Sea Lord

be said for a good motor yacht.”

“Tell me one thing.”

“The beds are wider,” he grinned. Despite his professed nostalgia for sail, he was clearly proud of Barratry. “She’s a good sea boat,” he claimed with a fervour that made me suspect it wasn’t true. He gave me the guided tour, proudly showing me her radar system, the twin state rooms with their king-size beds and television sets, the immaculate engine room, and finally the famous hot tub. “I hardly ever take the damn thing’s cover off,” he said apologetically, “because it’s a bugger to fill up, and there’s hardly room for two in it, but the bloody salesman sold me on it.”

After lunch we fired up the motors and took Barratry out into the Channel. It was a warm bright day and Charlie opened up the throttles so that the twin propellers whipped a path of cream across a sun-glittering sea. The boat banged across the small waves, jarring from crest to crest, but, despite the discomfort, it was still an impressive display of power. “What’s her top speed?” I shouted.

“I’ve had thirty-eight knots out of her.” He throttled back, letting the hull settle into the water. We were already out of sight of land, but the Decca repeater on the flying bridge offered us a course straight back to Dartmouth. Charlie let the big boat idle while he opened two bottles of beer. Joanna came out of the cabin beneath us and went to the foredeck where she casually discarded her bikini top before stretching out on deck.

“Not a bad looker, eh?” Charlie wanted my approval.

“Every boat should have one,” I agreed.

“She works for a construction firm I do a fair bit of work for. She tells me how much to tender, and if her boss wonders why she’s got the money to buy a BMW then he’s got too much sense to ask. I might bend the rules a bit, Johnny, but I provide a damned good service. Hey! Joanna! We can’t see you properly! Come closer!”

“Get lost, Charlie.”

He laughed. He looked immensely happy. He sat on the helmsman’s chair, stripped to the waist, and I could see that he was as muscled as ever. He had always been tough, with immense stamina, and monetary success had not softened him. His skin was flecked with welding burns and scars, making him look as strong and battered as one of his beloved hand-tools, but, in the days I’d worked with him on Sunflower, I’d seen a new wariness in his eyes. Some of Charlie’s toughness had become mental and I guessed he was now a ruthless man to do business with, but I was an old friend, so the ruthlessness was never turned on me. “I might just do that, you know,” he said suddenly.

“You might do what?”

“Fly over to the West Indies. I’ll need a break soon, and I could take a week or two with you. We’ll drink some whisky, find some women, sail some blue water.”

“Sounds good, Charlie.”

“Like old times.” He had taken his eyes off Joanna and was staring moodily at the southern horizon. “My God, but things have changed. Do you remember our first boat?” It had been a fifteen-foot clinker-built wooden dinghy with a gaffed main and a pocket-sized jib. Charlie laughed suddenly. “You remember those two scrubbers we picked up in Cherbourg? Bloody hell, but I thought we’d have to push them overboard to get rid of them.”

I smiled. “I remember their boyfriends chasing us.”

“We saw them off, though, didn’t we?” Or rather Charlie had seen them off. I’d helped, but Charlie’s strength was awesome. We’d been eighteen then, cocksure and cockfree, lords of the Channel. We’d crossed in the dinghy to France on a night as cold as charity and we’d been ready for mayhem when we arrived in Cherbourg. “It was a good weekend,” I said.

“We had lots of them, my friend. Lots of them.” He lit a cigarette. “And we had some bad ones, too. Do you remember the food poisoning?”

Charlie had nearly died after eating some fish we’d caught off the reefs in French Polynesia. I’d nursed him back to health, but it had been a close thing. He grimaced. “I haven’t eaten fish since.”

“You remember the Tasman Sea?” I asked. That had been another bad time, a bitter ship-killing storm which had threatened to overwhelm us, but Charlie’s extraordinary stamina had seen us through. I had been at breaking point, past it in truth, but Charlie had sung his way through.

He smiled at the memory, but didn’t comment. Instead he shook his head wistfully. “I do envy you, Johnny.”

“I can’t think why.”

“Of course you can.” He lightly punched my upper arm. “Free as a bird, aren’t you? No kids, no wife, no accountant. Just wall-to-wall Joannas wherever you go.”

“Not always, Charlie.”

“But enough, eh?” he asked seriously.

“Enough,” I reassured him.

“You’re a lucky bastard.”

“Meaning you’re not?” I gestured at the near-naked Joanna on the foredeck.

“Responsibilities,” he said darkly. He tossed his empty beer bottle overboard and lit a cigarette. “I don’t know, Johnny. I like making money, but the more you’ve got, the more the bastards try to take it away from you, so the more you have to work to hang on to it. I work bloody hard now, and it’s beginning to interfere with my pleasures. But when you and I sailed together it seemed to be nothing but beer and bare bodies.”

“That’s because I was doing all the work.”

He laughed. A mile off Barratry’s port beam a big ketch was close-hauled on a course for France. She looked like a proper boat, one that could take the blue water and Charlie watched her wistfully. “If I could make two million tomorrow, Johnny, I’d jack it all in. I’d follow you.”

I smiled. “It doesn’t take two million, Charlie.”

“But it does, Johnny. It does. I have to settle with the banks, you see. And I can’t just abandon Yvonne and the kids. I’ll have to leave them with some money. But if I had two million now I’d pay the debts, sell the company and never work again. In five years’ time I might just be ready to do it, but now? Now I’d need two big ones to be really safe.” He opened another bottle of beer. “Those two blokes, Johnny. They’ve scarpered.”

The change of subject was so abrupt that for a few seconds I couldn’t think what he was talking about. In the last few days I had become so absorbed in Sunflower’s repairs that I had almost forgotten Garrard and Peel. “How do you know?” I asked.

“Because I’ve been pulling in favours, Johnny. Asking questions. But no one knows where they are. Mind you, on the principle that most shit ends up in a cesspit, it’s likely that they’ve gone to London, but I’ve put the word around that if they show their scabby faces in Devon again, I’ll bury them.” He punched me lightly on the arm. “Forget ’em, Johnny. Just worry about getting back to sea.”

Which was all I was worrying about now. The memory of that bad night in Cullen’s yard was fading. At first I’d wanted to find Garrard, and repay him, but I’d been humiliated when I went to ask Jennifer Pallavicini for help, so now they could all get on without me.

“Charlie?” Joanna sat up On the foredeck. “Put some lotion on my back, will you?”

He winked at me, offered me the wheel, then went forward. He stayed with Joanna, evidently lotioning more than her back, while I climbed to the lower wheelhouse where I hunched down so that I couldn’t see what was happening. I was suddenly jealous.

I supposed that my mistake had been to come home. Till that moment when I had plunged through the broken water of Salcombe’s bar I had been a happy man. Now, suddenly, inexplicably, I was frustrated. One part of me did not want to go back to sea. It was not that I would ever abandon sailing, so long as I lived I would need blue seas at my boat’s cutwater, but I wanted something else now. I wanted a place to come home to. I wanted someone.

But there was no place, and no one. I was unwanted, except by my sister Georgina, and she was mad, so I would go back to nowhere because, for me, there was nothing else.

* * *

I sailed a week later. I’d provisioned in Dartmouth but, before leaving England, I sailed round the corner into Salcombe to say goodbye to Charlie. I moored alongside Barratry off Frogmore Creek and Charlie brought Yvonne and the children out to the boats. He also brought two bottles of champagne, one of which we broke over Sunflower’s bow fairlead, and the other we drank. Charlie insisted his children both took a glass, even the two-year-old. Yvonne seemed determined to disguise her dislike of me and to