“You’re not taking your eggshell out in this wind, are you?” I greeted David as he opened the Riley’s door, then I saw he could not possibly be thinking of taking out the 505, for he was wearing his dog collar and cassock, and even David’s mild eccentricities did not extend to sailing in full clerical rig. Instead he was dressed ready for the afternoon’s Easter weddings, and I supposed he had come to inveigle me into buying him a pub lunch before he performed his splicing duties. Then the passenger door of the Riley opened and another man climbed out.
It is at that point, just as Brian Callendar climbs out of David’s car, that my memory of that Easter weekend becomes like some dark and sinister film that is played over and over in my head. It is a film that I constantly want to change, as if by rewriting its action or dialogue I can miraculously change the film’s ending.
Brian Callendar comes toward me. He is an acquaintance rather than a friend, and he is also a detective sergeant in the County Police Force, and there is something about his face, and about David’s face behind him, which suggests that the two men have not come to the boatyard for pleasure. The Riley’s engine is still running and its front doors have been left open. I remember how the wind was whirling wood-shavings out of the carpenter’s shop and across the sloping cobbles of the boatyard’s ramp. “Tim?” Callendar said in a very forced voice. I am still smiling, but there is something about the policeman’s voice which tells me that I won’t be smiling again for a very long time. “Tim?” Callendar says again.
And I want the film to stop. I so badly want the film to stop.
But it won’t.
David took my elbow and walked me down to the pontoon where he stood beside me as Callendar told me that a yacht had exploded in mid-channel. Some wreckage had been found, and amongst that wreckage was a yellow horseshoe life buoy with the name Slip-Slider painted in black letters.
I stared at the policeman. “No,” I said. I was incapable of saying anything else. “No.”
“A Dutch cargo ship saw it happen, Mr. Blackburn.” Callendar, as befitted a bringer of bad news, had slipped into a stilted formality. “They say it was a bad explosion.”
“No.” The word was more than a denial, it was a protest. David’s hand was still on my elbow. Church bells were clamorous in the town, foretelling the afternoon’s weddings.
Callendar paused to light a cigarette. “There are no survivors, Mr. Blackburn,” he said at last, “at least none they could find. The Dutch boat has been looking, and the navy sent a helicopter, but all they’re finding is wreckage, and not much of that either.”
“No.” I was staring blindly at the river.
“Who was on board, Mr. Blackburn?”
I turned to look into the policeman’s eyes, but I could not speak.
“Was it Joanna?” David sounded uncomfortable, as he always did when raw emotions extruded above the calm surface of life, but he also sounded heartbroken, for he knew exactly who would have been sailing Slip-Slider. The question still had to be asked. “Was Joanna aboard?”
I nodded. There was a thickening in my throat. I wanted to turn and walk away as though I could deny this conversation. I looked back to Callendar to see if he was joking. I even half smiled, hoping that the policeman would smile back and it would all turn out to be a bad joke.
“Was anyone else aboard, Mr. Blackburn?” Callendar asked me instead.
I shook my head. “Just Joanna.” I was shaking. Nothing was real. The world had slipped its gears. In a second David would laugh and slap my back and everything would be normal again. Except David did no such thing, but just looked stricken and unhappy and embarrassed.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said. I had given up smoking fifteen years before, but I took the cigarette from Callendar’s fingers and dragged on it. I supposed that either the navy or the Dutch boat had called the Coastguard with Slip-Slider’s name, and the Coastguard would have looked in their card-index and discovered that I was Slip-Slider’s owner. Then they would have called the police, and Callendar, being on friendly terms with me, would have volunteered for this horrid duty, but he had first recruited David to help him. “Oh, Jesus,” I said again, then threw the foul-tasting cigarette into the river. “When?” I asked. “When did it happen?” Not that it mattered, but all I had left now were questions which would try to turn tragedy into sense.
“Just after nine o’clock this morning,” Callender said.
But nothing made sense, Nothing. Except the slow realization that my Joanna was dead, and I began to cry.
The film goes scratchy then; scratchy and fragmented. I didn’t want to watch the film, yet night after night it would show itself to me until I was crying again, or drunk, or usually both.
I remember telling the London lawyer and his girl to fuck off. I remember David pouring brandy into me, then taking me to his home where his wife, Betty, began to cry. David had to leave and marry three couples, so Betty and I sat in the cheerless comfort of their childless home while the church bells rang a message of joy into the wind-scoured air. The first reporters sniffed the stench of carrion and phoned the rectory in an effort to discover my whereabouts. Betty denied my presence, but when David came back from his weddings a group of pressmen waylaid him at the rectory gate. He told them to go to hell.
I felt I was already in that fiery pit. David, more comfortable with actions than emotions, tried to find a mechanical reason for Joanna’s death. He wondered if there had been a leak of cooking gas on Slip-Slider, but I shook my head. “We had a gas alarm installed. Joanna insisted on it.”
“Alarms don’t always work,” David said, as though that would comfort me.
“Does it matter?” I asked. I only wanted to cry. First my son had been killed, then Nicole had disappeared, and now, Joanna. I could not believe she was dead. Somehow, hopelessly, I thought Joanna might still be alive. For the next few days I fiercely tried to imagine that she had been blown clear of the exploding boat and was still swimming in the channel. I knew it was a stupidly impossible scenario, but I convinced myself she would somehow be safe. Even when they found Joanna’s remains I tried to convince myself that it was not her.
It was, of course, and when the pathologists were done with what remained of my wife, the undertakers put the scraps in a bag, then into a coffin, and afterward they made up the coffin’s weight with sand before David buried her in the cemetery high on the hill where she and I had used to sit and watch the channel. Joanna was buried in the same grave as our son, Dickie, who had also died in an explosion just as a year was blossoming into new life.
A navy boat scooped up what remained of Slip-Slider, and the wreckage was brought ashore and examined by forensic scientists, who confirmed what the pathologists had already deduced from their examination of Joanna’s remains. My wife had been killed by a bomb.
I remember gaping at Sergeant Brian Callendar when he told me that news, and I again tried to deny the undeniable. “No, no.”
“I’m sorry, Tim. It’s true.”
There was not much physical wreckage for the forensic scientists to analyze; just the life buoy, some shredded cushions from the cockpit, a plastic bucket, the man-overboard buoy, the radar reflector, the dinghy, one oar, the shaft of a boathook, and the wooden jackstaff to which the red ensign, scarred by the bomb blast, was still attached. It was in the shaft of the jackstaff that the scientists discovered a tiny cogwheel which they later identified as coming from a very common brand of alarm clock, and I was able to confirm that to the best of my knowledge there had been no such clock on board Slip-Slider, which meant the cheap alarm must have been used to trigger the bomb’s detonator.