Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

“I hear you, Jimmy.”

“But you never were one to listen, were you? Go on with you, boy. I’ll see you in the pub tonight.” He glanced at the waiting film crew. “Do you have to wear lipstick, Nick?”

“Piss off, Jimmy.”

He laughed, and I went to make a film.

I can’t say that we went to sea as a happy ship. Mulder did not speak to me, his crew were surly, while Matthew and his camera team stayed out of everybody’s way. Angela retired to the after cockpit.

Tony Bannister grasped the nettle, though. “I’m glad you’ve come, Nick.”

“Somewhat under protest,” I said stiffly.

“I’m sure.” We were motoring across the bar, between the rocky headlands where the breakers smashed white. To starboard I could see the waves breaking on the Calfstone Shoal. “I think,” Bannister said awkwardly, “that we’d better let bygones be bygones. We behaved badly, but I would have told you about Fanny, and you would have got your medal back.”

“I just don’t like dishonesty.”

“I think you’ve made that very plain. Let’s just agree that we’ll try harder?”

For the sake of peace, and because we seemed stuck with each other’s company, I agreed.

We had bucked our way across the bar and Mulder now ordered the sails hoisted. He killed the engine, folded the propellor blades, and instantly Wildtrack became a creature in her element. She was no longer defying the sea with her diesel fuel and churning blades, now she was caught in the balance of wind and water. The sails were vast and white, swooping her gracefully southwards into the face of a brisk south-westerly wind.

Bannister and I sat in the central cockpit. Mulder must have known I was watching him and he must have guessed how I wanted to despise his seamanship.

But he was good.

I wanted him to be a butcher of a helmsman. I wanted him to be as crude as his physical appearance suggested. But instead he displayed a confident and rare skill. I’d expected him to be that most hateful of creatures, the loud and strident skipper, but his orders were given without fuss. His crew of seven men, identically dressed in blue and white kit, were drilled to a quiet efficiency, but the star of the boat was Fanny Mulder. He had an instinctive, almost gentle, touch and I knew, right from the beginning, that he was a natural.

He was good.

And I was suddenly, unexpectedly happy. Not because I’d made a precarious peace with Bannister, but because I was at sea. I was watching my dark Devon coast slip away. Already the small beaches were indistinct, hidden by the heave of grey waves. I could look back into the river’s mouth and I saw what I had forgotten; how the inland hills were so green and soft, while the sea-facing slopes were so wind battered and dark that it almost seemed as if the river was a wound cut into a crust of matter to reveal the softer flesh within.

I looked seaward. A Westerly was beating under full sail towards Dartmouth. A grey misshapen mass on the horizon betrayed a fleet auxiliary heading for Plymouth. A lobsterman coming from Start Point thudded past us in a stained boat heaped with pots and buoys and I thought I detected a derisive expression on the skipper’s face as he glanced at Bannister’s fancy boat. I would not have chosen a boat like Wildtrack to take me back to the ocean, but suddenly that did not matter. I was back where the hospital had said I would never be, and I could smell the sea and I could feel its lash in the spray and I could have cried for happiness when I saw the first ful-mar come arrowing down to flick its careless flight along a wave’s shifting face.

“You look happy.” Bannister had taken the wheel from Mulder.

“It’s good to be back.” There was an awkward moment when neither of us had anything to say. Mulder had disappeared, sent down to the main cabin while Bannister conned the boat. I suspected, and later confirmed by observation, that Mulder was not to be included in the film. The audience would have to understand that it was the beloved Tony Bannister who was rescuing me. He looked impressive as he stood at the big wheel. His legs were braced, his face tanned, and his hair wind-stirred. On film he would look marvellous, like a Viking in a designer floatcoat.

“What do you think of the boat?” he asked me.

“Impressive.” The truth was that I preferred my yachts to be old-fashioned. I’d never cared overmuch for speed, but Wildtrack cared so much that her digital log was accurate to one hundredth of a knot.

Yet, in her way, I suppose Wildtrack was an impressive boat. She was certainly expensive. The main cockpit was in the boat’s centre, but there was a rear cockpit, aft of the owner’s cabin, which would serve as a sundeck when the boat was in warmer seas.

She was a boat built for the world’s rich, complete with digital logs offering a ludicrous accuracy and motor-driven winches and weather faxes and satellite receivers and running hot water and air-conditioning and ice-making machinery and power-steering. The old seamen who had sailed from Devon, Raleigh and Drake, Howe and Nelson, would have understood Sycorax immediately, but they would have been flummoxed by the silicon-chip efficiency of this sleek creature.

They would have been flummoxed, too, by the extraordinary equipment which the film crew had deployed on the coachroof.

Bannister saw my nervousness and tried to reassure me. “The idea is to film a background interview today. How you learned to sail, where, who taught you, why. We’ll chop it all to ribbons, of course, and cut it in with some old home movies of you as a kid. Does that sound good to you?”

“It sounds bloody foul.”

“Let’s give it a whirl when we’re ready.”

The cameraman was filming general views of the boat, but was inexorably working his way aft to where Bannister and I waited in the central cockpit. I noticed how Bannister fidgeted with the boat.

He constantly checked the wind-direction indicator on the dash-board, then twitched the helm to keep the small liquid-crystal boat-shape constant on the tactical screen. Mulder had not needed the electronic aids to sail Wildtrack at her highest speed, but Mulder was a natural helmsman and Bannister was not. He suddenly seemed uncomfortably aware of my gaze. “Would you like to take her, Nick?”

“Sure.”

“We’re steering 195,” Bannister said as he stepped aside.

“195.” I glanced down at the compass. So long as the wind did not change, and this wind seemed set for eternity, I only had to keep one finger on the big stainless-steel and power-assisted wheel to compensate for Wildtrack ’s touch of weatherhelm. The sea was not big enough to jolt the big yacht off her course. A few waves shuddered the hull, but I noted with relief how my balance seemed unaffected by them. I sensed a gust, luffed into it for speed, and then paid off with the extra half knot staying on the fancy speedometer. I did it without thinking and knew in that moment that nothing had changed.

It isn’t hard to sail a boat. The hard bit is the sea’s moods and the wind’s fretting. The hard bit is surviving shoals and squalls and tidal rips. The hard bit is navigating in a filthy night, or reefing down in a shrieking storm when your body is already so wet and cold and tired that all you want to do is die. But putting a boat into a wind’s grip and holding her there is as easy as falling off a cliff. Anyone can do it.

However, sailing a boat well takes practice that turns into instinct.

I had found, at that moment when I added the small pulse of speed to the long hull, that the instincts had not been abraded by the years of hospitals and pain. Nothing had changed, and I was back where I wanted to be.