Stormchild (5 page)

He left us alone with Nicole who was now wearing a shirt and trousers in the pale green that seemed to be the uniform color of the
Erebus
crew, when they wore any clothes at all. “I’m sorry,” she said awkwardly, “it’s just something I have to do.”

“What is?” I demanded too angrily.

“Oh, Daddy.” She sighed and looked at her mother, who was making soothing noises and telling Nicole to look after herself.

“You don’t know anything about this man!” I attempted one last line of attack.

Nicole shook her head in denial of my anger. “Caspar’s a good sailor, and he means to do something about a filthy world, and that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Her head went up as she recovered some of her usual defiance. “I want to make a difference. I want to leave the world a better place. Is that so bad?”

Oh God, I thought, but there was no way of dissuading the young when they discovered the world’s salvation was in their passionate grasp. “I love you,” I said awkwardly, and I tried to give her all the money in my wallet, but Nicole would not take it. Instead she kissed me, kissed her mother, then, cuffing tears from her cheeks, ushered us both ashore.

Joanna and I walked to the car, then drove to the Cross and Anchor from where we could watch the tideway. Joanna nursed a gin and tonic, while I drank beer. After a half hour we saw
Erebus
shove off from the pontoon and motor out into the fairway. All three girls were now on deck, and all were wearing pale green clothes.

“Nicole looks happy,” Joanna said wistfully. She had fetched a pair of binoculars from the car and now offered me the glasses. “Don’t you think she looks happy? And maybe this is just something she has to work out of her system.”

“It’s what that superannuated hippie is working into her system that riles me,” I said grimly. Then the hippie himself appeared on the catamaran’s deck, dressed in his shorts with his white hair tied into a long ponytail. There was something goatlike about him, I thought, and something very disturbing in the girls’ matching clothes, which somehow suggested that they had uniformly humbled themselves before von Rellsteb’s authority.

“He’s a very charismatic man,” Joanna said unhappily.

“Balls.”

“He defused you.” Joanna stroked my hand as the clumsy catamaran motored past us toward the sea. The tide was flooding, which suggested von Rellsteb planned an eastward passage, perhaps back to Germany. I focused the binoculars to see that Nicole, who did indeed look happy, had taken the catamaran’s wheel, while Caspar von Rellsteb was winching up the mainsail. The
Erebus’
s sail was banded in broad stripes of white and pale green, the same green as the odd uniform clothes that Nicole and the other girls were wearing.

“She’s enlisting in a very good cause, Tim,” Joanna said as she watched her daughter sail away.

“She’s volunteering for a floating harem,” I insisted.

“They’re young,” Joanna said patiently, “and they’re full of idealism and hope. Besides, Nicole’s always been an environmentalist, and surely that’s better than getting arrested or having abortions?”

“She’ll have that goat’s baby instead?” I demanded angrily.

“They just want to clean up a polluted world,” Joanna said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Except I don’t think that bastard’s a real environmentalist. He’s an opportunist. He knows how desperately the young want a cause, so he attracts them with a load of earnest-sounding claptrap, then turns them into his private harem.”

“You don’t know that,” Joanna said patiently.

“If he’s such a wonderful environmentalist,” I demanded, “then why are his engines so filthy?” The
Erebus’s
twin exhausts were leaving a dirty cloud of black smoke to drift across the river. “I should have stopped her.”

“You couldn’t have stopped her,” Joanna said, her eyes on the departing catamaran. She paused for a long time, then looked sadly at me. “I’ve never told you this, Tim, because it’s so very unfair and so very stupid, but Nickel blames you for Dickie’s death.”

“Me?” I stared at Joanna. The accusation was so unexpected and so untrue that, instead of shocking me, it merely surprised me. “She blames me?”

“Because you encouraged Dickie to join the army.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I swore in exasperation. “Why didn’t she talk to me about it?”

“Lord knows. I don’t understand the young. I’m sure she knows it isn’t really your fault, but—” Joanna, unable to finish the thought, shrugged it away. “She’ll be back, Tim.”

But I was beyond such hopeful consolations. I was watching my daughter, who blamed me for her brother’s death, sail into the unknown. Legally she was a grown woman, able to make her own choices, but she was still our daughter, and now our only child, and I had just lost her to a man I had instinctively hated at first sight. I also knew I had handled my confrontation with Caspar von Rellsteb very badly, but I had not known how else to cope with the man I now thought of as my daughter’s abductor.

“Nicole’s tough.” Joanna tried to find more reassurance as we watched our daughter expertly steer the catamaran through the Bull Sands Channel. “She’ll use him and his ideas to get what she wants, and then she’ll come home. He’s an attractive man, but I doubt he’s clever enough to keep her, you mark my words. She’ll be home by Christmas.”

But Nicole was not home by that Christmas, nor by the next. She did not write to us, nor did she telephone. Our daughter had disappeared, gone we knew not where with a man we could not trace on a boat we could not find. She sailed away and she never came home, though Fletcher, my grimly unpleasant policeman, still insisted that Nicole had come back like a thief in the night to plant a bomb that had killed her mother and had been meant to kill her father, too.

“No.” I dismissed Fletcher’s allegation scornfully.

Fletcher’s knowing smile derided my denial. “Is she still in your will?” he asked. When I did not answer, he assumed correctly that Nicole was. “She gets everything, does she?” he insisted.

“It’s none of your business.”

“Change your will.” Fletcher ignored my anger. “Cut her out. So even if the next bomb does get you, she won’t profit from it. We don’t want the wicked to flourish, do we, Mr. Blackburn?”

“Don’t be so offensive,” I snapped at him, but even to myself the retort sounded futile and, for the first time in my life, and despite my fame as a solo sailor, I felt entirely alone.

T
he public interest in Joanna’s murder faded as the months passed and no one was arrested. The newspapers found juicier bones to chew, while the police transferred their efforts to fresher crimes that were more easily solved. Joanna was forgotten.

My life recovered, then limped on. To my astonishment the London attorney, Miller, bought
Stormchild
after all, or rather he and his partners purchased the boat which they announced was to become a “client hospitality facility.” The law firm paid a decent price, then offered my yard yet more money to have the boat rigged and launched. Miller demanded that her name be changed from
Stormchild
to
Tort-au-Citron,
which was evidently some kind of legal joke, and though I told him it was bad luck to change a boat’s name, he insisted it was not my luck that was at risk but his, and so I had the new name painted on
Stormchild
’s transom. Miller and a group of loud friends came from London to take the newly christened
Tort-au-Citron
on her first voyage. They did not hoist the sails, but merely motored beyond the bar, where they anchored and drank champagne in the summer sunshine before bringing the beautiful boat back to the yard. “Can you keep her until a delivery crew fetches her?” Miller asked me.

“How long?” I asked suspiciously, because I did not want to tie up one of our precious moorings for too many weeks.

“A month at the most. I’m having her delivered to Antibes.” He clearly wanted me to know that he did his business in fashionable waters.

I agreed he could keep
Tort-au-Citron
on one of the yard’s moorings for a month, but at that month’s end no delivery crew had arrived. Then another month passed, and still the abandoned boat swung to her mooring on the changing tides. Autumn winds shivered the river cold, and the first gray frosts of winter etched
Tort-au-Citron’s
rigging white, but still no one fetched her. Her hull became foul with weed and her coach roofs streaked with gull droppings. Telephone calls to Miller’s office elicited no instructions, so I sent him a whacking bill for the mooring’s rent, but the bill, like the boat itself, was ignored.

Not that I cared very much, for Joanna’s death had left me in a state of numbed despair. The house decayed about me, the garden turned rank and wild, and the boatyard only functioned because the staff ignored me and ran it by themselves. I wallowed in self-pity. I had lost a son and a wife, my daughter had disappeared, and I seemed trapped in hopelessness. For weeks I wept in the night, the tears fueled by whiskey. My friends rallied, but it was the friendship of marriage that I missed most; I missed it so much that I often wished I was with Joanna and Richard in their graveyard high above the sea. Christmas was a nightmare, and Joanna’s birthday a purgatory. David tried to comfort me, but his efforts did not work; my brother was never a comforting kind of man. To be a comforting man one needs a much greater sensitivity to pain than David either possessed or wanted to possess. “Well at least you might cut your hair,” he finally told me, “you look like a damned hippie.”

The mention of a damned hippie made me think of Caspar von Rellsteb, then of Nicole, and, for the umpteenth time, I wondered aloud where she was, and how I could send her news of her mother’s death. Since the bombing I had renewed my efforts to locate Nicole. I had contacted an old friend who now worked in Army Intelligence, and he had pulled official strings in Germany, but no one there knew of a man named Caspar von Rellsteb, or had heard of a boat called
Erebus.
Nicole had simply vanished. “If she knew her mother was dead,” I insisted to David, “she’d come home. I know she would.”

David muttered something about letting bygones be bygones. He wanted me to forget Nicole, not because he disliked her, but because he doubted she would ever return home. My brother, with his vigorous view of life, wanted me to dismiss the past and start again, and a year after Joanna’s death he tried to kick-start that new beginning by introducing me to a widow who had moved to our town from Brighton, but I bored the lady by talking of nothing but Joanna and Nicole. I did not want a replacement family; I wanted what was left of my original family.

David finally challenged me over Nicole. “Do you have the slightest evidence that she cares about you? Or wants to have anything to do with you?”

“If she knew her mother was dead,” I insisted, “she’d feel differently.”

“Dear, sweet God.” David sighed. “Has it ever occurred to you, Tim, that Nicole herself might be dead? Perish the thought, but that catamaran she sailed away on doesn’t sound like the safest vessel afloat.”

“Maybe she is dead,” I said listlessly.

“One prays not,” David said enthusiastically, “but whatever’s happened to Nicole, you simply cannot ruin your life wondering about it. You need a new interest, Tim. You’ve always liked dogs, haven’t you?”

“Dogs?” I gaped at my brother.

“Dogs!” he said again. “I mean I quite understand if Irene wasn’t the lady for you”—Irene had been the widow from Brighton—”but Betty’s found a charming woman who breeds dogs up on the downs.”

“I don’t want a dog breeder,” I snapped. “I want to find Nicole.”

“But I thought you agreed she might be dead?”

“Fuck off,” I told my reverend and insensitive brother.

David might have half wanted Nicole to be dead, yet oddly it was he who found her, or rather who brought me the evidence that Nicole might still be alive. It happened on the Sunday after our brief argument. I was at home, trying to ignore the whiskey bottle as I contemplated opening a can of soup for lunch, when David, still in his cassock, appeared at the back door. “It’s me,” he said unnecessarily, then dropped the color supplement of one of the Sunday newspapers on the table beside my can of tomato soup. “Mrs. Whittaker gave it to me after Matins”—he explained the newspaper—”because she recognized, well, you can see for yourself. Page forty. Mind if I have a whiskey?”

I did not answer. Instead, with a heart thudding like a diesel engine, I turned to page forty. I knew it was Nicole. David did not need to say anything; there was something in his demeanor that told me my daughter had at long last reappeared.

Nicole was in a photograph that showed a group of environmental activists harassing a French warship on the edge of France’s nuclear weapons testing facility in the South Pacific. The picture was part of a long article about the growing militancy of the ecology movement and there, in the very center of the photograph, was Nicole. My heart skipped as I stared at the photograph. Nicole. I wanted to laugh and to cry. The fifteen months of despair and sadness since Joanna’s death were suddenly shot through with brilliance, like a spear of lightning slashing through gray clouds. Nicole was alive, and I was not alone. My breath caught in my throat, and my eyes pricked with tears.

The picture, taken in black and white through a telephoto lens, showed a catamaran that was festooned with banners carrying antinuclear slogans. In the foreground an inflatable boat manned by armed French sailors was motoring toward the catamaran, which was wallowing hove-to in a surging sea. Six young people lined the catamaran’s cockpit, all evidently shouting toward the photographer, who had presumably been on board a French warship astern of the inflatable boat. Nicole was one of the six protesters. Her face, distorted by anger, looked lean and tough.

“Oh, God,” I said weakly, because seeing my daughter’s face after four years seemed something like a resurrection.

“Genesis,” David said. He was striding up and down the unwashed kitchen tiles, and was plainly uncomfortable with my emotion.