Isvik (29 page)

Carlos had got to his feet. Apparently he didn't have to be told who Iain was. ‘Carlos Borgalini.' He held out his hand.

Iain ignored it. ‘Ah ken who ye are. Ah asked ye a question.'

Carlos was smiling, full of charm as he began to explain.

‘Ushuaia! Why Ushuaia?'

‘Mario said you would understand.'

‘Mario? Our Connor-Gómez friend, ye mean, eh – Ángel?' Iain stared at him a moment, then turned to Iris. ‘Gi' me some coffee, fur God's sake. It's been a bad mornin'.' He didn't say why it had been a bad morning, but Nils had already told me he had arrived on board early, got some papers from his briefcase, which was locked in the security drawer at the back of the chart table, and then gone up into the town where he had found somebody with a fax machine. ‘Oh, an' the snowmobile has been unloaded by mistake at Puerto Gallegos, God knows why. Ah've been tryin' to sort that out, too.'

Much to my surprise he seemed to accept that we would start off by heading west and ducking down into the Beagle Channel. And when I told him it didn't make sense poking our nose out into the Pacific, then facing Cape Horn, just because Connor-Gómez preferred to join ship at Ushuaia rather than Punta Arenas, he turned on me and told me to mind my own business.

‘It is my business,' I answered angrily. ‘A raw crew –'

‘Shut up, will ye!' He had grabbed hold of me with that gloved steel claw, thrusting his face forward, his eyes gone cold. ‘Ye dae yer job, Ah'll dae mine. We pick him up at Ushuaia if that's what he wants.'

‘You mean he's
persona non grata
here in a Chilean port?'

‘Ah told ye, mind yer own business.' The claw bit into my arm. ‘Okay?' He let the silence round the table hang a minute, finally releasing my arm, his face relaxing into a smile. ‘One good thing, the
Anton Varga
is due in around ten-thirty. Yer new sails should be off-loaded shortly after midday.' Iris handed him his coffee and he sat back. ‘The first thing is to get all our stores listed and stowed. Then ye can go to work checkin' the sails. Carlos can gi' ye a hand.'

To my surprise the boy proved very useful. He might look effeminate, but he had plenty of energy, and he was intelligent. In no time at all he had learned the ropes, so that the following day, when all the stores had been correctly stowed in order of use and I was free to deal with the sails, I found I could rely on him for quite a lot of the hard pulley-hauley and winching as we hoisted them one by one, testing them out as best we could with the wind coming at us round the bows of the freighter moored astern.

Thrown into his company like this, I took the opportunity to try and clarify his connection with the Connor-Gómez family. It seemed unlikely I would get as good a chance again, for once we were all of us living on board, privacy would be at a premium with seven of us cooped up together, eight if he came as well. My main concern was his relationship with Iris and the reason for his apparent determination to join the expedition. Remembering the look on his face as he had peered down at us through the
Cutty Sark
's skylight there had to be something between them.

I tried a straight question first – ‘You're Iris's cousin, I understand?' But he just laughed. ‘Some cousin she is, going off, pretending she's dead and leaving me to pick up the cans.' He wouldn't say much more than that, and when I asked him what his connection with the Connor-Gómez family was, he answered that if Iris hadn't told me by now, he was damned if he was going to.

Later I tried another tack, complimenting him on the speed with which he had mastered the intricacies of
Isvik
's rig and saying he must have had a good sailing instructor. ‘The best,' he said, his eyes lighting up.

‘Who?'

He glanced at me, a sudden wariness. ‘Mario, of course.'

‘Mario? Mario who?'

‘Mario Borgalini.'

But when I asked him whether Mario Borgalini was his father, he shrugged and turned away, muttering over his shoulder, ‘I never know who my father is, only that I am a Borgalini.' He said the name almost pretentiously as though he were proud of being a Borgalini.

‘You mean you don't know who your parents are?'

‘No, I do not mean. My mother's name is Rosalli. She is a singer, to the guitar mainly – a very passionate, very remarkable woman.' His eyes were alight now with a luminous warmth. ‘She is also very beautiful, even now, though she is more than forty when I am born. And very talented,' he added. ‘You have not heard her sing? She is Rosalli Gabrielli. All those records …'

‘Yes, of course.' I was suddenly remembering an advertisement in a King's Lynn shop. Not my sort of music, but vaguely I recalled a very Romany face with a large open mouth full of teeth and very black hair. So that was his mother. A woman who had briefly been married to Juan Gómez. And Mario was Ángel Connor-Gómez's first name.

‘It was Ángel who taught you to sail, Ángel Connor-Gómez. Is that right?'

He nodded, turning away again. ‘At home we always call him Mario.'

‘So he is your half-brother.' He had to be since Rosalli Gabrielli was his mother also.

‘Per'aps. You want me to get the fisherman up? Shall we try that next?'

‘Did you see a lot of him?'

‘Of Mario? No. I don't see enough of him.' He said it almost petulantly. ‘It was only during that one year, in the holiday. I was at school, you see, and he was at school, too, in a way, at the
Escuela Mecánica
. And then, of course, we were often away from our home in Buenos Aires. My mother's engagements took us all over America.'

‘How old were you when he taught you to sail?'

‘Fourteen, I think. Why?'

It was an impressionable age and I was beginning to have an uneasy feeling about their relationship. ‘What about Iris?' I asked. ‘Did you see anything of her?'

‘Of course not. Why should I?' He said it with what I thought was a touch of venom, adding by way of explanation, ‘As you can imagine, the Connor-Gómez and the Borgalini families don't mix.' He banged back the hatch on the foredeck, disappearing down into the sail locker, and that was the end of it.

Just after dawn on the Sunday the cargo vessel astern of us pulled out into the Strait and I had
Isvik
warped round while we had room, so that she faced into the wind, and then once again I had the sails hoisted one at a time, Carlos and myself working as a team. Unfortunately, I did not dare test the set of the upper and lower squares'ls, having to be content with setting them flying. The fisherman stays'l, too. And there was another sail I didn't quite understand. It was huge, with a hoist on both masts and filled all the space between, the foot of it reaching back almost to the rear of the deck housing. A block just aft of the upper squares'l boom that I had not understood now made sense. Carlos went up the foremast, rove a long nylon line to it, and with this round the belly of the sail, we were able to scandalize it into a roll as we hoisted it.

Thankfully all the sails seemed to have been cut correctly, the luffs exact as to length and only the main requiring some adjustment to the leach. Also I decided to have the lower panels and batten pockets double-stitched.

‘Lucky we are not junk-rigged,' Carlos said, smiling at me as he stood on the stern looking up at the flogging sail. The wind was gusting quite strongly now and I dared not sheet any of them in. ‘You ever sailed in a junk rig? I do it once. Only in the Río de la Plata. It is the lazy sailor's dream of a rig, but too many battens for us, too much sewing. Do you have a machine for sewing on board this ship?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Good. Then I sew for you. I do that on the boat I sailed in from Rhode Island to Plymouth when I come to study in England.' It was then that I managed to extract one further piece of information from him. It was in connection with some wild plan of his to purchase a boat and sail round the world. ‘Alone?' I asked him, and he laughed and said no, not alone. ‘With Mario, of course.'

‘You mean he plans to sell that hacienda in Peru?'

‘No, of course he don't sell the Hacienda Lucinda. But when we get the money from the insurance people … There is a lot of moneys owed to us for the fire at the Gómez store.'

Won't that go to Iris?' I asked.

‘No.' He smiled. It was a nasty little vicious smile. ‘Mario has seen to that. She gets nothing. Her father made all the shares over to Mario, and some to me. It is enough to buy several boats.' He said it boastfully, his eyes as intense as a cat looking at a bird caught in wire netting. ‘And nothing to Eduardo. Or to Iris.' The undertone of viciousness was back in his voice.

I came to the conclusion then and there that, however good a hand he turned out to be, I wasn't going to like the boy. And that's how I thought of him, as a boy, though there couldn't have been more than a few years between us in age. There was something immature about him, as though he had grown up outside of parental control and was mentally an undisciplined kid.

However, I was certainly lucky to have somebody else on board who was not only hooked on sailing, but had transocean experience. And then, the next day, he suddenly announced that he was going climbing. The kit he had brought with him included a rucksack and into it he stuffed his oilskins, some cold weather gear, heavy socks, food, and strapped to the top of it a waterproof sleeping bag.

‘I am studying too much, then in a police cell –' He was looking at Iris as he said this, but smiling still. He didn't seem to bear her a grudge. ‘I need to harden up.' He slapped his stomach.

‘Where are you going?' she asked him.

‘Up there.' He waved his hand vaguely towards the north. ‘There is some sort of a track leads back of the town and up over the top of the Brunswick Peninsula. Maybe I hitch a ride up to the ski slopes. That will save me eight kilometres. Once on the tops I will be able to have a look at the Seno Otway and all the rest of that sweep of water that makes an island of Riesco.
Seno
means womb, and that's what it looks like on the chart – a secret place.' He was looking at Iris, smiling. ‘If I don't return the day after tomorrow send out a search party please.'

He borrowed the lightest of our four ice picks, also a little plastic handbearing compass from the chart table drawer, which he slung round his neck. We were both on deck to see him off, and as his slender, boyish figure disappeared behind the sheds, I said to Iris, ‘I don't understand him.'

‘No?' She was tight-lipped, her voice cold.

‘He talks about “us” and “we” all the time. He seems to think he's coming with us. Is he?'

She didn't answer.

‘You'll decide at Ushuaia, is that it? When your brother arrives.'

‘I have told you …' She stopped there, turning away towards the wheelhouse.

‘Why does he want to come?' I called after her. ‘Does he need to prove something?'

She looked back at me then. ‘Per'aps. We'll see what Ángel says – what their relationship is.' She said this slowly, standing there, looking worried. ‘That boy –' She shook her head, beads of moisture gleaming like diamond dust in the blackness of her hair. ‘You ask if he need to prove something. I think per'aps he need to prove he is a man.' She smiled fleetingly. ‘I don't think his life has been an easy one.' She turned then and went below.

That night, I don't know why – possibly it was because the arrival of Carlos brought it home to me that we were very near to the point of departure – I started thinking about the purpose of life, my life, and why I was risking it on this crazy search for what would probably turn out to be a non-existent ship. What was the point? Was
I
trying to prove something?

I looked back down the years, so little of achievement, not even the commonest of all – a home, a wife, children. Was that what I wanted?

I thought of the ice ahead and almost laughed aloud. I wouldn't find those sort of satisfactions down there. So why was I going? What the hell did I want? That question went rattling round in my mind until it merged into a welter of ice, and myself standing gazing up at an image of Iris stretched out like one of the carved angels on the hammer beams of a Norfolk church. No, more like the figurehead on the bows of an old sailing ship. She was staring down at me, bare-breasted and her hair flying, and the bows were bedded in ice, the long bowsprit reaching up into scudding clouds. She was trying to tell me something. I could see her lips moving, but I couldn't catch the words. And then the figurehead changed into my mother, watering cans in her hand, and she was calling to me to help her with the flowers. But there were no flowers, only a great berg of ice hanging over the broken stump of a mast and the gaunt figure of a man staring at me out of a bearded face. And all the time there was the tinkling sound of crystals falling.

I woke then to the stillness of the night and Iain's wristwatch alarm ringing like a cracked musical box. ‘What is it this time?' I mumbled as he heaved himself out of the bunk below me.

‘Got to catch a plane,' he replied.

‘Where to?'

There was a long pause. Then he said, ‘BA. Then Montevideo.'

‘Checking up on the
Santa Maria del Sud
?'

He didn't answer that and I dozed off. He woke me just before he left to say he would be away three days, possibly more. ‘Tell Iris, will ye? And as soon as Galvin arrives to give ye a hand, take
Isvik
out again and give those new sails a thorough trial. Don't worry about the engine. It's the sails and the crew we need to concentrate on now. Ah don't want any balls-up reefin' as we beat our way down towards the Beagle Channel. Okay? Ah want everybody knowin' exactly what they have to dae on deck in any eventuality.' I could just see the lift of his hand in the meagre light that came from the uncurtained window. ‘And don't put the ship ashore, understand?' Then he was gone, and a minute later there was the sound of a car pulling away.