“You’re not going to walk out on this!” Angela shouted.
“A thousand pounds,” I said to Bannister again.
Bannister was caught between the two of us. I suspected he would gladly have surrendered to me at that moment, but Angela wanted her pound of Nick Sandman’s flesh and Bannister, I assumed, was afraid of losing her flesh. He prevaricated. “I think we’re all too overwrought to make a decision now.”
“I’m not,” I insisted.
“But I am!” He betrayed a flash of anger. “We’ll talk next week. I need to look at the budget, and at the film we’ve already shot.” He was making excuses, trying to slide out from making a decision. “I’ll phone you from London, Nick.”
“I won’t be here,” I said.
“You’d better be here,” Angela snapped, “if you want to keep your boat.”
So far, except for the first time she’d spoken to me, I’d succeeded in ignoring her. Now I told her to go to hell, then I turned and walked from the room. The guests on the terrace fell silent as I limped past them. I didn’t know whether I’d resigned, been fired from the film, or was about to be baked in a lawyer’s pie. Nor did I much care.
I stumped down the lawn, skirted the boathouse, and saw that Jimmy Nicholls had come upriver and tied his filthy boat alongside Sycorax. He was lifting two sacks into Sycorax’s scuppers. “Chain plates and bolts,” he told me. “Ready for the morning.”
“Bugger the morning. Can you tow Sycorax away today?”
“Bloody hell.” He straightened up from the sacks. “Where to?”
“Any bloody where. Away from bloody television people. Bloody stuck-up, arrogant powder-puffs.” I climbed down to Sycorax’s deck.
Jimmy chuckled. “Fallen out with your fancy friends, boy?” I looked up at the house and saw Angela watching me from the study window. “Up yours, too.” I didn’t say it loud enough to carry.
“The bastards are threatening to get the bailiffs on to Sycorax. Where can I hide her?”
He frowned. “Nowhere on this river, Nick. How about the Hamoaze?”
“Georgie Cullen’s yard?”
“He liked your dad.”
“Every thief likes my dad.” I scooped up a coiled warp and bent it on to a cleat ready for the tow. I wanted Angela and Bannister to see me leave. I wanted them to know that I didn’t give a monkeys for their film or their threats. “Have you got enough diesel to get me there today, Jimmy?”
“You don’t want to go anywhere right now,” Jimmy said sternly.
“I’ve got a letter for you. Boy on a motorbike brought it from London!
Said I was to get it to you, but no one was to notice, like, so that’s why I hid it with the bolts, see?” He pointed to one of the sacks.
“From London, Nick!” Jimmy was just as astonished as I that someone should hire a messenger to ride all the way from London to Devon. “The boy said as how an American maid gave it he. You want to read it before you bugger off?”
I wanted to read it. A moment ago I had been full of certainty as to what I should do, but the sudden and overwhelming memory of a naked girl in my dinghy, of her smile, of her competence, made me carry the heavy sack down into Sycorax’s cabin. The creamy white envelope was marked ‘Urgent’.
I tore it open. Two things fell out.
One was a first-class ticket for British Airways, London to Boston and back again. The ticket was in my name, and the outbound flight left Heathrow the very next morning. The return had been left open.
The second thing was a letter written in a handwriting that I’d just read in Bannister’s study. ‘If you haven’t got a visa then get one from the Embassy and come Tuesday. I’ll meet you at Logan Airport.’
The signature was a child’s drawing of a smiling face, a sketched heart, and the initials JB.
I did not consider the choices. Not for one heartbeat did I sit and think it through. It never occurred to me that I was being asked to take sides, nor did I think it odd that a girl would send me an expensive air ticket. At that moment, after years in which I had known nothing except fighting, pain, and hospital, I was being offered a great gift. The gift seemed to imply all the things that a soldier dreams of when he’s neck-deep in wet mud with nasty bastards trying to bury him there forever.
In short, with visa and passport ready, I would go.
There would be no time to hide Sycorax, but a stratagem would have to protect her while I was away. I also asked Jimmy to keep an eye on her. “If they tow her off, Jimmy, follow them.”
“I’ll do what I can, boy.” He eyed the air ticket. “Going far, are you?”
“Out of the frying-pan, Jimmy, and straight into bed.” I laughed.
It seemed like a madcap thing to do, an irresponsible thing to do, but a wonderfully spontaneous and exciting thing to do, and there had been precious little spontaneous and enjoyable excitement in my life since the bullet caught me. So I locked the cabin hatch, rode Jimmy’s boat downriver to the town, and caught a bus. For Boston.
The stratagem to protect Sycorax involved telephoning my mother in Dallas.
“Do you know what time it is, Nick?” She sounded horrified. “Are you dying?”
“No, you are.” I fed another fifty-pence piece into the coinbox.
“It’s half-past four in the morning! What do you mean, I’m dying?”
“I apologize about that, Mother, but if anyone calls from England and asks after me, then say you’re not well. Say you asked me to visit your deathbed. It’ll only be for a few days.” There was a pause. “It bloody well is half-past four!”
“I’m sorry, Mother.”
“Where are you, for God’s sake?”
“Heathrow.”
“You’re not really coming to see me, are you?” She sounded appalled at the prospect.
“No, Mother.”
“Your sister came a month ago and I’m still exhausted. Why am I dying?”
“Because I’ve told some people that I’m visiting you. I’m actually going somewhere else and I don’t want them to know.” Another pause. “I really don’t understand a word you’re saying, Nick.”
“Yes, you do, Mother. If anyone telephones you and wants to know if I’m there, then the answer is that I am there, but I can’t reach the telephone straight away, and you’re dying. Will you tell your maid that?”
There was another long pause. “This is uncommonly tedious, even for you. Are you drunk?”
“No, Mother. Now will you help me?”
“Of course I will, I just think it’s terrifying to be telephoned at half-past four in the morning. I thought the Russians must have in-vaded. Did you transfer the charges?”
“No, Mother.”
“Thank God for that.” She yawned down the telephone. “Are you well?”
“Yes. I’m walking again.”
“How’s your father?”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“You ought to. You were his favourite. How are Piers and Amanda?”
“They’re very well.”
“So crass of you to have lost Melissa. Do you mind if I go back to sleep now?”
“Thank you, Mother.”
“You’re very welcome.”
I pressed the receiver rest, put in more coins, and dialled Devon.
No one answered in Bannister’s house, or rather the relentlessly cheerful answering machine responded. “This is Sandman,” I said,
“and I’m phoning to say that my mother’s been taken ill in Dallas and her doctors think I should be with her. I’ll discuss our other problems when I get back.”
I was taking precautions. I feared that Angela might interpret my disappearance as a desertion of her wretched film, and that she would then carry out her legal threats. I had no idea how long it took to get a court order, or whether the court could really order Sycorax’s sequestration, but I reckoned the fiction of a dying mother would confuse the lawyers for long enough. Then, just as soon as I returned to England, I planned to take the boat away. I’d had enough of Bannister, more than enough of Medusa, and I would take Sycorax to another river and there rig and equip her. But first, America.