“I don’t believe.” Her voice came down from the coachroof where she was catching the sun’s small ration of mid-day warmth. I was in the cabin with bits of the engine spread around me. If we were to reach the place of Nadeznha Bannister’s death and intercept Wildtrack’s return, then I would need the bloody engine.
Because in the night a flat calm had quietened the sea and by dawn the smoke from our chimney was drifting with the boat. The sails hung like washing. The glass was steady and the sky was palely and innocently veined with high wispy cloud.
“I can’t believe in God.” Angela had evidently been thinking about it.
“Stay on a boat long enough, and you’ll believe.” I wondered if prayer would help the engine.
“Ouch,” Angela said.
“What?”
“Vicky’s claws.”
“Throw her overboard.” The damned cat had spent the whole night in the sleeping bag with us. Every time I turfed it out it would come back, purring like a two-stroke and burrowing down for warmth.
“If you think sailing encourages belief in God,” Angela said pedantically, “then do you think Fanny Mulder believes?”
“Deep in his dim soul,” I said, “I expect he does. I agree that Fanny’s not a very good advertisement for God’s workmanship, but there you are; I have my theological problems just like you.” I decided I also had a problem with the engine’s wiring system. I began spraying silicon everywhere.
“What are you doing?” Angela heard the aerosol’s hiss.
“Debugging the electrics.”
“Do you want to debug me of this cat?”
“Why can’t you do it yourself?”
“Because I want you to do it.”
I pulled myself up to the cockpit and laughed. I’d been invited topsides, not because of the cat, but because Angela was lying naked on the port coaming. I threw the cat up on to the slack mainsail where she did her spider performance, then I leaned over and kissed Angela. “Do you feel like a debauched man?” she asked.
“I feel happy.”
“Poor Nick.” She stared out at the glassy sea. “Was Melissa unfaithful to you?”
“All the time.”
She turned her face back to mine. We were upside down to each other. “Did it hurt?”
“Of course.”
She stroked my face. “This won’t hurt anyone, Nick.”
“No.”
“You are an ugly sod, Nick, but I love you.” It was the first time she had said it, and I kissed her. “I love you.”
“But…” she began.
“No buts,” I said quickly, “not yet.”
We floated on an empty sea. The glass stayed steady. The North Atlantic had calmed.
More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. The motor started.
We went west under the engine, leaving a trace as straight as a plough-furrow in the sea behind. So long as the engine was charging the batteries I left the VHF switched on to Channel 16. Its range was no more than fifty or sixty miles, but if any boats were talking within that circle I would hear them, and then I could ask if they had news of Wildtrack. I heard nothing. I took the short-wave to pieces and discovered that water had somehow penetrated the case.
The intricate circuits were now a mess of rust and mould. I gave up on the wretched thing. I lost my trailing log when it snagged on a piece of flotsam and tore itself free and, though I turned the boat upside down, I could not find either of the spares which I was certain I had stored on board.
The sea was no longer smooth. A tiny wind rippled it and a long swell stirred beneath the hull. I tapped the glass again and saw the needle sink a trifle. The clouds thickened. I took running sights of the sun and, logless now, measured our progress between the sights with chips of wood. Angela timed the chips with a stopwatch as they floated past the twenty-five measured feet I’d marked on Sycorax’s starboard gunwale. The chips averaged three and a half seconds which, multiplied by a hundred, then divided into the twenty-five feet times sixty, meant that the motor was pushing us along at just over 4.2 knots. We were running against a half-knot current, so our progress was slow.
“Why, great mariner,” Angela asked icily, “do you not have a speedometer?”
“You mean an electronic log?”
“I mean a speedometer, you jerk.”
“Because it’s a nasty modern thing that can go wrong.”
“Stopwatches can go wrong.”
“Put it back in its bag,” I said, “while I think of an answer.” It was in those middle days of the voyage that Angela learned to sail Sycorax. She stood her own watches while I slept below. Life eased for me. And for her. The seasickness was gone and she seemed like a new woman. The strains of London and ambition were washed out by a healthier life. She looked good, she laughed, and her sinewy body grew stronger. The winds also strengthened until we were under sail alone, beating stiffly westwards, close-hauled all the way, but I knew we must soon turn south to run down on the place where a girl had died. Day by day we could see the pencil line closing on the cross, yet it still did not seem real that we sailed to a place of revenge.
What seemed real was the two of us. It was a child’s game that we played, only we called it love and, like all lovers, we thought it could never end. We had run away together for an adventure, but the adventure now had little to do with Kassouli or Bannister; Angela’s naked finger on her left hand showed the truth of that. We were happy, but I suppose neither of us forgot the cloud that waited beyond the western horizon. We just stopped talking of it.
We were busy too. A small boat made of wood and powered by cotton generates work. I repaired the broken cleat, sewed sails, and touched up worn varnish. Our lives depended on the boat, and there was a simple, life-saving rule that no job should ever be deferred.
The smallest gap in a sail seam had to be repaired before it ripped into useless shreds. It was a life that imposed its own discipline, and thus enjoyment. “But for ever?” Angela asked.
I was caulking the bridge deck where the mizzen had strained a timber. “For as long as it takes.”
“For as long as what takes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nick!”
I leaned back on the thwart. “I remember waking up in the helicopter after I was wounded. I knew I was hurt bad. The morphine was wearing off and I was suddenly very frightened of dying. But I promised myself that if I lived I’d give myself to the sea. Just like this.” I nodded towards the monotony of the grey-green waves.
“That stuff,” I said, “is the most dangerous thing in the world. If you’re lazy with it, or dishonest with it, or try to cheat it, it will kill you. Is that an answer?”
Angela stared at the sea. We were under full sail, close-hauled and making good progress. Sycorax felt good; tight and disciplined and purposeful. “What about your children?” she asked suddenly.
“Are you abandoning them?”
She touched a nerve, and knew it. I bent again to the caulking.
“They don’t need me.”
“Nick!” she chided.
“They need me as I am. Hell, they’ve got Hon-John, and Mumsy, and the bloody Brigadier, and the floppy great nanny, and their ponies, and Melissa. I’m just the poor relation now.”
“You’re running away from them,” Angela accused me.
“I’ll fly back and see them.” The words were inadequate, and I knew it, but I did not have a proper answer. Some things just have to wait on time.
We turned south the next day and our mood changed with the new course. We were thinking of Bannister now, and I saw that very same night how the two rings appeared again on Angela’s hand.
She shrugged when she saw that I’d noticed.