Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

And owned a house that was half the size of Stowey. I caught a glimpse of the big house as the Jaguar’s headlights slashed across its façade. My impression was of raw brick and broad glass. Charlie touched a button in the car and the triple garage doors clanked open. A dog began yelping in the kennels and Charlie shouted at it to be silent. “It isn’t a bad place,” he said of the house as he parked the car. “Cost me a penny or two.”

It was four o’clock in the morning, but Charlie made no effort to be silent. He crashed into the house, switching on lights and slamming doors. He went to the laundry room and fetched me a pair of dry jeans and a sweater. I changed in the kitchen where children’s drawings were held by magnets on the fridge door. “How many kids have you got now?” I asked him.

“Still just the two. Johnny and Sheila.” Johnny had been named after me, despite Charlie’s wife who didn’t like me. Sheila was named for Charlie’s mother. Yvonne, I reflected, did not have much say in how this family was run.

Charlie scooped ice out of the freezer and filled two glasses. Even when we’d been teenagers he had liked to take his drinks American fashion; that, for Charlie, was the height of sophistication, and he hadn’t changed. He grinned as I jettisoned the ice from my glass, then he filled it to the brim with single malt Scotch. “Cheers, Johnny.”

“Cheers, Charlie.”

It was good to be home. We touched glasses, then drank. Somewhere upstairs a child cried, and I heard footsteps as Yvonne went to soothe it. She must have heard Charlie’s arrival, but she did not come down.

“Come on, Johnny, let’s have a proper chat.” Charlie led me into a wide drawing room. Before he switched on the lights I saw that the windows looked across sloping pastures to one of Salcombe’s lakes, then the view was obliterated by the glare of electric lights. He put the whisky bottle on the table, sat me down in a leather armchair, then insisted on hearing the whole story of my night once more. “I’ve told you once,” I protested.

“But I want to hear it again, Johnny.”

So I told him again. And still nothing made sense.

I woke at midday. The sun was streaming past yellow curtains. A Thermos of coffee, a jug of orange juice and a packet of cigarettes lay on the bedside table. My jeans, newly washed and ironed, were folded on a chair with a clean shirt. A radio was playing somewhere in the house.

I washed, shaved with a razor that had been laid out for me in the bathroom, then went down to the kitchen. Yvonne was topping and tailing a bowl of string beans. She was a tall thin woman with long dark hair and very pale skin. She had grown up in Stowey’s village and had been the prettiest girl there when Charlie married her. She was still attractive, but now her frail beauty was sullied by an air of brittle nervousness. She wasn’t glad to see me. “In trouble again, Johnny?” She sounded awkward calling me ‘Jonnny’, but Charlie and I had long cured her natural urge to address me as ‘my lord’.

“The trouble’s not of my making, Yvonne.”

“It never is, is it? You want coffee?”

“I’ve got some.” I lifted the mug which I’d filled from the Thermos upstairs. “Nice house, Yvonne.”

“He likes it. He built it.” She said it dismissively.

“You don’t like it?”

“I liked living in the village. I miss my friends.” She tipped the vegetable scraps down the sink, then turned on the waste disposer. While the machine ground away she stared through the wide window at the far yachts on the distant water. “He likes it, though,” she said when the machine had stopped its din; then, with a wry look at me, “he likes to show off his money, you see.”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

“It’s the bank’s money, not ours.” She sniffed. “I suppose you’ll be staying here for a few days now?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“You will if he wants you to. What he wants, he gets. You’re supposed to join him now.”

“Where?”

“In the yard. It’s on the Exeter road. You can’t miss it, it’s got his name plastered all over it. He says to take the jeep.”

The jeep was a powerful Japanese four-by-four; what Charlie would call a proper piece of kit. I drove it to the Exeter road where, in Charlie’s vast yard, Sunflower was standing on the bed of a low-loader. She’d been expertly cradled in timber. It was obvious that someone had worked very fast and very skilfully that morning.

“I couldn’t get to sleep,” Charlie greeted me from her cockpit. “So I went over to George’s and knocked up the cradle myself. A proper job, eh?” He congratulated himself on his own carpentry, then tossed me down a lit cigarette. “You’re looking better.”

“I’m feeling better.” I climbed the ladder propped against Sunflower’ s starboard flank. “Jesus,” I swore bitterly. Sunflower’ s portside guardrail stanchions were stove in, the mast was nothing but a stump, and, as the mast had buckled and broken, it had lifted the coachroof out of true. The starboard cleats had ripped from the teak-planked steel deck, leaving two-foot holes edged with jagged splinters. The deck was thick with filth. The liferaft must have been triggered into action after Charlie and I had left, for it had inflated itself and now, torn and cut by the crane wires, lay bedraggled and wet over the foredeck. I stepped down into the cabin which stank of filthy river water. Everything was waterlogged. In the forepeak the tool drawers had splintered open. I found my pipe, passport and money and carried them back topsides. The boathooks were missing, the danbuoys had gone; almost anything which had not been shackled to the deck had dropped or floated away. The boat was a mess; a tragic mess.

“What damage?” Charlie asked cheerfully. “It’s nothing! I’ll have the cabin dried out by tomorrow, then we’ll put some chippies in to repair the joinery. I’ll shot-blast your hull properly, instead of the dog’s mess you were making of it, paint her up, and we’ll rig a new mast in a couple of weeks. Your sails are already drying in my paint shop.”

“I can’t afford a new mast,” I said bitterly.

“You probably can’t afford to buy my dinner either, but we won’t go hungry. Come on, you bastard, cheer up!”

“Charlie, I’m serious. I can’t afford it.”

He paused at the head of the ladder. “What’s friendship for if it can’t help out a mate, eh? Don’t be daft, Johnny. You won’t have to pay. I’ve already ordered your bloody mast. Now come on, I’m hungry as hell.”

We drove to a pub where the barmaids greeted Charlie with a kiss. He knew everyone, and had a word for all of them. He glad-handed the bar like a politician on the make, but then took me to a secluded corner where we could talk in peace. “I told them to make us a proper steak and kidney pie,” he said as he sat down. “You could do with some decent food.”

“Sounds good.”

“And no salad.” He drank half his pint. “Yvonne eats nothing but bloody salad. She read this article about diet in one of her women’s magazines. Jesus wept, I’m married to a rabbit. She told me I should give up the beer and the beef. Like hell, I said. I told her I expected a proper meal on my table, and by God she’d better provide it.”

I smiled. “You’ve got a happy marriage, Charlie?”

“You know how it is, Johnny.” He lit a cigarette. “They’re never happy, are they? You can give them the world and they’ll still find something to bitch about. But Yvonne’s all right.” He made the concession grudgingly. “She’s a good mother, anyway. Not that I’m home much. Business.”

“What were you doing in Hertfordshire?”