something by Churchill—and it got the reception it deserved. Vanderdecker wasn’t in the least surprised.
“You will have noticed,” he continued, “that the bay is full of boats. What you may have overlooked is the fact that most of them are sailing-boats, not motor-boats. I think we’ve been lucky, and pitched up in the middle of some sort of yacht-race or regatta or something, so if we act naturally and mind our own business, perhaps nobody will take any notice of us. Meanwhile, it’s quite important that we should get this ship over to Jeanes’ Boatyard in the next half hour, because if we don’t we’re all going for a swim. Got that?”
A rhetorical question. With an exquisitely fine mixture of apathy and contempt the crew of the
“Captain,” Vanderdecker turned round to see the first mate behind him, looking worried.
“Not now, Antonius,” Vanderdecker said.
“But Captain…”
“Please,” Vanderdecker said, as gently as he could, “I know you mean well, but just now…”
“Captain,” Antonius said, “there’s a boat coming alongside.”
Vanderdecker stared at him for a moment in horror. “What?”
“I said there’s a boat…”
“Where?”
Antonius pointed proudly at the boat, which was about thirty yards away and closing fast. “There,” he said, as if he was pointing out a new star in the Crab Nebula. “I saw it just now.”
“Oh God,” Vanderdecker muttered, “not now, we haven’t got time.”
“Haven’t we?” Antonius said. Vanderdecker had almost forgotten he was still there. “Time for what?”
“That’s bloody marvellous,” Vanderdecker went on, mainly to himself. “We’ve got to get rid of him somehow, and quickly.”
Antonius beamed. “Leave it to me, skipper,” he said, and disappeared down the companionway before his commanding officer could stop him. He was heading towards the gun deck, where the ship’s entirely authentic sixteenth-century culverins were lined up. Vanderdecker called after him but he didn’t seem to hear. He had thought this one up all by himself. It was his big chance.
“Fire!” he shouted down the hatch.
“You what?”
“Fire!” repeated the first mate impatiently, “and less lip off you.”
“Please yourself,” said the voice, and a moment later there was the unique sound of an entirely authentic but hopelessly corroded sixteenth-century culverin blowing itself to shrapnel, followed by disappointed oaths from Sebastian van Doorning.
In the bay, the competitors in the Bridport Old Ships Race jumped to their positions and cast off. The motor- boat, which contained Danny Bennet, a representative of a leading brewery, a cameraman, the boat’s owner, thirty thousand pounds worth of camera equipment and a roundshot from an entirely authentic sixteenth-century culverin, sank. As the water closed over Danny’s head, he suddenly remembered that he had forgotten something. Swimming lessons.
“You’ve got to do something,” the brewer said. “I’m telling you, they shot a cannon at us. They were trying to kill us.”
The coastguard smiled a sort of “well-yes-quite-possibly smile”. “What exactly happened, then?” he asked.
The brewer shuddered and pulled the blanket closer round his shoulders. “I went out with the producer in a launch—he wanted a close-up of the ship, and I wanted to see their entry form. They weren’t on the list of competitors. We came in alongside and bang! They shot at us.”
“Shot at you,” repeated the coastguard. “With a cannon.”
“With a cannon, yes.” The brewer had the feeling that his word was being doubted. “They shot a hole in the boat and we sank. We swam back to shore.”
“I see,” said the coastguard. “And which ship exactly was that?”
The brewer scowled. “The galleon,” he said. “The Tudor galleon.”
“Excuse me,” said the coastguard, “but there isn’t a Tudor galleon anywhere on the schedule.”
“Exactly,” said the brewer.
“Exactly what, sir?”
“Look,” said the brewer, who had not expected Socrates, “you ask the rest of them, they’ll say exactly the same thing.”
“I might just do that, sir,” said the coastguard. And he did.
The cameraman said that he’d heard a bang, sure. What he wanted to know was who hired that perishing boat in the first place, when it was obvious that the man driving it was as pissed as a rat. He must have been, or he wouldn’t have run into that buoy. The buoy we collided with. Just before we sank.
The owner of the boat said that he had almost certainly heard a bang, and he would be suing the BBC for every penny they’d got. It was definitely the last time he hired his boat out to film people. They should have warned him that all that electrical gear was liable to blow up when it got water on it. Some people have no consideration for others. They just don’t think.
Danny Bennet didn’t say anything. He wasn’t there. He was on the deck of the
EIGHT
Never a particularly dressy man, Vanderdecker had not taken much trouble choosing an appropriate outfit to visit Jeanes’ Boatyard. He hadn’t even stopped to consider whether his shirt went with his trousers; he’d just flung open the lid of his sea-chest and grabbed. As a result, he was wearing a good, solid herringbone overcoat which had blossomed on the loom when George V was on the throne, a pair of flared slacks, a coarse Venetian doublet from the early seventeenth century, and Hush Puppies.
Jane Doland, on the other hand, didn’t share this lilies-of-the-field attitude to clothing. By nature and inclination she was very much a baggy pullover and pleated skirt person, but she had realised quite early on that accountants are not as other women are; that it stands as an edict in destiny that unless you wear a suit nobody will believe you can add up. She therefore affected the imitation Austin Reed look, and wore her light grey dogtooth check as if it had broad arrows running down the sleeves.
Most people who frequent Jeanes’ Boatyard either buy their clothes in the army supplies shop or find them in the corners of fields. As a result, both callers at the yard looked rather out of place.
The problem of dealing with the House of Jeanes had been a constant source of worry to Vanderdecker for longer than he could remember. Usually he only went there once every generation, so there was no danger of being recognised and rebuked for not being dead yet; on the other hand, there was the equally difficult job of explaining himself from scratch every time he called. By now the words flowed out of his head without conscious thought; but the worry was still present, like a submerged rock.
The speech, as perfected over the centuries, went like this:
“Mr Jeanes? My name’s Vanderdecker, I wonder if you can help me. I have this very old ship, and it needs some work doing on it.”
So far, so good. Mr Jeanes is expecting, at the worst, something that was last a tree in the 1940s. He says something noncommittal, like “Oh”. Although it was completely wasted on him, Vanderdecker had over the years acquired enough research material to write a definitive study of heredity among the seafaring classes; the only part of which that had registered with his conscious mind was the fact that every Jeanes since 1716 had said “Oh” in precisely the same way.
“Yes,” Vanderdecker now replies. “She’s down in the cove half-way to Burton at the moment. Do you think you could come out and look at her?”
The invariable reply to this suggestion is “No”. If by some wild sport of genetics a stray proton of politeness
