“Christ!” I suddenly felt the pain. Not the old pain, but a new one in my chest.
“I said don’t talk.” The doctor had half-moon spectacles. “Can you move the fingers of your right hand?” I tried and must have succeeded for he nodded with satisfaction. “Now the left? That’s good, that’s good.” His face did not reflect the optimism of his words.
“If you speak,” he warned, “do it very gently. Can you tell us your name?”
“My name?” I was confused.
“You were found without any identification. You’re now in the South Devon General Hospital. Can you remember your name?”
“Sandman,” I said. “Nick Sandman.”
He showed no sign of recognizing the name. “That’s good, Nick.” He had been feeling my ribs as I spoke, but now he leaned forward to shine a light into my eyes. “Where do you live?”
“Here,” I said, knowing it was not a helpful answer, but suddenly the new pain was melding with the old, washing through me, making me arch my back, and I saw the doctor’s hand dart to the hanging drip and I knew what would happen, but I did not want to sleep yet. I wanted to know how badly I was hurt, and so I tried to protest, but no words came. I saw the nurse frowning at me and I wanted to reassure her that I’d been through worse than this, much worse, but I could not speak for I was once again falling down the soft, dark and familiar tunnel of chemical sleep.
Where I dreamed of Sycorax. At night, when the phosphorescence sparkles thick in the turned water of her wake, I like to peg her tiller and go forward. I go right forward, past the pulpit, until I’m standing on the bowsprit and holding on to the forestay. I turn there and stare back at her. That’s what I dreamed I was doing, only in my dream I had two good legs. I dreamed I was standing on the bowsprit, as I had so often stood, and staring at the slim beauty of an empty hull driving through dark seas to leave an arrow’s path of light beneath the stars.
Thus should Sycorax sail for eternity; breaking the glittering seas and, driven by the endless winds of night, free.
Sycorax had been built on my river as a rich man’s toy, but built by men who only knew how to make a fisherman’s workboat. She had the lines of a fishing smack, a Brixham mule, with a straight bow, a raked stern and a gaffed main. The design was old, and proven by generations of men who had worked the dangerous Western Approaches. She was an honest boat, sturdy and functional, but made pretty by her elegantly overhanging counter and by the workmanship of her fittings. Her first owner, uninterested in speed, had commissioned a safe cruising boat that would doggedly plunge through the worst of seas.
Sycorax had known five good years until the Depression had struck. Her rich owner sold her, and, until 1932, she was resold every season by a succession of owners who must have found her either too slow or too expensive to maintain. So summer by summer Sycorax had faded. Her brightwork had become tarnished, her sails had blown out, and her paint had peeled. Yet the copper sheathing had kept her hull-planks as sound and dry as the day they were laid.
By the mid-thirties she had become a working boat. Her cabin was stripped of luxuries and her coachroof ripped out to leave only a tiny cuddy aft of the mainmast. Her long raking stern was cut short and squared off, while her mizzen was thrown away, which must have made her an unbalanced brute at sea, but she took the mistreat-ment like the stubborn witch that she was. Her name was changed, which should have brought her bad luck, but as The Girl Pauline she did five safe seasons longlining and potting off the Devon headlands.
The war ended that. She was abandoned; canted on her side in the sands of Dawlish Warren where the oxidised copper was ripped off her hull and the lead torn from her keel. Soldiers training for D-Day shot at her, her planks were sprung, and the rain seeped in to rot her oak frame.
My father found her on the Warren in the sixties. He was making his money then, pots of bloody money, more money than he knew what to do with. His leaseback deals on London’s property market had brought him a Rolls, two Jaguars, three Maseratis, and two Nicholson racing cruisers that were moored in the river beside our house. That was the Devon house where I’d been born. There was also a London house, a Berkshire house, and a flat by the harbour in San Tropez. For some reason my father fancied an antique yacht to add to his fleet. He loved flash things like fast cars and painted women and a son at Eton. My elder brother wore a fancy waistcoat at Eton, but, to my relief, the College wouldn’t even look at me. I was too dumb, too slow, and had to be sent to a dullards’ boarding school where I rotted happily in ignorance.
I only cared about boats, and in that long summer holiday before I went to my dullards’ school, I helped rebuild Sycorax in the yard where she’d been born. My father, like the first owner, ordered that no expense was to be spared. She was to be restored to her old and splendid beauty.
Her hull was repaired with a loving and almost forgotten skill. I helped caulk the planks and became used to the ancient sea sound of mallet blows echoing from harbour walls. We tarred and papered her, then laid new copper so that she gleamed like a boat of gold.
We lengthened the truncated stern to accommodate the new mizzen mast’s twin backstays. Teak decks were joggled home, and a new cabin was made where all the brass fittings my father had collected could be lovingly installed.
New masts were cut, carefully chosen from the north side of a spruce forest so that the trunk’s heartwood would be central, and not drawn to one side by the sun on the southern forest flank. I helped the boatbuilders adze the spruce down, corner by corner, until two treetrunks had become smooth and shining masts. We soaked the new spars in linseed oil and paraffin, then put on coat after coat of varnish. I can still close my eyes and see that finished mainmast lying on its trestles; straight as a clothyard arrow and gleaming in the sunlight.
Sails were made, sheets were rove, oil-lamps polished, and a dead boat came to life on the slips of a Devon yard. Her old name was deeply incised into her new transom, then painted with gold: Sycorax. A diesel engine was put in her aft belly, and the day came when she was lifted by slings into the mucky water of the yard’s dock. She still had to be rigged, but I watched that hull float in the tide’s wrack, and swore that so long as I lived she would be my boat.
My father saw my devotion, and was amused by it. Once she was launched, though, he lost interest in Sycorax. She was as beautiful as he had imagined, but she was not the slow docile craft he had dreamed of. He wanted a boat for long sunsets with gin and melting girls, but Sycorax could be a hard-mouthed bitch when she set her mind to it. She was a stiff sailor in sea winds, and too long-keeled for easy river cruising. My father would have sold her, but he could never bear to part with pretty things, and Sycorax was dazzlingly pretty with her gleaming brass and shining varnish. He moored her below the house like a garden ornament.
Once in a long while he would motor her upriver, but I was the only person who bothered to hoist her sails. Jimmy Nicholls and I would take her out to sea and set her bows to the vast waves that came in from the Atlantic. She could be stubborn, but Jimmy said she was as fine a seaboat as any that had sailed from Devon. “She only be stubborn when you wrestle her, boy,” he would say to me in his deep Devon brogue. “Let her be and she’ll look after you.” Six years after Sycorax was relaunched I joined the Army. I had rarely seen my father so angry. “For Christ’s bloody sake!” he had shouted. “The Army?” There was a pause, then a warily hopeful note. “The Guards?”