Jackie forced a smile. “Hi.”
“Hi, indeed.” David plucked his seabags from the pavement. “The last time I was here the Admiralty Inn served a halfway decent beer and a damn good meal.”
“It still does,” I said.
“Then show me to it, dear boy. Show me to it.”
We found a table in the pub, but there was an immediate awkwardness between the three of us, to which David, full of news of home, seemed oblivious. The boatyard, he said, was surviving my absence. There had been a fire in a hardware store in the town’s high street, but no one had been hurt. The bishop had broken his leg on a dry-ski slope in the local shopping precinct. “It was entirely his own fault,” David said with unholy relish, “I see the church has to be relevant to modern life, but that doesn’t need to be proved by hurtling down plastic ramps.”
“The bishop doesn’t mind you taking a sabbatical?” I asked David.
“He’s all for it. He thinks I’ve been working too hard. He also believes that rubbing up against some foreign cultures will broaden my horizons, but I told him that was nonsense, I just wanted to do a bit of bird-watching.” David rubbed his hands gleefully. “Just think of it, Tim! The green-backed firecrown hummingbird.”
“I thought you were feeling too old to cope with a yacht’s discomforts,” I said accusingly.
“Old?” David laughed. “I’m only fifty! Just three years older than you, Tim.” Jackie glanced at me, then looked away quickly. “So!” David spread his arms to encompass the table. “What do the next three months hold for us?”
“You’re here for three months?” I gaped at him. I had somehow thought he might have come for just two weeks.
“That should be long enough to settle von Rellsteb’s hash,” David said happily, “and still give us time to spot a hummingbird or two. But first we have to beard the monster in his Patagonian lair. How do you plan to do that?”
I unfolded a paper napkin, found a pen, and, still dazed by David’s blunt happiness, made a crude sketch of South America. “We sail to Panama as soon as possible,” I said, “then make a loop out into the Pacific to avoid the Humboldt Current. I’m afraid there won’t be any time to make a visit to Easter Island, or to put in at any of the ports in northern Chile, instead we’ll go straight to the southern coast, probably to Puerto Montt.” I stabbed my crude map low down on the Chilean coast.
“You seem to be in a devil of a hurry.” David lit his pipe.
“From everything I hear it’s sensible to make a landfall in Patagonia before the end of February,” I said, “and between now and then we’ve got the best part of five thousand miles to go, so yes, I’m in a hurry.” I paused. “It’s going to be a very uncomfortable voyage, David.”
David laughed. “He thinks I’ve gone soft,” he confided in Jackie, then looked back to me. “I assure you I’m as fit as you are, Tim.”
“Who’s keeping an eye on the boatyard while you’re away?” I asked with alarm.
“Your new manager. Very good chap, by the way. Knows his onions.”
“Oh, Christ!” I sighed because my elder brother’s arrival threatened to tear my life into shreds. Just three months ago I had been begging for his company, but now, isolated in the strange relationship I had with Jackie, I did not want David’s loud intrusion. Except he was here now, and could not be sent back, which meant that the small fragile bubble in which Jackie and I had been so delicately existing was about to be obliterated by the great gales of David’s bluff goodwill.
Jackie clearly felt the same sense of violated privacy for she had spoken hardly a word since we sat down in the pub, but now she leaned toward me with a frown on her sun-tanned face. “I think maybe you don’t really need me anymore, Tim. Now that your brother’s here.”
“Of course I need you!” I said hastily.
“Every ship must have a cook!” David put in his three cents’ worth of appalling insensitivity.
“Shut your bloody trap!” I snapped at him, then looked back to Jackie. “You can’t jump ship now!”
“What I was thinking,” she said, and without even acknowledging David’s presence at the table, “was that I ought to fly home and make sure everything’s OK there. With my mom, you know? And with my apartment. I mean, hell, I just walked away from it! Things may need looking after.”
“You’re abandoning the Genesis community?” I asked in disbelief.
“No! I just ought to visit home, that’s all! And when I’m there I’ll try and raise the cash to fly down to Chile and meet you. I mean if we really are going to find the Genesis community then I ought to be prepared for it, and I don’t even have a camera with me! What kind of a journalist am I without a camera?”
“I have a camera.” David seemed oblivious of the effect his arrival had caused, but he had never been a sensitive man. A good man, but not subtle. He unzipped one of his bags and pulled out a 35mm camera that he put on the table. “It’s an efficient camera, but if you find it too complicated, my dear, then we can always buy one of those idiot-proof point-and-shoot jobs, isn’t that so, Tim?”
I ignored David, while Jackie, who had gone pale under her tan, just continued talking as though my brother had never spoken. “And maybe if I go home, Tim, I can sell the story to an editor. I know a lot more about Genesis than I did before, and maybe a major newspaper will listen to me now?”
“They’ll certainly listen if you tell them that the famous circumnavigator, Tim Blackburn, is sailing to Chile to shoot a bloody ecologist!” David hooted with laughter at his own wit.
“Shut up.” I spoke with hissing menace to my brother, then looked back to Jackie. “Why don’t you get the story first, then sell it to a newspaper?”
“I don’t know, Tim.” Jackie glanced very quickly at David, thus suggesting to me that his bluff arrival was her real reason for not staying. She seemed not to have taken his words about shooting von Rellsteb seriously, which was a relief, but David was never a man to let a sleeping dog lie, and now he pushed his camera across the table toward Jackie.
“Take it, dear girl, with my blessing.”
“No, really.” Jackie tried to push the camera back.
“Of course you must take it. We are one for all and all for one, are we not?” David offered Jackie his most benevolent smile. “Besides, you look much too frail to use one of the rifles. Not that I think we shall need the guns.” David palpably changed mental gears and offered me his most serious expression. “I need to talk with you, Tim, about what we plan to achieve in Patagonia. I really don’t think I can involve myself in violence. It just wouldn’t look good in the Church Times! Of course, if we’re attacked, and we do have to defend ourselves, then I assure you I’ll be shoulder to shoulder with you.” He smiled at Jackie. “And frankly those old Lee-Enfields have the devil of a kick, so I doubt you’d be strong enough to fire one. Not that I think we’ll need them, but you never know.”
“Shut up,” I said plaintively, but much too late.
“Lee-Enfields?” Jackie asked. “What are Lee-Enfields, Tim?”
I did not answer. I had been cornered in a lie and I was desperately thinking how to find an elegant way out, but there was none.
“Are they guns?” Jackie demanded of me.
“There are two rifles on board Stormchild,” I told her very flatly. “I hid them before I left. It seemed a good idea at the time.”
“A damned good idea!” David said with an elephantine lack of tact.
Jackie stared at me very coldly. “Are you planning to fight von Rellsteb, Tim? Is that what you’ve been planning all along?”