Rock was rammed. Bunting had been strung up all the way from the Sailing Club to the railings of the car park – which was the furthest point in the village – and people were milling everywhere. The tide was in, slapping noisily against the harbour walls, and more boats than she could count were bobbing about in the estuary. The winds had picked up since this morning’s dead calm, and a gauze-thin mist was beginning to roll in, dampening skin and making hair frizz.
‘Oh, Suzy, come on,’ Cassie said in a nervous voice as Suzy scanned the crowds on her behalf for Betsy. ‘This isn’t reasonable. I thought it was just a little thing, but there are hundreds of people here. I can’t possibly be expected to—’
‘Oh, I see her!’ Suzy cried, waving her arm in the air and taking off at a sprint towards a group of women on the slipway.
‘Arch, talk to her,’ Cassie pleaded, turning round to Archie, who was holding Velvet in his arms and looking longingly as people walked past with pints in plastic beer glasses.
‘You know what Henry’s like with his lists,’ he shrugged sympathetically, giving her a quick squeeze.
‘Yes, and it’s thanks to you he got the list to me in the first place,’ she tutted. ‘You’re his lackey. I don’t know why I thought you’d do anything to help.’
‘Listen, it won’t be all that bad. There’s five others in the boat with you; I reckon so long as you just keep rhythm with them, no one will notice whether you’ve got a clue about technique or not.’ He winked at her. ‘Come on. It’s just one race. Suzy’s going to give herself a hernia if she keeps waving at us like that.’
They trotted down the quay, beside the lifeboat station, to where Suzy was standing with a heavy-set girl with beautiful bright orange hair that from a distance looked like a mass of flames. She was wearing it pulled up in a messy top-knot, with a hot-pink vest and black sports shorts on, seemingly oblivious to the cold and gusty wind.
Cassie’s eyes fell again to the white horses rippling down the estuary, the water a dark air-force blue, and she heard the flap and rattle of the ratchets on the Sailing Club’s toppers and picos, all safely stowed on the quay for the night. Out on the water, sails were being lowered on the clinkers and skiffs as people tried to neutralize their positions and not drift with the winds. It was hard to believe they had been enjoying millpond conditions for their surfing lesson just this morning, and she could only guess at the size of the waves that must now be thundering into the wide beach at Polzeath. Laird would be in seventh heaven, no doubt. Luke too, maybe.
‘Cass!’ Bets greeted her, holding out an oar in place of a hand. ‘It’s good to meet you. And oh boy, do we need you! You couldn’t have volunteered at a better time. I’ll tell you, I’m going to kill that Emma when I see her next. She did it slipping on a spilt beer in the Mariner’s, you know.’
But Cassie didn’t reply. She was too busy looking at the enormous oar. It was at least 2.5 metres high, and so thick her fingers didn’t close round it. How was she supposed to row with this thing? It could prop up a house.
‘How much gigging have you done, did you say?’ Betsy asked.
‘I didn’t,’ Cassie replied, just as Suzy’s arm shot forward and pushed her out of the way of a crew who were jogging down the slipway, holding their yellow gig between them.
‘Polperro,’ Betsy said, her eyes narrowed as she watched them stop by the water’s edge and lower the boat down. She turned slightly to Suzy. ‘Remember their cox in ’95?’
‘As if I could forget,’ Suzy replied in a dark voice, her arms folded menacingly across her bosom.
Archie and Cassie swapped arched eyebrows but said nothing. People had begun to move forwards towards the waterline now, and someone called Betsy’s name.
‘Come on, Bets!’
Betsy turned with a wave, and Cassie saw a group of women in the same hot-pink vests as her, manoeuvring a blue boat – ‘Speedwell’ written in large white letters along the side – towards the water.
‘Time to go,’ Betsy grinned, tossing Cassie one of the pink tops. ‘Our crew colour. Put it on. Dress like a team, row like a team, we say.’
Betsy grinned and jogged down to the others. Cassie – realizing she was out of time to try to argue her way out of this – hurriedly pulled off her grey marl hoody and mint Sweaty Betty T-shirt and put it on. She went to put the hoody back on, but Suzy stopped her.
‘Trust me. You won’t need it.’
‘I will. It’ll be a lot colder on the water.’
‘Not with the amount of work you’re going to be doing. It’ll be a miracle if you keep your bikini top on.’
Cassie frowned, but reluctantly let Suzy keep hold of the hoody.
‘Go get ’em, tiger,’ Arch smiled, giving a small punch in the air to rally her fighting spirit. It didn’t work.
‘I bloody well hate both of you,’ she muttered. ‘But I love you, darling,’ she whispered to Velvet, giving her a quick kiss before jogging dejectedly down the slipway to where the others were now sitting in the boat. A tiny woman in a yellow sailing jacket and navy baseball cap was holding the prow to keep it steady against the quay.
Betsy, who was doing some energetic shoulder rolls, stopped and turned in her seat at the front. ‘Everyone, this is Cass. Cass, this is Lorna, Stevie, Sall and Jacqs. And Debs here’ – the woman in the yellow jacket nodded – ‘is our cox.’
‘Hi,’ Cassie smiled, raising a feeble hand and seeing a space in the fifth seat back. Hers, she presumed. The seats were positioned left and right alternately down the boat. Cassie saw her seat was on the left, meaning her oar would go into the water from the right.
‘Hop in,’ Betsy said, resuming her shoulder rolls. ‘You’re at five. We need to get into position. The other crews are at the start already.’
‘You jump in – I’ll pass the oar over to you when you’re sitting,’ Suzy said brightly.
‘Where’s the start?’ Cassie asked her in a quiet voice, stepping down tentatively into the boat and trying not to shriek as it rocked.
‘See the blue tug out there?’ Suzy said.
Cassie, sitting with relief – although not comfort – in a blue plastic bucket seat fixed to a bench, turned to see the small boat Suzy had pointed to. It was at least 500 metres away, in choppy waters, and as the girl who tended to have second thoughts about getting into Jacuzzis, she didn’t fancy her chances of going anywhere in these conditions. A wind wrestled with her briefly and she shivered, her eyes meeting Suzy’s apprehensively as she reached for the oar.
Sympathy was what she was hoping for. Surely even Suzy could see this wasn’t simply unreasonable, it was downright unsafe? But Suzy just winked, helping her slot the oar into the bracket and holding the boat secure as Debs hopped in and everyone gripped their oars. Cassie took a deep breath and looked at how the other girls were holding theirs. They seemed to hold their outer hand – the one that was on the tip of the oar – facing them around the oar, the inner hand cupped over the top.
‘Ready?’ Suzy asked, and at everyone’s nod (except Cassie’s), she let go of the boat, pushing it away from the harbour wall. Away from safety.
Cassie scrunched her eyes shut and automatically launched into the Lord’s Prayer – the first time she’d recited it since school.
‘Right, girls, let’s keep this tight,’ Betsy said calmly as the boat floated freely on the water, lurching from side to side so that the dark water splashed threateningly over into their laps. Cassie winced at the shock of the cold and gripped the oar tighter, willing herself not to scream, before realizing the crew was already moving in a unified rhythm that righted their direction; within five strokes they had faced the boat into the waves, rather than side-on to them, so that the chop cut around them and the boat bobbed gently on the surface as they rowed.
Cassie forced herself to calm down. They weren’t sinking; they weren’t sinking . . .
She watched the team’s steady rise-and-fall rhythm, knowing she couldn’t just sit there like a lemon while they did all the work. She counted as they leaned back in unison, pulling the oars into them, before sitting up on the forwards push on the count of three.
‘Cassie, pick it up!’ Debs said through her little tannoy, her eyes hidden beneath her cap but clearly seeing how Cassie struggled to fall into line. The principle of it was fine – down two, up two – but the weight of the water on the oars meant she found it hard to push them through and get back up in time, so that she was perpetually leaning behind as the others sat back up again.
Another gig – red – glided past, the crew a symphony in motion, backs straight, arms strong. Cassie could see Debs watching her and knew she must be able to tell that Cassie had never set foot on a gig before. ‘Oh God, oh God,’ she muttered.
‘Twist your wrist on the forward push,’ Jacqs murmured, from behind her.
What? Cassie stiffened in surprise – she hadn’t been aware she’d expressed her panic out loud, but she did as instructed and the oar sliced cleanly through the water, like a blade through butter.
Oh!
‘Thank you,’ she whispered back as she did it again and again, beginning to catch up with Sally’s rhythm and maintain it. Their speed seemed to increase a little – or was that just her imagination? – and she felt a bolt of relief as she integrated into the team’s coherent motion. This wasn’t so bad after all, she thought, as she rose and fell with the others. She hadn’t fallen in. She hadn’t dropped her oar or hit anyone else’s – although there was still time.
She clenched with tension again, concentrating so hard on not messing up that she was surprised when Debs gave the cue for them to stop rowing and drift.
She turned and saw the blue tug just ahead. Really? Already?
Jacqs reached over and patted her on the back. ‘Good going,’ she said encouragingly.
Cassie beamed as relief and pride surged through her. Phase One was complete – she’d made it to the start line at least, now just the finish line to go – and as she stretched out her back and arms, she allowed herself the luxury of looking around at last.
She was amazed by what she saw: yellow water taxis chugging away at a distance, filled to capacity with spectators yelling out the names of their favoured teams – ‘Swift!’, ‘Shearwater!’, ‘Bonnet!’, ‘Hope!’ – as those on the smaller crafts did the same. There were so many boats on the stretches either side of them that from the shore it had looked more like a Normandy landing, but here, sitting amid them, it felt like a festival on the water.
It took a while for them to get the boat into position. No sooner were they in line with the tug’s prow than they drifted forwards again as they waited for the last gigs to line up. Cassie sat on the boat, her hands gripping the oar tightly, nerves beginning to kick in again as she looked left and right. Padstow sat to their right (the place of pilgrimage for seafood lovers the world over) and Rock to the left (the postcode with some of the highest retail values in the country), but the sea mist had stripped them of clarity and all that she could really see was the vast channel that surrounded her on all sides and had seemed so menacing from the shore. Beneath them, she could just make out the pale shimmer of the drifting sandbank, called the Doom Bar and historically the undoing of so many vessels.
But not this one – this gig was buoyant and beautifully hand-crafted in the ancient tradition, these girls strong, and as they bobbed about, just like plastic water bottles on the sea, waiting for the off, Cassie suddenly understood exactly why Henry had put this on her list. Being on the water was what this place was all about – not buying olives from the deli or eating at Rick Stein’s, or even paddling in the tame shallows of Daymer Bay or wave-jumping at Polzeath, but rowing out to the deepest, darkest depths when the wind was up, the sun was setting, the air was like cobwebs and the sea had a snarl to it . . . This place had a wild, savage beauty that either touched you or frightened you, and it was here that Henry’s love of adventure had been moulded and nurtured. This – right here in the middle of the sea – was where he had become the man she loved.
‘Nervous?’ Jacqs asked, tapping lightly on her shoulder.
‘You could say that,’ Cassie confessed with a shy smile, twisting in her seat slightly. ‘Is this an important race?’
‘North coast friendly,’ Jacqs said with a dance in her hazel-green eyes. ‘Of course, we say friendly. What we mean is, a fight to the death.’
‘Oh yikes,’ Cassie managed to grin.
A bell rang somewhere and everything suddenly fell quiet, like the sky emptying of birds in the moments before a storm. The yells from the spectators stopped and Jacqs gave her a fist-bump. Cassie took a deep breath, her hands tingling from the adrenalin. This was it, then . . . The crews in the eight gigs all assumed identical positions, heads tipped down slightly, arms poised to pull.
The tug gave a long blast of its horn and suddenly the girls were rising and falling again in perfect synchronicity, Cassie a half-beat behind, as the gig began to move through the water to the cheers and toots of the supporters. At first the boat felt heavy, as though tethered to the seabed beneath them, but repetition rapidly brought momentum and within a minute the boat felt if not quite powered under its own steam, at least like it was rising out of the water and skimming across the surface.
Cassie kept up the pace, concentrating on the twist of her wrist as she realized she still had no idea exactly where they were rowing to. There was a huge rock at the mouth of the estuary, but they wouldn’t be going all the way there and back. Would they?
It was probably better she didn’t know, she decided, having to put all her concentration into just keeping up.
Debs was shouting instructions at them – ‘Heave’, ‘Aft’ – but before they’d even reached the distinctive hump of Brea Hill, at the near end of Daymer Bay, her arms were already beginning to burn. Usually, the most exercise her arms ever got was lugging heavy picnic hampers up and down her stairs, but this was a different kind of pain, the muscles burning but not seizing as they contracted and released over and over again.
She had no idea where they were in the race, only that she could see two other gigs from her back-facing position. That had to mean they weren’t last, right?
‘Speedwell!’
‘Go, Cassie!’
Cassie turned her head only fractionally as she pulled back, but it was enough to see Suzy and Archie waving dementedly from a yellow water taxi as the gig cut past, Cassie beaming back with . . . exhilaration, she realized.
She had forgotten all about the cold wind as she took huge, deep breaths, trying to power her body on, and she knew her face must already be pinker than their crew tops. She stared grimly at Sall’s back, barely aware of the way her right wrist instinctively twisted on the push forwards now or of how she clenched her core on the roll backs.
The first she knew of their route was when the rock island came into her peripheral view on the left-hand side of the boat – her worst fears confirmed.
‘We’re at Newlands! Starboard double up! You can do this!’ Debs hollered, the rock staying to their left as they coursed round it. The waves grew bigger in this expanse of open water and a shot of alarm jangled Cassie’s nerves as the rough sea slammed into the sides of the gig and sprayed high into the air, drenching them all, but there was barely time to process it. They just kept on rowing, the rock staying to their left and then beginning to pull forwards in her vision until eventually she was staring straight at it, its bulk receding as they made their way back into the protected waters of the estuary and towards the finish.
Her muscles were screaming now, the fibres tearing minutely with every stroke, and her heart felt like a jackhammer. Every stroke hurt; she couldn’t think, could barely see beyond the pain, but she knew they were getting close, as the number of taxis and boats around them increased again, short horn-blows bursting over the wind in encouragement alongside the cacophony of shouts and yells and cheers.
Cassie wasn’t sure she had enough left for the finish. She had moved past exhaustion long ago, and yet somehow she kept moving in time, her body overriding her conscious controls like a computer outsmarting the technician; she groaned with every stroke, desperate to keep the pace, not to let down the team.
Behind her, she heard the long toot of a horn, followed by several shorter ones and a crescendo of cheers. The first boat had to be over the line. Was it much further? Could she keep going long en—
The blue tug shot past them, Cassie staring at it with a removed sense of recognition, her stomach taut and arms syncopated. It was a moment before she realized everyone else had stopped rising and falling and was slumped forward and back in their seats like felled skittles, that Debs had stopped shouting and was punching her arms in the air.
She wanted to ask if it was over, but there was no breath left in her to do it and she dropped her head onto her lap, her cheek by her knees and her eyes closed as she luxuriated in the exquisite feeling of not moving anymore. She felt her heart in her chest in a way she never had before. It pounded wildly like a boxer’s fist, as if trying to show her not just that she was alive but so alive.
Henry’s message was clear; she got it now: if she wanted to drift through her life – half asleep, uncommitted – she was with the wrong man.