then lay back again and pillowed my head on the coiled genoa sheet.
“Sleepy?” Jennifer asked.
“Just lazy. I’m not used to being chauffeured.”
“Don’t you get bored with sailing alone?”
“I don’t always sail alone.”
She thought about that for a while. “Girls?”
“Thank God, yes.” I told her about the hitch-hikers who wandered the trade-wind routes; how they lived from island to island, boat to boat, and one summer’s day to the next.
“They make me feel very dull,” she said.
“I can’t think why. You seem very exotic to me.”
“Exotic?”
“Rich, beautiful and engaged to the King of Swiss processed cheese.”
She laughed. “I can’t think why you’re so nasty about Hans! You only met him twice, and he was perfectly pleasant to you.”
It was my turn to betray an intimacy; to offer her some vulnerability of my own. “I dislike him because he’s engaged to you. I’m jealous.”
She smiled acceptance. “How nice.”
It was that kind of morning. Flirtatious and happy, and the flirting sometimes veered very close to something deeper, but we both avoided it. I wasn’t going to hurry her. One learns patience at sea, and I would be patient.
By late morning we had entirely lost sight of land. The wind had died to nothing and the sea was slapping petulantly at
Jennifer stood up and, rather decisively, peeled off her jeans and shirt. The abruptness of the gesture somehow invested it with importance, as though she had taken another deliberate step on the road to intimacy. She was wearing a yellow bikini. I had been right: she did look good in a bikini. In fact she looked wonderful, and I said as much.
“I didn’t think you’d be able to resist a comment,” she said tartly.
“And I very much hoped I wouldn’t be able to resist one.”
The hull rocked in the small waves as the sails slatted from side to side. Jennifer abandoned trying to sail
I assumed Daddy was Sir Leon. “Why not?”
“He thought Inspector Abbott should go. I persuaded him that I stood a better chance of convincing you.”
“If you’d have dressed like that, you’d have succeeded.”
“If we become friends,” she said, “will you persist in making sexist remarks?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. “You are a philistine.”
“So why did you go to the Azores?” I asked.
She paused for a heartbeat, wondering whether to offer the confession, then looked across at me. “Because I wanted to see you.”
“I thought that must have been it,” I said complacently.
“You are a bastard!”
I grinned. “For someone who wanted to see me, you weren’t very friendly.”
“What was I supposed to do? Jump into your boat singing ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’?”
“It might have broken the ice.” I sat up momentarily to check that no shipping threatened to run us down. Nothing did. The only vessel in sight was the mackerel boat which had drifted slightly closer. I lay down again. “I very nearly did go back to England with you.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because you made me feel like a puppet.”
“Something went right, then.”
I laughed. A gull floated above us, decided we weren’t a fishing boat, and slid away.
“Mummy likes you,” Jennifer said suddenly.
“I like Mummy.”
“Do you? Yes, I’m sure you do. Men always do.”
“I prefer her daughter.”
Jennifer treated that compliment as merely dutiful. “Did she talk to you about Hans?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“In the first place that he’s dull, in the second that he’s duller, and in the third that he’s very dull. She added later that he’s extremely dull.”
She laughed, but didn’t say anything.
“Is she right?” I asked.
“Mummy’s usually very acute about people.”
I digested that one. I’d left the VHF switched on to Channel 16 and I heard a squawk as someone called the coastguard to report their passage. I waited for the conversation to be switched to the working channel and, in the ensuing silence, looked across the cockpit. “Jennifer?”
“John?” She mocked my solemnity with her own.
Perhaps I wasn’t so patient after all, for I suddenly wanted to short-circuit the morning’s flirtatiousness. “I think I’m in love with you.”
She looked at me for a long time in silence. I wondered if I had spoilt the mood by being too serious, but then she smiled. “How very inconvenient.”
We smiled at each other. I knew then that everything was going to be all right. It really was. Hans had lost. I didn’t know how it had happened so quickly, or what would happen next, but I knew everything was wonderful. Happiness filled me like a great glow.
She sat up, pulled off her headband, and ran fingers through her hair. “I’m told,” she said happily, “that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?”
“There are alternative routes.”
She stood and gave my belly a reproving slap. “For now, John Rossendale, it will be the stomach. Lunch?”
“I’ll get it.”
“You stay there. I know what food I packed, and you don’t. Besides, you doubtless believe a woman’s place is in the galley, so why pretend otherwise?” She stooped and gave me a very swift kiss on the lips. I made a grab for her, but she was too fast for me. She laughed, and swung herself down the companionway steps.
I listened to her unpacking the food. I was happy, so very happy, transported to some new region of gold- touched, warm and loving contentment.
“Where’s the tin-opener?” she called.
“In the cave-locker behind the sink.”
“Wine glasses?”
“Hanging in a rack over your head.”
“Soup plates?”
“Use the big coffee mugs.”
She began singing ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’, and I wanted to laugh aloud because I knew she was as happy as I was.
