I looked upstream to the French yacht just in time to see the skipper take off his hat. He was a she, shaking out her black hair.
She went to the foredeck to bag the jib and I envied her the simple task. I remembered the sweet luxury of arriving on a mooring and knowing that once the small chores were done there would be time for a drink as the tide ebbed. Behind me Bannister’s famous and sonorous voice was telling my story. I tried to block it out, but failed.
I turned despite myself, to see my own photograph on the screen.
It was a photograph taken five years before and had once stood on my wife’s dressing-table. I wondered how the television people had come by a copy. It did not look like me, at least I did not think so.
My rattail mouse-coloured hair was unnaturally tidy, suggesting that a cheap wig was perched on my ugly, long-jawed face. “We’ll replace the caption with film, of course.” Angela saw I had turned from the window.
“Caption?”
“The photograph. We’ll have film of you instead.” My face was replaced by Sergeant Terry Farebrother who looked nasty, brutish and short in his combat smock. He had been filmed at one of the Surrey exercise grounds where thunderflashes smoked in the far distance to lend the screen a suitably warlike background.
Farebrother had cleaned up his accent and language for the camera and the result was a bland and predictable tribute to a wounded officer. It was as unreal as reading one’s own obituary. I remembered that Terry still had my kit in his house. Some day I should go and fetch it. He described the moment I was wounded; the same moment that had led to the medal. I did not recognize the description. I had not felt heroic, only bloody foolish, and instead of expecting a medal I thought I would be reprimanded for breaking orders.
Doctor Maitland’s pink and plump face filled the screen. “Frankly we were surprised he hadn’t died. The body can only stand so much shock, and Nick had been very badly mauled. But that’s our specialization here, you see. We make the lame to walk.” The picture changed to one of the physiotherapy rooms.
“We’ll cover these pictures with wildtrack,” Angela said, “describing how they treated you.”
“Wildtrack,” Matthew helpfully explained, “is an unseen voice.”
“Like God?”
“Exactly.”
Doctor Plant appeared and said I had an unnaturally high quotient of bellicosity that was more usual in a criminal than in a soldier.
Most army officers, she said, were conformists, but it was undoubtedly my pugnacious traits that had forced me to prove the hospital wrong by making myself walk. Somehow it did not sound like a compliment. She added that my bellicosity was tempered with very old-fashioned conceptions of honour and truth, which did not sound like a compliment either. I saw how Matthew and Angela were intent on the film, staring at it like acolytes before an altar. This was their work; a rough-cut film which told how I had been written off as a hopeless casualty of a bitter little war in a lost corner of the Atlantic. A West Indian nurse described how galling it had been to watch me trying to walk. “Nice to have the ethnic input,” Matthew murmured to Angela, who nodded.
“He’d be bent over,” the nurse said. “I know he was hurting himself, but he wouldn’t give up.”
“Nick Sandman wouldn’t give up,” Tony Bannister’s voice broke in, “because he had a dream.” The picture cut to Sycorax as she had been when I first saw her lying abandoned in the trees. “He had a boat, the Sycorax, and he dreamed of taking her back to the Falklands.
He would sail in peace where once he had marched in anger.”
“Oh, come on!” I protested. “Who makes up this garbage?”
“We can change anything,” Angela said dismissively. “We’re just trying to give you an idea of what the final film could look like.” The film described how the Sycorax had chafed her warps and been driven on to a mudbank in the river. “That’s a bloody lie!” I was angry. “Bannister wanted my berth! He had his bloody Boer move my boat.”
“But we can’t say that.” Angela pressed the pause button and her voice intimated that I was being unreasonably tiresome. “What happened was a regrettable accident, for which Tony is making amends.” She released the button and the film showed the caterpillar-tracked crane which had lifted Sycorax out of the trees and on to the front lawn. “Boat and man,” Bannister’s wildtrack intoned, “would be restored together, and this film follows their progress.” The screen went blank. They had been ten bad minutes, and now they wanted my co-operation to make the rest of the film.
“There,” Angela switched the set off. “That wasn’t too painful, was it?” She used the same patronising inflection that had so grated on me in hospital.
“What’s painful”—my anger made me forget just how attractive I found her—“is getting a bullet in the back. That’s not painful.” I waved at the set. “That’s rubbish. Bannister took my boat and my wharf. Now, because he doesn’t want the bad publicity, he’ll foist that gibberish on the public!”
“Tony rented Lime Wharf from your wife in good faith,” Angela said primly.
“My ex-wife,” I corrected her, “whose power of attorney expired when she walked out on me to marry that soggy MP.”
“Tony didn’t know that. And you have to admit he’s trying to put matters right, and very generously, I would say.”
“At least your bloody film didn’t mention my father,” I said.
“We wanted to talk to you about that.” Matthew, clearly made nervous by the animosity between Angela and myself, lit a new cigarette from the stub of his old.
“Bloody hell.” I turned to stare out of the window, but the French girl had gone down to her cabin. I limped to the far end of the room where Bannister had hung a whole slew of pictures of his dead wife, Nadeznha. The photographs showed Nadeznha at sea, Nadeznha in Rome, Nadeznha and her brother at Cape Cod, Nadeznha and Bannister in Sydney, Nadeznha in oilskins, Nadeznha at a fancy-dress ball. Nadeznha had been a very beautiful girl, with dark eyes and a happy smile which made me presume that no one had ever tried to coerce her into being an unwilling TV star. I turned back to Matthew and Angela. “Just out of interest,” I said, “who exactly is paying to repair Sycorax? ”
Angela was pouring herself some Perrier water. For a second I thought she was going to answer, then she gave me a very cold look.
“We are, naturally.”
My ribs hurt beneath the bandages. “We?”
“It’s a television production, Mr Sandman. If the programme wants to film the boat’s restoration then the programme budget will have to find the funds.”
So Bannister wasn’t even paying for Sycorax? He’d towed her ashore, then allowed his Boer brute to strip her of valuables, and the TV company would now pay to put it back together? It was astonishing. It was a venality that even my father would have admired, but not me. “No,” I said. “No way.”
“No?” Angela enquired delicately.
“Bannister wrecked my boat. Bannister can put it back together. Why the hell should I make a spectacle of myself for something he did?”
“You drink whisky, don’t you, Nick?” Angela asked.
I ignored her attempt at conciliation. “I’ve spent the last two years running away from publicity. Can you understand that? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being a man who won a medal. I’ve got other things to do and I want to be left alone. I am not a hero, I’m just a damn fool who got shot. I don’t want to be made into something I’m not, I don’t want to make money out of something that I didn’t deserve, and I’m not doing your film. So take the wretched thing back to London and tell Bannister to send me a big cheque.” There was silence for a few seconds, then Angela stood and walked to the window. “Look at it this way, love.” Her voice dropped nastily on the last word. “You accepted Tony’s hospitality. Your boat’s on his lawn. The first ten minutes of the film are already shot. Do you think any law court in the land will think you didn’t agree to all of that? Or to all of this?” She waved at the lavish room with its sunken pool and electronic gadgets and raised fireplace. “Of course you can fight the case, Mr Sandman. You can claim that you always planned to sue Tony, but that you first decided to rip off his hospitality.” She mocked me with a smile. “Do you think you’ll win?”