“No! I just ought to visit home, that’s all! And when I’m there I’ll try and raise the cash to fly down to Chile and meet you. I mean if we really are going to find the Genesis community then I ought to be prepared for it, and I don’t even have a camera with me! What kind of a journalist am I without a camera?”
“I have a camera.” David seemed oblivious of the effect his arrival had caused, but he had never been a sensitive man. A good man, but not subtle. He unzipped one of his bags and pulled out a 35mm camera that he put on the table. “It’s an efficient camera, but if you find it too complicated, my dear, then we can always buy one of those idiot-proof point-and-shoot jobs, isn’t that so, Tim?”
I ignored David, while Jackie, who had gone pale under her tan, just continued talking as though my brother had never spoken. “And maybe if I go home, Tim, I can sell the story to an editor. I know a lot more about Genesis than I did before, and maybe a major newspaper will listen to me now?”
“They’ll certainly listen if you tell them that the famous circumnavigator, Tim Blackburn, is sailing to Chile to shoot a bloody ecologist!” David hooted with laughter at his own wit.
“Shut up.” I spoke with hissing menace to my brother, then looked back to Jackie. “Why don’t you get the story first, then sell it to a newspaper?”
“I don’t know, Tim.” Jackie glanced very quickly at David, thus suggesting to me that his bluff arrival was her real reason for not staying. She seemed not to have taken his words about shooting von Rellsteb seriously, which was a relief, but David was never a man to let a sleeping dog lie, and now he pushed his camera across the table toward Jackie.
“Take it, dear girl, with my blessing.”
“No, really.” Jackie tried to push the camera back.
“Of course you must take it. We are one for all and all for one, are we not?” David offered Jackie his most benevolent smile. “Besides, you look much too frail to use one of the rifles. Not that I think we shall need the guns.” David palpably changed mental gears and offered me his most serious expression. “I need to talk with you, Tim, about what we plan to achieve in Patagonia. I really don’t think I can involve myself in violence. It just wouldn’t look good in the Church Times! Of course, if we’re attacked, and we do have to defend ourselves, then I assure you I’ll be shoulder to shoulder with you.” He smiled at Jackie. “And frankly those old Lee-Enfields have the devil of a kick, so I doubt you’d be strong enough to fire one. Not that I think we’ll need them, but you never know.”
“Shut up,” I said plaintively, but much too late.
“Lee-Enfields?” Jackie asked. “What are Lee-Enfields, Tim?”
I did not answer. I had been cornered in a lie and I was desperately thinking how to find an elegant way out, but there was none.
“Are they guns?” Jackie demanded of me.
“There are two rifles on board Stormchild,” I told her very flatly. “I hid them before I left. It seemed a good idea at the time.”
“A damned good idea!” David said with an elephantine lack of tact.
Jackie stared at me very coldly. “Are you planning to fight von Rellsteb, Tim? Is that what you’ve been planning all along?”
“I’m planning to find my daughter,” I said as calmly as I could.
“For which purpose you’re carrying guns?” Jackie accused me.
“You’re the one who warned Tim that these wretched people are survivalists”—David was trying to retrieve the damage he at last perceived he had caused—”and you can’t really expect us to face such maniacs unarmed, can you?”
Jackie ignored him. “I’m going to the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo to secure a story, Tim, and I thought you were going to help me.” She paused in an effort to control the fury that was suffusing her voice, but instead of calming down she seemed to shake with a sudden rage. “But now I find that you lied to me! That you’re carrying guns! And that you expect me to help you in your stupid macho crusade!”
There was silence. Some Americans at the next table, embarrassed by the intensity of Jackie’s words, raised their voices as if to demonstrate that they were not really eavesdropping, while David, realizing that he had sown the wind that had raised this whirlwind, desperately tried to calm the storm. “Dear girl! Please calm down!”
Jackie still ignored him, fixing me with a fierce look instead. “Did you lie about the guns?”
“Yes,” I said wretchedly. “I’m sorry.”
“So all this time, when you’ve been talking about finding your daughter and reasoning with her, you were really planning to use violence?”
“No!” I insisted, though weakly, because I was again lying. I believed von Rellsteb had murdered Joanna, and I knew I would take revenge if it was possible. I could see Jackie did not believe my feeble denial, so I tried another and more plausible justification. “If we’re attacked,” I said, “then we have to be able to defend ourselves.”
“Even the act of carrying a weapon is offensive,” Jackie said passionately, “and is liable to encourage violence in others.”
“Oh, come!” David said. “Does carrying a fire extinguisher make a man an arsonist?”
Jackie threw down her napkin. “I thought we were going to Chile to find a story! To discover a truth! I can’t be a part of some stupid scheme to start a fight!” Her eyes were bright with tears and she shuddered, clearly in the grip of an overpowering emotion. “And I will not involve myself in even the smallest part of your futile and primitive violence!” She glared at David. “Not even as a fucking cook!”
Her piercing voice had now attracted the attention of half the bar. Someone cheered her last words.
“For God’s sake, girl!” David tried frantically to calm her, but Jackie would not be calmed. She flung her chair backward and stalked away between the tables. An amused group of Americans offered her loud applause and a berth on their own yacht.
“Oh, good Lord,” David groaned, “I’m sorry, Tim.”
“Look after the bill,” I said to him, then hurried after Jackie, but she had run from the pub to the quay, and, by the time I came out into the harsh sunlight, she was already swinging herself down to Stormchild’s deck. “Jackie?” I called as she disappeared down the yacht’s companionway.
“God damn it, Tim! Leave me alone!”
By the time I had reached Stormchild’s saloon Jackie had already locked herself in her forward cabin. “I don’t want you to leave!” I shouted through the door.
“I am not going to be part of a killing expedition! That is not why I came! I want to write a good piece of journalism, and I want to help the parents whose kids have run off with von Rellsteb, but that is all I want to do! I do not want to be a part of your violence, so from now on I’ll have to make my own arrangements!” I could hear a half sob in her voice.
“Jackie!” I tried to open the door, but its bolt was too solid to be forced. “I don’t want to kill anyone,” I said, but it sounded a rather feeble defense, even to me.
“Then throw the guns overboard! You know how I hate guns! Will you throw them overboard?”
“Just come out and talk to me,” I said, “please.”
“Will you throw the guns away?”
“I might if you come out and talk to me,” I said, but my halfhearted concession earned nothing but Jackie’s silence, or rather the sounds a girl makes when she stuffs a seabag full of dirty clothes. “Jackie!” I rattled the door again.
“Go away.”
“You can’t leave,” I said, “you haven’t got any money.”
“I’ve got plastic!” she shouted at me as though I had insulted her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll make you some tea, then we’ll talk about it, OK?” I went back to the galley, leaned my hands on the stove, and sighed. God damn it, I thought, God damn it. Then, taking my time so that Jackie would have a chance to calm down, I made a pot of the herbal tea she liked so much. I let the concoction steep, then poured it into her favorite mug—one
that showed two cats with twined lovers’ tails and surrounded by little love hearts. I carried the tea to her cabin. “Jackie?”
There was no answer.
I knocked harder. “Jackie?”
The silence was absolute.
“Jackie!”
I ran back through the saloon, up the companion-way, and onto Stormchild’s deck, where I found the forehatch was open and the bird was flown.
She must have climbed on deck while I was making the tea, tiptoed her way aft, then climbed to the quay and disappeared. I ran through the dockyard, but there was no sign of her. I even caught a cab and raced to the island’s small airport, but still I did not find her. My shipmate had vanished; she was gone.
“There’s an obvious explanation for the girl’s behavior,” David said to me a week later. It had been an awkward week. We had spoken about such mundane matters as navigation and watch-keeping, but neither of us had spoken about Jackie’s abrupt departure. David, realizing that he had behaved in Antigua with the sensibility of a falling rock, seemed to be ashamed of himself for detonating the emotional outburst, while I was just plain miserable. But now, as Stormchild slammed into a vicious steep wave, my brother at last tried to break the silence that was so painfully between us.
“Tell me what is obvious,” I, at last, invited him.
“The girl was in love with you.”
“Thank you, David,” I said with a caustic venom, “and now please shut up.”
I had waited three days for Jackie to return to Stormchild, but she had not appeared. I couldn’t raise any answer from her home telephone number, and, finally, believing that action would be a better diversion than anger, I put back to sea where I had crammed on all sail to drive the big yacht through the Caribbean as though the devil himself was in our wake. It was proving a rough passage for the east winds were driving the Atlantic waters into the shallow basin of the Caribbean and heaping them into steep, short waves. David and I had rigged jack-lines down either side of the deck, and I insisted that we wore safety harnesses and lifelines if either of us moved out of the cockpit. We had also erected the new spray hood so that the helmsman could crouch behind its view-perspex screens as the seas shattered white at our stem and splattered down the decks like shrapnel. Now, four nights out of English Harbour, David and I were sharing the sunset watch as he steered Stormchild fast toward the Panama Canal. He was also trying to repair the breach that gaped between us. “I think you’ll find I’m right,” he said mildly, “she showed all the symptoms.”
“I thought you were a vicar, not an agony aunt.”
He crouched to light his pipe. When, at last, the tobacco was drawing sweetly, he straightened up to steer Stormchild into the next steep wave. “A man in my job is constantly being tapped for help by people having emotional crises, so one does learn to recognize the symptoms.”
I was tempted to observe that an emotionally troubled parishioner seeking David’s help was the equivalent of a seriously ill patient calling for the services of a mortician, but I contented myself with asking him how on earth Jackie’s behavior had suggested to him a bad case of love. “I would have thought,” I continued sarcastically, “that if the girl was in love with me she’d have stayed on board. She’d hardly have run away from me!”
“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 goo
d 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.