There were terrible cracks and bangs as the sea pounded the boat. Lady Myre said she wanted something stronger than tea. She’d finished her rum, so I got my flask of Glenfiddich from my bag. She added cranberry juice to hers to hide the taste, though I told her I doubted this was a good idea. Our glasses swooped across the table.
‘Let’s talk about sexual organs,’ Kurt said. I said I’d rather not. ‘He’s a dry stick,’ Lady Myre whispered. ‘The slightest spark will ignite him. Cross your legs and hunch your shoulders.’
Kurt then went to the cockpit door and yelled, ‘You bloody bitch.’ I feared I was very much at sea with two extremely strange people. ‘Bloody fucking Pacific,’ he said. ‘If I’d’ve known it would be like this, I’d never have come here.’ Then he sat and delivered a monologue, for he hadn’t spoken for all those days. He said he’d lived on this boat for four years, had given up a lucrative veterinary practice in Basle and never again wanted a house. He’d left his wife because he was in love with his receptionist. For a year they hadn’t touched, but the atmosphere between them as they tended the Chihuahuas and wolfhounds had been electric, all day, and day after day.
‘Dear oh dear,’ said Lady Myre. A huge wave broke over the deck. Her open case slid across the cabin floor.
He realised he’d never loved his wife but he needed a woman and didn’t want to sail alone. He was now forty-nine and his moods veered from depression to elation. When young he’d read Nietzsche and thought of suicide. His father’s tyrannical moods had ruled the house and his mother was subservient to him – he’d died twenty-six years ago of prostate cancer. She was now eighty, Valium-addicted and with her memory shot to pieces. She didn’t know Kurt was alone on the ocean, she thought he was with his last girlfriend Leila, who was Brazilian and black and had no money and was so beautiful she was stared at in all the ports. She had three children, all with different fathers, and had deceived Kurt into thinking they were her brother’s children. She used to leave her knickers on the windlass and the rigging.
‘Dear oh dear,’ said Lady Myre once more. The sky was black with rain, and lightning forked the ocean. Kurt went outside and again shouted, ‘You fucking bitch.’ I was afraid he’d be washed overboard, leaving Lady Myre and me alone to manage the boat.
The wind, now gale force nine, moaned, and blue-black waves, fringed with white and high like mountains, cracked against the boat. Lady Myre lurched to the cabin, I supposed to be sick again. I refrained from mentioning the cranberry juice. Kurt said sailing was a metaphor for freedom, and the ocean helped him formulate his thoughts and to find himself. I thought of the Bounty and of being cooped up. I felt I had a better understanding of why they might have massacred each other when the opportunity came. Once again Kurt asked me if I’d like a sausage. He got out a packet of bright-red things acquired from the Pitcairn shop. I wondered why he resisted Hank’s fresh fruit and vegetables. I thought of the hunger of the ocean’s sharks and of how long it might take to die of hypothermia. I had a headache and felt very strange.
‘You look like an ostrich,’ Kurt told me. ‘You watch every wave. You go to the worst-case scenario. I am anxious, but you make me more anxious.’
Lady Myre returned, dressed as a pirate, in knee-length breeches and cummerbund, with a red-spotted kerchief round her head. She’d applied bright-red lipstick, green eyeshadow and a sickly perfume – Joy, perhaps, by Jean Patou. She lurched with the yacht, whooped and slid to a seat. ‘You’re very good-looking,’ she said to Kurt. I said I must lie down. I felt sure they’d manage without me.
I lay on the cabin bed and watched the waves pound against the window glass. I didn’t see how such a small boat could survive this pounding much longer. I hoped for a quick demise. The thought of first being cocooned with these two for a fortnight, upside down in the watertight hull of the cabin, seemed an unwelcome option. I imagined the Pandora as it wrecked on the barrier reef, the wailing of the wind in the rigging, the cries for help, which did not come, of the drowning men, some still in shackles.
I closed my eyes and again tried to remember the names of the mutineers with Fletcher Christian on the Bounty as he searched for Pitcairn: Alexander Smith, Edward Young, Matthew Quintal, William Brown. It occurred to me that I never used Lady Myre’s first name and that I didn’t know her unmarried name, and how bleached of meaning names become, and how hard they are to remember if they are unfamiliar sounds.
I thought of David Nelson the botanist, in that open boat with Bligh, racked by fever and gut pain and without even the comfort of a soft bed and a warm blanket as I had now. Bligh named Nelson Hill in Tasmania after him when he stopped there in February 1792 in the Providence on his second breadfruit journey to Tahiti.
I tried to recite the inventory of what they had with them in the open boat: twine, sails, some bread, pieces of pork, six quarts of rum, six bottles of wine, a quadrant and compass, four cutlasses, no maps … I wondered why Christian allowed them anything. He knew what a resourceful navigator
