Maggie Gee - The Ice People

And so we decided on a small boat, with a gathering sense of excitement on my part. The chaos meant they were available again for the kind of money we could just afford. To be off on the sea in a boat with my son — wasn’t this the life I had been longing for? The kind of action I had somehow been missing?

I had to pay the bugger two million ecus, although the boat had come through ‘friends’, through a Manguard member, Riswan’s second cousin. It was nearly a quarter of the sum I’d brought with us — it would have bought me a bloody castle in Scotland, now everyone was flooding south, as I told him, but Kishan insisted the price was cheap. Perhaps it was. The boat would be a writeoff, for he was too cautious to come with us and sail it back across the Channel.

At first I was dismayed that he wouldn’t take us, but very soon a sneaking excitement, a sense of wild exhilaration, took over. I would sail the boat. Of course, of course.

I had sailed quite often, with my mother’s brother, when we stayed by the sea with Milly’s family. My mother had always got cross and worried and nearly succeeded in spoiling it all. I loved it, though. The nautical language, the sense of freedom, the light on the sea, the chance to do something without the women — and my uncle said I was a good sailor. But I hadn’t sailed for over thirty years.

Still, anyone could sail a boat. I’d seen endless images of men sailing boats. My boyhood hero, the actor Guy Ball, had sailed a small boat across the Atlantic in Sea Man, the film to end all films. I was ten, a very impressionable age.

I had to take Briony along, and Dora, which maybe made everything a bit less romantic …

Yet more old-fashioned, in a pleasant way. Myself, my son, the wife, the dog. Sailing off together on a Great Adventure. Daddy could do it. Daddy would.

If anyone had watched us setting out, from a Dorset cove near Lulworth, at sunset, they would have seen something from a twentiethcentury picturebook, Briony’s blonde head bronzed by the sunlight, Luke’s loose curls, Daddy at the helm, Luke with the faithful pet at his side, Dora the Dog, tethered, sleeping, Mummy bending over the picnic things (in fact, she was checking we had the guns), homewardbound as the sun went down, tacking slowly across the V’s of red surf as Daddy got used to harnessing the breeze, and out through the black rocks that guarded the bay, sailing out silently as far as we could before we took the risk of starting the engine.

It began like something fun, romantic, and Luke was grinning with excitement at the bow, leaning back against the pulpit in the last of the sunshine, the red light glazing his face with healthy colour, wrapped up (on my advice) in layers of sweaters that made him complain of being too hot. I was giving him and Briony firm, calm instructions about hauling and sweating up the sails, and all of us were doing awfully well … But that was at first, before the wind got up, while we were still near the dark shape of the shore, with the ghost nets of light from the little resorts growing brighter point by point as we watched and, Briony and Luke competing to count them.

(Only I knew Briony was afraid. We had had a conversation the night before. She’d been at pains to tell me how tough she was, which I took with a hefty pinch of salt, since she had been crying, one second earlier. ‘You won’t regret taking me,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s just that I get horribly seasick. And I can only swim ten lengths —’ She looked adorable when she cried, her cheeks flushing, her full lips trembling, and I comforted her, till she got very assertive, and pretended she had once been in the Army. But I poured her a whisky, and calmed her down. I felt that somehow we had got closer, and I liked the new feeling of responsibility. It made me feel tender, and — yes, tender.)

Now no one would have guessed she had a problem. Briony was chattering away to Luke, and Dora was perched by my son’s knee, and the sky overhead was a picture of heaven, great lakes of wet crimson with gulls flung across it. Sarah would have loved it; I missed Sarah, how very sharply I missed her, suddenly, but that was in another country, and I was here, in the gathering dark. I was Daddy now. I had to protect them.

‘Luke, take Dora below,’ I said. She was sleeping, but the wind had strengthened a few knots, veering now from south to southwest, and I thought she might slip from her seat in the cockpit. Definitely time to start the engine.

It was an old-fashioned boat, almost a hundred years old, though Kishan insisted he had cared for it ‘like my own child’ — but he had no child. The engine was an ancient twostroke inboard that you started with an enormous castiron flywheel. I gave Briony temporary charge of the helm (I thought it would give her confidence, though she was already looking faintly green) while I followed his written instructions precisely. First I worked out what everything was. I attached the starting handle, opened the seacock, turned on the fuel, then swung the handle vigorously. And nothing happened. Nothing at all. We thudded into the shortening waves.

I had paid the bastard bloody millions for this. I tried it again, more violently. ‘Bastard!’ I shouted, ‘Start, you bastard —’ In response, the motor suddenly backfired, the carburettor spat out fuel and blue smoke and the starting handle kicked back against my shin. From the cockpit my silent crew watched me. ‘You’d better calm down,’ Briony said. What did she mean? I was perfectly calm. I ran up the companionway, grabbed the helm and lashed the tiller to keep us upright.

‘You bloody see if you can do any better,’ I shouted, but she took me at my word, went down and started rotating the flywheel, and I must have got the thing ready to go, because her languid turning of the starting handle made it cough into life almost straight away, and there was a wonderful, steady chatter, and then we hardly felt the swell but only the purposeful power of the boat, shooting us out across the blazing water and beyond the brightness to the dark horizon, and on to the point of no return …

I had killed a man. I could use a gun. I was fifty years old. I refused to be frightened. And steering was easy — wasn’t it? Into the wind, straight into the wind, but the mainsail for some reason was flapping wildly, making it hard to concentrate, so I gave my crew orders to get down both sails and secure one to the boom, the other to the guardrails — I was doing okay, it was all coming back. I could hear Uncle Jim’s voice, giving me advice, and I loved the way my crew obeyed me, it wasn’t a feeling I was used to –

But as soon as I relaxed the other worries came back. I was on the alert for copter patrols. They’d been whining ceaselessly overhead on land since the run-up to the elections, hovering and circling like the last crazed wasps, anything from two or three to a dozen, working on our terror, our sleeplessness. Now I could hear a buzzing in the distance, but the rhythmical thump of the little engine and the wind whistling through the stays and halyards made it hard to hear if it were getting any louder. I could see them maybe ten miles down the coast, their little red nightscopes darting and diving over what might have been Southampton, where Wicca still ruled, so perhaps there was a nest of them … I almost wished for a few more knots of wind, and then the copters would be grounded.

But the coastguard patrols were a worse danger. Their fast response launches could handle any weather, and their microradar scanners were minutely accurate. The coastguards had been vapping unauthorised vessels on sight, we had been warned, to deter emigration. The coastguards, Wicca’s strongest supporters –

I started whistling to keep up my spirits. ‘The crossing should only take five hours,’ I called. Time to give out some of my bars of chocolate. ‘We should be in France by two or three in the morning.’ Saying that made me feel a lot better, though I’d plucked the figures from the air.