Stormchild (4 page)

“She’s a wild one,” the coxswain had told me the next day, “spat at me like a cat, she did.”

Nicole became wild when she was thwarted. She thwarted herself most of all, failing in some ambition she had set for herself. Not that she failed often, for she was a capable and an extraordinarily tough girl. You learn about peoples’ characters when you sail with them in small cruising yachts, and I learned a lot about Nicole, even though she prided herself on hiding her feelings. I watched her in gales, in cold, and in fogs, and I never once saw her come near breaking point. The harder a voyage became, the harder Nicole proved. Her brother relied on humor to cushion hardship, but Nicole cultivated a rock-hard endurance. Sometimes that hardness worried Joanna and me, for it spoke of a lack of sympathy in our daughter, yet we also had much to be thankful for. Nicole, like her twin brother, grew into a good-looking adolescent with straight straw-colored hair, sea-blue eyes, and broad shoulders.

The twins had the attractiveness of good health and physical confidence, yet still there was that unsettling streak of ice in Nicole’s character. Richard could be immensely giving and understanding, but Nicole was intolerant of any weakness, either in herself or in others. Nicole had to be the best, with one, and only one, exception. Her twin brother Richard, and only Richard, was allowed to be her equal, and even her superior. They were inseparable, the best of friends, and Nicole regarded Dickie’s victories as hers, and his defeats as personal slights on her. Once, when Richard was beaten three times in one afternoon’s dinghy racing by a newcomer to the town, Nicole was furious. Richard was typically generous in praise of the newcomer, but Nicole regarded his victories as an insult. She swore revenge, but Nicole sailed a Shearwater, a catamaran, while Richard preferred a Fireball, which was a monohull. Nicole’s Uncle David, who had missed a place on an Olympic team by just one race, and therefore knew a thing or two about dinghy competition, warned Nicole that the newcomer was too good and that her unfamiliarity with the Fireball dinghy would lead to a hiding, but Nicole would have none of it. She practiced for a week and, at week’s end, in her brother’s boat and with her mother as crew, she routed the newcomer. She won every race and never once, according to Joanna, cracked a smile. “It was war out there,” Joanna said. “Terrifying!”

Nicole calmed as she grew older. By her late teens she had learned to put a governor on her temper, and by the time she went to university she could, as her brother lovingly put it, do a passable imitation of a normal human being. Richard had already left home, going, much to my pleasure, into my old regiment. Nicole, who had been suffering from a temporary bout of anti-militarism, had initially disapproved of Richard’s career, but the disapproval passed. She herself went to a north-country university where she studied geology. For a time Joanna and I worried that the constraints of scholarship might irritate Nicole into rebellion, but instead she settled down and even displayed an academic aptitude that surprised us both. Not that the old, angry Nicole vanished entirely. She threw herself eagerly into campus politics and succeeded in having herself arrested for throwing eggs at the Prime Minister in a protest against power-station emissions. When I said that it seemed damned silly to be arrested for throwing eggs, I was treated to a half hour’s scathing denunciation of my generation, my views, and my carelessness for the planet’s future. Yet, despite her passionate intolerance for any views other than her own, Nicole seemed happy and purposeful, and Joanna and I had begun to anticipate the day when we could fulfill our long-held dream of selling the house and buying a boat large enough to live aboard permanently.

Then, in an Irish springtime, when the blossoms exploded white in the deep hedgerows of County Armagh, Richard had died.

And something in Nicole had died with her twin brother.

She abandoned her studies and came home where, like a wild thing, she raged against life’s injustices. Joanna and I were advised to give Nicole’s grief time to work itself out like some splinter of shrapnel, but instead it seemed to go deeper, and there sour into a grim and hopeless misery. Nicole lost weight, became pale and snappish, and for a time she haunted the local churches, even going so far as to declare an intention of entering a Discalced Carmelite house in Provence. Her Uncle David told her to snap out of it, which she did, but only to hurl herself in entirely the opposite direction. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and three weeks later for possession of marijuana. Joanna and I paid those fines, only to discover that our daughter was pregnant and had no idea who the baby’s father was. Nicole herself opted to abort the child, and afterward sank into a sullen, vituperative mood that was worse than her previous extremes of religiosity and carnality.

“It isn’t your fault.” David tried to reassure Joanna and me, though David, who had no children himself, was hardly an expert on childrearing.

“I could understand,” Joanna had said, “if we’d dropped her on her head as a baby, or abused her, or disliked her, but Nickel had a wonderful childhood!”

“Nickel” was the family’s nickname for Nicole.

“It’s just her nature,” David had said. “Some people are excessively ambitious and competitive, and Nickel’s one of them. It’s a Blackburn trait, and you’ll just have to endure while she learns to channel it. Right now she’s like a motor given too powerful a fuel, but she’ll eventually learn to control it, and then you’ll be proud of her. Mark my words, Nickel will achieve great things one day!”

Joanna had sighed. “I hope you are right.”

Then, that same summer, Nicole met Caspar von Rellsteb. She met him in our boatyard, where he had docked to repair his catamaran’s broken forestay. It was a Saturday, and Joanna and I had been trying to hack some order into our tangled garden when, late in the afternoon, Nicole came home and calmly announced that she was leaving to live with a man called Caspar. “I’m going right now,” she added.

“Now? With Caspar? Caspar who?” an astonished Joanna had asked.

“Just Caspar.” Nicole either did not know the rest of his name or did not want us to know. “He’s an ecologist. He’s also a live-aboard like you want to be,” she airily told us, “and he’s leaving on this evening’s tide.”

“Leaving where?” Joanna asked.

“I don’t know. Just leaving.” Nicole went into the house and began singing as she collected her oilskins and seaboots. For a moment Joanna and I had just stared at each other, then we had tentatively agreed that our daughter’s sudden and unexpected happiness might prove a blessing, and that running away with the mysterious seagoing Caspar had to be better than a life of shoeless desiccation in a French nunnery, or of witless drunkenness in the town’s pubs.

Nicole, her kit bag hastily packed, did not want us to go to the boatyard to see her off, but she could hardly stop us, so we drove her to the river where Caspar’s boat proved to be a great brute of a wooden catamaran called
Erebus. Erebus
was a graceless craft, nearly fifty feet in length, with a boxy, clumsy appearance that suggested she had been constructed by an amateur builder who had compensated for his lack of experience by making every part of his craft hugely heavy. That precautionary strength must have paid off, for
Erebus
carried the unmistakable marks of long and hard usage. Her gear was chafed, her hulls were streaked, and her decks had been blanched by long days of hard tropic sunlight. There was no indication of where the boat had come from, for no hailing port was painted on either of her transoms and her ensign was an anonymous pale green rag that hung listless in the day’s sullen heat.

The big catamaran was moored at our visitor’s pontoon. Clothes and dishrags were hanging to dry from her guardrails, but there was no other sign of life on board until, quite suddenly, a tribe of very small, very fair-haired and very naked children erupted from the cabin to scream and chase one another across the coach roof and down onto the trampoline netting that formed the catamaran’s foredeck. “Are they Caspar’s children?” Joanna asked, with what I thought was a remarkable forbearance.

“Yes,” Nicole said, as though it was the most normal thing in the world for a girl to wander off and join a ready-made family she had met only two or three hours before.

“So he’s married?” I asked.

“Don’t be a toad, Daddy.” Nicole swung her kit bag onto her shoulder and walked down to the pontoon.

The four naked children on the catamaran’s foredeck netting were shrieking with loud excitement, but then a very tall and excruciatingly thin man, who had a pale green scarf knotted around his neck, suddenly appeared in
Erebus’
s cockpit. “Shut up!” He spoke in German, which I had learned years before and still half understood.

The four children were immediately quiet and utterly immobile.

“Oh dear, sweet Lord,” Joanna murmured, for the man, apart from the wispy pale green scarf, was bare-assed naked. His skin was tanned the color of old mahogany against which his long white hair and straggly white beard showed bright. He glowered at the cowering children for a few seconds, then turned as he heard Nicole’s footsteps on the wooden pontoon. He smiled at her, then held out a hand to assist her on board.

“Time to become the heavy father,” I said grimly, then climbed out of the car into the summer afternoon’s sunshine. Billy grinned at me from the inner pontoon where he was rerigging a Beneteau, but I did not grin back. Instead I strode down the pontoon, past the fuel pumps, and jumped down into
Erebus
’s cockpit. “Nicole!”

Nicole and the naked man had disappeared into the catamaran’s spacious main cabin. I ducked down the companionway into the familiar cruising-yacht reek of unwashed bedding and smelly oilskins. Once in the big saloon my immediate impression was of a tangle of sun-browned skin and greasy hair, then I unraveled the impressions to see that, besides Nicole and the bearded man, there were two other girls in the big cabin. Both girls were about Nicole’s age, and both girls were naked. One was completely nude, while the other, a startling redhead, wore nothing but a pale green sarong that was loosely knotted round her waist. That girl seemed to be helping Nicole undress. “What the hell is going on?” I demanded fiercely.

“This is my father,” Nicole offered in laconic explanation. The two girls, both as blond as Nicole, snatched up clothes to cover their nakedness, while the man, whom I assumed was the beguiling Caspar, turned slowly to face me. He said nothing, but just stared at me with an oddly quizzical look on his thin face.

“What the hell is going on?” I demanded again.

“Do you want to join us?” the man asked in a courteous voice.

“Nicole! For God’s sake,” I said, “come away.”

“Daddy! Please go away,” Nicole said, as though I was being tiresome.

“Tim?” That was Joanna, calling me from the pontoon.

Caspar slowly unfolded himself to stand upright in the spacious cabin. He found a pair of faded khaki shorts, which he pulled on, then he gestured for me to go back to the cockpit. “I would like to talk with you,” he said, and his manner was so polite that I felt I had no choice but to do as he requested. “You are unhappy?” he asked when we were both in the open air. His English was strongly accented with German and held a tone of pained puzzlement. “You think your daughter is coming to some harm, yes? I am sorry. It is just that we are most casual on the boat.” He smiled contentedly, as though inviting me to share pleasure in his explanation.

But I was beyond reason. “You’re running a bloody whorehouse!” I shouted.

Joanna, standing on the pontoon, tried to calm me down. Caspar offered her the hint of a bow. “My name is Caspar von Rellsteb”—he introduced himself—”and I welcome you both on board
Erebus.
Your daughter wishes to join our small group, and I am delighted for her and for us.” He waved a thin hand about the boat, encompassing the frightened children who huddled together at the catamaran’s bows. “We have work to do,” he added mysteriously.

“Work?” Joanna asked.

“We do not sail for our recreation,” Caspar von Rellsteb said very portentously, “but to measure the damage being done to our planet.” His voice was suddenly tougher, and I saw that despite his scrawny build he was no weakling, but had hard muscle under the deeply tanned skin. I guessed he was about my own age, early forties, though it was hard to tell because his long hair, which had gone prematurely white, made him look older, while the lithe movements of his tanned and sinewy body suggested a much younger age.

“Nicole tells us you’re an ecologist,” Joanna said in her best conversational tone.

“It is a convenient label, yes, though I prefer to think of myself as a surveyor of the planet. My present task is to gauge the extent of pollution and of species-murder. My small boat is ill-equipped to fight such evils, but I monitor them so that the extent of the world’s ills will be understood.”

“He’s not an ecologist,” I broke in scornfully, “he’s just running a private knocking-shop.” I pushed past the tall man and shouted into the cabin’s shadows. “Nicole!”

There was no answer. Caspar von Rellsteb half smiled as though Nicole’s lack of response was a measure of his victory. “Nicole is an adult, Mr. Blackburn,” he explained to me in a patronizing voice, “and she can choose her own life. You can choose to use violence against me if you wish, but nothing you can do will alter what is ordained.” He turned away from me. “Nicole! Do you wish to leave
Erebus
and return to your parents’ home?”

There was silence except for the small waves slapping at the twin hulls and the raucous cry of gulls in the warm air.

“Answer me, Nicole!” Caspar von Rellsteb’s voice held a sudden heart of steel.

“I want to stay.” Nicole’s voice was unnaturally timid, as though she feared this skinny man’s displeasure, and Joanna and I, hearing such unaccustomed meekness in our daughter’s voice, were both astonished.

“Then stay you shall,” von Rellsteb said magnanimously, “but first it is only right that you should say farewell to your mother and your father. Come!”