Peter James - A Twist of the Knife

The following weekend he took her out into the Channel on his 22-foot Sonata, the entry-level yacht he had bought with a small inheritance from an uncle. She was instantly smitten — both with Tony and with being out on the open water. And Tony was smitten with her. His previous girlfriend had thrown up fifteen minutes beyond the Shoreham Harbour moles, and had spent the rest of the short voyage lying down below on a bunk, puking into a plastic bucket and wishing she was dead. Sitting in the cramped cockpit of the small boat, he fell in love with Juliet’s sea legs. And with — erm... well — her very sexy legs.

And with everything else about her.

Juliet loved that Tony was so manly. Loved that she felt so safe with him out at sea. He knew everything there was to know, it seemed, about the craft of sailing and seamanship. He taught her how to tie a reef knot, a bowline, a round turn and two half hitches, a clove hitch, and helped her create her very own knot board. She learned from him how to navigate with the satnav and then, far more basic, with a sextant. How to read charts. How to learn from the clouds to predict squalls and rain. Tony seemed capable of fixing anything on the boat, from taking the engine apart to sewing torn sails. Gradually, in their modest little craft, they ventured further and further afield. Down the south coast to Chichester, then to the Hamble and up the Beaulieu River, and then further afield still, to Poole and then Torbay.

A promotion at work, coupled with a large year-end bonus, enabled him to splash out on a bigger yacht, with more comfortable accommodation, and a larger stateroom — or master-bonking quarters — as he liked to call it.

A year later he proposed to her on the stern of the Juliet, the Nicholson 27 he had named after her, in Cowes Harbour on the Isle of Wight at the end of the year’s round-the-island race. She accepted without an instant of hesitation. She loved him truly, deeply, as deep as the ocean below them.

As his career advanced and he climbed higher up the corporate ladder and salary scale, their boats became bigger. Big enough to comfortably accommodate their three children as they grew older and larger, culminating in his dream Oyster 42 with hydraulic roller reefing. A substantial yacht that, thanks to all the electronic technology, the two of them could easily handle, with or without the help of their youngsters on board.

And then suddenly, without realizing how time had crept up on them, with two of their children at university and one married, they found themselves planning for Tony’s retirement.

And his dream. To circumnavigate the world. Spending time in each country on the way. America. Then Australia. Then Asia. South Africa. Up through the Suez Canal. Then maybe a couple of years in the Mediterranean. ‘Hey, what does it matter how long we are away?’ he said to her. ‘What’s time to the Irish?’

‘We’re not Irish,’ she replied.

‘So?’

She shrugged. It was a strange thing he had said, she thought. And he had become a little strange, if she was honest with herself, during this past year leading up to his sixty-fifth birthday. She couldn’t place a finger on what it was exactly. He seemed to have become a little distant. Distracted. Grumpier. He had always been good-natured. She used to tell her friends that they had the best marriage, that they never argued, that their sex life was still wonderful.

But there was a wrinkle. Deeper than the ones that gradually appeared over the years on their increasingly weather-beaten faces. Tony began to joke more and more about sailors having a woman in every port. And in his now senior position with the bank, he had become responsible for its overseas client development, which meant he regularly flew around the world. And with each trip, when he returned home, his interest in making love to her seemed to wane further and further.

She tried to put it down to a natural decline in libido as he aged, knowing from discussions with her girlfriends, and from looking it up on the internet, that a man’s testosterone levels diminished as he grew older. Nevertheless, she began to have nagging doubts about what he got up to on the trips, which were becoming even more frequent and often prolonged — very prolonged at times, with some two-day trips turning into a week or even longer. He also became a little furtive, guarding his mobile phone carefully, getting an increasing number of texts at all hours of the day and night, and frequently disappearing to his den to make or take calls.

At dinner one night, with friends, he told a jokey story, but one she did not find particularly funny. ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that in naval-base towns like Portsmouth and Southampton, wives of seamen whose husbands were away at sea for long periods of time used to put a pack of OMO washing powder in their front windows to signal to their lovers, Old Man Overseas!’

Everyone laughed, except Juliet. She just stared quizzically at her husband, wondering. Wondering.

For Juliet, the day of his sixty-fifth birthday, and the big retirement party the bank held for him in the City of London, could not come soon enough. Because they had planned their round-the-world sailing trip to start soon after, and they were going to spend the next five glorious years away. They would be together for all that time, and Tony seemed really happy and had spent months planning every last detail and provisioning the yacht.

He told her, repeatedly, how happy he was at the thought of the trip and spending all that time together. She began to think that maybe she had misjudged him, and had been jumping to the wrong conclusions. All those long trips overseas in the past few years had, perhaps, been totally innocent after all. He had just been working as hard as hell to justify his worth to the bank. He was a good man, and she loved him, truly, deeply, as much as ever. More, perhaps. She realized that of all the choices that life had presented to her, nailing her colours to his mast had been the right decision. She began to prepare for the voyage with a sense of excitement and adventure she had not felt since she was a child.

And Tony told her, after a bottle of Champagne celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary, and using one of the nautical phrases that were part of his language, that being spliced to her was the best thing that had ever happened in his life.

She and Tony pored over charts, looking at routes that famous round-the-world sailors had taken. Through the Bay of Biscay, around Spain and Portugal, then through the Med and down through the Suez Canal was one option. Another was to carry on after Spain down the coast of Africa. But the one they preferred was to cross the Atlantic first, cruise the East Coast of America, then head through the Panama Canal, down the coast of Ecuador, across to the Galapagos, then Fiji, then circumnavigate Australia, before heading up to Indonesia, then across to South Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, over to the East coast of South America, to Brazil, then across to the Canary Islands, Morocco, then home to England.

Finally the big day came. Their children, with their own young families now; a large group of friends, who had sponsored them on Just Giving to raise money for the Martlets Hospice in Brighton; a photographer from the local paper, The Argus; a television crew from BBC South, and a chaplain friend, Ish, from Chichester Cathedral, who had renewed their wedding vows on the stern of Juliet 3, were all there to wave them off and wish them luck.

The next two years were, for the most part, a blissfully happy time. They had plenty of scary moments, particularly when they lost their self-steering gear during one severe Atlantic storm, and another when they lost their mainsail off the coast of Florida. But, one by one, they made their destination ports and got things fixed or replaced.