to show the girls when we get back?’ He stared briefly at Johnny, ‘You like to fish, don’t you?’ – something about his unease with the boys conveyed in the way he never used their names. ‘Well . . .’ said Johnny. He knew from last summer there was pride in sitting down to a fish you had caught, and with it something that soured and spoiled the taste, the effort to shut out images in the mind, hooks in the throat and the brain. He sat down now, to excuse himself from helping, as Clifford cut their speed and they puttered on with the engine down low, the screws frothing as they came out of the water on the drop of a swell. It turned out there was a gadget in one of the lockers, which could be taken out and clamped at the back of the boat, and half a dozen lines run out from it with what looked like silver spangles hiding the hooks. Clifford set it all up with oddly intent seriousness and thoroughness. Johnny watched the lines paying out from their spools, hoping he would fail.
When the lines were all set, Clifford said, ‘Gentlemen, refreshments.’ He stooped down into the cabin and took the lid off a plastic box of sandwiches wrapped in grey greaseproof; there was also a Thermos. ‘Your missis prepared this,’ he said, ‘though you might like a drop of something stronger, David.’ He had a flat metal flask, which he unstoppered and took a shot from, and clenched his lips.
‘No, not with the boys to look after, Cliff.’ The tea, with milk and sugar in already, was passed round in the cap of the Thermos, Johnny avoided the side Clifford had drunk from, refilled it and passed it forward to Bastien, who sipped and screwed up his face – he never drank tea. Then the sandwiches were offered, paste – again disgusting to Bastien, so that Johnny, crouching in front of him, amazed by his near-nakedness, in his underpants and life-vest, ate his share too, making faces at him as if they were delicious. Bastien grunted and looked away.
It was hot after all in the relative calm, and once the sandwiches were finished Johnny’s father, steadying himself against the small pitch and slide of the boat as they chugged on, unfastened his own life-vest and pulled his top over his head.
‘Going to soak up a few rays, David?’ said Clifford. ‘Good idea.’ He looked up at him with confident blankness – as he said, they were all men here; though Clifford himself, it seemed, was keeping his shirt on.
Johnny was used to the sight of his father’s heavy upper arms, the rounded-out chest just shadowed with dark hair – he watched him fold up the windcheater, proud of him, and minutely embarrassed too by the display, or by his father’s own pride in making it. ‘Don’t get sunburn, Dad,’ he said.
His father tutted, turned their attention away from himself to a luxurious white cruiser that was coming in ahead of them towards Falmouth, two uniformed crewmen active on deck.
‘I’d say you keep pretty fit, then, David?’ Clifford said.
His father swung round, as if not expecting the compliment. ‘Oh, I like to keep in shape, Cliff,’ with a modest but competent laugh.
Clifford made an odd gesture, squaring of the shoulders in forlorn competition. ‘Mind you, we were all pretty fit, weren’t we, in the War.’
‘Yes, well . . . I’ve always kept fit,’ Johnny’s father said, raising his arms casually, halfway, and letting them drop, his fingers clenching and flicking. ‘Twenty minutes every day before breakfast. You’re ready for anything then.’
Clifford smiled, nodded slowly, seemed to take this in, as a possible new regime, sizing the other man up as an example of what could be done. Johnny’s father smiled back, raised his chin: ‘I think you’ve had some joy there,’ he said. It took Clifford a moment to see what he meant, but Johnny hadn’t forgotten about it, the activity on the lines. Clifford got up and leant out and started reeling them in – ambiguous at first among racing ripples and refractions on four of the hooks, but then clearer and grimmer, the sleek fighting black-arrowed shapes of mackerel, and on the end hook something else that Johnny’d never seen, a paler more golden fish with dark fins, curving and jerking frighteningly in the air as it was pulled from the sea, though it was the frightened one, of course. ‘Well, don’t just stand there gaping,’ Clifford said, as he brought them in over the edge of the boat, and it was safe (though not safe for them) to grip them as they fought, and then prise them off the hooks. The first mackerel landed on the boards at Johnny’s feet, and he jumped back, as the fish jumped, bucked and slithered, head and tail beating the floor in mortal desperation. His father, just beside him, with a hand on his shoulder, smiled strangely, at the flailing death, and also, Johnny felt, at Clifford’s furious excitement.