A night sail to the Île-de-Bréhat in the university boat. Twenty-four hours if the wind is fair, the course as south as they can sail it, cut the shipping lanes at right angles, raise the La Peon lighthouse or Les Heux, pick their way in through the currents.
There are six of them—three young men, three young women. In experience there is little to choose between them though some, like Maud, know more about dinghies than yachts, are more at ease working purely with sail and wind than passage planning and tidal curves. As a matter of club policy they have (in the pub in Bristol) appointed a captain. The choice was made by ballot, the names written on Rizla papers, the papers folded and dropped into a clean ashtray. Tim won by a single vote and promised to flog them all for the merest indiscipline. Maud received two votes, one of them from Tim. As for whether Maud voted for him, he knew there were two who did not and prefers to assume she was not one of them.
They leave on the morning tide. The wind is from the west, force three to four, the boat moving in stately rhythm and heeling just enough to make a pencil on the chart table roll slowly to the leeward side. As they come clear of the shelter of the bay there are cross-currents, fields of green water stubbled with short choppy waves that make the hull jitter and send wisps of spray to darken the wood of the deck. But this is sailing at its easiest, its most pleasant. Summer air, the boat’s shadow like black silk hauled just beneath the water’s surface, the crew fresh, fresh-faced, the forecast excellent. In the afternoon the wind backs towards the south. There’s a rain squall they watch arriving from miles off that leaves the boat’s hundred surfaces shining and dripping. England disappears in the murk astern then appears again in uncanny green detail as the weather blows through.
In the last good hour of daylight they prepare a supper of chilli con carne (chilli sin carne for the one vegetarian), have a single glass of wine each, mugs of coffee. They switch on the navigation lights and begin the watches. In another hour they will be up in the shipping lanes with vessels of fifty thousand tonnes, a hundred thousand tonnes, some moving so fast that a light on the far horizon could be on top of them inside of fifteen minutes. Ships that by rumour and repute travel blind or nearly so, some man or other dozing on a part-lit bridge sixty metres above the water.
At ten to three in the morning, Tim and Maud are woken for their watch and move from thin sleep into the life of the boat, the tilted world. The off-going watch has made hot drinks for them. A voice, amused, calls Tim ‘skipper’. On the chart table under a red lamp the English Channel is pinned by weights of lead wrapped in leather. Soft lines show their progress. The last fix places them thirty miles west of Jersey. In the cockpit Maud takes the tiller. Tim goes forward to look for shipping. Off the starboard bow are the heaped lights of a Ro-Ro ferry; something much smaller off the other bow—a trawler, perhaps, from the odd way she’s lit up. He watches for a while, sees how her bearing changes, then makes his way back to the cockpit.
‘O.K.?’ he says.
‘O.K.,’ she says.
She has a blue Helly Hansen jacket on, jeans, sea boots.
‘You should have a hat,’ he says and points to his own.
The light of the binnacle on her face, the eeriness of that light. She’s peering up at the mainsail, the dove-grey ghost of it under the masthead light. She lets the boat fall away from the wind then brings it up a point and settles it. Tim puts half a turn on the headsail winch. The ferry is already passing them. He thinks he hears its engines. Perhaps he does.
‘Turn right,’ he says, ‘and we could sail for America.’
She nods. She’s concentrating.
‘Would you like that?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘I’ll pop below and cut their throats.’
‘O.K.,’ she says.
‘You may have to help me heave them over the side.’
‘O.K.’
‘Or would you like to cut their throats?’
‘Are you keeping watch?’
He reaches across, touches the cold cloth of her jeans. ‘O.K.,’ he says. ‘I’ll behave.’
At twenty-minute intervals they swap roles, one to the tiller, one to the slatted bench on the leeward side to keep watch under the foot of the sails. The urge to keep talking to her, to keep her attention, is disturbingly strong. Love is making him slightly foolish. Here they are, crossing the English Channel at night, and he, the nominal captain, is thinking of the chocolate in his pocket and whether she would let him feed it to her so that he could feel for a moment the slight damp heat of her mouth on his fingertips. He should shake this off. He should assume his responsibilities. Come on, Rathbone! But beyond all admonition is his belief that the world is secretly powered by people in exactly the condition he is now, melodic, lit up, the nerve-trees of their brains like cities seen from the air at night . . .
Over the eastern horizon, the morning star. At twenty to six the sun is rising. Briefly, sea and air appear as things new made and they are Adam and Eve drifting on a vine leaf, a morning in Eden. Then fog comes down as fog can, long fingers of it winding shyly around the things of the boat and thickening until visibility is down to thirty yards, then ten. Tim fetches the horn, shouts up the rest of the crew. They stand by to start the engine, to drop the sails. The sea rustles at the side of them. The fog is theatrical, impenetrable. Tim sounds the horn—one long blast and two short. There’s someone below watching the radar, everyone else is on deck, leaning into the fog. They begin to hear the horns of shipping. They speak in whispers, see shapes, imaginary headlands, vessels of smoke. On the VHF, the open channel, comes a sudden voice in a language none of them recognize. The cadence is unusual. It may be a warning of some sort but it sounds more like a recitation or a call to prayer.