Bernard Cornwell: Wildtrack

“I’m fine,” I lied. “I just want to walk.”

The door hissed shut and the bus grumbled away towards the village while I went haltingly down the lane which led to the old ferry slip. From there I would be able to stare across the river at Sycorax .

To stare at my home, for, however battered she might be by the winter’s ice and gales, Sycorax was home. She was the only home I had, or wanted any more, and it had been thoughts of her that had steered me through the long months to this moment when I walked towards her.

Or rather limped. It hurt to walk, but I knew it would hurt for the rest of my life. I’d simply have to live with the pain, and I’d decided that the best way to do that was to forget it, and that the best way to forget it was to think of something else.

That was suddenly easy, for, as I turned the steep corner halfway to the river, a watery sunlight reflected with surprising brilliance from the windows of my father’s old house which stood high on the far bank.

I stopped. The new owner of the house had extended the river façade, making a great sweep of plate glass that looked down the wide expanse of sloping lawns to the water. The towering mast my father had put on the terrace still stood complete with its crosstree, shrouds and angled yard. No flag hung from the mast, suggesting that the house was empty. To me, as I gazed across the river, the house seemed like a foreign place for which my visa had long been cancelled.

I picked up my small bag and hobbled on. In summer this lane was busy with dinghy-sailors who trailed their craft to the water’s edge, but now, in the wake of winter’s cold, there was just one car parked at the head of the old slip. It was a big shooting-brake filled with paint and tools and warps and all the other gear needed to ready a boat for the season. A middle-aged man was stowing cans and brushes into a bag. “Morning! It’s a bright one, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I agreed. There were a dozen boats moored out—only a handful compared to the scores that would use the anchorage in summer, but just enough to hide Sycorax from me. She was on the wharf by the deep cut that led to my father’s old boathouse on the far bank.

The tide was ebbing. I hoped the middle-aged man would ignore me now, for this was the moment that had kept me alive through all the months of hospital and pain. This was the dream; to see the boat that would sail me to New Zealand. I was prepared for the worst, expecting to see her topsides shabby and her hull clawed by the ice of two winters. Jimmy Nicholls had written in the autumn and said she needed work, and I’d read between the lines that it would be a lot of work, but I had persuaded myself that it would be a pleasure to mend Sycorax as the days lengthened and as my own strength seeped back.

Now, like a child wanting to prolong a treat, I did not look up as I limped to the slip’s end. Only when my shoes were almost touching the swirl of falling water did I at last raise my eyes.

I was holding my breath. I had come home.

And Sycorax was gone.

“Is something wrong?”

My right leg was shaking uncontrollably. Sycorax was gone. In her place, tied to the ancient wall that was my private berth, was a box-like houseboat.

“Excuse me?” It was the middle-aged man who had approached me on soft-soled sea-boots. He was embarrassed by needing to ask the question. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” I said it abruptly, not wanting to betray the dismay I felt.

I looked into the big upstream pool where another handful of boats was moored, but Sycorax was not there. I looked downstream towards the bend which hid the village, but no boats were moored in the reach. She was gone.

I turned round. The middle-aged man had gone back to loading his inflatable dinghy with supplies. “Were you moored out through the winter?” I asked.

“’Fraid so.” He said it sheepishly, as though I was accusing him of maltreating his boat.

“You don’t know what’s happened to Sycorax , do you?”

“ Sycorax? ” He straightened up, puzzled, then clicked his fingers as he remembered the name. “Tommy Sandman’s old boat?”

“Yes.” It was hardly the moment to say that my father had long ago sold me the yacht.

“Sad,” he said. “Shame, really. She’s up there.” He pointed across the river; I turned, and at last saw her.

She had not disappeared, but rather had been dragged on her flank up the wooded hill to the south of the boathouse. I could just see her stern in the undergrowth. A deep-keeled hull like Sycorax ’s should be propped on a cradle or held by sheer-legs if she’s out of the water, but whoever had beached my boat had simply hauled her like dead meat and abandoned her in the undergrowth.

“A bloody shame,” the man said ruefully. “She was a pretty thing.”

“Can you take me across?” I asked.

He hesitated. “Isn’t it private?”

“Not the woods, I think.” I was sure, but I did not want to betray my connections with this stretch of river. I wanted to be anonymous.

I wanted no one to share my feelings this day, because, even if the dream was broken, it was still my private dream.

The man did not want to help, but the freemasonry of the river would not let him turn me down. He watched my awkward manoeuvres that were necessary because I could not simply step down into the dinghy, but instead had to sit on the stones at the slip’s edge and transfer myself as though I was going from bed to wheelchair.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Car accident. Front tyre blew out.”

“Bad luck.” He handed down the bags of paint and brushes, then climbed in himself and pulled the outboard into noisy life. He told me he was a dentist with a practice in Devizes. His wife hated the sea. He pointed out his boat, a Westerly Fulmar, and said he thought he was getting too old for it, which probably meant his wife’s nagging was wearing him down. In a season or two, he said, he would put his Westerly on the market and spend the rest of his life regretting it.

“Don’t do it,” I said.

“She wants to see Disneyworld.”

We fell into companionable gloom. I looked up at Sycorax . The gold lettering on her transom caught a shaft of sunlight and winked at me. “Who beached her?” I asked.

“Lord knows. It isn’t the sort of thing Bannister would do.”

“Bannister?” I asked.

“Tony Bannister.” He saw with some astonishment that I did not immediately place the name. “Tony Bannister? The Tony Bannister?

He owns the property now. He keeps his boat down in the town marina.”

It was my turn to be astonished. Anthony Bannister was a television presenter who had become the darling of the British public, though his fame had spread far beyond the glow of the idiot box.

His face appeared on magazine covers and his endorsement was sought for products as diverse as cars and suntan lotions. He was also a yachtsman, one of the gilded amateurs whose big boats grace the world’s most expensive regattas. But Bannister, I recalled, had also known the sea’s horror; his wife had died the previous year in an accident at sea while Bannister had been on course to win the St Pierre trophy. The tragedy had prompted nationwide sympathy, for Bannister was a true celebrity.

So much of a celebrity, indeed, that I felt oddly complimented that he now lived in my father’s old house.

“Perhaps it’s an unlucky house, eh?” The dentist stared up at the expanse of windows.

“Because of his wife, you mean?”

“Tommy Sandman lived there, too.”

“I remember.” I kept my voice neutral.

The dentist chuckled. “I wonder how he likes his new home?” The chuckle held a distinct British pleasure at a rich man’s downfall. My father, who had once been so brilliantly successful, was now in jail. “I imagine he’ll survive,” I said drily.