I put the phone down and ducked into the pouring rain to see if Joanna had returned. The streetlights on the far side of the river shook and danced their reflections in the black water and I thought I saw a moving shadow silhouetted against one of those liquid spears. The movement seemed to be on board Slip-Slider, and I assumed Joanna must have taken our supper down into the Contessa’s cozy cabin. “Jo!” I shouted toward the shadow.
The yard gate clanged shut behind me. “I’m here.” Joanna ran through the pelting rain to the shelter of the yard’s office. “Come and eat while it’s hot!”
“Just a minute!” I turned on the yard’s security lights. Rain sliced past the yellow lamps, but otherwise nothing untoward moved on the wave-rocked pontoons and I guessed the shadow by Slip-Slider had been my imagination, or perhaps one of the dozen stray cats that had taken up residence in the yard.
“What is it?” Joanna asked me from the office doorway.
“Nothing.” I killed the lights, but still gazed toward the rain-hammered river where, at the midstream buoys that the Sailing Club had emptied at dusk, I now thought I could see a big, dark yacht moored, but the smeared afterimage of the bright security lights blurred my sight and made me uncertain whether I was seeing true or just imagining shadows in the darkness.
I went to the office and told Joanna about Harry’s prospective customer, and we agreed that the opportunity of selling the big yacht was too good to pass up. The widow of Stormchild’s owner was feeling the pinch and, in consequence, we were feeling responsible. That guilt was unreasonable, for the state of the economy was the fault of the bloody politicians, but reasonable or not that guilt meant I would have to sacrifice this weekend’s family reunion in an effort to sell the boat. Joanna offered to stay as well, but I knew how eagerly she was looking forward to Easter day, so I encouraged her to sail alone to Guernsey. “Perhaps you can get a flight?” Joanna suggested, though without much optimism for she knew that the chance of finding a spare seat to the Channel Islands on an Easter Saturday flight was remote. “But look on the bright side,” Joanna said wickedly, “because now you’ve got no reason not to hear your brother’s Easter sermon.”
“Oh, Christ, I hadn’t thought of that.” My brother David, rural dean in the local diocese and rector of our parish church, frequently complained that while he often patronized my place of work I rarely patronized his. David’s muscular Christianity was not entirely to my taste, but, thanks to a London lawyer, it looked as if I would have to grin and bear a dose this Easter.
I left Joanna with the accounts and went back to finish the yawl’s repairs. As I ran across the yard I noted that the midstream buoys were empty, which meant that the big yacht I thought I had seen there must have been a figment of my imagination, which made sense for no one in their right mind would have slipped and gone to sea in the teeth of this vicious wind. The weather seemed to be worsening, making a mockery of the marine forecast’s promise of a fair morning, but Joanna, more trusting than I, went home at nine o’clock to get a good night’s sleep before her early start. When I followed her up the hill three hours later the gale was still blowing the sky ragged, yet, when the alarm woke me before dawn, the wind had indeed veered westerly and lost its spitting venom. “I told you so,” Joanna said sleepily. “Did you finish the yawl?”
I nodded. “The bugger’ll never know it was hit.”
She opened the bedroom window and sniffed the wind. “It’s going to be a fast crossing,” she said happily. Joanna had grown up in Guernsey where she had learned to sail as naturally as other children learned to ride a bicycle. She relished strong winds and hard seas and, anticipating that this day would bring her a fast wet channel crossing, all spray and dash and thumping seas, she was eager to get under way.
I cooked Joanna’s breakfast, then drove her down to the river. She was dressed in oilies, while her red-gold hair, beaded by a light shower, sprang in a stiff undisciplined mop from the edges of her yellow woolen watch hat. She suddenly looked so young that, for an instant, her eager face cruelly reminded me of our daughter, Nicole.
“You look miserable,” Joanna, catching sight of my expression, called from the cockpit.
I knew better than to mention Nicole, so invented another reason for my apparent misery. “I just wish I was coming with you.”
“I wish you were, too,” she said in her no-nonsense voice, which acknowledged we could do nothing to change the day’s fate, “but you can’t. So be nice to the London lawyer instead.”
“Of course I’ll be nice to him,” I said irritably.
“Why ‘of course’? You usually growl at customers you don’t like, and I’ve yet to meet a lawyer you don’t treat like something you scrape off a shoe.” Joanna laughed, then blew me a kiss. “Perhaps I should stay and make the sale?”
I smiled and shook my head. “I’ll be good to the bastard,” I promised her, then I released Slip-Slider’s bowline and shoved her off the pontoon. “Give me a call when you arrive!”
“I will! And go to David’s sermon! And eat properly! Lots of salad and vegetables!” Joanna had released the stern line and put the engine in gear. “Love you!”
“Love you,” I called back, and I was struck again by Joanna’s sudden resemblance to our daughter, then, after a last blown kiss, she turned to look down river to where the channel waves crashed white on the estuary’s bar. I watched her hoist the sails before a gray squall of sudden hard rain hid Slip-Slider and made me run for the shelter of my car. I drove to a lorry driver’s cafe on the bypass where they made a proper breakfast of blood pudding, eggs, fried bread, bacon, sausage, kidneys, mushrooms, and tomatoes, all mopped up with bread and butter and washed down with tea strong enough to strip paint.
By the time I opened the yard for business the rain had eased and a watery sun was glossing the river where, one by one, the boats hoisted their sails and slapped out toward the boisterous sea. I stripped the tarpaulins from Stormchild’s decks and jealously thought how Joanna would be sailing Slip-Slider sharp into the wind, slicing the gray seas white, while I swept Stormchild’s topsides clean, then put two industrial heaters into her cabins to take the winter’s lingering chill out of her hull.
The London lawyer turned up an hour late for his appointment. He was a young man, no more than thirty, yet he had clearly done well for himself for he arrived in a big BMW and, before climbing out, he ostentatiously used the car phone so that we peasants would realize he possessed such a thing. But we were more inclined to notice the girl who accompanied him, for she was a tall, willowy model type who unfolded endless legs from the car. The lawyer finished his telephone call, then climbed out to greet me. He was wearing a designer oilskin jacket with a zip-in float liner and a built-in safety harness. “Tim Blackburn?” He held out his hand.
“I’m Blackburn,” I confirmed.
“I’m John Miller. This is Mandy.”
Mandy gave me a limp hand to shake. “You’re quite famous, aren’t you?” She greeted me.
“Am I?”
“Daddy says you are. He says you won lots of races. Is that right?”
“A long time ago,” I said dismissively. I had been one of the last Englishmen to win the single-handed Atlantic race before the French speed-sleds made the contest a Gallic preserve, then, for a brief period, I had held the record for sailing nonstop and single-handed round the world. Those accomplishments hardly accorded me rock-star status, but among sailors my name still rang a faint bell.