Sea Lord

mast would snap, and the sea would pounce on us to tear man and hull into dented steel and bloody scraps. I was holding the tiller with both hands, muscles rigid, as the crest behind shattered to cascade like spilt ice down the wave’s dark face. Christ, I thought, but why had I done this?

The jib was flogging, shielded by the main. We were veering to port, I dragged her back. The wave that was carrying us collapsed, its underpinning sheared off by the rising bar, and Sunflower was suddenly nothing but a scrap of steel in the heart of a broken tidal wave. Water bounced halfway up her mast. A new wave reared behind and Sunflower’s keel began to drop, crashing down through an incoherent sea towards the hidden land that could fracture her steel hull as though it was an egg. Down we went, and still down, and behind me the new wave curled at its top and I saw the glassy black beneath the fractured white, and still we dropped and I saw that I would be crushed between the bar and the following wave, but then Sunflower, good Sunflower, began to rise. She fought her death inch by damned inch. The peak of the reefed sail was drawing, forcing her on. She had way on her still and she was cutting her steel through the water. She would not give up, but still that toppling wave threatened to poop us and I knew it could kill with a blow as easily as it could drown us.

The wave broke. The dark black glossy heart of the wave was blown apart as if by dynamite. It turned white as it tumbled and as it broke into a million fragments. It fell, and it would have killed me, except that it fell a foot behind Sunflower’s transom and the force of the sea’s fall was bounced up from the bar to lift and drive her on. On across the bar’s broken water, on past the Wolf Rock and the Bass Rock, and then, just short of the Poundstone, I gybed her again, and I knew I was showing off to the people who were standing ashore to watch my death. I was proving that I had mastered one thing and, in demonstration of that mastery, I had come home in style. So I gybed Sunflower again, turned her, and suddenly we were sailing into calmer waters as Limebury Point stole the wind’s brute force. I looked back. The bar was a mass of churning white, as bad as I’d ever seen it, but Sunflower had come through.

And I, in a proper job, had come home.

Charlie wasn’t at home. His wife, who had grudgingly taken my reverse-charge call, said he was in Hertfordshire on business. I could tell she was not pleased that I had returned. She believed I was a rakehell who might yet take her husband back to the sea. “When will he be back, Yvonne?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Her voice was guarded. Somewhere in the background a child whined.

“Tell him I called, and tell him I’m moored in Salcombe.” Yvonne promised she would pass on the news, though I doubted if she would be in any hurry. I wondered why it was that Charlie, my best, closest, and oldest friend, should marry someone who so disliked me.

I said goodbye; then, ignoring the impatient people who waited to use the public phone, I tried to reverse the charges to my mother’s house. There was no answer, so I had the operator call my twin sister in Gloucestershire. Elizabeth was not at home either, but her husband grudgingly agreed to accept the charges. He had once been a friend of mine, but he had chosen his wife’s side in our family battle. “Do you think we’re made of money?” was his greeting.

I didn’t bother to explain that I’d only just landed in England and had no small change other than American, Antiguan and Portuguese coins. “Is Elizabeth there?” I asked instead.

“No she’s not.” He sounded drunk.

“I tried to reach Mother.”

“She’s in hospital.”

I waited to see if he’d offer more information. He didn’t. “Which hospital?” I asked.

“South Devon General. They took her in last week. She’s in a private ward, which we’re paying for.”

The inference was that I should help with the cost, but I ignored the hint. “What’s the ward called?” I asked instead.

“The Edith Cavell Ward. It’s on the third floor.”

“Do you know what the visiting hours are?”

“I am not an information service for the National Health Service,” he said irritably; then, relenting, “you can go any time. They don’t seem to mind. Bloody silly, I call it. If I was running a hospital I wouldn’t want visitors traipsing about at all hours of the day or night, but I suppose they know their own business.”

“Perhaps I’ll see Elizabeth there?”

“I don’t know where she is.” There was a long pause as though he was about to add some comment, but then, without another word, he put down the receiver.

There was no one else to telephone. I knew I couldn’t reach my younger sister, who was the only person beside Charlie who might be glad to hear I had come home, so instead I rowed myself back to Sunflower and dug out a tin of baked beans which I mashed with a can of stew and heated over the galley stove. The pain in my tooth had miraculously subsided, which was a blessing as I’d run out of both aspirins and Irish whiskey.

It had begun to rain hard. The water drummed on Sunflower’s coachroof and gurgled down her scuppers. The wind howled above the moorings to slap halliards against noisy masts. I spooned down my meal and thought how I might even now be six seas away and running free.

But had come home instead.

The toothache had entirely disappeared by morning. For the first time in weeks I woke up without pain, except for the bruise on my ribs where I’d been thrown against the stanchion, but that kind of pain was an occupational hazard, and therefore to be ignored. Yet the tooth, astonishingly, felt fine. I bit down hard on it and did not even feel a twinge. The spontaneous cure and a good night’s sleep combined to fill me with optimism.

The bus journey soon dissipated that happy mood.

It wasn’t the Devon countryside which, though damp, looked soft and welcoming. Rather it was my fellow passengers. The bus was filled with young mothers and their squalling children. The sound of screaming babies is blessedly absent at sea and, suddenly exposed to it, I felt as if I was listening to nails scratching on slate. I stared through a misted window at the cars slopping through puddles and wondered how Charlie endured being a father.

The bus dropped me a mile from the hospital. I could have waited for another bus which would have taken me up the hill, but the thought of more screaming infants persuaded me to walk. I was wearing my heavy oilskin jacket, so only my jeans got soaked with rain. The oily was smeared with grease and dirt, but it was the only coat or jacket I possessed so it had to serve as formal wear. I climbed through the pelting rain and cut across the hospital’s waterlogged lawns. The big entrance hall was loud with more squalling children. I ignored the lifts, climbed three flights of stairs, and wondered just why I had sailed for six weeks across three and a half thousand nautical miles.

I had been half expecting and half dreading that my sister Elizabeth would be visiting the hospital. She was not. Except for the patients, the Edith Cavell ward was empty. On the wall opposite the ward’s two beds a silent television was showing a frenetic children’s cartoon. An elderly woman lay in the nearest bed with a pair of earphones over her grey hair. She eyed my sodden jeans and sneakers with distaste, and her face betrayed relief that I had not come to visit her. “She’s asleep,” she said reprovingly, at the same time jerking her head towards the second bed which was still surrounded by drawn curtains.

I crossed the rubber-tiled floor and gently pulled back the pale curtains.

My mother was sleeping.

At first I did not recognise her. In the last four years her gold hair had turned a dirty grey. Even in sleep she looked exhausted. She lay, wan and emaciated, with her grey hair straggling untidily from her pale forehead. She had always been a woman of great pride, foully excessive pride, but now she was reduced to this drawn creature. Her great beauty was gone, vanished like a dream. Her breath rasped in her throat. Every heave of her lungs was an effort. Once she had worn a king’s ransom of diamonds, but now she struggled for life. She was only fifty-nine, but looked at least a decade older.

“She had a bad night,” the grey-haired woman volunteered.

I said nothing.

The woman took off her earphones. “She won’t have the oxygen tent, you see. Stupid, I call it. I’ve told her, I have. I told her she should listen to the doctors, but she won’t take a blind bit of notice. She says she’s got to smoke. Smoke! That’s what’s killing her, but she won’t listen. She says she can’t smoke if she’s in an oxygen tent.