She smiled up at the coaster’s limp red flag. “I suppose I shall have to tell you. But you mustn’t laugh. I won’t have you laughing at me, even if I am a poor landlubber.”
Trelawney clapped a hand to one eye. “Nelson’s honour!” he declared, looking more roguish than ever. Then suddenly his face was serious, perhaps even a little anxious. “Go on.”
“Well,” said Miss Teatime, polishing the clasp of her handbag with one gloved hand, “it started with father, really. He used to keep a very nice cabin cruiser—a forty-footer, I think he called it—moored on the Thames at home. Of course, during his illness it wasn’t used and then when he passed on and there was all that business of the estate being settled I really wasn’t in the mood to think about things like pleasure boats.”
The commander nodded sympathetically. “So I let it go to one of father’s old business friends who had often sailed with him and was very keen to have it. I knew what the boat was worth, because it was in the valuation at two thousand three hundred pounds—and that was only just over half what it had cost two years before. But I also knew that Mr Cambridge wasn’t terribly well off, so...well, I made him take it for five hundred. He was quite pathetically pleased and insisted on giving me an undertaking that if ever he wished to part with the boat, it would—what is the word—revert?—it would revert to me for the same money.
“Anyway, I received a letter from Mr Cambridge’s daughter. He is in hospital, poor man, and terribly worried about that silly promise. And strictly between ourselves, he needs the money desperately. I wrote at once and told her to sell the boat for as much as it would fetch, but not for a penny under two thousand...”
An almost indetectable tremor passed over Trelawney’s face.
“...and now back has come that dear, foolish woman’s reply. No—I must have the boat or no one else will. Final. Flat. Now can you understand how anyone could be so stubborn?”
The commander’s expression said that he certainly could not.
“Mind you,” Miss Teatime added, “I must admit that the temptation is almost irresistible. When I look at that water, I can just picture the Lucy—did I tell you he named it after me?—gliding along with that funny little thing on the mast going round and round...”
“Do you mean to say it’s got radar?”
“I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s something to do with being able to steer in fog. Anyway, she really is a beautiful little ship and there’s nothing I’d love so much as to...”
She stopped, suddenly serious.
“Yes?” Trelawney prompted. Boats had become an altogether fascinating topic.
Miss Teatime remained silent.
“I do believe,” he said, doing his best to be roguish again, “that you’ve let out that secret ambition of yours. It’s true, isn’t it? You want to cast off.”
She nodded, but something seemed still to be troubling her.
He asked: “Was it the Lucy you had in mind all the time?”
“Oh, no. When I mentioned my...my ambition in that letter, I certainly was thinking of the sea and going to all those wonderful places like Naples and Marseilles and, and Mozambique—perhaps with someone to share the adventure. But it was only afterwards, when I got Miss Cambridge’s letter, that the idea of the Lucy came into my head. Oh, but no—no, it’s impossible. It would be like taking advantage of a sick old gentleman.”
“Come now,” said Trelawney bluffly, “you mustn’t look at it like that. These old chaps are very proud; it wouldn’t be kind to go against what they believe to be right.”
“Dear Jack,” she sighed, “you are so masculine and sensible about these problems. I suppose that comes of your having had to deal with—oh, I don’t know—storms and mutinies and all that sort of thing.”
He laughed, and she was smiling, too, but in the next moment she looked glumly into the distance and murmured: “I don’t know why I’ve told you all this. You see, there is nothing I can do about it, in any case.”
“Simple, my dear. Send Mr Cambridge the money. Ease his conscience.”
“I am afraid you are wrong. It is not simple. I do not have the money.”
Trelawney waved a careless hand. “How long would it take? A week?”
“Oh, no, longer. Perhaps three. As I told you, my financial advisers are an old fashioned and you might say excessively fastidious firm. They have no faith in any process that takes less than a fortnight. And by then...well, it would be too late.”
“How do you mean, too late? The man’s not dying, surely?”
“Not dying. But in a serious condition in quite another sense. Something called a distress warrant has been applied for by some people to whom he owes money, apparently. Miss Cambridge says that unless the boat is sold within the next week it will be taken from him.”
“Good lord!” Thoughtfully, the commander straightened up from his bollard and took her arm. They strolled in silence towards the lock gates beyond which lay the tidal stretch of the river.
They had almost reached the lock when he stopped and faced her, frowning.
“Suppose,” he said, “that I were to buy that boat...”
She shook her head quickly. “He would never let it...”
“Wait, though,” he interrupted. “Suppose, as I say, that I were to buy it—but in your name...”
“I do not quite understand, dear.”
“In other words, let him think that you are the buyer—at the agreed price, of course—five hundred pounds— when it’s really me who’s put up the money.”
“But Jack, I could not ask you to do anything of the kind. You do not even know these people.”
