Not that I had time to admire my own manoeuvre. We had survived the gybe, but as soon as the sail settled I felt Sunflower’s bows drop and I knew the bar was straight beneath the boat’s stem. I whooped a crazy challenge. I was staring down into the trough where mud and sand discoloured the water. Scummy strings of foam whipped across that dull patch. I was running into the killing trough and, for a few seconds, the howl of the wind was muted by the towering wave behind me. I could only hear the seething of the water. This sea had perhaps a hundred yards left in which to kill me, no more, but they were the worst hundred yards. If I broached now then nothing would save me because Sunflower would be turned over, her mast would snap, and the sea would pounce on us to tear man and hull into dented steel and bloody scraps. I was holding the tiller with both hands, muscles rigid, as the crest behind shattered to cascade like spilt ice down the wave’s dark face. Christ, I thought, but why had I done this?
The jib was flogging, shielded by the main. We were veering to port, I dragged her back. The wave that was carrying us collapsed, its underpinning sheared off by the rising bar, and Sunflower was suddenly nothing but a scrap of steel in the heart of a broken tidal wave. Water bounced halfway up her mast. A new wave reared behind and Sunflower’s keel began to drop, crashing down through an incoherent sea towards the hidden land that could fracture her steel hull as though it was an egg. Down we went, and still down, and behind me the new wave curled at its top and I saw the glassy black beneath the fractured white, and still we dropped and I saw that I would be crushed between the bar and the following wave, but then Sunflower, good Sunflower, began to rise. She fought her death inch by damned inch. The peak of the reefed sail was drawing, forcing her on. She had way on her still and she was cutting her steel through the water. She would not give up, but still that toppling wave threatened to poop us and I knew it could kill with a blow as easily as it could drown us.
The wave broke. The dark black glossy heart of the wave was blown apart as if by dynamite. It turned white as it tumbled and as it broke into a million fragments. It fell, and it would have killed me, except that it fell a foot behind Sunflower’s transom and the force of the sea’s fall was bounced up from the bar to lift and drive her on. On across the bar’s broken water, on past the Wolf Rock and the Bass Rock, and then, just short of the Poundstone, I gybed her again, and I knew I was showing off to the people who were standing ashore to watch my death. I was proving that I had mastered one thing and, in demonstration of that mastery, I had come home in style. So I gybed Sunflower again, turned her, and suddenly we were sailing into calmer waters as Limebury Point stole the wind’s brute force. I looked back. The bar was a mass of churning white, as bad as I’d ever seen it, but Sunflower had come through.
And I, in a proper job, had come home.
Charlie wasn’t at home. His wife, who had grudgingly taken my reverse-charge call, said he was in Hertfordshire on business. I could tell she was not pleased that I had returned. She believed I was a rakehell who might yet take her husband back to the sea. “When will he be back, Yvonne?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Her voice was guarded. Somewhere in the background a child whined.
“Tell him I called, and tell him I’m moored in Salcombe.” Yvonne promised she would pass on the news, though I doubted if she would be in any hurry. I wondered why it was that Charlie, my best, closest, and oldest friend, should marry someone who so disliked me.
I said goodbye; then, ignoring the impatient people who waited to use the public phone, I tried to reverse the charges to my mother’s house. There was no answer, so I had the operator call my twin sister in Gloucestershire. Elizabeth was not at home either, but her husband grudgingly agreed to accept the charges. He had once been a friend of mine, but he had chosen his wife’s side in our family battle. “Do you think we’re made of money?” was his greeting.
I didn’t bother to explain that I’d only just landed in England and had no small change other than American, Antiguan and Portuguese coins. “Is Elizabeth there?” I asked instead.
“No she’s not.” He sounded drunk.
“I tried to reach Mother.”
“She’s in hospital.”
I waited to see if he’d offer more information. He didn’t. “Which hospital?” I asked.
“South Devon General. They took her in last week. She’s in a private ward, which we’re paying for.”
The inference was that I should help with the cost, but I ignored the hint. “What’s the ward called?” I asked instead.
“The Edith Cavell Ward. It’s on the third floor.”
“Do you know what the visiting hours are?”
“I am not an information service for the National Health Service,” he said irritably; then, relenting, “you can go any time. They don’t seem to mind. Bloody silly, I call it. If I was running a hospital I wouldn’t want visitors traipsing about at all hours of the day or night, but I suppose they know their own business.”
“Perhaps I’ll see Elizabeth there?”
“I don’t know where she is.” There was a long pause as though he was about to add some comment, but then, without another word, he put down the receiver.
There was no one else to telephone. I knew I couldn’t reach my younger sister, who was the only person beside Charlie who might be glad to hear I had come home, so instead I rowed myself back to Sunflower and dug out a tin of baked beans which I mashed with a can of stew and heated over the galley stove. The pain in my tooth had miraculously subsided, which was a blessing as I’d run out of both aspirins and Irish whiskey.
It had begun to rain hard. The water drummed on Sunflower’s coachroof and gurgled down her scuppers. The wind howled above the moorings to slap halliards against noisy masts. I spooned down my meal and thought how I might even now be six seas away and running free.
But had come home instead.
The toothache had entirely disappeared by morning. For the first time in weeks I woke up without pain, except for the bruise on my ribs where I’d been thrown against the stanchion, but that kind of pain was an occupational hazard, and therefore to be ignored. Yet the tooth, astonishingly, felt fine. I bit down hard on it and did not even feel a twinge. The spontaneous cure and a good night’s sleep combined to fill me with optimism.