I looked into his merciless gaze, but said nothing.
“You know it’s her, don’t you?” Fletcher demanded.
“No,” I said. “No!” And once again that simple word became a protest as well as a denial. “No, no, no!”
Fletcher was suggesting that my daughter, Nicole, had murdered her mother. Fletcher was crazy. It was not Nicole. Not my daughter. Not Nicole.
Richard and Nicole were twins. Nicole was always the leader, the braver, the instigator of disobedience and daring, though Richard was never far behind his tomboy sister. At ten years old they had been rescued off the cliffs to the east of the town, though Nicole, who had led her brother on the expedition to find gulls’ nests, had defiantly insisted that she and Richard had been entirely safe. At thirteen, in a sudden spring storm, their Heron dinghy had been pulled off the shoals by the town’s Lifeboat. The Lifeboat’s coxswain, being a good man, had first saved their lives, then given them each a good hiding and said that the next time he would leave them there to drown. Nicole had been furious, not at the coxswain for clapping her ears, but at herself for being trapped on a drying lee shore.
“She’s a wild one,” the coxswain had told me the next day, “spat at me like a cat, she did.”
Nicole became wild when she was thwarted. She thwarted herself most of all, failing in some ambition she had set for herself. Not that she failed often, for she was a capable and an extraordinarily tough girl. You learn about peoples’ characters when you sail with them in small cruising yachts, and I learned a lot about Nicole, even though she prided herself on hiding her feelings. I watched her in gales, in cold, and in fogs, and I never once saw her come near breaking point. The harder a voyage became, the harder Nicole proved. Her brother relied on humor to cushion hardship, but Nicole cultivated a rock-hard endurance. Sometimes that hardness worried Joanna and me, for it spoke of a lack of sympathy in our daughter, yet we also had much to be thankful for. Nicole, like her twin brother, grew into a good-looking adolescent with straight straw-colored hair, sea-blue eyes, and broad shoulders.
The twins had the attractiveness of good health and physical confidence, yet still there was that unsettling streak of ice in Nicole’s character. Richard could be immensely giving and understanding, but Nicole was intolerant of any weakness, either in herself or in others. Nicole had to be the best, with one, and only one, exception. Her twin brother Richard, and only Richard, was allowed to be her equal, and even her superior. They were inseparable, the best of friends, and Nicole regarded Dickie’s victories as hers, and his defeats as personal slights on her. Once, when Richard was beaten three times in one afternoon’s dinghy racing by a newcomer to the town, Nicole was furious. Richard was typically generous in praise of the newcomer, but Nicole regarded his victories as an insult. She swore revenge, but Nicole sailed a Shearwater, a catamaran, while Richard preferred a Fireball, which was a monohull. Nicole’s Uncle David, who had missed a place on an Olympic team by just one race, and therefore knew a thing or two about dinghy competition, warned Nicole that the newcomer was too good and that her unfamiliarity with the Fireball dinghy would lead to a hiding, but Nicole would have none of it. She practiced for a week and, at week’s end, in her brother’s boat and with her mother as crew, she routed the newcomer. She won every race and never once, according to Joanna, cracked a smile. “It was war out there,” Joanna said. “Terrifying!”
Nicole calmed as she grew older. By her late teens she had learned to put a governor on her temper, and by the time she went to university she could, as her brother lovingly put it, do a passable imitation of a normal human being. Richard had already left home, going, much to my pleasure, into my old regiment. Nicole, who had been suffering from a temporary bout of anti-militarism, had initially disapproved of Richard’s career, but the disapproval passed. She herself went to a north-country university where she studied geology. For a time Joanna and I worried that the constraints of scholarship might irritate Nicole into rebellion, but instead she settled down and even displayed an academic aptitude that surprised us both. Not that the old, angry Nicole vanished entirely. She threw herself eagerly into campus politics and succeeded in having herself arrested for throwing eggs at the Prime Minister in a protest against power-station emissions. When I said that it seemed damned silly to be arrested for throwing eggs, I was treated to a half hour’s scathing denunciation of my generation, my views, and my carelessness for the planet’s future. Yet, despite her passionate intolerance for any views other than her own, Nicole seemed happy and purposeful, and Joanna and I had begun to anticipate the day when we could fulfill our long-held dream of selling the house and buying a boat large enough to live aboard permanently.
Then, in an Irish springtime, when the blossoms exploded white in the deep hedgerows of County Armagh, Richard had died.
And something in Nicole had died with her twin brother.
She abandoned her studies and came home where, like a wild thing, she raged against life’s injustices. Joanna and I were advised to give Nicole’s grief time to work itself out like some splinter of shrapnel, but instead it seemed to go deeper, and there sour into a grim and hopeless misery. Nicole lost weight, became pale and snappish, and for a time she haunted the local churches, even going so far as to declare an intention of entering a Discalced Carmelite house in Provence. Her Uncle David told her to snap out of it, which she did, but only to hurl herself in entirely the opposite direction. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and three weeks later for possession of marijuana. Joanna and I paid those fines, only to discover that our daughter was pregnant and had no idea who the baby’s father was. Nicole herself opted to abort the child, and afterward sank into a sullen, vituperative mood that was worse than her previous extremes of religiosity and carnality.
“It isn’t your fault.” David tried to reassure Joanna and me, though David, who had no children himself, was hardly an expert on childrearing.
“I could understand,” Joanna had said, “if we’d dropped her on her head as a baby, or abused her, or disliked her, but Nickel had a wonderful childhood!” “Nickel” was the family’s nickname for Nicole.
“It’s just her nature,” David had said. “Some people are excessively ambitious and competitive, and Nickel’s one of them. It’s a Blackburn trait, and you’ll just have to endure while she learns to channel it. Right now she’s like a motor given too powerful a fuel, but she’ll eventually learn to control it, and then you’ll be proud of her. Mark my words, Nickel will achieve great things one day!”
Joanna had sighed. “I hope you are right.”
Then, that same summer, Nicole met Caspar von Rellsteb. She met him in our boatyard, where he had docked to repair his catamaran’s broken forestay. It was a Saturday, and Joanna and I had been trying to hack some order into our tangled garden when, late in the afternoon, Nicole came home and calmly announced that she was leaving to live with a man called Caspar. “I’m going right now,” she added.
“Now? With Caspar? Caspar who?” an astonished Joanna had asked.
“Just Caspar.” Nicole either did not know the rest of his name or did not want us to know. “He’s an ecologist. He’s also a live-aboard like you want to be,” she airily told us, “and he’s leaving on this evening’s tide.”
“Leaving where?” Joanna asked.
“I don’t know. Just leaving.” Nicole went into the house and began singing as she collected her oilskins and seaboots. For a moment Joanna and I had just stared at each other, then we had tentatively agreed that our daughter’s sudden and unexpected happiness might prove a blessing, and that running away with the mysterious seagoing Caspar had to be better than a life of shoeless desiccation in a French nunnery, or of witless drunkenness in the town’s pubs.