We spoke of Bannister again. Now, though, Angela spoke of his innocence, telling me again and again how she had insisted on hearing the truth before they married. Nadeznha, she said, had been killed when a wave swamped Wildtrack’s aft cockpit. The grounds of her belief, I thought, were as shifting as those of Yassir Kassouli’s, but I said nothing.
“If we don’t find him,” she said, “and he’s all right, then I can fly home from Canada before he reaches Cherbourg?”
“Yes,” I promised her. She was planning her departure from me and there was nothing I could do to stop it. My immediate worry was the glass. It had begun to fall fast, and I knew we were in for a bad blow and that, by sailing south, we sailed towards the depression’s vortex.
We won that race by hours. We reached our destination before the gale reached us. We reached the blank and featureless place where, a year before, a girl had died. The clouds were low, dark and hurrying. The sea was ragged and flecked. I hove to at mid-day as a kind of tribute, but neither of us spoke. There was no ship in sight, nor any crackle on the radio. I wished I had a flower to throw into the sea, then decided such a tribute would have been maudlin.
“Are you in the right place?” Angela asked.
“As near as I can make it, yes.” I knew we could be miles away, but I had done my best.
“We don’t even know that Kassouli planned to meet him here,” Angela said. “We only guessed it.”
“Here, or nowhere,” I said. But the truth was that we did not know. We had sailed into nothing because that had seemed better than doing nothing, but now that we had arrived there was still nothing we could do.
Angela, her face hardened by the sea and her hair made wild by the wind, pointed Sycorax’s bows to the west. I let her choose the course, and watched as she sheeted home the foresails and pegged the tiller. The cat sharpened its claws on a sailbag.
“Perhaps,” Angela said after a few minutes, “they haven’t reached here yet?”
“Perhaps.” On my Atlantic chart I had marked Wildtrack’s presumed progress, and if my guesses were right then our meeting would have been a close-run thing, but the growing seas made any chance of a sighting unlikely.
Angela stared around the empty sea. “Perhaps they didn’t even come this way?”
“Perhaps.”
The seas were growing and the visibility was obscured by a spume that was being whipped off the wavetops. Angela, without asking me, but with the new confidence born of the days we had shared, reefed the mainsail and stowed the staysail.
The waves were running towards us; some of them smashed white on our stem and under their pounding Angela’s confidence began to shred like the wavecrests. “Are we in for a storm, Nick?”
“Only a gale. That isn’t so bad. I don’t like storms.” By twilight we were under the heavy canvas of storm jib and mizzen staysail alone. Both sails were tiny, yet they kept the heavy hull moving in the churning water. Angela and I were both oil-skinned and harnessed, while the cat was imprisoned below as Sycorax staggered in troughs of green-black waves that were scribbled with white foam. The sky was smeared with low quick clouds and the wind was loud in the rigging. Angela was shivering beside me. “Where are the lifebelts?” she shouted.
“I don’t have any. If you go over in this, you’re dead anyway.
Why don’t you join Vicky?”
She was tempted, but shook her head. “I want to see a gale.” She would have her gale, and was lucky she was not in a full-blooded storm. Yet even so that night was like an echo of creation’s chaos.
The noise is numbing. The wind’s noise is everything from a knife-sharp keening to a hollow roar like an explosion which lasts forever.
The sea is the percussion to that mad music, hammering through the boat so that the timbers judder and it seems a miracle that anything made by man can live.
The noise is bad, but the sight of a gale-ripped sea is worse. It’s a confusion of air and water, with foam stinging like whips in the sky, and through that chaos of white and black and grey the great seas have to be spotted and the boat must be steered by or through them.
After dark the wind veered to set up cross-seas. The main swell still roared from the west in big seas, but now the crests were saw-edged by the crossing waves, yet still Sycorax rode the waters like the witch that she is. We staggered up the sides of ocean mountains and spilt at heart-stopping speed down to their foam-scummed pits. I felt the tug of the tons of cold water on her keel, and once I heard Angela scream like the wind’s own eldritch shriek as Sycorax laid over on her side and the mainmast threatened to bury itself in a skirl of grey-white water.
Sycorax was upright, hauled there by the metal in her keel, the same metal that would take her like a stone to the ocean’s bed if the sea won this night’s battle. Except it was no battle. The sea had no enmity, it was blind to us and deaf to us, and there comes a moment when the fear goes because there seems no hope any more, just submission.
Water boiled over the decks, ran down the scuppers, and swamped the cockpit drains. I made Angela pump; forcing her to do it when she wanted to stop, for the exercise made her warm. The cold would kill us before the sea did. The sea might flog, claw and tear at us, but the cold would lull us to death. I made her go down to the cabin to get warm and to fetch the Thermos and sandwiches we’d made ready. She brought me the food, then went below and stayed there, and I imagined her huddled in her bunk with the cat clutched in her arms. I pumped as Sycorax climbed the crests and I steered as we careened madly down the wind-crazed slopes. The wind was making my eyes sore. It was a wind born somewhere in the heartland of North America, brewed in the heat of the wheat fields and twisted into a depression that would race round the ocean’s rim to take rain to the barley fields in England. Yet, despite the steepness of the seas, I sensed that this was not one of the great ship-breaking storms that could rack the Atlantic for days, but merely a snarling wildcat of a low that would skir across the water and be gone. On a weather chart this gale would look no bigger than the one in which Nadeznha Bannister had died.
Even before the night was out the wind was lessening. It still seethed in the rigging and flicked the water off the crests, but I could feel the boat’s motion easing. The gale was passing, though there was still a sickening wind and a cross-sea confusing the threatening swell. I opened the cabin hatch once and saw that Angela slept.
I hardened the boat into the wind, took down the aft staysail and hoisted reefed mizzen and main. The wavetops slashed across Sycorax and rattled on her sails. Angela still slept, but I stayed awake, searching for a yacht running fast towards Europe.
My search was merely dutiful, for I believed we had missed Wildtrack. The odds of finding Bannister’s boat had always been as-tronomical, and so I expected to see nothing, and when, in the shredding dawn, I did see something, I did not at first believe my salt-stung eyes.
I was tired and cold, and I thought I’d seen a lightning flash. Then I thought it was a mirage, and then I saw the reflected glow of the flare on the clouds above and I knew I’d seen that pale sheen before.
It was a red distress flare that cried for help in the middle of nowhere.
It flickered out, then another seared to burst against a dirty sky made ragged by the gale’s wake and I knew that, either by ill-luck or by God’s loving mercy, we had come to the killing place.
I pushed back the hatch and switched on the radio, but there was only the crackling hiss of the heavens. Sycorax was juddering to the short steep waves that ran across the grain of the surging swell.