roaring green. She spoke about the little people on her back and her duties, her rushing and scurrying and fighting with the wind; she told great truths that were lost as soon as uttered, blown away and buried in the dark. Becky clenched her fists, writhing; woke to hear still the bang and slap of the sea, slept again.
She came round to someone gently shaking her shoulder. Again she was disoriented. The motion of the boat was stopped; lamps burned in the cabin; through the port other lights gleamed, made rippling reflections that reached to within inches of the glass. From outside came a sound she knew; the fast rap and flutter of halyards against masts, night noise of a harbour of boats. She swung her legs down blearily; rubbed her face, not knowing where she was. Not daring to ask.
A meal was laid in the cabin, great kedgerees of rice and shellfish pieces, mushroom and eggs. Surprisingly, she was hungry; she sat shoulder to shoulder with the boy who had spoken for her, had she realised argued for her life in the bright afternoon. She ate mechanically and quickly, eyes not leaving her plate; round her the talk flowed, unheeding. She crouched small, glad to be forgotten.
They took her with them when they went ashore. In the dinghy she felt more at ease. They sat in a water- front bar, in France, drank bottle on bottle of wine till her head spun again and voices and noise seemed blended in a warm roaring. She snuggled, on the Welshman’s knees, feeling safe again and wanted. She tried to talk then, about the fossils in the rocks and her father and the Church and swimming and nearly being drowned; they scumbled her hair, laughing, not understanding. The wine ran down her neck inside the sweater; she laughed back and watched the lamps spin, head drooping, lids half closed on dark-lashed brown eyes. ‘Ahoy White Boat…'
She stood shivering, seeing the lamps drive spindled images into the water, hearing men reel along the quay, hearing the shouts, feeling still the tingling surprise of foreignness. While White Boat answered faint from the mass of vessels, the tender crept splashing out of the night.
She was still barefooted; she felt the water tart against her ankles as she scuttled down to catch the dinghy’s bow. ‘Here,’ said David. ‘Not puttin’ you to bed twice in a bloody day…’
She felt her head hit the rolled blankets that served as a pillow; muttered and grinned, pushed blearily at the waistband of her jeans, gave up, collapsed in sleep. The miles of water slid past, chuckling in a dream.
She woke quickly to darkness, knowing once more she’d been fooled. They had
slipped out of harbour, in the night; that heave and roll, chuckling and bowstring sense of
tightness, was the feel of the open sea.
White Boat, and these people, never slept.
There were voices again. And lights gleaming, rattle of descending sails, scrape of
something rolling against the hull. Scufflings then, and thuds. She lay curled in the bunk,
face turned away from the cabin.
‘No, she’s asleep…’
‘Easy with that now, man…’
She chuckled, silently: The clink of bottles, thump of secret bales, amused her. There was nothing more to fear; these people were smugglers.
She woke heavy and irritable. The source of irritation was for a time mysterious. She attempted, unwillingly, to analyse her feelings; for her, an unusual exercise. The wildest, most romantic notions of White Boat were true; yet she was cheated. This she knew instinctively. She saw the village street then, the little black clustering houses, the church. The priest mouthing silently, condemning; her father, black-faced, slowly unfastening his broad buckled belt. To this she would return, irrevocably; the dream was finished.
That was it; the point of pain, the taste and every essence of it. That she didn’t belong, aboard White Boat. She never would. Abruptly she found herself hating her crew for the knowledge they had given so freely. They should have beaten her, loved her till she bled, tied her feet, slammed her into the deep green sea. They had done nothing because to them she was worth nothing. Not even death.
She refused food, for the second time. She thought the skipper looked at her with worried eyes. She ignored him; she took up her old position, gripping the friendly thickness of the mast. The day was sunny and bright; the boat moved fast, under the great spread whiteness of a Genoa, dipping lee scuppers under, jouncing through the sea. Almost she wished for the sickness of the day before, the hour when she’d wanted so urgently to die. As White Boat raised, slowly, the coast of England.
Her mind seemed split now into halves, one part wanting the voyage indefinitely prolonged, the other needing to rush on disaster, have it over and done. The day faded slowly to dusk, dusk to deep night. In the dark she saw the cressets of a signal tower, flaring moving pinpoints; and another answering it, and another far beyond. They would be signalling for her, without a doubt; calling across the moors, through all the long bays. She curled her lip. She had discovered cynicism. The wind blew chill across the sea.
Forward of the mast, a hatch gave access to the sail locker. She lowered herself into it, curled atop the big sausage shapes of canvas. The bulkhead door, ajar and creaking, showed shifting gleams of yellow from the cabin lamps. Here the water noise was intensified; she listened sullenly to the chuckle and seethe, half wanting in her bitterness the boat to strike some reef and drown. While the light moved, forward and back across the sloping painted walls. She began picking half unconsciously at the paint, crumbling little brittle flakes in her palm. The loose boards interested her.
By the lamplight she saw part of the wooden side move slightly, out of time with the upright that supported it. She edged across, pulled experimentally. There was a hatch, behind it a space into which she could reach her arm. She groped tentatively, drew out a slim oil-cloth packet. Then another. There were many of them, crowded away in the double hull; little things, not much bigger than the boxes of lucifers she bought sometimes in the village shop.
On impulse she pushed one of them into the waistband of her trews. Scurried the rest out of sight again, closed the trap, sat frowning. Rubbing the little packet, feeling it warm slowly against her flesh, determined for the first time in her life to steal. Wanting some part of White Boat maybe, something to hold at night and remember. Something precious.
Somebody had been very careless.
There was a voice above her, a moving of feet on the deck. She scrambled guiltily, climbed back through the hatch. But they weren’t interested in her. Ahead the coastline showed solid, velvet-black; she saw the loom of twin headlands, faintest gleam of waves round long stone moles. Realised with a shock and thrill of coldness that she was home. She saw other things, heresies that stopped her breath. Machines, uncovered now, whirred and ticked in the cabin. Bands of light flickered pink, moved against a scale of figures; she heard the chanting as they edged into the bay, seven fathoms, five, four. As the devil boat came in, with nobody at the lead…
The dinghy, swung from its place atop the cabin, thumped into the sea. She scrambled down, clutching her parcelled dress. Another bundle was lowered, heavier, chinking musically. For her father, she was told; and to say, ‘twas from the Boat. A bribe of silence that, or a double bluff; confession of a little crime to hide one monstrously worse. They called to her, low-voiced; she waved mechanically, seeing as she turned away the last descending flutter of the jib. The dinghy headed in slow, the Welsh boy at the tiller. She knelt upright on the bottom boards till the boat bumped the mole, grated and rolled. She was out then quickly, scuttling away. He called her as she reached the bottom of the path. She turned waiting, a frail shadow in the night.
He seemed unsure how to go on. ‘You must understand, see,’ he said unhappily. ‘You must never do this again. Do you understand, Becky?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Good-bye.’ Turned and ran again up the path to the stream, over the bridge to home.
There was a window they always left open, over the washhouse roof. She left the bundles in the outhouse; the door hinge creaked as she closed it but nothing stirred. She climbed cautiously, padded through the dark to her room. Lay on the bed, feeling the faint rocking that meant mystically she was still in communion with the great boat down there in the bay. A last conscious thought made her pull the package from her waist; tuck it firmly beneath the layers of the mattress.
Her father seemed in the dawn light a stranger. There was no explanation she cared to give him, nothing to say. She was still drugged with sleep; she felt with indifference the unbuckling of her trews, heard him draw the belt slow through his hands. Dazed, she imagined the beating would have no power to hurt; she was wrong. The pain exploded forward and back through her body, stabbed in red flashes behind her eyes. She squeezed the bed rail, needing to die, knowing disjointedly there was no help in words. Her body had sprung from rock and shale, the gloomy vastness of the fields; the strap fell not on her but on the headlands, the rocks, the sea. Exorcising the loneliness of the place, the misery and hopelessness and pain.
