“Very literally a bloody swelling,” Mary Clarke said to Angela,
“which presses on the spinal cord to induce a temporary paralysis, but which can usually be expected to subside within a matter of weeks.”
“Mine didn’t,” I said stubbornly, as though I was proving her wrong.
“Because you’d been severely traumatized. There was extensive burning as well as the bullet damage. In essence, Mr Sandman, you have a permanent oedema now.” She paused, then gave a grin that was almost mischievous. “The truth is that you’re a very remarkably scrambled mess. When you die they’ll probably put your backbone in a specimen jar. Congratulations.”
“But what’s to be done?” Angela insisted, and I was touched by the look of real anguish on her face until I realized that she was probably just terrified for the future of her film.
“Nothing, of course,” Mary Clarke said happily.
“Nothing?” Angela sounded shocked.
Mary attempted a nautical metaphor; explaining that my body had somehow lashed together some kind of nervous jury-rig that gave me control of my right leg. The problem was that the jury-rig sometimes blinked out and, though further surgery might help, the risks were too frightening. “Are you determined to sail round the world?” Mary asked me at the end of the bleak explanation.
“At least to New Zealand, yes.”
“You shouldn’t do it, of course. If you had any sense, Mister Sandman, you’d apply for a disabled person’s grant, find a bungalow with a nice ramp for your wheelchair, then write your memoirs.” She smiled. “Of course, if you do that, then you’ll become a completely helpless cripple, so perhaps you should go to New Zealand instead.”
“But…” Angela began.
“There’s nothing I can do!” Mary said sturdily. “Either the leg will function, or it won’t. All any doctor can do now is experiment on him, which I rather suspect won’t meet with Mister Sandman’s approval?”
“Too bloody right,” I said.
“But supposing he’s alone in the middle of the Atlantic when the leg fails!” Angela protested.
“I imagine he’ll cope,” Mary said drily, “and so far there’s always been a recovery of function. The muscle tone is good”—she looked at me—“but if you detect that the numbness is lasting longer each time, or if you see a withering in the limb, then you’d better seek medical advice. Of course they won’t be able to do anything, except slice you up again, but some people find the attentions of a doctor reassuring.” She stood up. “My fee will be a bottle of Côte de Beaune
’78, chateau-bottled.”
That was a good year for Burgundy, and Mary Clarke was a good doctor who knew that sometimes, maybe most times, the best thing to do is nothing. With which treatment Angela had to be content, and I had to live, and so we went back to Devon.
The good times began then. Anthony Bannister was commuting between his London house and the Mediterranean where Wildtrack had been entered for a series of offshore races. Fanny Mulder was with the boat, so I had Devon to myself. I also had the non-sailing Angela.
Matthew and the film crew must have realized what had happened between Angela and me, but they said nothing, and they were happy for me that Sycorax could make such progress. Her rigging wire arrived and, for the price of a dozen pints of beer, we borrowed a buoy barge so that its onboard derrick could lower the varnished masts into their places. Before stepping the mainmast I carefully placed an antique penny in the keel chock where the mast’s heel hid and crushed the silver coin. It was a traditional specific to bring good luck to the ship, but love brought better fortune as Angela freed all the materials for Sycorax. Suddenly there were no more conditions, only co-operation. I even gave the camera a limping description of what had happened on the night I won the medal. I heard nothing from Jill-Beth, and I let myself think that Kassouli’s threat was a chimera. Micky Harding phoned me a few times, but I had nothing to report and so the phone calls stopped.
Day by day the rigging took shape. Wire, rope, timber and buckets of Stockholm tar were hoisted aloft and turned into the seemingly fragile concoction that could withstand the vast powers of ocean winds. It was slow work, for if any part of the rigging was to fail then I would rather it failed on the berth than in an Atlantic force eight. I cut the belaying pins out of lignum vitae and rammed them home in oaken fife rails that were bolted to the mast beneath cheek pieces. The film crew gave up trying to understand what was going on; they said I was becoming nautical, which just meant that the vocabulary had become technical as Jimmy and I worried about deadeyes and gantlines, robands and leader cringles, worming and parcelling. The cameraman retaliated by presenting me with a dic-tionary, while Angela made Sycorax a gift of some antique brass scuttles. She called them portholes.
“Scuttles,” I insisted. They were beautifully made, with thick greenish glass and heavy brass frames. They had hinged shutters that could be bolted down in bad weather.
I screwed and caulked the scuttles home. Beneath them I was rebuilding the cabin. I made two bunks, a big chart table and a galley.
I turned the forepeak into a workshop and sail locker. I built a space for a chemical loo and Angela wanted to know why I didn’t put in a proper flushing loo like the ones on Wildtrack and I said I didn’t want any unnecessary holes bored in Sycorax’s hull. Why bother with a loo at all, she asked tartly, why not just buy an extra bucket?
I said that the girls I planned to live with liked to have something more than a zinc bucket. She hit me.
The sails were repaired in a Dartmouth loft and came back to the boat on a day when the film crew was absent. Jimmy and I could not resist bending mizzen and main on to their new spars. The sails had to be fully hoisted if they were to be properly stowed on the booms and I felt the repaired hull shiver beneath me as the wind stirred the eight-ounce cotton. “We could take her out?” Jimmy suggested slyly.
I wound the gaff halliard off its belaying pin and lowered the big sail. “We’ll wait, Jimmy.”
“Put on staysails, boy. Let’s see how her runs, eh?” I was tempted. It was a lovely day with a south-westerly wind gusting to force five and Sycorax would have revelled in the sea, but I’d promised Angela I’d wait so that the film crew could record my first outing in the rebuilt boat. I lifted the boom and gaff so Jimmy could unclip the topping lift and thread the sail cover into place.
He hesitated. “Are you sure, boy?”
“I’m sure, Jimmy.”
He pushed the cover on to the stowed sail. “It’s that maid, isn’t it? Got you right under her thumb, she do.”
“I promised her I’d wait, Jimmy.”
“You keep your brains in your trousers, you do, Nick. When I was a boy, a proper man wouldn’t let a maid near his boat. It means bad luck, letting a woman run a boat.”
I straightened up from the belaying pin. “So what about Josie Woodward? Who put her in the club three miles off Start Point?” He laughed wickedly and dropped the subject. I promised him it would only be a day or two, no more, before we could film the sequence I had dreamed of for so long; the moment when Sycorax sailed again. Two months before, I reflected, I would have taken Jimmy’s hint and we would have taken the old boat out to sea and debated whether ever to come back again, but now I was as committed to the film as Angela herself. I had even begun to see it through her eyes, though I still refused to contemplate sailing on the St Pierre, and Angela had agreed that we’d devise a different ending for the film; one with Sycorax beating out to sea.