“But you can cook, can’t you?” David had demanded.
“A bit.” Jackie had been confused by the question.
“Then you won’t be entirely useless.” David’s characteristic bluntness had left Jackie rather dazed.
Dazed or not, Jackie was now my sole companion on Stormchild, which meant I had the inconvenience of sharing a boat with a complete novice. I could not let her take a watch or even helm the ship until I had trained her in basic seamanship, and that training was going to slow me down. Worse, she might prove to be seasick or utterly incompetent. All in all, I was sourly thinking, it had been bloody inconsiderate of David and Betty to have encouraged her to join the ship.
There was also another and murkier reason for my unhappiness. I had felt an inexplicable tug of attraction toward this odd little stray girl, and I did not want that irrational feeling to be nurtured by the forced intimacy of a small boat. I told myself I did not need the complication, and that this girl was too young, too naive, too idealistic, too noisy, and too pathetic. “I thought you had a job to go home to,” I said nastily, as though, being reminded of her employment, Jackie might suddenly demand to be put ashore. “Aren’t you the Kalamazoo Gazette’s star reporter?”
“I was fired,” she said miserably.
“What for? Talking too much?” I immediately regretted the jibe, and apologized.
“I do talk too much,” she said, “I know I do. But that wasn’t why I was fired. I was fired because I insisted on going to Hamburg. I was supposed to be writing some articles on date rape in junior high schools, but I thought the Genesis community was a better story, so I left the paper. And now I’ve got a chance to sail the Atlantic, so you see I was quite right. Molly says that we should always take our chances in life, or else we’ll miss out on everything.”
“It’s a pity to miss out on roast beef,” I said nastily. “What is all that sprouting shit you brought on board?”
“It isn’t shit,” she said in a hurt voice. “You put seeds in the trays, water them twice a day, and harvest the sprouts. It’s a really good, fresh source of protein.”
I glanced up at the pale mass of the mainsail. “Did you know that Hitler and Mussolini were both vegetarians? And so was the guy who founded the KGB?”
There was a pause, then Miss Jackie Potten showed me another side of her character. “I know you’re captain of this ship,” she said, “but I think it’s important that we respect each other’s beliefs, and that we don’t mock each other’s private convictions. I kind of think that’s really crucial.”
I had just been told off by a floozy young enough to be my daughter. I was so mortified that I said nothing, but just clung to the big wheel and glanced down at the binnacle to make certain we were still on a course of 240 degrees.
“Because we all need our private space,” Jackie went doggedly on, evidently translating my silence as incomprehension, “and if we don’t recognize each other’s unique human qualities, Mr. Blackburn, then we won’t respect each other, and I really believe that we need to share mutual respect if we’re to spend so much time together.”
“You’re right,” I said briskly, “and I’m sorry.” I meant the apology, too, though my voice probably sounded too robust to convey the contrition I genuinely felt, but I had been boorish and Jackie had been right to protest. She had also been very brave, but it was evident, from the embarrassed silence that followed, that the display of defiance had exhausted her courage. “Is there anything I can do to help, then?” she finally asked me in a very small and very timid voice.
“You can call me Tim,” I said, “and then you can go below and make me a mug of coffee, with caffeine and milk, but no sugar, and you can get me a corned beef sandwich with butter and mustard, but nothing else, and certainly with nothing green in it.”
“Right, Tim,” she said, and went to do it.
By the time we docked in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, I had developed a healthy respect for the frail-looking Jackie Potten. Not that she looked so frail anymore, for fifteen hundred sea miles had put some healthy color into her cheeks and bleached her mousy hair into pale gold. After her complaint about feeling cold on our first night out she had uttered not a single grievance. In fact she had proved to possess a patient tenacity that was well suited to sailing and, despite her fondness for a diet that might have starved an anorexic stick-insect, she had a stomach that could take the roughest motion of the waves. In the beginning, as Stormchild had thrashed into the great gray channel rollers with their hissing and bubbling white tops, Jackie had been nervous, especially when the first sullen dawn showed that we were out of sight of land. That, to me, is always a special moment; when at last you can look around the horizon and see nothing but God’s good ocean. For Jackie, when all she saw was the cold crinkling heave of the careless waves, her overwhelming sensation was the terror of insignificance.
The terror did not last. Instead she began to enjoy the challenge, and learned to have confidence in the boat and in her own ability to control Stormchild. Within two days she was watch-keeping alone, at first only by daylight, but within a week she was standing the night watches and all traces of her initial nervousness had disappeared. She was a natural sailor, and, as her competence grew, her character hardened out of timidity into confidence. She even talked less, and I realized her previous volubility had been merely a symptom of shyness.
We marked off our private territories within the boat. Jackie had excavated a sleeping space among the heaped stores in the starboard forward cabin where she settled like some small cozy animal. Once in a while I would hear her speaking aloud in that cabin. At first I thought she was just chattering to herself, but later I learned she was dictating into a small tape recorder. She was making a record of the journey, but would not let me listen to the tape. “I’m just making notes,” she said disparagingly, “only rough notes.”
We raced across Biscay where Jackie, equipped with Stormchild’s copy of The Birds of Britain and Europe learned to identify the various seabirds that kept us company. There were fulmars on either beam, storm petrels flickering above our wake, and handsome, slim-winged shearwaters effortlessly skimming all about us. As Jackie learned to identify the birds, I taught myself more about Stormchild’s character. She was a stubborn boat, good in heavy seas, but sluggish and sullen when, ten days into our voyage, we encountered light winds north and east of Madeira. The winds eventually died to a flat calm and the sails slatted uselessly to the boat’s motion on the long swell. I was tempted to turn on the powerful engine, but there was no point in wasting fuel, for nothing would hurry the establishment of the trade winds and I reasoned that we might just as well wait it out at sea than pay daily harbor fees of seventy pesetas per foot of boat length in a Canary Islands port.
After three days the winds came again and Stormchild dipped her bows to the long ocean swell. The weather had turned fiercely warm. I changed into shorts, but Jackie had no summer clothes so stayed in her usual baggy attire. I stored our foul-weather gear in a hanging locker and suspected that, storms apart, we would not need the heavy warm clothes again until we had long cleared the Panama Canal, for now we were entering the latitudes of the perpetual lotus-eaters and would stay in these warm latitudes for weeks.