It isn’t hard to sail a boat. The hard bit is the sea’s moods and the wind’s fretting. The hard bit is surviving shoals and squalls and tidal rips. The hard bit is navigating in a filthy night, or reefing down in a shrieking storm when your body is already so wet and cold and tired that all you want to do is die. But putting a boat into a wind’s grip and holding her there is as easy as falling off a cliff. Anyone can do it.
However, sailing a boat well takes practice that turns into instinct.
I had found, at that moment when I added the small pulse of speed to the long hull, that the instincts had not been abraded by the years of hospitals and pain. Nothing had changed, and I was back where I wanted to be.
The cameraman had appeared close in front of me. The clapper-board snapped, and I gritted my teeth and tried to forget the lens’s intrusive presence.
“Tell me when you first sailed, Nick?” Bannister asked.
“Long time ago.” I was watching the wind-kicked spray shredding from the rocks off Start Point. We were overtaking a big Moody that was idling along while its crew lunched in the cockpit. They waved.
“Tell me how you started?” Bannister insisted. The sound-recordist crouched at my feet and thrust a long grey phallus of a microphone up towards my face.
Bannister had to coax me, but suddenly I found it easy to talk. I spoke of Jimmy teaching me in a dipping-lug dinghy, and I talked of stealing my father’s boats to explore the Channel coast, and I described a bad night, much later on, when Sycorax had clawed me off the Roches Douvres, and I still swear that it was Sycorax who saved my life in that carnage of rock and rain. I should never have been under the lash of that northerly gale, but I’d promised to pick up a fellow lieutenant in St Malo and somehow Sycorax had kept the promise for me. I must have talked enthusiastically, for Bannister seemed pleased with what he heard.
“When you were wounded,” he asked, “did you ever think you’d be back in a boat?”
“I thought of nothing else.”
“But at the very first, in battle, didn’t you give up hope?”
“I wasn’t too aware of anything at that moment.” Now that he was talking about the Falklands I heard my answers becoming sullen and short.
“What actually happened,” he asked, “when you were wounded?”
“I got shot.”
He smiled as though to put me at my ease. “What actually happened, Nick, when you won the VC?”
“Do you want to cross the Skerries?” I nodded ahead to where the shallow bank off Start Point was making the tide turbulent.
“The VC, Nick?” he prompted me.
“You want to go inshore of the Skerries?” I asked. “We’ll get the help of the tidal current there.”
Bannister, realizing that he was not going to draw me on the medal, smiled. “How does it feel,” he asked instead, “to be in a boat again?”
I hesitated, searching for the right words. I wanted to say I’d let him know just as soon as I was in a proper boat, and not in some hyper-electronic Tupperware speed-machine, but that was unfair to the pleasure I was having, and the thought of that pleasure made me smile.
“Cut!” Matthew Cooper called to his cameraman.
“I didn’t answer!” I protested.
“The smile said everything, Nick.” Cooper looked back towards Angela in the aft cockpit and I saw him nod. The performing dog, it seemed, had done well.
Bannister, off camera now, crouched to light a cigarette with a gold-plated storm lighter. “You’re going to have to answer those unwelcome questions, Nick.”
“I am?” I let Wildtrack’s bows fall off the wind to take us east of the broken water.
“You can’t be coy about the medal, you know. The reason we’re making the film is because you’re a hero.”
“I thought we were making it because it was your thug who damaged my boat?”
He smiled. “Touché. But you will have to tell us. Not today, maybe, but one day.”
I shrugged. It seemed that this day’s filming was over because the camera crew began to pack up their equipment as Mulder took the wheel from me. To escape from the South African’s sullen company I explored Wildtrack. I’d been worried before I came aboard that my injuries might have made my balance treacherous, but I found no difficulty in keeping my footing as I went to the foredeck. There was pain in my back, though I fancied that the regular morning swimming in Bannister’s pool had done wonders to strengthen the muscles and dull the discomfort. I was more worried about my right leg which still shook uncontrollably and threatened to spill me like a drunk. That weakness was at its worst when I was tired, which was hardly an encouragement for single-handed sailing across the world, but at least my mobility on Wildtrack’s deck gave me optimism. I used the handrails and shrouds for support, but I would have done that even if I had never been wounded.
I dropped down a hatch and saw how the forepeak had been stripped empty to make the bows light. The main cabin showed the same dedication for speed. I’d expected a lavish comfort pit, but luxury had been sacrificed for lightness. What money had been spent had gone on navigational equipment; there was Loran, Decca, Satnav, even an Omega to trap very low frequency radio waves transmitted around the globe. The only thing I could not see was a sextant.
The rear cabin, approached through a narrow tunnel that ran abaft the centre cockpit, was more lavishly furnished and it was clear that these were Bannister’s quarters. There was an air-conditioner, a heater, even a television and a VCR built into the bulkhead at the foot of the bunk.
Above the double bunk, framed and screwed to the bulkhead, was a photograph of Nadeznha. There was a line of print on the photograph’s vignette and I knelt on the bunk to read it: ‘Nadeznha Bannister, 1956–1983, 49° 18’ N, 41° 36’ W’.
I stared into the dead girl’s dark eyes that were now so familiar to me from all the other pictures I’d seen. She had been no attenuated blonde like Melissa or Angela, but a robust girl with dark skin and strong bones. It seemed a terrible waste that her bones were in the ocean’s deep darkness.
The cabin’s rear hatch slid forward and Bannister swung himself down. He seemed surprised to find me in his quarters, but made no protest. He nodded towards the photograph. “My wife.”
“She was very beautiful,” I said.
He pulled open the sliding door to the head and took something from a locker there. I saw it was a phial of seasickness capsules. He turned and stared at the photograph. “Greek, Arab, French, Persian and American blood. A wonderful mix. Mind you, it also gave her a fearful temper.” He somehow made the temper sound like one of his wife’s more endearing characteristics. “She could be very determined,” he went on, “especially about sailing. She was so damned sure she could win the St Pierre, which is why she was pushing the boat so hard.”
“Is that what killed her?” I asked brutally.
“We don’t know, not really.” He offered a theatrical pause as though speaking of his wife’s death was painful. “It was a dirty night,” he said at last, “a following sea, and Wildtrack was pooped.
That’s usually caused because you’re travelling too fast, isn’t it? And I think Nadeznha must have unclipped her safety harness for a few seconds.”
He’d told me nothing that I had not read in the inquest’s transcript.