Part One
I didn’t want to go home. I’d once sworn I’d never go home, yet here I was, plugging across the Western Approaches on a flooding tide in a filthy night.
In seven years I had been home just once. That first return had been a family duty and had turned into a family disaster. I had endured as long as I could; then, overwhelmed by responsibilities and harried by lawyers, I had sailed away. It was then that I had sworn never to return to England.
Now, four years later, I was going home.
And again it was duty which drew me back; family duty.
It certainly wasn’t homesickness, for in seven years of ocean wandering I had never missed England. I tried to persuade myself it was curiosity that took me north into the cold Channel waters, but curiosity needs the provocation of affection or hate, and I felt neither for my family. Yet now, if the message was true, my family wanted my return and so, dutifully, perhaps guiltily, I was going home.
The message had reached me in English Harbour, Antigua. It came from my family’s lawyers who had left the message with my London bank. I’d telexed the bank, hoping some dividends had taken me out of the red, but instead of money the bank had sent me news that my mother was sick and wanted to see me. It was the first time in four years that my mother had noticed my existence or, to be fair, that I had remembered hers. I didn’t want to go, but there was a pathetic appeal in the message and so I slipped my mooring and turned Sunflower’s bows to the eastern sea.
I didn’t hurry home. Indeed, and it might have been my fancy, it seemed to me that Sunflower sailed sluggishly right across the Atlantic. We spent a week becalmed in the horse latitudes and afterwards, when we made the westerlies, she developed a weather-helm I’d never known in her before. For the first time in her life, my boat became a pig to sail and I wondered if this new stubborn waywardness was some reflection of my own reluctance to reach England. Somehow we made it to the Azores, but then, a week out of Horta, a foul toothache erupted in the back of my upper right jaw, and I was tempted to believe that this new pain, like Sunflower’s weather-helm, was a mute protest against the voyage. The toothache got worse as I endured a long beat north before the west winds drove me hard towards the English Channel. I sailed alone.
Just Sunflower and me. Sunflower was a French-built steel-hulled cutter, thirty-eight foot long, with an angular hull that banged in a moderate sea and sounded like a demented field gun in a big one. She was twenty years old that springtime, and showed it. The mainsail on a modern yacht has about as much cloth as a bikini bottom, but Sunflower had a proper mainsail with some guts in it; a big bellying brute of a driver-sail. She had a proper boom too: a real skull-cracking spar instead of a stubby high-tech afterthought. She hadn’t been built with the modern refinements of in-mast reefing or headsail roller reefing; instead she had old-fashioned reef points that needed to be tied down by hand. On a cold wet night that can be a murderous job, but better to have fingers scraped raw and bloody than a mainsail jammed in its slot and threatening a capsize in a rising gale. Her foresails had to be dragged on to the foredeck in their stiff bags, piston-hanked on to their stays, then hauled into the wind’s face. She was never a fast boat, not compared to the gossamer-light multihulled speed-sleds that take all the ocean-sailing records these days, but Sunflower would have sailed you to hell and back, and that’s all a proper seaman should ever want in a yacht.
It was all I ever wanted, for Sunflower was my home. She and I had done a lot of miles. We’d sailed the southern ocean, rounded the Horn, run the Agulhas Current, smelt the African jungle, anchored off Indian coral; and now, because of a message from my family’s lawyers, we were pounding a Western Approaches sea; a short, grey, unfriendly sea that hammered the hull’s angular chines and shredded white into a stinging cold shrapnel that slashed over Sunflower’s gunwales to spatter me in the cockpit.
It was night-time and the wind was rising. It was England’s homecoming wind, a southwesterly, but there was nothing welcoming in this malevolent cold force. At dusk the wind had been force three or four, by midnight it was five and rising, by three in the morning I’d taken in the first reef, and now, an hour before dawn, Sunflower was riding a hard force seven. I’d dropped the main and was running on a working jib alone. That sounds cautious, but I did not shorten sail out of fear, only because I was dog tired. I dared not sleep, for we were near the shipping lanes, and you don’t take risks with the one-hundred-thousand-ton tankers that slam oblivious through the darkness. I’d seen one such supertanker just after midnight, or rather I’d seen the great block of her bridge beneath her steaming lights, but I hadn’t seen the tanker’s hull because the wind was shredding the wavetops into a grey devil-drizzle that danced above the sea. Sunflower and I had been racing the whitecaps then, just spits of light in the darkness, and I’d known the tanker would be
