I SAW THE Eddystone Light just before dawn and called Mark. As we came closer to it in the new light of day, Mark said, “That light sits on a rock out there, but it isn’t the first Eddystone. The first one was swept away in the last century by a single, giant wave.”
I looked at the three-foot seas around us and wondered what sort of wave it would take to wipe out a lighthouse more than a hundred feet tall.
As we approached Plymouth a huge stone wall seemed to rise out of the sea. This was Plymouth Breakwater, which protected the harbor from the rough seas outside. As we sailed past the eastern end of it I got my first real look at Plymouth. We sailed across the harbor and, under sail with Mark at the helm, picked up a mooring in front of the Royal Western Yacht Club, a low structure built on a shelf of rock just above the sea. As Mark took up on the line and the boat settled with her nose into the wind, I looked to the right and above the clubhouse and saw a familiar figure. I stuck my head inside the hatch, took the binoculars from their rack, and scanned the railing along the street, but no one was there.
“What are you looking at?” Mark asked as he came back from the foredeck.
“I just thought I saw someone I knew. Must be seeing things.” I put the binoculars away, almost certain that I had seen Blunt Instrument, Derek Thrasher’s chauffeur, leaning against the railing watching Toscana pick up her mooring. Then, as I watched, the skinny man from Cowes appeared on the street above the railing, got into an old car, and drove around a corner. I was bloody well not seeing things, and my curiosity was mounting.
While Annie made breakfast Mark and I busied ourselves with odd jobs. The logbook showed the engine oil ready for changing, so I changed that and the filter and tightened the alternator belt, aware that Mark was watching me closely as I worked.
Mark and I sat in the lounge of the Royal Western Yacht Club, sipping a pint. Annie had gone off in a taxi to do some shopping for the boat. Mark pointed out the open doors past the terrace and flagpole to the harbor. “Looks peaceful, doesn’t it? What with the breakwater and all. But in a storm, with the wind from the south, the tides can get ferocious.” He nodded at a portrait of Prince Philip hanging on the opposite wall. There was a brown line running across it at about the Prince’s knees. “That’s the high water mark in this room,” he said. “I was here when it happened. We shoveled a lot of mud back into the sea.”
We laughed about that and sat quietly for a few minutes, sipping our beer. “Well,” I said, finally, “I guess I’d better check on the ferry schedule.”
Mark held up a hand. “Hang about,” he said. “Look here, Willie [I seemed to have got stuck with that name], I have a proposition for you: I could use some help on this project. In fact, I’ve got that built into the budget in my agreement with Thrasher. We’re building the new boat in Ireland, at a little yard in Cork Harbour; there’s a lot of work in that, and when we finish, the work really begins. A boat of this size takes a lot of maintaining. You know your way around a diesel engine ….”
“Well, the boats I sailed on in the states all had gasoline engines, but your diesel isn’t much different from a tractor engine, really.”
“Right, and you’ve had some pretty good experience with woodworking and tools, right?”
“I guess so, right.”
“It won’t be all work, mind you. “It’ll be November before we start the actual building—the yard has another boat to finish first—so we’ll be doing some cruising in Ireland in Toscana. And when the boat’s finished we’re going to race her out to the Azores; I’ll sail her back singlehanded to qualify for the big race. You’d get the best sort of blue-water experience, a bit of everything.”
I started to speak, but he held up a hand.
“I know you want to travel, but there’s travel in this, too, although we won’t get to Paris, and I think you’d have a terrific experience with us, learn a lot, the sorts of things that will stay with you. I could pay you, say, twenty quid a week, cash, and your meals and board, and, of course, any travel expenses involved. Annie and I have taken this marvelous cottage up a little river from Cork Harbour, at a place called Drake’s Pool, and there’s a spare room. The three of us seem to get on well enough.”
I found myself breathing faster. I realized that I had been dreading leaving these two people. Suddenly, instead of a year of wandering there was a plan, a real involvement with something exciting. “You’re sure I can hack it?” I asked him. “You don’t know me very well, we’ve only spent a little time together.”
“No, but you don’t know us all that well, either. If you come aboard you can jump ship anytime you feel it’s not working out; just give me a bit of notice. I’ll feel free to kick you overboard if you aren’t ‘hacking it,’ as you put it. What do you say?”
If I had needed another reason to accept, it entered the club lounge at that moment. Annie Robinson strode in, carrying a box of groceries, wearing her tight jeans and her bright yellow sweater. She sank into an armchair, grabbed my pint, and took a long draught from it. Oddly, for a woman who had just come off a yacht and gone straight to a supermarket, she seemed freshly groomed and made up. “Sorry to be so long,” she said breathlessly. “There was a long queue at the market. Have I missed lunch?”
“No,” said Mark. “You’re just in time, too, to hear whether Willie is going to join us.”
“Oh, Willie,” she cried, reaching over and squeezing my hand, “please do!
“God, I’d love to,” I said. Where do I sign?”
Mark smiled broadly and stuck out his huge, rough hand. “A handshake will do.” I shook, and we all stood up to go in to lunch. “Annie, will you get us a table while I settle the bar bill?” Annie put her arms around me, kissed me firmly on the ear with a loud smack, and hugged me tightly.
“Mark,” I said, when Annie had left us, “I don’t want to start this whole thing off by making you think I’m crazy, but if this were a movie, I’d say we were being followed.”
“Eh?”
“When I got out the binoculars at the mooring, it was Derek Thrasher’s chauffeur I thought I saw. He was gone when I looked again, but then I saw another man I had seen in Cowes, who seemed to be paying a lot of attention to us when we came out of the restaurant with Thrasher.”
“And you saw him here, too?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it. It was almost as if the chauffeur was following us and the other guy was following the chauffeur.”
Mark laughed. “Well, I suppose Derek’s chauffeur could be down here on some sort of errand for him—God knows, he seems to have business interests everywhere—and as for the other fellow, well, we’ve just gone from one hotbed of sailing to another, and it’s not unusual to see a familiar face; you’ll probably see a couple more at lunch.” He clapped me on the back. “Come on, we’re not in the movies. Let’s get something to eat.”
As we walked toward the dining room, my feet seemed hardly to touch the ground. I was off on a true adventure, something I realized now I had been looking for all along. I was off on something else, too. My elation was pushing a Southern Baptist upbringing into a far corner of my mind; I felt almost no guilt at the realization that, for the first time in my young life, I wanted another man’s wife.
I have often wondered how things might have turned out if I had taken the ferry to France that afternoon. Mark might be farming in Cornwall, now, Annie with him. I have a lot to answer for.