Stormchild (21 page)

“Love is very mysterious,” David said, as though that explained everything. He was in a confident mood, sure that his diagnosis was unassailable. “As you just observed,” he went on, “the girl’s reaction to the situation was extraordinary, which would suggest to any reasonably intelligent person that she was seeking a reason, any reason, to escape from what she saw as an intolerable and increasingly irksome dilemma.”

“What in hell’s name are you going on about?”

“Pour me another Irish whiskey, dear boy, and I shall tell you.”

I poured him the whiskey, choosing a moment when
Stormchild
was between white-topped crests. “Here!” I served him the whiskey in one of the plastic-spouted childrens’ training cups, which saved us from spilling precious Jamesons across the deck.

“As I told you, the American girl”—even now David found it hard to articulate her name—”is in love with you. I saw it in her face the moment I met you both on Antigua. There is a mooncalf quality about the young when they’re in love, and she had it. Doubtless she is searching for an authority figure, which is why she finds older men attractive. I daresay her father died when she was young?”

“He abandoned the family.”

“Ah! There you are! You don’t have to grow a beard and call yourself Sigmund Freud to pluck the bones out of that one! She’s after a father figure, isn’t she? You, of course, being a man of honor, did not return her schoolgirlish crush, which frustrated her, and, being an innocent child and uncertain how to surmount the obstacle of your indifference, she made the wise decision to cut her losses and skedaddle. It was clearly too embarrassing a matter for her to explain calmly, so instead, and quite sensibly in my view, she seized upon the first convenient excuse to make her admittedly embarrassing and hasty exit.” My reverend brother smiled very smugly at me.
“Quod erat demonstrandum,
I believe?”

I stared past the streaming drops on the spray hood’s screen to the ragged turmoil of the sea beyond. “She wasn’t in love with me, David,” I said after a long pause, “I was in love with her.”

David smiled as if I had made a fine joke, then he suddenly realized that I might have spoken the truth and he looked appalled instead. “Oh, dear,” was all he could say.

“I’m besotted,” I confessed. “I’m the mooncalf, not her.”

David puffed fiercely at his pipe. For a moment I thought I had silenced him, then he glowered at me from beneath his impressively bushy eyebrows. “The girl’s young enough to be your daughter!”

“You think I don’t know that, for Christ’s sake?” I exploded at him. Jackie was just twenty-six, one year older than Nicole. Indeed, Jackie had not even been born when Joanna and I had married.

“I blame myself,” David said with a noble air of abnegation.

“You? Why are you to blame?”

“I encouraged her to accompany you, did I not? But only as someone to spare you the cooking and cleaning chores. Good God, man, I didn’t think you’d make a prize fool of yourself!”

“Well I did,” I said bitterly.

“Then it’s a good thing she’s cut her losses and run,” David said trenchantly. “You said yourself that this was meant to be an adventure, and certainly not some half-baked romance.”

“Can we shut up about it?” I begged him.

“Old enough to be her father!” David, abjuring tact, would now try to jolly me out of misery with mockery. “October falling in love with April! My cradle-snatching brother!”

“Shut up!”

We sailed on in silence as David’s pipe smoke whipped back in the wind’s path. He looked very self-satisfied and very self-righteous. I probably looked miserable. I could not shift Jackie out of my head, and all I could think about was the desperate hope that she might be waiting for us in Colon Harbor at the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal.

We reached Colon two weeks later, dropping our sails as we passed through the breakwater entrance, then motoring through a downpour of rain toward the yacht moorings. Thunder bellowed across the sky, and lightning stabbed viciously above Fort Sherman. As soon as the customs and immigration launch had dealt with us, I insisted on unlashing
Stormchild
’s dinghy, dragging the outboard motor up from its locker in the engine room, then going ashore to the Panama Canal Yacht Club. I told David, with a remarkable lack of conviction, that I wanted to speak with the weather service. He gave me a disbelieving look, but did not try to dissuade me, nor did he suggest that I might use
Stormchild’s
radio-telephone to get a forecast. The thunder echoed back from the hills as the little dinghy buffeted its way through the filthy waters. The yacht club was the rendezvous for small boat crews, but Jackie was not waiting there, and the only mail for
Stormchild
was a good luck message from Betty which contained the reassurance that all was well at the boatyard. At that point I could not have cared if the boatyard staff had gone mad and burned the place to the ground. I cared for nothing but Jackie. I rang her home number and, at last, heard her voice, but only on a newly installed answering machine. “Hi! This is Jackie Potten and I’d really like to talk with you, but I can’t take your call right now, so please leave a message after the beep. Oh! And have a nice day!”

“This is Tim,” I said, “and I would really like to talk with you. We’re going through the Panama Canal tomorrow, then heading south to Puerto Montt. But you can leave a message for me at the Balboa Yacht Club”—I fumbled to find the number of the yacht club, which lay at the canal’s Pacific end—”that’s 52-2524, and we’ll be there tomorrow evening.”

“So what is the forecast?” David boomed at me when I returned.

“I couldn’t get through to the weather people,” I lied. “It seems the rain has tied up the phone lines.” David made a mocking noise, but was mollified when I presented him with a bottle of brandy I had bought ashore. “It’s something,” I said, “to celebrate our first trip through the canal.”

It was a trip I would normally have enjoyed; an extraordinary passage past basking iguanas and through the massive, water-churning locks, where local line-handlers, especially hired for the transit, skillfully held
Stormchild’s
gunwales off the towering walls. We followed a vast German bulk-carrier through the locks and
Stormchild
bucked in the merchantman’s wake as though she was stemming a North Sea storm. David let loose a cheer as we cleared the final lock, then uncorked the brandy.

No message waited at the Balboa Yacht Club, and the only response from Jackie’s telephone was the sprightly machine that wished me a nice day, so David and I, in a wet wind and on a gray sea, sailed on.

We sailed into sickening calms and contrary currents against which, day by day and inch by inch, we made our slow way out into the vast and empty Pacific until, a week from Panama, a real wind at last plucked us from our lethargy and bent
Stormchild
’s sails toward the sea. Water hissed at our stem and broke into a creamy wake astern.

The wind carried us into the chill airs brought north by the Humboldt Current. Ten days out of Panama I put away my shorts and took out long trousers, and three days later I dragged my heavy foul-weather gear out of
Stormchild’s
wet locker where I also discovered Jackie’s oilskins. I pushed them into a kit bag that I stored under the bunk she had used, and which was now once again given over to ship’s stores. For days I had been finding her belongings scattered about the boat. Her sprouting seeds had gone mad, luxuriating like a tiny forest in their plastic home until I had tossed the whole mess overboard. I had discovered her bikini in a wash bag, and that, like her oilskins, I stored aboard. I found an unused sound tape for her recorder, a pen, her awful felt hat, and a pathetic pair of pink socks. “Chuck ‘em!” David robustly encouraged me when he saw me holding the little socks with the reverence that a Catholic might yield to a scrap of the true cross.

“They’re not mine to chuck.”

“You are master under God of this ship, which gives you inalienable rights under international law over all persons and objects and smelly socks found in your domain. Allow me to lighten your ship, Tim, if you lack the resolve.” He plucked the socks from my hand and hurled them far into the wind. I saw the flash of bright pink wool floating briefly amongst a mess of white foam on a wave’s grim face, then the socks were gone forever. The next morning I hurled the silly mug with the loving cats overboard, though I took a perverse comfort from wearing the scarf Jackie had knitted me.

We thumped on, curving round the bulge of a continent, then steering
Stormchild
hard to the south. I saw our first albatross, vast, serene, and riding the sky like an angel. There were whales in the gray-green sea and strange stars above us as we left the northern hemisphere behind and slashed on into the southern emptiness. Mile after lonely mile we went, with neither a sail nor a ship in sight, nor even an aircraft above us. This was one of the empty seas, as empty as when Alexander Selkirk, who would be transmuted by genius into Robinson Crusoe, was marooned on an island in the middle of its desolation.

The further south we sailed, the worse the weather became. We seemed to have entered a region of perpetual cloud that shadowed the sea with a sinister, slaty cast. Squalls hissed across that gray, dark sea. The wind flecked the water white and lifted spindrift that permeated every inch of
Stormchild’s
cabins. David and I, when on watch, crouched behind the spray hood and tried not to move our heads too much because the skin of our necks, unused to the confining stiffness of the oilskin’s collars, had been chafed to rawness. My mood, already tormented by Jackie’s disappearance, was further soured by the weather. My only escape from doom-laden misery lay in sailing
Stormchild
as efficiently as possible, taking pleasure in a skill well done. I could lose myself behind the wheel, imagining that my endless path through the heave and pattern of great waves could last forever.

There was too much cloud for celestial navigation, and I could not be bothered to use the SatNav, yet I knew we were closing on an unseen coast because of the increasing numbers of molly-mawks, gray gulls, terns, and storm petrels that came near
Stormchild.
One day, miraculously, the sun shone, but the weather stayed cold and when I dipped a thermometer into the sea the temperature measured a mere six degrees centigrade, which meant we had plunged into the very heart of the icy Humboldt Current which drags tons of Antarctic meltwater north into the Pacific. I dug out the red, white, and blue Chilean courtesy ensign I had bought in Colon and stored it in a ready locker of the cockpit.

That night the phosphorescence made a dazzling path behind
Stormchild’s
transom. A school of Chilean dolphins embroidered that starry wake by weaving trails of shattered light around it, yet the beauty of the moment was deceptive for the weather was becoming ominous and the seas still heavier. So far, in the nine thousand miles of
Stormchild’s
voyage, I had escaped all the bad storms, but that night, almost as though the Genesis community was aware of our coming and had summoned the spirits of the deep to stop
Stormchild,
a black gale came hurtling out of the northeast. The barometer plummeted, and the sea, its current fighting against the wind, became frighteningly steep and confused. The dolphins flicked one last dazzling curve in
Stormchild’s
wake, then left.

David, dragged from his bunk, helped me shorten sail. We were both swathed in oilskins and sea boots, and had our lifelines clipped to steel rings bedded in the cockpit’s sole. An hour later we took in all but the storm trysail and jib, yet still the wind rose, and by midnight we had reefed down to just the triple-stitched scrap of storm jib which dragged us scudding through the maelstrom of vicious sea and shrieking wind.
Stormchild
rode the storm beautifully. She thumped up those bastard seas, slashing through their confused summits before plunging down into the dark troughs. At times a cross sea would jar the boat sideways and the cockpit would fill with a seething swirl of freezing water, but always
Stormchild
held firm on course to meet the next wind-haunted crest.

The gale seemed to increase its fury. Once, when a flicker of lightning sliced the sky, I saw that David was praying. A few moments later, when the wind was a deafening and demonic screech, he manfully went below and somehow heated soup which he brought precariously back to the cockpit. Rarely had food tasted better. The boat bucked and shuddered in the worst of the seas, but as dawn approached I sensed that the anger was at last dying from the wind. First light showed us mad waters, blown white by the storm’s anger, but already the madness was settling and slowly, as the gray day lightened and the wind became tired, we could at last stow the storm jib, set headsails, and turn our weary boat toward the hidden shore. “If all I hear about Patagonia is right,” David remarked ominously, “then that little blow is a mere promise of what is to come.”

“Indeed.”

“But she’s a well-named boat,” he said with great satisfaction, and indeed she was, for
Stormchild
had worn the gale’s quick savagery with an easy confidence. I knew there was worse to come, much worse, for we were approaching a coast renowned for killing ships, yet our baptism of tempest augured well. “I fear the galley is painted with spilled tomato soup,” David confessed, but otherwise there was not a great deal of damage. A seam in the storm jib had begun to tear its lockstitches apart, some ill-stowed wineglasses had shattered, and an errant wave crashing on our stern had carried away one of the two life buoys, but otherwise
Stormchild
had indeed lived up to the promise of her name.

That evening, as we sipped our whiskey and as
Stormchild
hissed and bubbled her quick wake across the long, exhausted swell of an ocean after storm, the far peaks of Chile showed like jagged clouds above the eastern horizon. We had come to our landfall, to the high snowcapped Andean mountains that lay behind the Patagonian coast. David stared at the mountains through binoculars, then raised his plastic cup in a heartfelt tribute to my navigation. “Well done, my good and excellent little brother, well done.”