I would pass Ushant on the French coast, then go to the great emptiness.
I made Melissa promise once more that she would try to phone Bannister, or at least think about it, then I took the bus back to Plymouth. Buses were cheaper than trains, and I had no Angela now to tempt me into high-speed but expensive travel. Another bus took me to George’s boatyard.
George, his workers gone for the weekend, was peering down at Sycorax. I saw he’d moored the fishing-boat outside Sycorax again.
“You’re not going this weekend, are you?” he asked me.
“Monday or Tuesday.”
“I’ll be glad to have the dock back,” he said as though there were yachts lining up in the Hamoaze for his skilled attentions. “So you’ve got everything you need, Nick?”
“I still need fenders, a Dan buoy, jackstays, a rigid tender”—my old dinghy was still at Bannister’s house, and somehow I did not think I would see her again—“fuel filters, radar-reflector, sail needles, courtesy flags, a couple of spare impellers, medicines…”
“All right!” He checked the flow. “I’m going home. Look after the yard.”
It began to rain. I went into Sycorax’s cabin and made myself a cup of tea. I screwed a framed photograph of Piers and Amanda over the navigation table and tried not to think of how many months it would be before I saw them again. Instead I wondered whether Melissa would telephone Bannister, and decided she probably wouldn’t.
Yet I had done all I could to preserve his life, save going to France and confronting him. Yet confrontation would do no good, for Bannister undoubtedly would not believe me. He doubtless would not believe Melissa either, but I had tried. Kassouli would win.
I told myself I had behaved decently in trying to save Bannister.
Melissa had asked me why, and I’d given her the answers of truth and justice which she believed, for she knew how important those things were to me, yet the real truth was both simpler and far less noble. The real truth was that I cared very little whether Bannister lived or died, or whether he deserved punishment for his wife’s death; the truth, however ignoble it might be, was that I had struggled to warn Bannister because that was my only way of staying in touch with Angela.
I had done it all for Angela. Each attempt to reach Bannister was a way of reminding Angela that I lived and loved. Each high-minded attempt to save his life was a pathetic protestation of my love. That was why I had tried so hard. It was unsubtle and demeaning, but also irresistible, for Angela had lodged in my desire, and life without her seemed flat.
I needed to go to sea. I needed winds and waves to blow that flatness clean away. I sipped my tea and jotted down what few items of equipment I still needed. I started a list of perishable supplies; the very last things I’d buy before I turned Sycorax towards the earth’s end.
Through the rain outside, coming from George’s locked offices above me, I heard a phone start ringing. I could not concentrate on the list of supplies, so instead I teased my anticipation by unfolding my chart of the Azores. The season would be ending by the time I reached Horta, which was good because berthing fees would be low.
I could resupply with fresh food and renew friendships in the Café Sport. I smiled in anticipation, then noticed that the phone in the offices still rang. And rang. And rang.
I banged my right knee as I scrambled up the side of the wharf. The curved coping stones were wet, throwing me back down the wall, but I seized one of Sycorax’s warps and scraped my way over the top. My knee was numb and my back laced with pain as I limped across the yard. The rain had begun to fall harder so that it bounced in a fine spray from the cobbles.
The phone, dulled by the window and the rain, still rang.
I slipped in a puddle. I had the keys to the yard’s outer gate in my pocket, but George never trusted me with the office keys in case I made phone calls that he could not monitor. I pulled at the door, but he’d remembered to lock it. I swore. The phone still rang.
I told myself it was probably only a customer asking about one of George’s endlessly delayed jobs, but it was a bloody stubborn customer who’d phone at this time of the evening. I found an abandoned stanchion and swung it to shatter the door’s pebbled glass. I reached through for the latch. The phone sounded louder now that I was inside the building.
I limped upstairs, thanking providence that there was no burglar alarm. I knew the phone would stop before I reached it. I smashed the glass in the door of Rita’s office, then tripped on the frayed carpet as I lunged across the room. I stumbled and, as I fell headlong, my right hand grabbed the telephone’s old-fashioned braided lead and the ancient Bakelite instrument slid off the desk to shatter its case on the floor. I fumbled for the fallen handset and prayed I had not cut off the connection. “Hello!”
There was silence. Except for the airy and echoing hiss that told me the line was not dead. I straightened the broken phone on the carpet and twisted myself round so that my back was against Rita’s desk. “Hello?”
“Nick?” The voice was very small and unnaturally timid.
“Oh, God.” I felt tears in my eyes. Then, stupidly, I really was crying with the relief of it. “Angela?”
“Nick.”
“I’m crying,” I said.
“So am I,” she said, “for Tony.”
I closed my eyes. “Where are you?” I asked.
“Cherbourg. Melissa telephoned.”
I said a small prayer of thanks for Melissa’s caring and compas-sionate soul. “I told her to.”
“I know. I don’t know what to do, Nick.”
“Stop Tony sailing.”
“He’s already gone. They caught the afternoon’s tide.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“Melissa called just afterwards and then I spoke to that journalist you told me to find and he said you’d been telling the truth. I should have believed you before, Nick, but…”
“It doesn’t matter.” I stared up at a calendar that Rita had hung on the wall. The calendar, which showed three kittens nestling in a pink blanket, was an incongruous advert for a firm that supplied VHF sets. “You must radio him,” I said. “Get a taxi to the Chantereyne Marina. Go to the office there—”
“I’ve tried him on the radio telephone already. It wasn’t any good.
He says I’m being hysterical. He says it’s newly-wed nerves. He says you’re just trying to stop him winning the St Pierre because you work for Kassouli.”
I scrambled to my feet to see if there was a clock on Rita’s desk.
There wasn’t. “What time is it now?”
“Nearly seven o’clock.” I subtracted one hour to get British Summer Time. “Nick?” Angela asked.
“I’m still here.”
“Can you stop him, Nick?”
“Jesus.” I thought for a few seconds. The answer had to be no, but I didn’t want to be so bleak. “What time did he leave?”
“He crossed the start line at twenty past three exactly.”
“Local time?” I asked. She confirmed that and I told her to wait.
I went into George’s office and ripped pin-ups off his wall to reveal an ancient and faded chart of the Channel. I dragged open his desk drawer and, among the pipe reamers, corkscrews and patent medicines found an old pair of dividers. This year’s tide table was in the other drawer. High Water at Dover had been ten minutes after mid-day, British Summer Time, which meant Bannister was sensibly using the fastest tidal current to launch his run.