With Robert Currey beside her, nothing in the work feels too difficult, nothing overwhelms. The canvas tool bag, the pantomime fish—always seems to have what they need. Several times during these mornings and evenings with Currey she remembers working with Grandfather Ray, the pair of them in his garage with the pre-cut parts of the dinghy, the smell of glue and resin, the Calor gas from the heater. Her hair in a plait then, her small hands passing out the tools. The radio on. The old man quietly whistling. Some slung lamp on a flex they worked beneath.
She does not mention any of this to Robert Currey. When they talk it’s about the boat, the work in hand. They fit a new bow roller, a new samson post. They fit the U bolts—one either side of the cockpit, low down, so that she could, in theory, clip on before leaving the cabin; two each side going forward, all of them with steel backing plates and lock nuts.
The rigger comes. He’s sweating cider. He has eyes like a frightened horse. Robert Currey speaks to him, calms him as though he were indeed a frightened horse. The rigger gets to work, hauls himself to the top of the mast, rope coiled over his shoulder. He takes half a day, and when the job is done he seems returned to some less disastrous version of himself. He accepts a mug of tea from Maud. He grins and shows the remnants of his teeth.
Day by day the weather sweetens. Maud works in T-shirt and jeans, her feet bare when she’s on the boat. A van delivers the wind vane—a three-year-old Hydrovane from a yard in Chichester. With its parts laid out along the pontoon it looks at first like the wreckage of a small plane that has flown into the side of a building. At half five, Robert Currey crosses the yard from Tinkerbelle. He puts the tender in the water at Lodestar’s stern, measures up, then drills the fibre glass while Maud, leaning through the push pit tails, holds the mounting brackets in place. Ten minutes in the boat shed produces six three-quarter-inch backing plates. By twenty to eight, after wrestling with a seized bolt at the base of the drive unit, and a moment of vexation when it appeared the nylon vane cover was too small, the system is in place.
‘This will be your new best friend,’ says Robert Currey, tilting the vane on its axis and watching it swing back to its centre line. ‘Most people give them names. You got a name in mind?’
‘For the vane?’
He laughs at her, her expression. ‘You don’t have to give it a name,’ he says, ‘but we should drink a toast to it. That would be a nautical thing to do. Got any drink on board?’
She goes below and comes up a moment later with a bottle of dark liquor and two plastic glasses.
‘Navy rum,’ says Currey, squinting at the bottle. ‘I wouldn’t have put you down for that.’
‘Tim bought it,’ she says.
‘Right,’ says Robert Currey. ‘For emergency uses.’
‘He thought it was something the boat should have.’
‘He was probably right.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
He holds the glasses and she pours a measure of rum into each. ‘Thank you,’ she says.
‘You’re welcome,’ he says. Across the water a light comes on in a house on the side of the hill, a farmhouse perhaps, a light that leaps like a spark from the darkness.
Two days later she takes the boat out into the bay. Ten knots of wind, an April sky fretted with high cloud, the headlands gleaming. When she has the boat balanced she secures the tiller, removes the vane lock-pin and angles the leading edge of the vane into the wind. She wedges herself into a corner of the cockpit and stares at it, the delicate tilting and twitching of the vane in its orange nylon cover. She checks the compass, looks at the boat’s wake. It’s working but it’s over-correcting, the boat crossing and recrossing its heading. She goes back and adjusts the angle of the vane, leans it away from the vertical. This is better, steadier, but it takes another three adjustments before she has it as she wants it. She’s on a close reach doing five knots, the sea ribbed and sparkling, a gull flying at deck height off her port side. Improbable as it seems, Lodestar is holding a course and the gear bolted to the transom is steering it. She is free! Free to do whatever she needs. Trim a sail, keep watch. Go below to make coffee. Go below to sleep.
With the control lines she moves the vane’s leading edge and the boat arcs gently away from the wind. She lets out the jib a little, feels the boat settle again. She is lost in it, this new game in which she mediates between the wind and the gear. Her role on the boat has changed. It already seems strange that she managed on her own before, scurrying between one task and the next like a figure in a silent film. Now she is a type of technician. No more lunging for a winch as the boat comes around. No more running forward to free a line only to find the boat immediately starting to luff. She reaches into the cabin for her tobacco pouch and squats on the cockpit sole to roll a cigarette out of the wind, then sits up wondering where the vane’s weak points are, what a big wave might buckle, how she might repair it in the middle of the night. Everything can break; she knows that. Everything will break in the end; she knows that too, for what it’s worth. But the vane—all that calibrated simplicity—has the look of something that will go on for a long time. She even likes the bright orange cover. It is a flag, a banner. She finds it comforting, and for that, if nothing else, she is grateful.
She has four more days before her pontoon booking expires. After that she must either renew or move to the swinging moorings in mid-river. Working with Robert Currey—sometimes so late they must wear head torches to see what they’re doing—the boat is fitted with tubular steel ‘goalposts’ over the head of the vane, and onto the crossbar they mount a pair of fifty-watt rigid solar panels. This should answer most of her electrical needs—it will at least mean significantly less time running the engine. Currey promises to fit an AC inverter for her. ‘You’ll be able to plug stuff in,’ he says. ‘CD player, hairdryer, power tools. You can charge your phone.’ Apparently, there’s someone he knows who might have a spare Victron out in a shed. Someone who might part with it for beer money.
She fills up with water and lays in some food. On the morning of the fifth day she casts herself off from the pontoon and motors out to the old mooring. When the boat’s secure, the bows parting the incoming tide, she goes below and pushes all the sail bags out through the forward hatch, then sits under the mast passing canvas through her hands looking for tears, loose stitching, signs of chaffing. Her mainsail and the furling jib she is not worried about. The others came with the boat, or all except the red spinnaker she has hardly used, that she does not quite trust herself to manage on her own. There’s a genoa she could hank onto the spare forestay (this extra stay an innovation from the days of John Gosse). Another foresail, already much repaired around the tack; and a little storm jib, suitably stiff and battered, though with no obvious signs of weakness.
She bags them and drops them back through the hatch into the forecabin. It’s mid-afternoon. She cooks eggs, eats them sitting on the companionway steps looking into the cabin. To her right is the VHF, the new battery monitor, the charge controller for the solar panels. Below these, the Navtex, the GPS, the radar, the chart table itself, chartless at the moment, just a coffee mug, an ashtray, the Breton plotter and a pair of brass dividers. In the deep shelf at the back of the table is a Reeds Almanac, a book of ocean landfalls, John Gosse’s old Channel pilot. Above, in the mesh pocket, is a Garmin handheld GPS, a pair of lighters, her phone (off), a pair of sunglasses, her pass for the hospital in Croydon. The Zeiss binoculars are in the wooden cubby beside her cheek, a torch in the same cubby, another torch somewhere among her bedding in the quarter berth. Behind her, in the cockpit lockers, she has parachute flares and handheld flares (she saw Robert Currey checking the dates on them). Also fenders and spare warps in there. Harnesses, foghorn, a canvas bucket of decent size, big enough perhaps to be used as a sea anchor.
Some items—the sail thread, the fishing line—are already lost or have somehow become absent from the plan of the boat she carries in her head. Others—a soldering iron, a measuring jug, a spare wristwatch, writing paper, a swimsuit (though she has shorts and T-shirts and these, surely, will serve)—she simply does not have. But if her lines were cut in the night and she woke at sea, she has enough, more than enough, to survive, to keep going. The boat is ready. It is ready, and there is nothing now except to decide what it has all been for.
She is a woman alone on a boat. What is strange about that? Yet it feels as if she has taken her place in the heart of the impossible, and for the space of four or five breaths an immense physical weakness overwhelms her. The thought of hauling on ropes, of doing the thousand things the most ordinary day at sea will demand of her, is intolerable. Also, weirdly remote, as if she were thinking of things she will never do.
She pushes herself away from the steps and puts her plate in the steel sink. She kneels on the cabin sole, opens a locker under the port-side bench, rummages there a while and pulls out a green backpack. She unzips it, looks inside, sniffs it, then starts to collect things from various parts of the boat, laying them first on the red bench before packing them carefully into the bag. This will be the crash bag, kept at hand to be snatched up when all else is lost—the bag of last resorts. She will not need breast pads or a spare nightie for this one. She will need a hand compass, a pair of smoke flares, a signalling mirror, a good knife. She will need, if she can only find it, the fishing line. The line, the hooks and lures . . .