“No, it’s all right, Sir Peter. It’s just that my Christopher’s a volunteer on the lifeboat and they got called out just before midnight. He usually keeps in touch with the shore by radio when the boat’s out and so I can phone them to see that everything’s all right, but our telephone line’s gone down and so — ”
“You can’t. And so you need to use ours. Come into my study, and you can take your coat off.”
“Thank you, Sir Peter. I’m sorry if I got you up.”
“You didn’t. The storm woke me. Broke the window upstairs. It seems like quite a gale.”
“It is. I haven’t felt the wind like this since the storm we had here ten years ago. I just hope that Christopher’s all right. I don’t know what I’d do — ”
“It’s all right, Grace, everything’s going to be fine,” said Sir Peter with a conviction that he did not feel as he picked up the telephone on his desk. He had heard the underlying panic in her voice.
“Damn. It’s dead too. Look, Grace, I’ll drive you down to the harbor. It won’t take a moment.”
Mrs. Marsh weakly protested, but Peter remained firm. There was nothing in fact that he wanted more at that moment than to get out of the house and put a space between himself and the events of the night. The trouble with Anne, the debauchery of his dream, the blood on the floor.
“There, I’ve written a note telling Anne where we’ve gone. I’ll just get my coat, Grace. I won’t be a minute.”
When Peter came back, he found that Grace Marsh was no longer alone. Greta had put a coat over her nightdress and was sitting beside Grace on the old black bench in the hall, the one with the four evangelists on the front. As she turned toward him with a look of concern, Peter felt himself plunged back into his dream and it was only with a supreme effort of will that he fought down a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to take her in his arms.
“What? You’re up as well.” Peter blurted out the first words that came into his head.
“Yes, I want to come too. Please let me.” Greta’s green eyes glittered.
“All right. But mind yourself on the steps. That wind’ll blow you into the road if you let it. Grace, you hold on to me. I’ll have you down at the harbor in less than ten minutes.”
Peter held the steering wheel of the Range Rover almost in his lap as he craned forward onto the dashboard in order to pick out the turns in the narrow road that wound down to the harbor alongside the seawall. He was conscious of Grace Marsh straining forward just like him, as if willing herself closer to the harbor and news of her husband.
Going out on the sea now would be like signing one’s own death warrant, thought Peter to himself as he glanced out to the foaming mass of furious high waves beating against the shore.
“I’m sure everything’s going to be all right,” he said, summoning as much conviction into his voice as he could. “Everyone on the lifeboat is very experienced.” The harbor came into view through a sloping wall of rain.
“I know. Thank you, Sir Peter. It’s just there’s not been a storm like this one since 1989. And that was when…”
Grace’s voice trailed away. Peter knew why. The storm of ’89 had not only uprooted the great chestnut tree in the Flyte churchyard planted in honor of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. It had also ended the lives of two Flyte fathers swept from the deck of the lifeboat as it went to rescue a sinking fishing boat out in the bay.
In the back of the Range Rover Greta gazed out at the sea. She felt electrified by the storm. Never had she seen such violence. She heard nothing of the anxious conversation being carried on in the front.
Peter parked beside the Harbour Inn and walked down the unmade road to the harbormaster’s hut in search of news.
“They had them on the radio about half an hour ago,” he told the others when he returned to the car. “They’re expected back at the harbor mouth in the next ten minutes.”
“But what about my Christopher?” asked Grace Marsh. “Did they say anything about him?”
Peter sensed the rising hysteria in her quavering voice and tried to inject a note of reassurance into his answer.
“Nothing one way or the other, Grace. But that’s good, I think. They’d have said something on the radio if anything was wrong.”
Peter did not mention the atmosphere of gloom and foreboding that he’d found in the hut. More than a dozen men in there, and no one saying anything except in brief answer to his inquiry. The radio communication that he had told Grace about had been cut off halfway through.
The minutes passed without any sign of the lifeboat, and the storm began to die away. On the opposite bank of the Flyte River the landscape took shape. Tethered boats rode high on the churning water, and beyond the harbor, fields of waving reeds and grasses rose toward Coyne Church. Several trees stood twisted at crazy angles.
Like men broken on the rack, thought Greta, standing now beside Peter and Grace Marsh at the back of a small group at the water’s edge. Everyone had their eyes fastened on the mouth of the harbor where the Flyte River begins and the North Sea ends.
It was just after the bells of the two churches, Flyte and Coyne, had finished tolling the hour of seven that a boat came into view, plowing its way slowly downstream.
“Black flag!” shouted a man at the front, who had the advantage of a pair of field glasses. “There’s a black flag on the mast.” A shudder ran through the crowd, and Peter caught Grace Marsh as she stumbled forward in a half swoon.
Soon everyone could see not only the black flag but also the bright yellow caps and raincoats of the crew moving about on deck. They tied up at the end of a long wooden jetty and came ashore almost immediately.
It was easy to distinguish the shivering rescued strangers plucked from the murderous sea by their rescuers, men of Flyte whom Peter recognized from their other lives as bank tellers or fishmongers or churchwardens. Their faces, however, were haggard, drained by the struggle with a force so much more powerful than themselves.
Peter kept an arm around Grace Marsh and watched the silent men coming up the jetty in the hope of seeing his neighbor. A minute passed and the last man reached the bank. There seemed to be no one left on either the boat or the jetty.
“Where’s my husband?” cried Grace in the voice of the about-to-be-bereaved. “Where’s my Christopher?” As if in answer, Christopher Marsh and another yellow-coated man appeared out of the boat’s cabin carrying a third man in their arms. A drowned man. Peter could tell from the way that they carried him, as if it were a duty rather than an act of love. Their shoulders sagged with their load and their failure.
“He was on the other side of the boat. Drowned before we could get to him, poor bastard,” said Abel Johnson, bank teller turned lifesaver.
He finished his sentence with a mute cry of protest as Grace Marsh pushed him aside in her rush toward her husband.
“Christy. I thought you were dead, Christy. Oh God, I don’t know what I would have done.”
“It’s all right, Grace,” said her husband, who had had no option but to deposit his burden on the ground at the end of the jetty as his distraught wife threw her arms about him. “You mustn’t take on like this. How did you get here?”
“Sir Peter brought me. In his car.”
“Well, thank you, sir. It’s a kindness. Grace takes it hard when we go out at night.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t do it anymore, Christopher. Find someone to take your place.”
“Well, I don’t know, sir. It’s like a duty. My father was on the lifeboat and his father before him.”
As the two men talked, Greta stood looking down into the face of the drowned man. Blue jeans and a thick black sou’wester jersey. A black beard flecked with white, and thick black curly hair. A big, strong, seafaring man, and now just a corpse. A thing to be disposed of in an appropriate way. Morgue meat.
The man’s blue eyes were like glass. There was nothing behind them, and the last of the rain pattered down on his upturned face, causing him no discomfort. His hands hung limp at his sides. Five hours ago they would have been wiping the water from his eyes. From his blue, far-seeing eyes.
Life and death. Everything over in a moment as the drowning man’s lungs collapsed and he floated facedown in the sea. His whole huge life was gone, and now he lay discarded on the ground while people talked about the weather and a man embraced his wife.
It was this that struck Greta most of all: the extraordinary insignificance of the fisherman’s death. A man
