whole wide world, that the ship could be patched up. No alternative. Pity the place was such a dump, but still.
Vanderdecker called the crew together on deck and told them. We are no longer going to Geneva; instead, we are going to Bridport. As the all-too-familiar chorus of groans, complaints, accusations and other going-to- Bridport noises reached its crescendo, Vanderdecker walked away and opened the last can of Stella Artois. He needed it.
Man’s reach must exceed man’s grasp, or what’s a heaven for? For twenty years Marion Price had dreamed of a nice little cleaning job at a chicken-plucking factory somewhere, and here she still was, running the tourist information office in Bridport.
Every year, when the clouds close in and Aeolus lets slip the sack wherein the four winds are pent, about a hundred thousand miserable-looking holiday-makers with children dangling from their wrists traipse in from West Bay and demand to be informed as to what there is to do in Bridport when it’s wet. To this question, there is only one answer. It rarely satisfies. Nothing shall come of nothing; speak again. Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but that’s all there is to it. There is absolutely nothing to do in this man’s town in the rainy season except grow your hair.
You don’t put it like that, of course. You suggest that they go and take a look at the Bridport Museum, or the Rural Grafts Exhibition, or the Working Water Mill. You draw them little plans on the backs of envelopes to show them how to get there. They stand there, dripping, and stare at you, as if you were keeping from them the secret of the location of King Solomon’s Mines, and finally they take a few Glorious Dorset leaflets and go away. On your way home in the evening, you retrieve the Glorious Dorset leaflets from the litter bin on the corner and reflect on the vanity of human wishes.
Some of them, however, refuse to go away until you come up with something that sounds at least bearable, and these poor fools are generally advised to go and visit Jeanes’ Boatyard. As a cure for optimism, Jeanes’ Boatyard, which is open to the public from 10 till 3 Mondays to Fridays all year round, has few rivals. In the interests of research, Marion has been there once. Never again. There is a hackneyed quip about such-and-such being as interesting as watching paint dry. The paint-drying shop is the highlight of a visit to Jeanes’ Boatyard.
Here is Marion Price, and she is talking to a pair of hopeless, incorrigible, dyed-in-the-wool optimists and their seven-year-old offspring.
“Boatyard?” says the male optimist.
“The oldest working boatyard in Dorset,” replies the tape recording that lives inside Marion Price’s larynx. “Boats are built there as they have been for the last five hundred years. Traditional crafts are lovingly kept alive by master shipwright Walter Jeanes and his two sons, Wayne and Jason. Nowhere else in Dorset can you more perfectly recapture the splendours of Britain’s age-old maritime heritage. A wide range of refreshments and souvenirs are also available.” And the very best of luck to you, my gullible friends. Why don’t you just go back home to Redditch and redecorate the spare room?
A long silence. Jean-Paul Sartre would have savoured it. “How do we get there, then?” says the female optimist.
“Let me draw you a map.” Nimble, practised cartographer’s fingers that have long since sublimated the last dregs of guilt draw a plan of the most direct route. The optimists depart. The rain falls. Time passes.
Jane Doland, being properly brought-up, wiped her feet before walking into the tourist information office. It was her last hope; she had tried the phone book, the post office and the hotel desk. If they couldn’t tell her here, she would give up and go back to her room.
“Excuse me,” she said, “can you tell me where I might find Jeanes’ Boatyard?”
“Certainly.” The woman behind the desk smiled at her. Thank God. It was wonderful to find someone actually helpful in this dismal place. “Shall I draw you a map?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” said Jane. “I always forget directions, in one ear and out the other. Is it far?”
“Oh no,” said the woman behind the desk, drawing busily without seeming to look at the paper, like one of those machines in hospitals that draw charts of people’s heartbeats. “Have you been to Bridport before?” she asked. Jane said yes, once.
“It’s a lovely little town, isn’t it?” said the woman behind the desk. “Some people just keep coming back time and time again.”
Very true, Jane reflected, you don’t know how true that is. “This boatyard,” she asked, “is it very…well, old?”
“Yes, indeed,” the woman replied brightly. “Boats are built there as they have been for the last five hundred years.”
“As old as that?” Jane asked. “That’s quite a record, isn’t it? Well, thank you very much.” She looked at the map. “Which way is north?” she inquired. The woman pointed, and smiled again. Clearly she enjoyed her work. Just now, Jane envied her that.
As she waded through the puddles in South Street, Jane cast her mind over the events of the past week, starting with the slump on the markets. As soon as she had seen the report of the attempted sabotage at Dounreay and what had been painted on the wall there, she had set off for the North of Scotland as quickly as she could. It was no problem getting to see the protesters who had done the painting; she simply called the Inverness office of Moss Berwick and they fixed it, using their contacts with the lawyers who were defending them. It had not been an easy interview. None of the Germans spoke A-level German, only proper German (which is a quite different language) and all of them were clearly confused as to why they should be talking to an accountant when they were facing criminal damage charges. But the story had slowly coagulated there in the lawyer’s interview room, and when all was said and done, it didn’t get anyone terribly much further forward. All that Jane could say for certain was that one place that the Flying Dutchman was likely
She arrived at West Bay at the same time as a television van, and the sight of it made her heart stop. For a terrible moment, she thought that the van might be there for the same reason as she was—after all, the link between the couple of sentences in the newspaper about goings-on at Dounreay and the dramatic slide on the world markets had yet to be sorted out; had some sharp-nosed ferret of an investigative journalist found out about the Vanderdecker policy? But the little mayfly of terror was soon gone as Jane remembered what she had heard on the car radio about some idiot boat-race at West Bay in the next day or so, and she dismissed it from her mind.
It was, she admitted to herself as she parked in front of the boatyard, a long shot, a hunch—or, if you preferred English to the language of the talking pictures, a very silly idea. It had started as she sat on the flight back from Inverness, trying to think of good reasons why she shouldn’t follow the Montalban lead. This had not been easy; it was, after all, the logical next step, to go to Geneva, find this Montalban, dream up some pretext for talking to him, and find out what he knew. But for some reason best known to herself—natural diffidence, probably, with a large slice of embarrassment and laziness thrown in—she didn’t want to go to Geneva. Her mind had been floating on the meniscus of this problem when she saw a paragraph on the back page of someone else’s newspaper about terrible storms in the North Sea. It occurred to her that Vanderdecker would be somewhere in the North Sea at this precise moment, on his way to wherever he was going when he met the
“Sorry,” said the sound recordist. “I didn’t see you there.”
Danny Bennet looked at the sleeve of his suede jacket, then at the sound recordist, and said something very quietly which nobody was supposed to hear. His debut in the field of sports coverage was not going well, mainly because he hadn’t the faintest idea of what was going on.
It was still raining outside, and from that point of view the inside of the scanner van was as good a place to be as any. It was dry, there was a Thermos of at least luke-warm coffee, and no cameramen. That, however, was about it as far as the attractions of the venue went. On the other hand, there were the monitors, and Danny didn’t
