‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ said Harry.
Johnson changed course. He said, without looking at Harry, ‘Wrong mammal, wrong gender. I wish that I were. The transmitter’ll be in the bilges or under the hull. We can look for it later, but I doubt if we’ll find it. Meanwhile, Haven’s faster than we are.’
Harry said, ‘What’ll happen? What’ll happen if she overtakes us?’
Johnson changed course by forty-five degrees, and, in our wake, the white boat changed course also. Johnson said, ‘She won’t overtake us. She’ll crash into us, and if she hurries, we’ll make the 1.25 news after Peyton Place.’
‘You’re zig-zagging?’ said Trotter.
‘Righty,’ said Johnson. ‘In the classical phrase. Haven’s rudder is giving a thirty-five-second delay on the turns, and so long as our fuel lasts, we may hold her until help arrives.’
Trotter said quickly, ‘Could we explode her? A rifle?’
I had already thought of my Frommer. Johnson said, ‘I haven’t a rifle. In any case, whatever the range, the explosion would wreck us. You don’t need to tell me it’s a pity we’ve lost the Avenger.’
He had changed course again. Harry, wrenching his gaze from the Haven, said breathlessly, ‘We could jump.’
Around us the sea stretched, blue and empty. ‘We could,’ said Johnson. ‘Sharks permitting. But I don’t think we should get very far. And the explosion would still take place very close to us.’
Spry came up quickly from below and said, ‘I can’t see anything, sir. Shall I send an SOS on the radio telephone?’
‘Yes,’ said Johnson. He began to say something else and broke off suddenly. I realized the engine had altered in tone. Spry stopped dead.
‘Well?’ said Harry.
The engine hesitated.
‘Intermittently well,’ Johnson said. It was time to change course. He turned the wheel steadily. The even tone of the engine changed, broke off, and resumed instantly again. Harry said, ‘My God, is the tub breaking down?’
The engine stopped. ‘The tub has broken down,’ Johnson said. His eyes on Spry, he had a hand on the starter. The engine coughed and was silent again. Spry disappeared suddenly below. We heard the hatch open which gave access to the engine under the floorboards. Dolly pitched in the silence, the advancing waves slapping her bows with a cluck. ‘All right. Let’s sail,’ Johnson said curtly. ‘Mainsail with me, Trotter. Harry, mizzen. Beltanno. take the wheel and bring her into the wind when I tell you. Spry!’
‘I heard you. You’ll want the spinnaker,” said Spry from the ladder. ‘The fuel pump’s choked. Sugar, I think, in the tank.’
Sabotage, as they say. I didn’t even take it in. The wheel was thrust in my hands and obeying the ceaseless stream of Johnson’s instructions, I brought Dolly round into the wind. Into the wind, stationary, and full in the path of that white, on-rushing arsenal.
It had to be done, to allow the sails to break out. And the sails were our only means now of escaping; those square yards of canvas Spry and Trotter and Harry were hauling up by main force while we rocked there in silence.
They worked as fast as they could. The heavy blocks rattled. I could hear the men’s breathing as their arms pulled in rhythm, their throats exposed to the sun and then masked by the lifting dark of the canvas. Johnson was everywhere, issuing orders, guiding, pulling. belaying. Watching the wind; the spinnaker bent on the fore- deck with Spry kneeling beside it; the Haven rushing towards us.
I watched the Haven as well. I could see her quite plainly. I could see her windshield and the neat, taped tarpaulin. I could see the empty seat and the empty wheel, turning a little, delicately, to left or to right, correcting her rudder, keeping a straight course towards us as she crossed the spent white expanse of our wake.
She was as near as that, and my hands were wet on my own steering-wheel when Johnson said, ‘Right. Beltanno. Ready to gybe . . ‘and I turned the wheel as the main topping lift was belayed and the mainsheet freed and held at the winch.
The mizzen slid up and pulled taut and. as Dolly swung round, the sails both bellied full, boomed out to catch the following wind. Then with a great huff of sound forward the spinnaker filled, a shining and fragile balloon, lifting the boat from under our feet with its pull, and Johnson vaulted down and took the wheel from me, his eyes on the sails. ‘Farther out, Spry . . What about this one? No. Clew up and leave it. A point or two for the mizzen . . That’s it. Now . . .?’
Now we were sailing. I had never travelled as fast as this on a yacht under canvas. The seas hissed beneath us: the sun, the shadow, the whirling draught of the sails made the escape a live thing: as personal as flight on the back of a horse. Johnson turned, one hand on the wheel and the other on the brown varnished coaming, and stood without moving, his eyes on the Haven behind.
We all stood. Through the glass you could see a graze on the Haven’s white paintwork where she had been brought too fast one day into the jetty, and the black lettering on either side of her bows, where her name started and ended. She hit our fresh wake and jolted, and the wheel moved itself crossly, correcting. But she was no longer devouring the distance between us.
Spry said. ‘You’ve done it, sir. We’ll hold her for a little.”
‘Christ! I hope so,’ said Trotter. The brown of his face glowed like beechwood under a running varnish of sweat: sweat had chequered Harry’s smart coloured beach shirt with great patches of grey. Johnson’s hair was merely wet at the edges. He didn’t say anything. He looked at Spry, and Spry vanished below, his lips pressed together.
To try and restart the engine. Because if Haven’s engine was faster than Dolly’s then it was certainly faster than Dolly’s top sailing speed under canvas. ‘We’ll hold her for a little,’ was all Spry said.
He was away for less than two minutes. He came up shaking his head just as Johnson silently laid down the radio telephone. Johnson said, ‘Still no joy? Spry, will you check the electrical stuff? I’m getting no response from the R/T.’
Harry said, ‘What?’ and the bifocals turned coolly on him.
‘The R/T isn’t functioning, and neither are the radar nor echo sounder. It may be a simple connection, or it may all be tied up with the engine . . . Yes?’
Spry’s head, reappearing, said, ‘You won’t get through, sir. Someone’s crossed the leads on the alternator. When you pressed the starter button, you blew every wire on the ship.’
No engine. No SOS. No help, unless a ship appeared by a miracle from the outside, uncaring, luxurious world. Harry said in a high, scratchy voice, ‘What is this? Big business? Black Power? Politics? What’s it got to do with me?’
‘Nothing,’ said Sergeant Trotter harshly. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me either, but I’m not wasting time yapping. Not yet. Not till I know if I’m going to survive. It’s all to do with that fellow Edgecombe. Someone’s trying to kill him. I suppose they got the Haven launched before they found out Edgecombe had gone off back home.’
‘Did you know that?’ said Harry to Johnson.
‘Yes,’ said Johnson. He was looking at the burgee.
‘And you allowed him to come here?’ said Harry. ‘Hell to Betsy . . . Come fishing, you tell us. Come and get your goddam gizzard fly-posted because the boat’s been evil-eyed by the Mafia . .
Harry wasn’t Trotter’s ideal officer. Trotter said, ‘He only made one mistake, didn’t he? He came right along with us all . . . Mr Johnson, what happens if the wind drops?’
A sail rattled. Spry, glancing at Johnson, ducked forward and tightened a sheet. From the blue sky, the sun shone naked as fire. Behind, the white boat had settled insensibly nearer. We were going fast, but Haven was slowly making up on us. Trotter began to repeat, ‘What happens . . ?’ and Johnson turned his dark glasses from the luff of the mainsail.
I said, ‘It is dropping. Isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Johnson. Another sail rattled. We were losing speed. The wind was all we had to propel us. If that failed, we should merely sail slower and slower until we finally sat there, like a piece of cracked driftwood, waiting for that long white boat full of explosives to drive up and hit us.
I said, ‘What now?’
‘What now?’ said Johnson; and turned from contemplation of his sails and the Haven, to the charts spread afresh on his knees. ‘We now employ strategy. Listen, my children.’
We listened as if he were God; Trotter tense, Harry frowning. They were trusting their lives, they believed, to a vague and unremarkable man with an ill-maintained boat. They obeyed him because there was no alternative. And also, I realized suddenly, because he knew rather well how to make himself obeyed.
We listened; and ran to our places; and Johnson threw the helm hard over to starboard and sent Dolly straight for the sandbanks.
You can find some of the best deep-sea fishing in the world in those islands, and soundings between the big groups can reach a thousand fathoms or more. But there are shoals on the west coast of the Berry Islands: a pattern of grass bars and shifting sandbanks which the settlement boats sometimes use, but which charter and freight boats keep clear of. If you drew over four feet, you couldn’t use some of the channels at all.
Dolly drew 5.75 feet, and we were at the lowest point of the tide. We were going to reduce sail and enter the sandbanks, keeping to the thin winding canals of deep water as shown on the chart. We were going to do it abruptly, and as fast as we could, and we were going to enter a channel whose southern access was guarded by the largest sandbank in the shoal.
If we set the sails right, and if Johnson steered us correctly, we should scrape past that shoal as we tacked into the channel.
But Haven, radio-controlled, wouldn’t follow us blindly. A homing beacon drew its partner towards it by the shortest route possible. We should alter course and sail hard to starboard. The signals would change. Haven would receive them and transmit the changed course to her rudder. That, we knew, took thirty-five seconds to answer.
Dolly would be on her way during that time, and, to reach her, Haven would have to cut corners. And if she cut corners she would land, inescapably, into that sandbank.
They say blue water sailing is easy, compared with inshore pilotage. I suppose canals are simple compared with sailing on rivers. I’m glad I didn’t fully realize what we were doing, taking a boat of Dolly’s size into that winding, river-like channel, with a crew of five, of whom two were casual amateurs and one was a tyro.
Johnson didn’t look worried; but then there seemed nothing of his face which wasn’t inset with lenses. He had pinned the chart to the bulkhead, a precaution for which I felt a gratitude encroaching on love. Then he started giving directions again, and we freed the sail, returning Dolly to port, and then brought her round again almost immediately, hardening up to the wind. I belayed and watched the water change from cerulean to almond to apricot off our right flank. Harry was watching it too, his face even greener. It was the bank at the entrance: a drifted pile-up of white coral sand so near in that clear water that there might have been inches between its long spine and the surface, or nothing at all. Spry said, ‘Port a little, sir,’ from the bowsprit, the jib sheet gripped in his hands, but Johnson smiled and said, ‘In a moment.’
Harry didn’t protest, and neither did I. It only needed a glance to the left. We had no sea room there either. The channel had silted. It was the precise width of Dolly at present: no less, and no more.
Then Dolly’s sides shaved the sand . . . No one spoke. There was a long hiss like compressed steam escaping, and we felt her slow, quicken and slow. Then Johnson said, ‘All right. Free her a little,’ and she eased a fraction into the left and someone gave a long sigh. I saw there was green water there now, and green water ahead, a narrow band of it, twisting out of our vision, like a soft, grassy canyon: a fairway between low limestone bluffs. I thought of Denise, and Great Harbour Cay, and all the small, violent events which had so shocked me, set in the everyday world with telephones and traffic and people and police.
Here there was nothing at all to rely on but ourselves. I had always been self-sufficient. I had despised indeed all those who were not. But now I wanted my fellow men. I wanted them very badly indeed.
I drew in sheets, and let them out, and watched Haven. Since the beginning, she had never gained on us as quickly as now, travelling over deep water with her engine evenly roaring, while we with our manoeuvring sail felt our way along that tortuous cut. Behind us the big sandbank showed now as a patch in the watered silk of the passage, with the deeper blue of the channel beside it.
From the coach roof, you could see Haven’s bows adjusting to reach us across the shoaled stretch of water. She had not yet reached the sandbank: the bunker; the trap in her fairway. A move of ours to the right, and her bows, it seemed, pointed straight for the shallows. A move to the left, and Haven swung back a little, safely headed for the deep seaworthy channel. Johnson glanced at the chart and said, ‘Damn. There’s a stretch to port coming.’
Trotter said, ‘Drop the mizzen? Anchor?’ Desperate counsel for desperate measures.
Johnson said, ‘No. We’d land in a sandbank if we lose much more way.’
Harry said, ‘Would it matter? Why not ram Dolly to starboard? Then she’d lead Haven straight through the sandbank.’
Johnson was steering one handed from the sidedeck watching the chart, the sails, and Haven behind us. ‘There are risks,’ he said. ‘She’s nearly got to the channel.’
‘What risks?’ said Harry hoarsely. ‘You don’t want to lose your bloody boat, that’s what.’
‘I don’t want to lose my bloody life, that’s what,’ said Johnson. ‘Free her. We’re going to port.’
‘No, we’re not,’ Harry said. He leaped forward to stop Johnson freeing the mizzen, but not soon enough. Johnson turned the wheel hard to the left and I freed the main and leaped like a hare to winch it in on the starboard: beside me Trotter worked like a fiend. The boom swung, catching Harry neatly behind his tanned ear, and flinging him into the cockpit where he landed on Johnson and pulled him with his weight to the floor. I grabbed the wheel.
Dolly, wavering, turned to port in a few swaying motions, caught the wind and settled down on her side. I looked aft. Haven had got to the channel.
Johnson rose to his feet, followed by Harry, their eyes on the white boat astern. Johnson said, ‘Keep her there,’ to me, and got up on the coach roof: the others all followed. Over our wake the shoals were now hard to distinguish. Green water or biscuit: channel or sandbank: which was she entering?
‘Well?’ said Johnson.
Trotter had taken two steps up the shrouds. A little above us, shielding his eyes from the sun, he watched, and said nothing, and climbed higher and watched again. Harry said, ‘Well? Has she missed? Has she got into the channel?’
Trotter said, ‘No. She hasn’t missed. She’s got to the sandbank.’
‘Hell!’ said Johnson with feeling.
Trotter looked down on him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right. She’s over the sandbank. She’s sailing over the sandbank and hasn’t bloody well stuck. That was the risk you took, wasn’t it? Why you wouldn’t jam Dolly? The tide’s making too fast and Haven’s draught is too shallow. Haven can cross them sandbanks. And we can’t.’
I saw Harry stop breathing. And for the first time I knew, really knew, what it is like to be advised of forthcoming death. Straight as a ruler death was coming towards us: Haven was beating towards us over deep water and shallows alike.
And idling here, trapped in our imprisoning channel, we had no means now left to avoid her.
Johnson said, ‘Beltanno, sail straight. Get a bearing and stay on it until I give the word. Spryl’
He was moving aft as he spoke. Trotter said, ‘What sail do you want, Doctor? Is she pulling the wheel?’ I told him, and he and Harry did what they could with the sheets. I watched the burgee and the wheel, and when I could, the racing blur of the white boat behind. You didn’t need to look. The engine noise was enough, and the sound of the spray. In fact, it was better not to look, and watch the wheel, moving magically, a fraction this way and that. Trotter said, ‘Doctor . . What are they doing?’
For a moment I couldn’t see it myself. And then I said, ‘They’ve got up a net.’
It was a heavy, coarse-meshed nylon affair, of the kind they use in fast-catamarans, and bright red in colour. I remember thinking how gay and incongruous it looked, lying on Johnson’s fine varnish. But then it was all out of key: the blue sky and hot beating sun, the marvellous shades of the water, the long white luxury yacht with her elegant cushions. And the workmanlike boat with its neat roped cargo, now devouring the short space between us.
Johnson said, raising his voice, ‘Right. If this doesn’t work, I want you to jump. There’s not a great deal of hope; we’ll be too near the collision. But dive: don’t stay on the surface a moment longer than you have to. And keep in deep water. No lifebelts. There’ll be plenty of wreckage . . .”
He didn’t mention the sharks. He said, ‘Now!’ and the red net flew over the stern and into the water, straight in the path of the oncoming Haven. He added gently, ‘Now, Beltanno.’ And I knew why I had to keep Dolly straight.
I was better off than the others, perhaps, because I had Dolly to think of. The others had nothing to do but to stare helplessly aft, watching the scarlet net float gently backwards, and Haven racing closer and closer towards it. Towards it and us.
It had seemed a tension past bearing, a moment ago on the sandbank. This time it was happening here, the crisis. If the net didn’t float towards Haven: if it didn’t stop her or slow her or hinder her, death would be upon us in seconds.
She got to the net in a gush of white spray. Harry said, ‘Oh Christ!’ on a gulp, and I could hear Trotter swear. Haven’s engine roared undiminished. Johnson’s voice said curtly, ‘Ready about!’ and he put the wheel hard down to the left while Spry jumped to the ropes: alter a second Trotter went to help him. I didn’t see that it mattered. In fact, if we were to jump to starboard, it merely meant that Haven would overtake Dolly beside us. Then Johnson said, ‘All right. Get ready to jump,’ and I guessed what he was doing, and saw by Spry’s face that I was right. He was going to off-load us and stay there on board, in order to sail Dolly clear.
I am used to making decisions. This is one which, thank God, I was saved from completing. Johnson drew breath to call, ‘Jump,’ when he saw me coming towards him. He said instead sharply, ‘Get back, Beltanno,’ and in that instant, one of Haven’s twin screws missed its beat.
Spry turned, and the two other faces showed from the weather rail, bloodless and taut. The engine grunted again.
We watched. We had reached the safe right-hand wall of the channel: Johnson turned the wheel gently and Spry without being told adjusted the sail for mid-channel. No one said anything. There was another splutter behind; a moment’s silence and then the rattling sound of Haven’s engine resuming on a new and wholly alien tone.
The spray at her bows had quite vanished. The boat was still moving; it was still following us; but her speed was now no more than our own. One of her propellers had taken the net.
One by one we left the side deck, our eyes on Haven, and stepped slowly into the cockpit where Johnson stood, his hand on the wheel, his lips under the dark glasses twitching. ‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘And how are your emboli doing?’
Surprisingly, it was Trotter who laughed: a cackle of pure amusement which owed nothing to hysteria. ‘I tell you something,’ he said. ‘At least I know me heart’s good for a century, and you could shove a ball-point pen clean down me arteries. I may, of course, still go off me poor bleedin’ nut.’
‘Don’t boast,’ said Johnson. ‘She’s swallowed the net, but she may chew it up and discard it. At best she’s going at the same speed as we are. The wind may die, or we may be stuck on a sandbank. And talking of sandbanks . . .
Bad news comes soon enough. I hadn’t told him but of course he had noticed. Where the chart had been were four drawing-pins adhering to four scraps of paper. ‘It was torn off,’ I said, ‘when Harry fell into the cockpit. At least, it was gone when I took the wheel. It must have flipped overboard. I’ve looked,’ I added.
They looked as well, but the chart wasn’t aboard. And while they were looking, Trotter got up in the shrouds and started to call out the soundings.
Perhaps it sounds easy. He didn’t know the tricks of these waters: he didn’t know what the colours denoted. The person who knew them best was Harry; and Harry, it turned out, had no head for heights. Spry took charge of the sails, with Harry and myself to help him, while high above on the ratlines, Trotter leaned on the top, swaying spar and called out.
To this day, I remember the lesson. A light blue for ten to fifteen fathoms, said Harry. A light green, four to five fathoms; a pale green one and a half to two fathoms; the pale marine straw of the shoals, a fathom or less. They called that white water, and if we sailed there, we were dead.
Watch out, he said, for patches of coral and rock: yellow-brown, deep brown or black. Watch out for coral heads embedded in debris: grass, or sponges or marine vegetation. Then they are harder to spot. But look for the ring of white sand around the rock or the coral, where the fish swim and wait for their prey and their plankton, and the bed is fanned clear of grass.
Trotter had a clear voice: an enunciation ungainly but perfect through years of instructing obscure foreign militia when to jump through their hoops. He had well-trained responses and an ability to keep his head and his balance on a thin swaying ratline on a slow, tacking ketch. He called out what he could see, and we hauled on ropes and released and belayed them: we ducked as the booms swayed across and the next moment seemed to sway back, guided by Spry and by Johnson and by Harry, interpreting the crazy mosaic of that brilliant sea-bed into a channel which would bear the passage of Dolly.
And all the time the choked whine of Haven’s engine sang in our ears, cutting corners; always there; never falling behind. And I knew what Johnson was doing; stealing every inch to port that he could make with the channel: bearing left and always left; trying to win out of the shallows he had entered so desperately and reach the deep water where we had been once before.
Then, with our engine failed and wind dropping, we had been no match for Haven. Now, with full sail crammed on her, Dolly could draw away from the crippled storeship and run until she found help or harbour. Help, in the form of another ship which could take us on board, or could explode the Haven by fire from a safe distance. Harbour, only when we were free of our enemy.
But the shoals held us trapped. The channel wound round the sand bars, but whether it was the right channel we had no means of knowing. Sometimes the sand brushed our keel or our sides and we were all silent, wondering if, like a party astray in a maze, we had come up a blind alley, and, unable to reverse, must wait there to be caught. Dazed with sun and strain, my hands raw from the ropes, my back aching with something which would soon become total exhaustion, I wondered how the others were faring. The men might be stronger, but I wouldn’t give much for Harry’s mental endurance; and the strain Trotter was undergoing, up there on those swaying shrouds under the glare of the sun. About Spry I knew nothing and he showed nothing of weakness. But then neither did Johnson; and I knew more about Johnson than he had wanted me to know.
And still the sand closed us in. Sometimes ahead Trotter would spy freer water, and we would sail for it, letting the sails fill all they would. But always in the end the channel thickened and narrowed.
In one of these spaces, Johnson called Trotter down, and when I saw him, I knew he shouldn’t go up again, although he was convinced he could, and said so all the time he was resting. I gave him a drink and a wet towel and dodged along to attend to the sheets on the foredeck while Spry climbed the ratlines as lookout. But I knew I hadn’t Spry’s endurance, or his speed or his grip. In Harry and myself, Johnson had a pretty poor crew. And if Trotter came down with heatstroke . . .
Then Johnson gave Trotter the wheel and ducked forward to where I was crouching. ‘Dr MacRannoch,’ he said.
I said, ‘He can’t . . .’
‘I know he can’t,’ said Johnson mildly. ‘Neither can you, or any of us for very much longer. But listen to Trotter’s suggestion. We haven’t enough speed for skiing. But if we let out a warp, he thinks he can drop back to Haven on it and board her.’
I looked at him, but the dark glasses told nothing. I said, ‘The sharks. He’s tired. What if he loses his grip? We couldn’t stop. We couldn’t pick him up, could we?’
‘Not before Haven reaches us,’ Johnson said. Behind us, Harry was complaining. The main basis for it, so far as I could gather, was that if Trotter drowned, or was carelessly mown down by Haven, we should not only have lost ground, but be short of one man to sail Dolly. Johnson added, ‘Beltanno, if only three of us are left to run Dolly, could you go up that shroud?’
I was glad at least that he knew what was happening to Harry. And there was no avoiding the issue. If only Spry and Johnson were left to tackle Dolly, I should have to be pilot. ‘I don’t see why not,’ I replied.
He nodded, but his attention had left me. Trotter strode by, stripped to his trunks. He spoke, and Johnson put up his hand. Spry had already belayed a long coil of rope near the stern post. There was a light grappling-iron. I saw, at one end.
Johnson brought Dolly half up into the wind to let Trotter drop overboard, and for a moment I think we all believed she had lost way for good. Then Trotter’s head, shaking off spray, appeared in the water. We saw him lean over, exposing one brown, sinewy shoulder and his two powerful forearms, the broad fists clutching the rope. The wind filled Dolly’s sails. She drew away, and Trotter’s body, rising, began to cut through the water. His head in the crook of his right arm was turned left cheek upwards, drawing air from the vortex caused by the shape of his body resisting the drive of the sea.
He was a magnificent swimmer. We all knew that. We had watched him scores of times towed by Dolly’s launch skimming up ramps and leapfrogging barrels on water-skis. Broad and small with a body like muscular teak, he ignored his tiredness. He braced himself, foetus-like in the water, and was drawn through it, his gasping mouth taking the air as Spry, as fast as he dared, paid out the cable.
It disturbed his rhythm, the lengthening cable. The first time, Spry misjudged it and the rope suddenly slackened, slamming Trotter under the water. He rose half-choked, legs threshing to keep him on top and swimming, until Dolly drew off and the rope tautened again. After that, Spry kept the warp tight, releasing it little by little, his eyes on Haven as much as on the swimmer.
We had lost ground. The white boat was far closer: the gap getting shorter. There was only so much time this manoeuvre could cost. But Spry didn’t lose Trotter again; and Trotter, snatching glance after glance over his shoulder, must have seen Haven’s bows getting closer. He was almost upon her.
It was then that I found the wheel in my hands. ‘Good luck,’ said Johnson, and grinned briefly, and walked to the rail. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. I stared alter him, and then my attention was snatched back to Trotter by a shout from Spry and from Harry.
The swimmer was just ahead of the Haven. Trotter lifted a hand, raising himself out of the water, and Spry allowed to spin free all the coils of remaining free cable. We watched the spray settle. Trotter’s head came up, cropped in the sunlight, and his hands flashed as he gathered the rope. For ten seconds maybe, he waited: the small tough sergeant-major, his brown shoulders washed by the blue surging sea, watching the approaching white boat with its sheer sides and its empty wheel and its well filled with explosives.
Lifting himself like a seal from the waves, Rodney Trotter drew back the arm with the cable, and threw. The rope hissed through the air dropping a string of white water: a sparkle of spray left the grapple. We saw the iron hit the coaming of Haven’s white starboard bow, hesitate, and then drop down inside out of sight.
The rope tightened. As the launch swerved unevenly past him, it drew Trotter swinging out of the sea, hands working, one strong foot already finding a purchase. By sheer momentum he got two-thirds up her sides before Haven forced past him, swinging the rope to her stern and unsettling the grip of the grappling-iron. The rope came loose and he snatched instead, with both hands, at Haven’s topside.
He caught it, and, with the same movement, vaulted on to her deck like a gymnast.
Johnson stayed only to see Trotter board the Haven. Then, just as he was, he dived off Dolly and struck out towards the white boat and the sergeant.
Harry and Spry didn’t see him. Nor did Trotter, working fast by the square engine casing. Haven’s engine droned on, and the white water sheared at her bows. Above me a sail flapped and Spry called sharply. ‘Doctor! Take her about!’
I thought: we ought to stop. I should bring her into the wind. But Haven wasn’t stopping and the gap between us was closing: was shrinking again as it had in those first terrible moments. I brought Dolly round, my gaze half on our sails and half on Johnson’s head, black in the water. He had been swimming, but, as I watched, he leaned back and began to tread water. There was no need to go on. Haven was still advancing towards him.
Then, like a pronouncement from God, Haven’s engine coughed once, and was silent.
I remember that the channel had narrowed, so that we were forced to sail on. Spry took the wheel and I climbed that swaying ladder of ratlines in the shrouds, but my binoculars were as often on Haven behind as conning the sandbanks in front. I saw Trotter rise from stopping the engine, fling over a rope and let himself overboard to do something efficient, I hoped, to the rudder. I saw Johnson arrive and board Haven, using the same rope, as Trotter emerged from the water: we could hear clearly Trotter’s shout of surprise, and then the sound of their conversation, carried over the blessed, still waters. Below me, Spry and Harry had their binoculars on them also.
We saw Johnson edge round the well to the rear of the boat and come back after a brief burst of activity. He took a moment as he did so to have a look under the tarpaulin. Then he leaned out to help Trotter clamber aboard for the second time, spoke with him, and, scrambling round, settled in front of the helm.
We watched, buffeted by the stillness, as if we had been prepared for an operation, and did not realize even now that the operation was not going to take place. I think that was why, when Haven’s engine suddenly started and that deathly roar, the roar we had throttled, came suddenly into rebirth, Harry’s nerves burst into screaming disorder. He heard the noise, and he saw those white bows begin again to move, to quicken, to drive along freely and powerfully and with ease begin to overhaul us. He dropped the mainsheet, and ran for the starboard side deck, as once he had been told. Then he tried to throw himself over.
Spry and I caught him and manhandled him down to the cockpit, while Johnson throttled Haven well down and brought her docilely behind us and then up to and past us as Dolly, unattended, drifted herself into the sandbar. Spry had Harry immobilized by that time, and I got out the syringe and the ampoules and immobilized him further. Then we put him into the saloon.
Haven warped Dolly off that sandbank; then Johnson let her float off behind, seacocks open, while he and Trotter climbed aboard on the cable. She sank very gently in the clear, clear water among the sponges and the sea grasses and the small coloured fish. I don’t think any of us felt anything: we carried our own precipitins, for the moment, against fear and danger and even relief. Besides, there was Dolly still to look after.
I climbed the shrouds again while Johnson took the wheel rather silently, a towel round his shoulders; and Trotter lay still and dripped on the after-deck without doing anything at all. He deserved it.
No one tried to disturb him, and very soon I saw open water and steered Johnson into it, and was allowed to come down. The sea all around us was mid-green and purple and blue. We were in deep water, and could begin to tack our way home.
I took the wheel in some of the long reaches and Spry and Johnson shared the rest. Once the sails were set on each tack, there was little to do. We took it in turns to go below into the saloon and stretch out on the cushions. Trotter recovered quickly, but Johnson slept for an hour. I left the wheel to go into the owner’s cabin to rouse him. Spry had made tea, on my advice, instead of pouring us alcohol, and I knocked and put the cup down by his side.
He grunted and opened his eyes. His hair was a mess, and he hadn’t put on his glasses since swimming, but his social adjustments as ever were effortlessly bang on the nail. He said, ‘I bet it’s sweet and weak, and God knows how you blackmailed Spry into producing it, but because I am suffering from fluid deprivation, I’ll drink it.’ He got off the bed, his beach shirt crumpled where he had been lying on it; put on his bifocal glasses and said, ‘Sit down, then, and let me look at you.’
I sat down. I was no picture. My turban had stayed somehow in place, but my sunsuit was filthy with oil and salt water and sweat, and I had larded cream all over the sunburn on my arms and my shoulders and nose. I stared back at Johnson as he stood leaning there drinking his tea; and to my disgnst a pricking sensation made itself felt behind my puncta lacrimalia. I controlled myself and said, stiffly, ‘We’ve missed the barbecue, I’m afraid.’
‘We rather did down the National Morbidity Survey as well,’ Johnson said. ’Didn’t we?’
He put down his cup, and twitching a tissue out of its holder leaned forward and wiped the surplus cream off my nose. Then he sat down beside me in the same suave and damnable silence, and putting up his two hands like a milliner, straightened the turban over my naked crop of tufted black hair. And like a child, a schoolgirl, a nurse under reprimand, I burst into tears. Into, I discerned distantly some moments later, the creased bosom of Johnson’s beach shirt.
He made no remarks, but merely patted me on the back with one hand and produced a concatenation of tissues with the other until the worst of the outburst was over; and it took a long time. I can’t remember ever crying like that. I suppose I had, some time, when I was a child. Eventually I wiped my eyes for the last time and blew my nose for the last time and lifted my head and sat soggily up. ‘Post-operative reactions,’ I said in bleary apology.
‘Partly. But some post-MacRannoch reaction, I fancy, as well,’ Johnson said. He got up and, unlatching a locker, produced and began to pour two glasses of whisky. He held one out to me. ‘To Beltanno Douglas MacRannoch, human being. Don’t marry Mr Tiko.’ he said.
I took what he gave me and drank it. ‘Why not?’ I said. It was all very surprising, I suppose. Except that I had no emotions left to be surprised with.
‘I’ve done an Eysenck personality inventory on you both,’ Johnson said, and put his glass on a locker and held it. We were sailing hard, on the port track. Someone was sober, and working. ‘You wouldn’t suit.’
‘Whom would I suit?’ I said impatiently.
Johnson took a long drink and then leaned back and took off his glasses. ‘In a long life, I’ve heard that said in many ways, but never grimly,’ he said. ‘The answer, of course, is most people, however poorly supported by data to date. Most people, provided you let go of James Ulric MacRannoch.’
‘Let go of my father?’ I exclaimed.
‘That’s what I said. You know you’re the cause of his asthma?’
Nonsense. I was rather stiff, I recall, in my answer. My father has been hypersensitized against pollen, house dust, Aspergillus fumi-gatus, the wheat weevil, dandruff and budgerigars. Without me, he has quite enough to be going along with.
Johnson ignored me. ‘And he is the cause of your belligerent bachelor doctorhood. He said he wanted a line of baby MacRannochs. But you gave him what you thought he really wanted, didn’t you? You turned yourself into a son.’
It was a lie. It was none of his business. I would consider it later. I said, ‘Amateur psychiatry, Mr Johnson?’
‘And avoidance behaviour, Dr MacRannoch.’ said Johnson.
We stared at one another. My whisky, somehow, had almost got finished. ‘He’s going to marry the Begum,’ I said.
‘He would have married her years ago,’ said Johnson uncompromisingly, ‘if he’d got you off his hands.’
‘If I don’t marry Mr Tiko . . I don’t want to marry.’ I said.
‘You don’t need to marry. All you want are a few nice, meaningful, human relationships, like Krishtof Bey. Let me recommend a well-tried and traditional therapy. People.’
‘People are Harry,’ I said.
‘Well, Christ! You turned him off and disposed of the carcass,’ said Johnson. ‘And anyway, what’s the matter with him? He had his post-operative shock before the operation, that’s all. What do you expect? A world peopled with B. Douglas MacRannochs?’ He paused. ‘I suppose you can get it, if you opt out and go for research. We’re all the same in ash weight of bones.’
I had a splitting headache, but I wasn’t going to stand for that kind of nonsense. ‘Some people,’ I said, ‘prefer pure thought to the painful vacuity of ill-considered social exchanges.’
I was rather pleased with that. Johnson sat down on the bed.
‘Now you mention it,’ he said, ‘that’s why I took off my glasses.’
And putting his two hands hard on my shoulders, he kissed me.
It was an extremely nice kiss. It didn’t go on quite as long as Krishtof Bey’s, nor was it unpleasant or torrid. Half-way through he shifted his grip so that the leverage was better; and since he had wiped off my cream, I didn’t have to worry what he did with my nose. At the end, he drew off and said, ‘You’ve been practising. Can I have afters?’
If I hadn’t been scarlet with sunburn I suppose I would have been flushed up to the eyes. He kissed me again, briefly, and then sat grinning maliciously at me and holding my hands.
Believe it or not, I had forgotten that tape-recorder on Crab. I even returned the smile, gasping a little. ‘I thought I should remind you,’ said Johnson frankly. ‘Anyway, everyone else seems to have had a ball, barring perhaps Mr Tiko. What was all that stuff again about painful vacuity?’
‘And pure thought,’ I said.
‘And pure thought. For some people, yes, Beltanno.’
‘But not for me?’
‘You haven’t had a pure thought since you were born,’ said Johnson cheerfully. ‘You’re a mixture of horrible complexes, and you know it. But underneath that freeze-dried exterior lies a splendid unprogrammed community known as Beltanno B. Loving.’
Outside the door, Trotter’s voice called from the cockpit, and we heard him go forward, and the rush of Spry’s feet. ‘We’re back,’ said Johnson. ‘Back from danger: back from isolation: back into the great big world. Are you sorry?’
‘Are you?’ I said. Until that moment, I had forgotten.
He said, ‘It’s my chosen profession. I’m sorry that this time it seems to have co-opted yourself, but don’t let it fret you. One more day will see the whole business finished, provided we can keep Harry quiet. Can we keep Harry quiet?’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘How? Will you bring the police over? Will they tell you who did all these things?’
Johnson got up. He collected my glass and his own, and putting them both in their slots, relatched the locker and put on his bifocal glasses. They flashed at me under the skylight: familiar, anonymous, unreadable. He said, ‘No need. I know who did all these things. I’ve known, actually, for a fairly long time.’