Sea Lord

  The hull rocked in the small waves as the sails slatted from side to side. Jennifer abandoned trying to sail Sunflower, and instead stretched herself out on the opposite thwart. She lay with her head towards the stern, while mine was nearer the cabin so we could look at each other across the cockpit. “Daddy didn’t want me to go to the Azores,” she said suddenly.

  I assumed Daddy was Sir Leon. “Why not?”

  “He thought Inspector Abbott should go. I persuaded him that I stood a better chance of convincing you.”

  “If you’d have dressed like that, you’d have succeeded.”

  “If we become friends,” she said, “will you persist in making sexist remarks?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled. “You are a philistine.”

  “So why did you go to the Azores?” I asked.

  She paused for a heartbeat, wondering whether to offer the confession, then looked across at me. “Because I wanted to see you.”

  “I thought that must have been it,” I said complacently.

  “You are a bastard!”

  I grinned. “For someone who wanted to see me, you weren’t very friendly.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Jump into your boat singing ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’?”

  “It might have broken the ice.” I sat up momentarily to check that no shipping threatened to run us down. Nothing did. The only vessel in sight was the mackerel boat which had drifted slightly closer. I lay down again. “I very nearly did go back to England with you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because you made me feel like a puppet.”

  “Something went right, then.”

  I laughed. A gull floated above us, decided we weren’t a fishing boat, and slid away. Sunflower’s sails and her red ensign hung limp, while Charlie’s wind vane at the masthead lazily boxed the compass.

  “Mummy likes you,” Jennifer said suddenly.

  “I like Mummy.”

  “Do you? Yes, I’m sure you do. Men always do.”

  “I prefer her daughter.”

  Jennifer treated that compliment as merely dutiful. “Did she talk to you about Hans?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “In the first place that he’s dull, in the second that he’s duller, and in the third that he’s very dull. She added later that he’s extremely dull.”

  She laughed, but didn’t say anything.

  “Is she right?” I asked.

  “Mummy’s usually very acute about people.”

  I digested that one. I’d left the VHF switched on to Channel 16 and I heard a squawk as someone called the coastguard to report their passage. I waited for the conversation to be switched to the working channel and, in the ensuing silence, looked across the cockpit. “Jennifer?”

  “John?” She mocked my solemnity with her own.

  Perhaps I wasn’t so patient after all, for I suddenly wanted to short-circuit the morning’s flirtatiousness. “I think I’m in love with you.”

  She looked at me for a long time in silence. I wondered if I had spoilt the mood by being too serious, but then she smiled. “How very inconvenient.”

  We smiled at each other. I knew then that everything was going to be all right. It really was. Hans had lost. I didn’t know how it had happened so quickly, or what would happen next, but I knew everything was wonderful. Happiness filled me like a great glow.

  She sat up, pulled off her headband, and ran fingers through her hair. “I’m told,” she said happily, “that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?”

  “There are alternative routes.”

  She stood and gave my belly a reproving slap. “For now, John Rossendale, it will be the stomach. Lunch?”

  “I’ll get it.”

  “You stay there. I know what food I packed, and you don’t. Besides, you doubtless believe a woman’s place is in the galley, so why pretend otherwise?” She stooped and gave me a very swift kiss on the lips. I made a grab for her, but she was too fast for me. She laughed, and swung herself down the companionway steps.

  I listened to her unpacking the food. I was happy, so very happy, transported to some new region of gold-touched, warm and loving contentment.

  “Where’s the tin-opener?” she called.

  “In the cave-locker behind the sink.”

  “Wine glasses?”

  “Hanging in a rack over your head.”

  “Soup plates?”

  “Use the big coffee mugs.”

  She began singing ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’, and I wanted to laugh aloud because I knew she was as happy as I was. Sunflower rocked gently. Small waves slapped at her steel chines. The sky was pale blue, with just the faintest hint of high cloud wisping.

  She stopped singing. “Matches?”

  “In a waterproof plastic container beside the cutlery tray. You strike the match on the inside of the container lid.”

  She started singing again, then stopped almost immediately. “Why won’t the gas turn on?”

  “Because you have to switch on the gas feed tap which you’ll find by the engine bulkhead under the companionway steps, and I have to switch the main feed on back here.”

  “Then do it,” she said.

  “Aye aye, Captain.” I sat up. I saw that the skipper of the mackerel boat had started his engine and was going away from us into the heat haze. I opened the transom locker where I kept the cooking gas bottles. The locker had a drain to the open air, thus, if one of the bottles leaked, the lethal gas would drain harmlessly outboard.

  I heard Jennifer grunt as she turned the feed tap which was uncomfortably stiff. She started singing again as she went back to the narrow galley which was midships on the starboard side. I reached into the locker and tried to turn on the main valve. It wouldn’t turn. I heard the rattle as Jennifer opened the matches, and I suddenly realised that the gas valve was already turned on and I had never, ever, left it turned on, not once in four years, which meant that someone else had been aboard Sunflower. I twisted desperately round.

  “No!” I roared.

  But she struck the match just as I shouted.

  And the happiness vanished.

  Ask any sailor what they fear most and they won’t cite the sea, or careless merchant ships, or rocks, but fire.

  And almost every yacht afloat carries a fire-bomb aboard: the bottles of liquid gas they use for cooking. The gas is heavier than air. If it leaks it settles down to the bilges where it lies, hidden and deadly, waiting for the spark. Some yachts carry a gas detector, but I’d never thought to put one on Sunflower. Instead I relied on the taps: one on the bottle itself, one where the gas pipe enters the main cabin, and the usual taps on the galley stove. I was punctilious about keeping all the taps closed unless I was actually cooking, for there is nothing I fear so much as a gas leak. Most days I hand pumped the bilges, not for any water, but just in case a tiny amount of gas had leaked. The pump will carry it to the outside air, but it was a chore I usually performed in the evening. That day, wallowing in the swell off the hidden Devon coast, the bilge and the cabin sole were unpumped and lethal.

  Because while I had been in London, and while the boat had been unguarded, someone had been aboard Sunflower and they had turned the taps and let the silent deadly gas seep into the cabin. The gas doesn’t smell. It just waits for a spark or a flame.

  Jennifer struck the match.

  And screamed.

  It was not an ear-splitting explosion. It was a soft roar. Red flame filled the cabin. I could hear Jennifer screaming beyond the fire’s noise. Her scream seemed to go on and on and on. The fire was thickening with appalling swiftness; flame and smoke pouring out of the open companionway as if it was a chimney. The slatting mainsail was already scorched up to the third reef points.

  The noise of the fire was like a seething hiss, beyond which Jennifer’s scream slowly faded.

  I was shouting incoherently, merely making a no
ise to tell her that I was there, and shouting to give myself courage. There were a dozen things I maybe should have done. I should have turned off the main gas valve. I should have dragged one of the fire extinguishers out of the starboard cockpit locker. I should have darted a hand through the fire to grab the VHF microphone and send a Mayday. I did none of them. Instead, and without really thinking, I plunged down into the flame.

  I had been turning and shouting in the cockpit as the explosion erupted out of the cabin and I did not pause to think that I was throwing myself down into the fire. I simply kept moving towards the sound of Jennifer’s fading scream. I put my hands on the coachroof either side of the companionway and swung myself down. I dropped into unimaginable pain. It was like falling into the jet-flame of an oxyacetylene lamp and I saw, as I dropped down, how a piercing lance of flame was seething into the cabin from the engine bulkhead. My ankle was on fire, bubbling and spitting. Even through the pain I realised that it was there, where the pipe came through the bulkhead, that the gas line had been cut. I scrambled away from the flame jet and fell against the cabin table. I had to take a breath and filled my lungs with burning gas. I was blinded by heat and smoke, choking and sobbing, and still trying to shout to Jennifer. I wanted to tell her to survive, to hold on, to live. Light flared to my right; a brilliant and searing light as the charts caught fire.

  I didn’t feel the pain. I lunged through the smoke to the galley compartment where I felt Jennifer rather than saw her. She was crouched down and I simply scooped her up as if she was an unwieldy sailbag and kept on moving. I hit the forecabin’s door and smashed it down with our combined weight. Jennifer screamed with pain. The air was suddenly cool, then instantly heated as the fire found the new oxygen and slashed in after us. Jennifer was moaning. Black smoke writhed round us.

  I dropped her against my small workbench, reached up, and undogged the forehatch. “Get out!” I was shouting at her, but at the same time pushing her upwards. Smoke poured past us. I realised she was beyond helping herself, so shoved her out. I followed her, then slammed the hatch shut.

  The main cabin looked like a blast furnace as it belched a horror of flame and smoke out of the companionway. The mainsail was on fire. There was no chance of reaching the radio now. I could already feel the heat coming through the teak planks laid over the thin steel deck. I could see no other boats. I didn’t want to look at Jennifer. I had caught glimpses of her burned skin, and I had heard her screams.

  The dinghy was still chained to the coachroof so I yanked the liferaft’s lanyard. The lanyard pulled out the split pin which held the metal container to its securing bolt. The container rolled towards me. I picked it up and hurled it over the guardrails. It splashed into the calm sea, tethered to Sunflower by its line and ripcord. I yanked the ripcord which was supposed to inflate the raft, but instead it just floated like a fat white keg of beer. I jerked the cord again, achieving nothing. I swore at the bloody thing. The deck was already burning the soles of my feet, and I knew the coachroof would already be red hot so I couldn’t reach the chained dinghy. A scrap of burning sail material landed in my hair. Something exploded in the cabin below, and I assumed the fire had reached the emergency flares. The hull lurched and I knew the fire must have burned through the plastic lavatory pipes and that the sea was already flooding through the seacocks into Sunflower. She was doomed.

  I had two life-jackets, but they were aft, where the fire was hottest. So was my single lifebelt which was attached to the danbuoy on the stern. I began to dance on the deck, trying to cool my feet. Jennifer was twitching and moaning. Her scalp was smoking where her hair had burned away. Her legs looked as if they’d been skinned and blackened. She was going to die because the bloody liferaft wouldn’t work and because I didn’t have a radio any more and because some bastard had broken into my boat and made it into a death trap.

  Jennifer suddenly screamed again because of the heat in the deck. She reached towards me with fingers turned into stiff dark claws. Further aft the teak deck planks were lifting and smoking. Burning scraps of sail were falling around us to hiss on the sea or flame on the deck. There was no choice left now, none. I picked Jennifer up in my arms, making her scream, and I knew she would scream more in a moment because of the salt water, but I would give her a few more minutes of life because there’s always a chance of a miracle so long as you don’t give up. Never give up. Never. I carried her to the port gunwale, put one foot over the guardrail, then jumped.

  The sea was blessedly cold, but the salt must have been like acid on her burned skin. I held her body above mine so that her grotesquely blackened head was out of the water. I had one arm round her neck, the other about her waist, while I kicked with my legs to force us away from the burning boat. I could smell her roasted flesh. She was babbling, moaning, screaming, choking. I was talking to her; telling her she would live, that everything would be all right, that she mustn’t give in. Every few seconds the water would slop into my mouth, choking me.

  I twisted my head to catch a glimpse of Sunflower. The fire had reached the aft locker where the spare gas bottle was kept. At first the fire merely melted the regulator valve so that a white spear of flame seared across the smoke in the cockpit, then the gas bottle exploded. The diesel fuel was making the flames deep red and the smoke even blacker. Her red ensign disappeared in a single flare of fire.

  She was settling by the bows. Her mainsail was gone and her genoa was burning into ash. Somehow the mast stayed up. I could see the liferaft container bobbing merrily and uselessly alongside the blistering hull.

  The bows dropped further. Everything flammable in the cabin must have been well aflame by now; lockers, foam, bedding, papers, clothes, cooking oil, table, chart table, my money, my passport, everything in the world I owned, all now an inferno that pumped flame and smoke out of the open companionway. Sunflower suddenly lurched sideways and I feared the mast would fall on us so I kicked with my feet again and the motion pushed my head underwater.

  When I surfaced again I saw she had dipped her bows under. The sea reached the hawse-hole and filled the chain locker. She sank further. I was treading water desperately. I was tiring. I was beginning to feel the pain where my legs had been burned, and the moment I began to feel it, so the pain suddenly became excruciating and I knew that the anaesthetic effect of adrenalin was wearing off. It must have been worse for Jennifer, except she was only half conscious.

  The sea reached Sunflower’s forehatch which, undogged, fell open and let the water surge in. The stern swung further up so that I could see her rudder and propeller. Steam was hissing and mingling with the smoke as the fire fought the sea. The sea would win, because it always does, and slowly, slowly, I saw my boat begin her long slide down to the sea bed. She’d taken me to far, far places. We’d sailed the blood-red sea off Cape Non and hove to off the cliffs at Cape Bojador, which the old navigators had thought was the place the world ended. We’d sailed the Whitsunday Islands, and dared the pirates in the Philippines. We’d anchored in mangrove swamps in Florida, and sailed the harbours of Maine. We’d rounded the Horn twice, but we’d never sail together again for now she was sinking and it seemed as if the fire was compressed, or else the steam was superheated for the jet of vapour and flames and smoke became a solid roaring plume that was being pumped three hundred feet into the summer sky. It seemed extraordinary that one small boat could make so much filth.

  Then she went. The mast-tip went under, the cockpit reared up, then, with one last puff of flame and dark smoke, Sunflower dragged herself down. Something hissed on the sea’s bubbling surface. There was a pause, then the liferaft, still tied by its rope to the sinking hull, was pulled down and out of sight. Floating burnt wreckage was all that was left; that and a dirty smear of smoke that lingered in the summer air.

  Jennifer was moaning and I knew she was dying. I also knew I was tiring and that soon I would be forced to let her go and she would roll over, her mouth would fill with water and she would drown. That realisat
ion made me angry, so I cursed her for dying. I told her she would live. I told her she would bloody well live. I told her to stop her pathetic whimpering and to start kicking with her legs. I told her she was a spoilt damned rich bloody bitch who deserved to die if she didn’t wake up and swim. I cursed her in three languages and four letters, and I might as well have saved my breath for she did not recover consciousness and I was tiring and every swear word drained another scrap of precious energy.

  In the end I stopped cursing her. I remember telling her that I loved her, but then I had no more energy to talk for all my strength was needed to keep us afloat. My legs were agony, and felt like lead. More and more often the water would slop into my mouth. I would choke and spit and struggle to gain an extra inch of airspace. I held Jennifer with one arm and paddled with the other.

  But I was losing the battle. The hallucinations began. I saw a boat coming to pick us up: it was a great schooner, white-hulled with a reaching bowsprit. The illusion was so exact that I could see the chain bobstay beneath the bowsprit and the gilded wood carving where her figurehead might be. Men leaned over from the bows to pluck us from the water and I reached up to catch their hands and the act of reaching up plunged me underwater and the hallucination vanished in a blow of reality as sea water choked my gullet. I struggled up and pulled Jennifer’s burned head from the water. For all I knew, she was already dead, but I would not let her go. I was crying, not out of pity, but frustration. There was no schooner. There was nothing but the sea and Sunflower’s funeral smoke and one seagull gliding past.

  I saw a beach. It was very close. The beach was long and sandy, backed by low grass-covered dunes. No one was on the beach, but a shingle roof rising above the dunes promised a refuge. I swam towards the beach. The hope of safety seemed to give me a new manic energy and I muttered in Jennifer’s ear that we were going to be all right now, that all we had to do was survive the surf and I’d go to the house and find help. “We’ve reached America,” I said, because now I could see the Stars and Stripes flying from a flagpole in front of the house. The illusion was so damned real that I was even wondering how to persuade an American hospital to treat us when we didn’t have any credit cards, but then a small wave splashed my face and when I opened my eyes again the beach was gone, and the flag and the house had vanished with it and there was only the empty sea and sky. Jennifer was heavy in my arm, the sea was seeping its fatal coldness into me, and the tiredness was filling me with a great weakness.