Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

“You got it, Charlie. Not all the time, because Harry’s a cheapskate copper, but so long as I’m on the river I’ve got company.”

“You’re daft,” he said, “plain daft.” He had spoken ruefully. Now he stood up. “I don’t know, Johnny. I thought you’d be halfway to the West Indies by now! Hell, I was going to bring Joanna out there for a fortnight!”

“There’ll be other fortnights, Charlie.”

“Maybe.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got a meeting up on the M5 extension. It’s a brand new motorway and it’s already crumbling to shreds. Still, I mustn’t complain. It’s all money. Look after yourself, Johnny.”

“I’m trying.”

“But if you want my advice,” he said morosely, “I’d bugger off. I wouldn’t trust Harry Abbott, and I certainly wouldn’t trust that Buzzacott mob. They’ve already conned a painting out of you, so what will they take next?” He climbed on to the pontoon. “Maybe I’ll drop by on my way home.”

“I won’t be here this afternoon, Charlie.”

“Oh, of course. You’re off to London with your girlfriend.” He paused on the pontoon. “You’re an idiot, Johnny.”

“Am I?”

“You’re getting involved.” He flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the river, then stared gloomily at me. “Do you know why I like you? Because from the very beginning, right from the beginning, you were always different. You never gave a damn. You didn’t give a monkey’s about a bloody thing. You’d do anything for a dare. But now? Now you’re letting those rich buggers call your tune. You’re joining them, Johnny, and they’ll use you.” He pointed an accusing finger at me. “Go back to sea, Johnny. You’ll be happier there.”

“I’ll go back soon.”

“Go now, before they tame you.”

I smiled, then watched him walk away. Had Charlie been tamed? I didn’t know. What I did know was that I had let down my friend. I had let him down by throwing in my lot with other people, and I abruptly realised that Charlie was upset because, till now, he had always seen himself as my protector. Now he felt betrayed, and I felt rotten, but I wouldn’t change my course, not yet, for Georgina’s future and my own stupid hopes depended on it. Not hopes of a painting, nor of a reward, but of Jennifer.

I chained the dinghy to the coachroof so that no thieving creep would steal it, locked Sunflower , told my police guards that I’d be going away and that I’d phone the local station before I returned, then went to London.

To my chagrin, Hans had accompanied Jennifer Pallavicini to the television studio. The happy couple were waiting for me in the hospitality room where Hans greeted me politely, then stood smiling by as Jennifer and I made small talk. Her friendliness of the morning had dissipated, though she did say that she liked Charlie.

“You did?” I sounded surprised, for she’d behaved very coolly when she met him.

“He looks a very capable sort of man.”

“He’s that, right enough.” I told her tales of our adventures together, and recounted the time when we had nearly died in the Tasman Sea storm, and how Charlie had sung all the way through the ordeal because, he said, he’d be buggered if he went to hell crying. “He’s a good man,” I said warmly.

“And you define a good man,” she observed icily, “as being someone who can sail small boats in big storms?”

I reflected that it was a more reliable definition than being a genius with the processed cheese, but managed to avoid saying as much. Instead I was buttonholed by the programme’s presenter who told me what he wanted me to say. It was evident that I’d been cast as the rogue aristocrat; unstable, unreliable, and somewhat mysterious; while Jennifer, I assumed, had been invited in case I proved to be tongue-tied, in which case she could be relied on to keep speaking.

We did our television programme. The interviewer treated me like a cretin, and I obliged by being suitably arrogant. When I was asked why I’d given away the Van Gogh, I simply replied that I didn’t want it. The audience seemed to like the interview. Jennifer was more loquacious, explaining the importance of the missing painting, then paying a very nice tribute to my generosity. The audience applauded me. The whole thing was quite painless, and all over within twenty minutes. We were shown back to the hospitality room where we were offered warm white wine and stale sandwiches. There was no sign of Hans.

“He had to catch a flight to Geneva,” Jennifer explained. She looked very excited, perhaps because she had enjoyed the interview more than she had expected. “It was fun, wasn’t it?”

“Was it?”

“Of course it was! Don’t be so boring. I think I’d like to be on telly more often.”

“You were very good,” I said loyally.

“Then we shall celebrate my success by having dinner.”

She was suddenly bouncing with happiness, and my own happiness was increasing because of it. We went to a restaurant where we could eat outside and, in the lantern-light, she told me about her childhood, and about the American university where she’d majored in Fine Arts, then about her apprenticeship at a London auction house and her first proper gallery job in Florence. I tried to put a time-span on various jobs, and decided she must be twenty-seven.

“And you,” she asked, “what about you?”

“I thought you’d done all that research on me?”

“Maybe it was wrong.” She caught my eye, and we said nothing for a moment, and I wondered if all the former hostility between us had been merely a disguise for what we had both been feeling. I think I already knew that this was a girl worth staying ashore for, and if that was an exciting thought, it was also somewhat frightening. Maybe she felt the same fear for she suddenly looked away and posed a brutal question. “Tell me about your brother. Why did he kill himself?”

“He couldn’t cope.”

“With what?”

“The problems of Stowey. Mother. Life. Debts. Disappointment.”

Jennifer frowned. “Disappointment?”

I lit a pipe, taking my time over the job. “It was very important to Michael that he was going to be an earl. He thought it would make him important. He couldn’t wait for Father to die. He wanted to see the forelocks twitching when he walked by, and he wanted to wear the ermine, and he fancied hobnobbing in the House of Lords, and when he finally inherited he suddenly discovered that it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. He was still just the same indecisive idiot that he’d always been. Mother kept pushing him to do things to the estate, which he didn’t have the guts to try, and she also wanted him to marry some monstrous creature from the Fens, which he couldn’t face, so in the end he just bunged a double-barrel into his mouth and put his big toe on the trigger.”

For a few seconds she didn’t speak, then she frowned. “You can be very flippant at times.”

“Can I?”

She didn’t reply, instead she just stared at me as though this was the very first time she had really taken notice of me. And I, suddenly, was frightened, because I knew I was being judged, and I wanted that judgment to be favourable.

“Listen,” I said. “Life can be very shitty, it can be tough, it can be the pits. So there’s only one rule, and that’s never to give in. Bad luck comes to all of us, so what must you do? You fight it, you claw at it, you kick the shit out of it, but you never, ever, ever give in. You only go through this vale of tears once, so for God’s sake make it a good voyage. So if I’m flippant, that’s only because it’s better to make light of a disaster than to cry over it.”

I had spoken with more vehemence than I had intended. Jennifer had looked away from me to stare down at the table, so I could not see what she had made of my words. “What do you think about when you’re out there?” she asked after a while, “on your own, at sea?”