CONNIE’S PRESENCE transformed my attitude to- ward what needed to be done on the boat. Abruptly, my dire pessimism was changed to a wild optimism. A clearing of the weather and a long, sunny spell helped, too. Connie had completed her school year, now, and had time on her hands. Although she refused to sleep aboard Toscana again, she came nearly every day and offered the best possible sort of support. She handed me tools, made notes on our progress, shopped for food and prepared it, lent muscle when mine alone wasn’t enough, and applauded, encouraged, and even admired my work.
We began by locating the electric bilge pump (it was in the bilges) and connecting it. It ran off the ship’s twelve-volt batteries and kept the boat dry, in spite of steady leaking, which I still could not locate. I got the diesel generator hooked up and going, and that gave us power for tools and bright working lights. I installed the two toilets, fitted the heater and attached dozens of small pieces of gear. Connie sanded and varnished the interior, applying coat upon coat until it began to gleam. I noticed that the power cord on the sander was fraying badly and made à mental note to replace it, something I would, to my everlasting regret, forget to do. I drilled holes in the stern and bolted on a prefabricated steel bracket, then mounted the large, Hasler windvane self-steering gear, leading the control lines to the helm, using Toscana’s similar but smaller installation as a guide.
With less than two weeks to go before the boat’s absolute last departure day, I began to install the electronic gear, and here I ran into problems. When Mark had taped all the electrical wiring he had marked every piece of the glossy, plastic tape with a felt-tipped pen. While nobody was looking, the damp atmosphere inside the yacht eroded the markings until they finally vanished. That meant I had to work my way through the whole of the wiring loom, identifying each wire as I connected it, which brought on the kind of frustration that always comes when one person begins a job and another finishes it.
Connie arrived every morning about nine and left about six in the evening. Although it was an hour’s drive each way, she adamantly refused to stay overnight and lightly brushed aside my tentative attempts to get physical, until I was afraid to try for fear of outright rejection. The other guy, I knew, was hanging in the background, and while she was spending every day with me, she was spending every evening—maybe every night—with him. It drove me crazy. It didn’t seem to bother her in the least. That drove me crazy, too.
As soon after my illness as I could I called Mark. Annie answered the phone.
“Willie! Where have you been? We’ve been worried sick! Are you all right?”
I explained my illness and recovery. “How’s Mark?”
“Coming along quite nicely. He’s down the hall having the plaster off his leg just now. I’m glad you caught me here, because we’re moving into a flat on the base tonight.” She gave me the address and phone number. “If the knee has healed properly from the surgery I’ll be working with him twice a day on physiotherapy. I’ve been taking a short training course at the hospital while he’s been recovering.”
“No idea yet how effective the surgery was?”
“The Xrays look very good, the doctor says. Now we have to see how he responds to the therapy. How’s it going at your end?”
I told her about Connie’s presence on the scene. “I feel a lot better about it with some help at hand. I’m reckoning to be in Plymouth with this bloody boat no later than the fourteenth of July. There’ll be some work to do still, I’m sure, but if you can get the provisioning organized in advance, that’ll help a lot. Do you think Mark’s going to make it?”
“With luck, yes.”
“And without luck? If he isn’t able to make it, will he be able to accept it?”
“You don’t understand. Not doing the race is just not a possibility in Mark’s mind. He’ll do it lying down, strapped on deck, if necessary, then return singlehanded for his qualifying cruise.”
We continued to talk a couple of times a week, and Mark improved steadily. He took quickly to the therapy, and a couple of weeks later, a leg brace fitted, was walking awkwardly with a crutch. Apparently, Annie had been right about his recuperative powers.
By the end of the first, full week in July Connie and I were near-ing completion of our multitude of tasks on the boat. The electronic gear was mostly hooked up—God knew if it would work when it had to—and all the essential equipment was installed and working. Connie’s varnishing job was sensational; the ship was looking shipshape.
But two essential jobs remained, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to do either of them. We might motor to England in the condition the boat was now in, but we couldn’t sail unless we got the mast into her. Depending on the engine entirely would be dangerous. It would be foolhardy to take a sailboat that distance unless she could sail. And we were still without the seacock being connected under the galley sink. I had found the fitting buried in the jumble of gear, but the boat would have to be removed from the water to install it. I could hardly do it while a stream of water poured from the bare hole in the hull. Both these jobs, the mast and the seacock, demanded that the boat be taken to a yard, but if I did that I risked some lawyer slapping a lien on her.
After a great deal of worrying, I thought I might have a way to do the seacock without swamping the boat. I had once watched in a marina while a man tipped a boat nearly to the horizontal by making the halyards fast to the dock and then winching until she heeled sufficiently to lift a through-hull fitting above the water. We couldn’t do that with this boat, because she didn’t have a mast in her. She had something else, though. She had a keel.
I got a spool of heavy, plaited, nylon anchor warp on deck, took an end ashore, and ran it through the heaviest block I had and made that fast to a stout oak. I made a loop in the end, tied a slipknot in it, and took it into the water. At the waterline of the boat I took a series of deep breaths, packing air into my lungs, then dove. It only took me a couple of dives before I was able to get the loop around the keel at its bottom and pull the slipknot tight so that the line wouldn’t ride up the keel and cost me leverage. Then I got back aboard, led the other end of the line through a pair of strategically placed blocks and around one of the main winches, and, with Connie tailing, began to grind. It was slow work, with the winch in its lowest gear, but the boat began to heel. The warps taken ashore from her other side kept her from drifting sideways. Slowly, but surely, the keel swung up, and the through-hull fitting peeked above the waterline, high and dry. In another hour I had the seacock installed, the line freed from the keel and the boat floating upright in her shady berth. I felt like a bloody hero.
On the tenth of July I telephoned Mark. “How’re you doing?”
“Listen, all I need is you here with that boat. How are you doing.”
“She’s finished, Mark. Done. All except the mast.”
“The seacock?”
I told him how I had managed it.
“Bloody marvelous. I’d never have thought of that.”
“There’s still the mast, though. There’s no possible way to do it where she lies, now.”
“Right. You’re going to have to go to the yard. You’d better call Finbar.”
“That way we risk losing the boat again.”
“Not necessarily.” I could hear him grinning. “Now listen.”
We spent the rest of the day provisioning the boat for the trip to England and generally tidying up. We packed most of the sails away, leaving at hand only the main and headsails we’d be most likely to need. Early Sunday morning I telephoned Finbar.
“Willie! Are you back?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I replied. “Listen, Finbar, I need you and Harry to help me tonight.”
“Of course.”
“High water’s just after one tomorrow morning. I want to bring Toscana up the creek and have you haul her at about ten, when the tide’s risen enough for her to get up there. You’ve storage space for her there, haven’t you?”
“Yes, sure.”
“Good, Mark will want to leave her there for the rest of the season and through the winter. Oh, and there’ll be another job to do. I want to get the mast into the boat.”
“Which boat?”
“The boat, Finbar.”
“Jesus, I thought she was in England!”
“That’s what everybody thinks, and they have to go on thinking that until the mast is in her. Now don’t ask any more questions, okay?”
“Sure, sure, I’ll see you tonight, and don’t worry, not a word to anybody!” He sounded positively gleeful.
By late in the afternoon we had finished; everything that could be done had been done. The big boat was, but for her mast, ready for sea and provisioned for the sail to England. What light gear and charts we needed from Toscana were aboard. The remainder of the smaller boat’s gear we had packed in boxes for storage ashore, along with her neatly folded sails. I was surprised at what an organizer I had become in Mark’s absence; I was even more surprised that we were so ready and, what was more, had a few hours to spare.
I shoved a cassette into the boat’s newly installed tape player; it was Wave, an album of guitar and strings by the Brazilian, Antonio Carlos Jobim, something we had listened to often during sails aboard Toscana. I grabbed a bottle of wine and joined Connie, who was stretched on deck in a dapple of late afternoon sunshine that came through a gap in our canopy of trees.
“That’s nice,” she said, cocking an ear to the music and taking a glass of wine. “I remember that from last summer, when we cruised down to Castletownshend.”
“Hold it,” I said. “Don’t drink yet.” I walked to the rail and tipped a bit of wine into the water. This was the first bottle opened aboard the new boat, and I didn’t want to get off to a bad start.
“I remember that, too,” she laughed. “‘Give Poseidon his, and maybe he won’t want you.’”
“What else do you remember about that cruise?” I asked.
She laughed again. “I remember somebody shouting at us late one night when we were anchored in Castletownshend. We were rocking the boat, I believe.”
I sat down beside her and bent to kiss her on the neck. “Why don’t we rock the boat again? Christen the new one?”
She shrugged away. “Don’t. I can’t do that.”
“Oh, Connie, are you still so angry with me?” I had apologized for New Year’s more than once, but she always changed the subject.
“No, I’m not angry anymore.”
“Is it the other guy, the one I saw you with at the Spaniard?”
She smiled slightly. “Terry? Well, he is quite a fellow.”
That stung badly. “I thought … I know I wasn’t honest with you before, but I thought we had something that could ride that out.”
She was silent, but a tear rolled down a cheek.
“Connie, there’s this … this bond between us.” If I had ever doubted this, it had become clear to me during our weeks together working on the boat.
“I know,” she said.
“Well, what are we going to do about it?”
“I don’t know.” She got to her feet. “What time do you want to start up the harbor?”
“We ought to start getting the boats out of here a bit after eight, I guess.”
She stepped across the deck and started down the plank to shore. “I’ll be back then,” she said over her shoulder. I thought she was still crying.
A moment later I heard the van start and drive away. Well, I thought, I still had the sail to England with her. Maybe, alone together at sea, we could start to talk to each other. I dumped the rest of the wine overboard. “Here,” I said to Poseidon, “have the lot.”