“You mean sail forever.”
“Oh, sure.” Her eyes were alight.
“There’s nothing to stop you,” I said, and felt my heart racing with a ridiculous and futile hope.
“Yeah, there is.” She turned away. “Money and a job.”
“Sure,” I said meaninglessly, and the ship rolled to starboard, back to port, and Jackie’s plait swung against her shoulder blades with Stormchild’s endless motion. Jackie’s hair, which had been mousy and bobbed when I first met her, had grown wildly long and had been bleached into a pale white gold by the salt and sun, so that now it lay in startling contrast against her dark-tanned skin. She looked exotic and fit now, and it was hard to see in this lean, bright-eyed and confident girl the nervous, timid, baggy-trousered waif who had first accosted me in Florida.
We sailed on, mile after rolling mile, in what for me was the most perfect trade-wind crossing of the Atlantic I had ever made. I doubt that a single wave broke high enough on our cutwater to wet Stormchild’s deck, and only at the end, as we neared the Caribbean, did two squalls briefly soak our topsides with a sudden and drenching rain. Not long after the squalls, as our deck steamed dry under the tropic sun, we at last saw the airy castles of white cloud rising high above the horizon and I told Jackie that the clouds were forming above land. That afternoon an extravagantly tailed frigate bird swooped close to Stormchild and both Jackie and I felt the nervousness that is engendered by an approaching landfall. It is a nervousness that comes from a reluctance to abandon the safe security and comforting routine of a ship for the dangers of a strange harbor and its unpredictable people.
I washed our shore-going clothes by sloshing them around in a plastic garbage bag half filled with seawater and detergent. Later, as the clothes dried in the rigging, we loosed the lashed down boom and hoisted the huge mainsail and let Stormchild steady onto a port reach. The rolling stopped immediately and the noises of the ship, which had stayed so constant for four weeks, changed with the new motion. I turned on the VHF radio and heard the intrusive babble of voices.
Two mornings later we were safe in Antigua’s English Harbour where, blessedly, there was space at the Dockyard Quay. The Dutch couple, with whom we had dined on my birthday and who had sailed from the Canaries a full month before us, took our mooring lines, and Jackie, to celebrate the completion of her first transatlantic sail, insisted on buying a bottle of cheap champagne that we all four drank at lunchtime. “I didn’t think you had any money,” I said lightly when the friendly Dutch couple was gone.
“I used my last crumpled dollars,” she said, “though I do have some plastic, but I’m afraid to use it because the bills would never reach me, and then the bank will have me crucified.” She leaned back on the thwart, under the shade of the cockpit canopy that I had rigged once more. “This is fun, Tim,” she said with languorous warmth, then reached and lightly touched my hand. “Thank you for letting me come. God, but this is fun!”
A week later, our ship dressed overall with what flags I could muster and with underwear filling in the gaps, we celebrated Christmas. I gave Jackie a coral necklace, and she gave me a woolen scarf that she had been secretly knitting. “I’ve nothing else to give you,” she apologized, “and you said it will be cold in Patagonia.”
“It’s wonderful,” I said, “thank you.”
“It isn’t much. I bought the wool in the Canaries. It’s real nice wool, isn’t it?”
I felt an urge to kiss her, just as a thank you, but I did not have the courage to move, or else I had too much sense to move, and Jackie must have intuited that something was out of joint for she looked at me oddly, then smiled and twisted away up the companionway. “It’s weird, isn’t it,” she said, “to be having a hot-weather Christmas?” I suspected she was covering a moment of mutual embarrassment with a meaningless babble of conversation. “I have an aunt who goes to Florida every winter, and she cooks a turkey and all the trimmings, but she has to turn the air-conditioning way up before she can bear to eat it. Oh, wow, look at that!”
“That” was a majestic French yawl, agleam with bright work and brass, that had shaken out its mainsail ready for sea. I envied the French crew, for I, too, would have liked to have been at sea where, somehow, coexistence with Jackie was easier than in port, but I was waiting for David’s promised letter which would enclose the sailing directions for the Chilean coast. I telephoned him on Christmas Day, but got no answer. I decided to wait until New Year’s Day, after which, letter or no letter, Jackie and I would sail again.
Jackie telephoned her mother on New Year’s Eve, and afterward called Molly Tetterman. “She wanted to come down and join us,” Jackie said when she joined me outside the telephone office, “but I couldn’t bear it! She never stops talking! Never!” Then she burst into laughter as she remembered how I had used to accuse her of the same sin. “Have I changed, Tim?”
“Yes,” I said, “you have.” We were walking back toward the dockyard in the hard, bright sunlight.
“Is it a good change?” Jackie asked coyly.
“Yes.” I smiled. “I think it probably is.”
Suddenly, and with what seemed like an impulsive artlessness, she put her arm through mine. “I was so scared of you at the beginning. I suppose I should never have asked to come with you. It was kind of rude of me, right? But once I was on board you were so awful to me!”
“I was not.”
“You were! I just happened to mention that I was a tiny bit cold and you jumped down my throat! I thought you were going to throw me off the boat!”
I laughed. “I don’t want you to get off the boat”—I hesitated, knowing I should not say the next word, but I said it anyway—“ever,” and immediately after I had spoken it I felt like such a damn fool that I wanted to take the word back. I felt Jackie stop, then pull her arm out of my elbow. She stared up at me looking shocked, and I knew I was blushing.
“Tim?” Her voice was suddenly very serious.
“Look—” I began to try and explain myself, and Jackie began to say something at the same moment, and then we both stopped to let the other carry on, and I was cursing myself for being such a clumsy and insensitive idiot. Then we were both interrupted by a voice that boomed at us from across the street.
“There you are, Tim! Good man! Well done! Don’t move! Splendid! And Miss Potten, too! First class! I was on my way to the harbor, piece of luck finding you here!” It was my brother David, who, lugging two enormous seabags, dodged between the bicycles and bright-painted taxis to join us. “I’m signing on,” he said as he dropped the bags on the pavement by my feet.
“You’ve come to join us?” I asked in horror.
“Indeed I have, dear boy. I decided you were right! I need the change. I need the rest. I need the inspiration, my God, do I need that! I have been granted a sabbatical! Twenty years, Miss Potten, I have labored in the Lord’s vineyard, and now I am free to sip the wine for a season of idleness.” He beamed his pleasure at me. “Betty sends her love.”
“She let you off the leash?”
“She cut the leash! She almost insisted that I come! So I have left her the keys to the Riley, and I have installed a Low Church curate in my place who will probably destroy my congregation’s faith, but I care not!” David turned his happy face to Jackie, who, I thought, did not seem overjoyed at his arrival. “My dear Miss Potten, permit me the liberty of observing that you look positively different!”