“I’ve never been with anyone as beautiful as you, Gillian.”
He saw she had gone to sleep. He disengaged her arms and helped her lie flat on the locker in the shifting shade of the mainsail. Life is a dream, he thought. Something she knew and I didn’t.
I love her, Blessington thought. She encourages me. The shadow of the peaks spread over the water.
Freycinet came out on deck and called up to him.
“Liam! We’re to stop here. Off les Pitons.”
“We can’t,” Blessington said, though it was tempting. He was so tired.
“We have to stop. We can anchor, yes? Marie is sick. We need to rest. We want to see them.”
“We’d have to clear customs,” Blessington said. “We’ll have bloody cops and boat boys and God knows what else.”
He realized at once what an overnight anchorage would entail. All of them up on speed or the cargo, cradling shotguns, peering into the moonlight while they waited for macheteros to come on feathered oars and steal their shit and kill them.
“If we anchor,” Freycinet said, “if we anchor somewhere, we won’t have to clear.”
“Yes, yes,” Blessington said. “We will, sure. The fucking boat boys will find us. If we don’t hire them or buy something they’ll turn us in.” He picked up the cruising guide and waved it in the air. “It says right here you have to clear customs in Soufrière.”
“We’ll wait until they have close,” said Freycinet.
“Shit,” said Blessington desperately, “we’ll be fined. We’ll be boarded.”
Freycinet was smiling at him, a broad demented smile of infinitely self-assured contempt. Cocaine. He felt Gillian put her arm around his leg from behind.
“Écoutez, Liam. Écoutez bien. We going to stop, man. We going to stop where I say.”
He turned laughing into the wind, gripping a stay.
“What did I tell you,” Gillian said softly. “You won’t have to marry me after all. ‘Cause we’re dead, baby.”
“I don’t accept that,” Blessington said. “Take the wheel,” he told her.
Referring to the charts and the cruising guide, he could find no anchorage that looked as though it would be out of the wind and that was not close inshore. The only possibility was a shallow reef, near the south tip, sometimes favored by snorkeling trips, nearly three miles off the Pitons. It was in the lee of the huge peaks, its coral heads as shallow as a single fathom. The chart showed mooring floats; presumably it was forbidden to anchor there for the sake of the coral.
“I beg you to reconsider, Honoré,” Blessington said to Freycinet. He cleared his throat. “You’re making a mistake.”
Freycinet turned back to him with the same smile.
“Eh, Liam. You can leave, man. You know, there’s an Irish pub in Soufrière. It’s money from your friends in the IRA. You can go there, eh?”
Blessington had no connection whatsoever with the IRA, although he had allowed Freycinet and his friends to believe that, and they had chosen to.
“You can go get drunk there,” Freycinet told him and then turned again to look at the island.
He was standing near the bow with his bare toes caressing freeboard, gripping a stay. Blessington and Gillian exchanged looks. In the next instant she threw the wheel, the mainsail boom went crashing across the cabin roofs, the boat lurched to port and heeled hard. For a moment Freycinet was suspended over blank blue water. Blessington clambered up over the cockpit and stood swaying there, hesitating. Then he reached out for Freycinet. The Frenchman swung around the stay like a monkey and knocked him flat. The two of them went sprawling. Freycinet got to his feet in a karate stance, cursing.
“You shit,” he said, when his English returned. “Cunt! What?”
“I thought you were going over, Honoré. I thought I’d have to pull you back aboard.”
“That’s right, Honoré,” Gillian said from the cockpit. “You were like a goner. He saved your ass, man.”
Freycinet pursed his lips and nodded. “Bien” he said. He climbed down into the cockpit in a brisk, businesslike fashion and slapped Gillian across the face, backhand and forehand, turning her head around each time.
He gave Blessington the wheel, then he took Gillian under the arm and pulled her up out of the cockpit. “Get below! I don’t want to fucking see you.” He followed her below and Blessington heard him speak briefly to Marie. The young woman began to moan. The Pitons looked close enough to strike with a rock and a rich jungle smell came out on the wind. Freycinet, back on deck, looked as though he was sniffing out menace. A divi-divi bird landed on the boom for a moment and then fluttered away.
“I think I have a place,” Blessington said, “if you still insist. A reef.”
“A reef, eh?”
“A reef about four thousand meters offshore.”
“We could have a swim, non?”
“We could, yes.”
“But I don’t know if I want to swim with you, Liam. I think you try to push me overboard.”
“I think I saved your life,” Blessington said.
They motored on to the reef with Freycinet standing in the bow to check for bottom as Blessington watched the depth recorder. At ten meters of bottom, they were an arm’s length from the single float in view. Blessington cut the engine and came about and then went forward to cleat a line to the float. The float was painted red, yellow and green, Rasta colors like Gillian’s bracelet.
It was late afternoon and suddenly dead calm. The protection the Pitons offered from the wind was ideal and the bad current that ran over the reef to the south seemed to divide around these coral heads. A perfect dive site, Blessington thought, and he could not understand why even in June there were not more floats or more boats anchored there. It seemed a steady enough place even for an overnight anchorage, although the cruising guide advised against it because of the dangerous reefs on every side.
The big ketch lay motionless on unruffled water; the float line drifted slack. There was sandy beach and a palm-lined shore across the water. It was a lonely part of the coast, across a jungle mountain track from the island’s most remote resort. Through binoculars Blessington could make out a couple of boats hauled up on the strand but no one seemed ready to come out and hustle them. With luck it was too far from shore.
It might be also, he thought, that for metaphysical reasons the Sans Regret presented a forbidding aspect. But an aspect that deterred small predators might in time attract big ones.
Marie came up, pale and hollow-eyed, in her bikini. She gave Blessington a chastising look and lay down on the cushions on the afterdeck. Gillian came up behind her and took a seat on the gear locker behind Blessington.
“The fucker’s got no class,” she said softly. “See him hit me?”
“Of course. I was next to you.”
” Gonna let him get away with that?”
“Well,” Blessington said, “for the moment it behooves us to let him feel in charge.”
“Behooves us?” she asked. “You say it behooves us?”
“That’s right.”
“Hey, what were you gonna do back there, Liam?” she asked. “Deep-six him?”
“I honestly don’t know. He might have fallen.”
“I was wondering,” she said. “He was wondering too.”
Blessington shrugged.
“He’s got the overstanding,” Gillian said. “We got the under.” She looked out at the water and said, “Boat boys.”
He looked where she was looking and saw the boat approaching, a speck against the shiny sand. It took a long time for it to cover the distance between the beach and the Sans Regret.