“How long?” I asked suspiciously, because I did not want to tie up one of our precious moorings for too many weeks.
“A month at the most. I’m having her delivered to Antibes.” He clearly wanted me to know that he did his business in fashionable waters.
I agreed he could keep Tort-au-Citron on one of the yard’s moorings for a month, but at that month’s end no delivery crew had arrived. Then another month passed, and still the abandoned boat swung to her mooring on the changing tides. Autumn winds shivered the river cold, and the first gray frosts of winter etched Tort-au-Citron’s rigging white, but still no one fetched her. Her hull became foul with weed and her coach roofs streaked with gull droppings. Telephone calls to Miller’s office elicited no instructions, so I sent him a whacking bill for the mooring’s rent, but the bill, like the boat itself, was ignored.
Not that I cared very much, for Joanna’s death had left me in a state of numbed despair. The house decayed about me, the garden turned rank and wild, and the boatyard only functioned because the staff ignored me and ran it by themselves. I wallowed in self-pity. I had lost a son and a wife, my daughter had disappeared, and I seemed trapped in hopelessness. For weeks I wept in the night, the tears fueled by whiskey. My friends rallied, but it was the friendship of marriage that I missed most; I missed it so much that I often wished I was with Joanna and Richard in their graveyard high above the sea. Christmas was a nightmare, and Joanna’s birthday a purgatory. David tried to comfort me, but his efforts did not work; my brother was never a comforting kind of man. To be a comforting man one needs a much greater sensitivity to pain than David either possessed or wanted to possess. “Well at least you might cut your hair,” he finally told me, “you look like a damned hippie.”
The mention of a damned hippie made me think of Caspar von Rellsteb, then of Nicole, and, for the umpteenth time, I wondered aloud where she was, and how I could send her news of her mother’s death. Since the bombing I had renewed my efforts to locate Nicole. I had contacted an old friend who now worked in Army Intelligence, and he had pulled official strings in Germany, but no one there knew of a man named Caspar von Rellsteb, or had heard of a boat called Erebus. Nicole had simply vanished. “If she knew her mother was dead,” I insisted to David, “she’d come home. I know she would.”
David muttered something about letting bygones be bygones. He wanted me to forget Nicole, not because he disliked her, but because he doubted she would ever return home. My brother, with his vigorous view of life, wanted me to dismiss the past and start again, and a year after Joanna’s death he tried to kick-start that new beginning by introducing me to a widow who had moved to our town from Brighton, but I bored the lady by talking of nothing but Joanna and Nicole. I did not want a replacement family; I wanted what was left of my original family.
David finally challenged me over Nicole. “Do you have the slightest evidence that she cares about you? Or wants to have anything to do with you?”
“If she knew her mother was dead,” I insisted, “she’d feel differently.”
“Dear, sweet God.” David sighed. “Has it ever occurred to you, Tim, that Nicole herself might be dead? Perish the thought, but that catamaran she sailed away on doesn’t sound like the safest vessel afloat.”
“Maybe she is dead,” I said listlessly.
“One prays not,” David said enthusiastically, “but whatever’s happened to Nicole, you simply cannot ruin your life wondering about it. You need a new interest, Tim. You’ve always liked dogs, haven’t you?”
“Dogs?” I gaped at my brother.
“Dogs!” he said again. “I mean I quite understand if Irene wasn’t the lady for you”—Irene had been the widow from Brighton—“but Betty’s found a charming woman who breeds dogs up on the downs.”
“I don’t want a dog breeder,” I snapped. “I want to find Nicole.”
“But I thought you agreed she might be dead?”
“Fuck off,” I told my reverend and insensitive brother.
David might have half wanted Nicole to be dead, yet oddly it was he who found her, or rather who brought me the evidence that Nicole might still be alive. It happened on the Sunday after our brief argument. I was at home, trying to ignore the whiskey bottle as I contemplated opening a can of soup for lunch, when David, still in his cassock, appeared at the back door. “It’s me,” he said unnecessarily, then dropped the color supplement of one of the Sunday newspapers on the table beside my can of tomato soup. “Mrs. Whittaker gave it to me after Matins”—he explained the newspaper—“because she recognized, well, you can see for yourself. Page forty. Mind if I have a whiskey?”
I did not answer. Instead, with a heart thudding like a diesel engine, I turned to page forty. I knew it was Nicole. David did not need to say anything; there was something in his demeanor that told me my daughter had at long last reappeared.
Nicole was in a photograph that showed a group of environmental activists harassing a French warship on the edge of France’s nuclear weapons testing facility in the South Pacific. The picture was part of a long article about the growing militancy of the ecology movement and there, in the very center of the photograph, was Nicole. My heart skipped as I stared at the photograph. Nicole. I wanted to laugh and to cry. The fifteen months of despair and sadness since Joanna’s death were suddenly shot through with brilliance, like a spear of lightning slashing through gray clouds. Nicole was alive, and I was not alone. My breath caught in my throat, and my eyes pricked with tears.
The picture, taken in black and white through a telephoto lens, showed a catamaran that was festooned with banners carrying antinuclear slogans. In the foreground an inflatable boat manned by armed French sailors was motoring toward the catamaran, which was wallowing hove-to in a surging sea. Six young people lined the catamaran’s cockpit, all evidently shouting toward the photographer, who had presumably been on board a French warship astern of the inflatable boat. Nicole was one of the six protesters. Her face, distorted by anger, looked lean and tough.
“Oh, God,” I said weakly, because seeing my daughter’s face after four years seemed something like a resurrection.
“Genesis,” David said. He was striding up and down the unwashed kitchen tiles, and was plainly uncomfortable with my emotion.
“Genesis?” I asked him, wondering if I had missed some subtle biblical point.
“Look below the photograph, in the box!” David’s tone clearly suggested that he believed this reminder of Nicole’s continued existence could do my life no good whatsoever. He drank a slug of my whiskey, lit his pipe, then stared gloomily at the birds in my unkempt orchard.
At the bottom of the page was a box in which the newspaper listed the various militant groups that were using sabotage, which they called “ecotage,” to jar the world’s governments into paying more attention to the environment. One of those groups was called the Genesis community, presumably, the writer averred, because its members wished to restore the world to its pristine condition. Not much was known about Genesis except that it was led by a man called Caspar von Rellsteb, who was one of the most outspoken supporters of ecotage, and that the group specialized in seaborne activities. They had attempted to sabotage the sixty-mile drift nets with which the Japanese and Taiwanese were obliterating life in the Pacific Ocean, and were believed to have attacked two Japanese whaling ships. The group’s activities were confined to the Pacific, where they had made strong, though futile, efforts to stop French nuclear testing. “It doesn’t say where they’re based!” I protested.