“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Then open the forehatch to air the boat. Then sit here and steer 289 while I sleep.”
“On my own?” She sounded alarmed.
“You can have Cat for company.”
“Vicky.”
“You can have Vicky for company,” I said.
She’s been Vicky ever since.
That night the sky clouded again and I was woken in the short darkness to hear the water seething past the hull and I knew we were getting the spinning backlash of yet another gale.
Angela was sick again, but not so badly. She was becoming accustomed to the boat, even to its chemical loo. I’d assured her that constipation could not last clean across the Atlantic, and had been rewarded with a sour look.
But the next couple of days brought colour to her cheeks. She began to eat properly. I did all the cooking, for there is something about cooking on a boat that prompts seasickness.
We ran fast in those days. We saw no other sails, only a trawler steaming west and another warship heading north. The contrails of aircraft laced the sky; jumbo jets carrying their huddled masses between the world’s great cities. The passengers, if they looked down at all, would have seen the wrinkles of a featureless sea, while we, leaning to the wind, watched a whale blow its vents. Angela stared like a child. “I never thought I’d see that,” she said in wonder.
But most of the time she talked of her husband and I detected how desperately she needed to justify her presence on Sycorax. “He’s more likely to believe the warning if he hears my voice on the radio,” she would say. “He’ll know it’s serious if I go to these lengths to reach him, won’t he?”
“Sure,” I would say. I was treating her like porcelain. My own belief was that Bannister would be mad as hell when he discovered his new wife had sailed the Atlantic with another man, but Angela did not need that kind of truth.
“I can’t believe he’s really in danger,” she said that evening.
“Danger’s like that,” I said. “It didn’t seem real in the Falklands, either. War didn’t seem real. We’d trained for it, but I don’t think any of us really thought we’d end up fighting. I remember thinking how bloody daft it was. I shouldn’t have been thinking at all. I was supposed to be counting the rounds I’d fired, but I clean forgot to do it. That’s what we were trained to do. Count the bloody rounds so you knew when to change magazines, you see, but I was just laughing! It wasn’t real. I kept pulling the trigger and suddenly there were no more bullets up my spout and this bloody great bloke with a submachine-gun appeared in a bunker to my left and all I had…” I shrugged. “Sorry. Talking too much.”
Angela was sitting next to me in the cockpit. “And all you had was what?”
“Did we bring any pickled onions?”
“Was that when you were wounded?” she insisted.
“Yes.”
“So what happened?”
I mimed a bayonet stroke. “Mucky.”
She frowned. “You were shot then?”
“Not for another minute. I was like a wet hen. I couldn’t go back, because it would have looked as if I’d bottled out, so I kept on going.
I remember shouting like a bloody maniac, though for the life of me I can’t remember what I was shouting. It’s stupid, really, but I’d like to remember that.”
Angela frowned at me. “Why wouldn’t you talk like that on the film?”
“I don’t know…” I paused. “Because I’d made a balls of everything, if you really want the truth. I’d gone to the wrong place, I was frightened as hell, and I thought we were about to be worked over by a bunch of bloody Argies. I just panicked, nothing more.”
“That’s not what the citation says.”
“It was dark. No one could see what was happening.” She mistook my tone, which was dismissive. “Do you regret the fighting now?”
“Christ, no!”
“No?”
“Queen and Country, my love.”
She stared incredulously at me. “You really do mean that, don’t you?”
Of course I meant it, but there wasn’t time to say any more, for the sun had dropped and conditions were perfect for taking a sight. I fetched Bannister’s expensive sextant with its built-in electronic stopwatch and brought a star sweetly down to the twilit horizon.
The wind dropped the next day. There was still a modicum of warmth in the mid-day sun, but by early afternoon we were both swathed in sweaters, scarves and oilskins. That night, after I’d plotted our position, I called Angela on deck to see the aurora borealis that was filling the northern sky with its great scrims of curving and shifting colours. She stared in enchantment. “I thought the Northern Lights only showed in winter?”
“All year round. You can see them from London sometimes.”
“No!”
“Two or three nights a year,” I said. “But you city-dwellers never look. Or else you’ve got so many neon lights on that you drown it out.”
A great coral-coloured lightfall shimmered and faded in the twilight as Sycorax’s booms slatted across in an involuntary but slow gybe. If I had been racing in the St Pierre I would have been fretting because of this calm. The sea was flattening to a sheen of gun metal while Angela and I sat in the cockpit and watched the magic lights drape the northern sky.
“Do you know what I forgot?” Angela broke our silence.
“Tell me.”
“A passport.”
I smiled. “I shall tell the Canadians that I kidnapped you.” She turned on the thwart so that she could lean against me. It was the first intimate gesture that either of us had made since she had first stepped aboard. She gazed at a vast ripple of star-dusted blue light. “Do you know why I came, Nick?”
“Tell me.”
“I wanted to be with you. It wasn’t because of your leg, and I’m not really sure that Tony’s in danger. I know I should believe it, but I don’t.” She lit herself a cigarette. “I was angry.”
“Angry?”
“When he said I had newly-wed nerves. Because he didn’t believe me.” She had brought a bottle of Irish from the cabin and she poured us each a glass. “Is this what’s called running away to sea?”
“Yes,” I said. “So why don’t you use the opportunity to give up smoking?”
“Why don’t you shut up?” So I shut up and we sat in silence for a while. The surge and fade of the great lights shimmered their reflection on the sea. “I married Tony on the rebound,” Angela said suddenly.
“Did you?”
“From you.” She twisted her head to look at me. “I shouldn’t be here, should I?”
“I wanted you to be here.” I ducked her question.
She smiled. “Shall I light the cabin fire?”
“You want to be inside when God puts on this light show?”
“You want to make love in the cold?” she asked. I hesitated, and she scowled. “Nick?”
“You’re married,” I said awkwardly, not wanting to say it, and knowing that I wanted her to batter down my feeble moral stance.
She closed her eyes in exasperation. “I’m cold, I’m lonely, I’m frightened, and I’m on a bloody boat miles from bloody anywhere because I wanted to be with you, and you play the bloody Boy Scout.” She twisted on the thwart and looked angrily at me. “Do you know when I last needed to ask a man to take me to bed?”
“I’m sorry,” I said miserably.
She wrenched the rings off her left hand and thrust them into a pocket. “Does that help?”
Principles are fine things, but are soluble in lust, too. We lit the cabin stove.
“Do you really believe in God?” she asked me the next day.
“I don’t know anyone who sails deep waters in small boats who doesn’t,” I said.