Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

“You God-damned bloody fool.” She strode naked across the room and seized the telephone.

“What are you doing?” I asked in alarm.

She fended off my clumsy grab for the phone. “You’re going to see a doctor.”

“I’m bloody not.” I lunged for the phone again.

She lifted the phone out of my reach. “Do you want to go to bed with me again, Nick Sandman?”

“For ever.”

“Then you bloody well see a doctor.” She paused. “Do you agree?”

“I told you,” I insisted, “it’ll cure itself.”

“I’m not discussing it, Nick Sandman. Are you going to see a doctor or are you not?”

I agreed. I’d found Angela now and I was not going to lose her and I’d even see a quack for her. I lay back on the bed and willed my leg to move, and I thought, as I listened to her quick, competent voice arranging my appointment, how very nice it was to be cared for by a woman again. I was Nick in love, Nick in La-la land, Nick happy.

PART THREE

The doctor turned out to be a woman of my own age, but who seemed older because of her brusque and confident manner. She was a neurologist whom Angela had met during the filming of a medical documentary. Doctor Mary Clarke had a hint of humour in her green eyes, but none in her voice as she briskly put me through her various tests. At the end of the performance she led me back to her private office overlooking a rose garden, where Angela had waited for us. Doctor Clarke asked me to describe the exact nature of my wound. She grimaced as she took notes, while Angela, who had not heard the full story before, flinched from the gory details.

“I wish,” Mary Clarke said when I’d finished, “that I’d had you as my patient, Mr Sandman.”

“I rather wish that, too,” I said gallantly.

“Because”—she pointedly ignored my clumsy compliment—“I’d have kept you strapped down in bed so you couldn’t have done any more damage to yourself.”

Silence. Except that a nearby lawnmower buzzed annoyingly.

“What do you mean?” I asked eventually.

“What I mean, Mr Sandman, is that your do-it-yourself physiotherapy has undoubtedly aggravated a fairly routine and minor oedematose condition. There’s no medical reason why you shouldn’t be walking normally, except that you forced the pace unreasonably.”

“Bollocks,” I said angrily, with all gallantry forgotten. “The bastards said I’d never walk again!”

“The bastards usually do.” Mary Clarke half smiled. “Because a spinal oedema routinely presents itself as a complete severance.

Naturally, if your spinal cord was cut, you’d be paralysed for life.

It’s only when some degree of mobility returns that an oedema can be diagnosed.”

“Oedema?” Angela asked.

“A bloody swelling,” I answered too caustically, and immediately regretted the tone. I might have lived too long with the doctors and their vocabulary, but Angela was new to it.

“Very literally a bloody swelling,” Mary Clarke said to Angela,

“which presses on the spinal cord to induce a temporary paralysis, but which can usually be expected to subside within a matter of weeks.”

“Mine didn’t,” I said stubbornly, as though I was proving her wrong.

“Because you’d been severely traumatized. There was extensive burning as well as the bullet damage. In essence, Mr Sandman, you have a permanent oedema now.” She paused, then gave a grin that was almost mischievous. “The truth is that you’re a very remarkably scrambled mess. When you die they’ll probably put your backbone in a specimen jar. Congratulations.”

“But what’s to be done?” Angela insisted, and I was touched by the look of real anguish on her face until I realized that she was probably just terrified for the future of her film.

“Nothing, of course,” Mary Clarke said happily.

“Nothing?” Angela sounded shocked.

Mary attempted a nautical metaphor; explaining that my body had somehow lashed together some kind of nervous jury-rig that gave me control of my right leg. The problem was that the jury-rig sometimes blinked out and, though further surgery might help, the risks were too frightening. “Are you determined to sail round the world?” Mary asked me at the end of the bleak explanation.

“At least to New Zealand, yes.”

“You shouldn’t do it, of course. If you had any sense, Mister Sandman, you’d apply for a disabled person’s grant, find a bungalow with a nice ramp for your wheelchair, then write your memoirs.” She smiled. “Of course, if you do that, then you’ll become a completely helpless cripple, so perhaps you should go to New Zealand instead.”

“But…” Angela began.

“There’s nothing I can do!” Mary said sturdily. “Either the leg will function, or it won’t. All any doctor can do now is experiment on him, which I rather suspect won’t meet with Mister Sandman’s approval?”

“Too bloody right,” I said.

“But supposing he’s alone in the middle of the Atlantic when the leg fails!” Angela protested.

“I imagine he’ll cope,” Mary said drily, “and so far there’s always been a recovery of function. The muscle tone is good”—she looked at me—“but if you detect that the numbness is lasting longer each time, or if you see a withering in the limb, then you’d better seek medical advice. Of course they won’t be able to do anything, except slice you up again, but some people find the attentions of a doctor reassuring.” She stood up. “My fee will be a bottle of Côte de Beaune

’78, chateau-bottled.”

That was a good year for Burgundy, and Mary Clarke was a good doctor who knew that sometimes, maybe most times, the best thing to do is nothing. With which treatment Angela had to be content, and I had to live, and so we went back to Devon.

The good times began then. Anthony Bannister was commuting between his London house and the Mediterranean where Wildtrack had been entered for a series of offshore races. Fanny Mulder was with the boat, so I had Devon to myself. I also had the non-sailing Angela.

Matthew and the film crew must have realized what had happened between Angela and me, but they said nothing, and they were happy for me that Sycorax could make such progress. Her rigging wire arrived and, for the price of a dozen pints of beer, we borrowed a buoy barge so that its onboard derrick could lower the varnished masts into their places. Before stepping the mainmast I carefully placed an antique penny in the keel chock where the mast’s heel hid and crushed the silver coin. It was a traditional specific to bring good luck to the ship, but love brought better fortune as Angela freed all the materials for Sycorax . Suddenly there were no more conditions, only co-operation. I even gave the camera a limping description of what had happened on the night I won the medal. I heard nothing from Jill-Beth, and I let myself think that Kassouli’s threat was a chimera. Micky Harding phoned me a few times, but I had nothing to report and so the phone calls stopped.

Day by day the rigging took shape. Wire, rope, timber and buckets of Stockholm tar were hoisted aloft and turned into the seemingly fragile concoction that could withstand the vast powers of ocean winds. It was slow work, for if any part of the rigging was to fail then I would rather it failed on the berth than in an Atlantic force eight. I cut the belaying pins out of lignum vitae and rammed them home in oaken fife rails that were bolted to the mast beneath cheek pieces. The film crew gave up trying to understand what was going on; they said I was becoming nautical, which just meant that the vocabulary had become technical as Jimmy and I worried about deadeyes and gantlines, robands and leader cringles, worming and parcelling. The cameraman retaliated by presenting me with a dic-tionary, while Angela made Sycorax a gift of some antique brass scuttles. She called them portholes.