Seagulls in My Soup (23 page)

This was a new one on me. I saw in my mind's eye the tiny blue-rinsed children's author. All I could say was, “Well, girl, you pays your money and you makes your choice,” but by the time I'd managed to roll that one out, Sissie was smiling again.

“Ai shell go to see her as
soon
as evah we're back in Formentera.”

She said it as if she were Queen Victoria ordering out the Guards, so I knew it was useless to argue further, and kept quiet while Francisco craftily worked his magic on the Dragon of Devon all the way back to the jetty.

We were alone again onboard
Cresswell
by the time I popped The Question to Sissie. I did it as casually as a sailor could. “How do you like Amyas, then?”

She dumped the supper potatoes into a bucket, violently. “Oh, what a dreadful,
boring
little man! I sweah I couldn't understand a word he said. All sorts of piston rods and . . . What was it—bally
gudgeon
bars? Ai'm
sure
it must have simply
tired out
thet awf'ly sweet Mothah Superior merely trying to
comprehend
what the dickens he was
talking
about. I know it did
me,
dreadfully.”

I made my way forward to fit
Cresswell
's new bowsprit. Nelson softly padded along the deck behind me. Both our hearts sank. Albion's daughter was staying with us for a while yet. That was obvious. But so, often, go the best-laid plans of mice and men—and dogs, too, we reflected as, hissing into my teeth, I viciously reamed out a new bolt-hole in
Cresswell
's foredeck and Nelson sadly looked on. We both knew now that Amyas was going to remain alone for quite a while.

Our voyage to Formentera was short in mileage but tall in experience. Ibiza harbor was calm when we left it, and so were the first couple of miles south, but when
Cresswell
cleared the southern point of Ibiza island, and rounded into the channel north of Espalmador, we found a strong southwest wind—hard enough to blow the devil's socks off. In the narrow, shallow channel, it piled up steep seas. It made them crowd together, impatient to shove past one another so as to reach the deeps to the east. Of course, as the seas shoved each other, and those in the rear cried “Forward!” and those in the front called “Back!” quite a furor was created in the strait, and it took poor old
Cresswell
, who could only sail up to about sixty degrees off the blind eye of the wind, about three hours of bash-and-crash-through, slide-and-glide-off, and hammer-and-stammer-into-and-over the charging ranks of watery panic, to get through.

Naturally, all this was right up Sissie's street. She stayed at my side as I heaved and strained at the wheel, beating
Cresswell
first this way, then that, against the wind, stealing a few yards each time we made a short “board”—each time we made first a zig, then a zag, with the boat rising and dropping down eight feet every four seconds and Nelson panting down my neck as he lay secure on the poop, watching for dolphins. Sissie was in her element in this kind of thing—the “juicy bits,” she called it. A sort of orgasmic idiocy crept over her face as she squinted against the flying spray. “Oh, jolly, jolly
dee!
Oh, happy,
happy
day!” she yelled, as another maverick sea picked up
Cresswell
's bow and flung her to one side with contempt and almost wrenched the wheel out of my straining arms. “Oh, lucky,
lucky
me!” she crowed, as yet another piled-up lump of green, watery malevolence rose ahead in vicious obduracy, up, up, up . . . and
Cresswell
humped the shoulders of her mainsail and girded the loins of her bows for the shock, and as the emerald monster grew before us in the light of the sun behind us, until we stared up at it, until it loomed—a great, lumbering, beautiful bully, which gathered up immense strength in the blue-black heart of it, curling slightly—and smashed down on our bow, sending great whizzing streams of water slashing aft.

All the time this went on, as if it had always gone on, and would always go on, for ever and ever, Sissie sang beside my ear . . .
“Somewheah, ovah the rainbow . . .”

After about an hour of this, the lotus-eater in me asked the age-old island-sailor's question: “Why sail uphill, against the wind, anyway? Why not take it easy and return to a haven downwind and wait for the wind to change direction? Why struggle? Why not do it the easy way?”

I turned to Sissie. Both of us were wet through, streaming seawater. “This is going to take us bloody hours, getting across this little lot,” I hollered. “I think we should turn tail and hang on in Ibiza for the wind to veer around to the east . . . It'll be 'round there tomorrow.”

Sissie's face dropped. She frowned at me. She looked as if she were about to burst into tears. Her lips moved, but I couldn't hear her in the wind, with the main and mizzen drumming away like steam engines and the banging and clattering of the seas. I leaned over and put my ear close to her face.

“ . . . and I was
so
looking forward to seeing if Miss Pomeroy was all right . . . and now I shall have to simply
fret
for anothah
beastly
night. Oh,
deah!
”

“What the hell are you on about?” I yelled at her, and replaced my ear in front of her laughing-gear again, as another sea crashed onboard and we both ducked to dodge the stinging spray.

“Poor,
deah
Miss Pomeroy,” she screeched when we rose again. “She's going to be in the hands of that
monstrous,
drunken
predator
!” I heard no more, as another twenty tons of water collapsed onto
Cresswell
's bow and scattered itself into a thousand splatters of silvery stabs.

Moments later, after the boat had recovered from that one, Sissie hollered, a pained look on her face.
“Dahling!”

I thought she was in trouble, somehow—perhaps one of her ribs had been stove in when she had been thrown against the cockpit bulwark a minute ago? I hoped. I leaned toward her again and poked my ear in front of her face.

“You
did
promise, you know . . . And I'm so
awf'ly
worried. Ai've a funny feeling . . . Reahlly . . .
deah
Miss Pomeroy!”

I was thrown halfway across the cockpit by the boat's next jolt and didn't hear the rest. Oh Christ, I said to myself. I leaned toward her again. “All right, we'll go on, then, if that's what you want.” Then I turned to glare at Nelson, who, wet through on the poop, was squinting at me through his one eye, and now and again swallowing the salt off his tongue. I knew he couldn't hear what I said, but I also knew that he was agreeing with what I was thinking. Bloody women, they can't stand the sight of each other when everything's going well, but when one of them is in trouble with a bloke the others don't fancy, watch out! Nelson nodded as I looked at him. Nelson knew the score, all right.

It took us three hours to get through that strait. Then we had another hour's bash west-northwest, another hour east-southeast, then another WSW, another ESE, and we finally came into the lee of the north coast of Formentera island about an hour before dusk. As I hadn't more than a half-gallon of fuel left (complicated, being poor) I had to work my way into Formentera's tiny port under sail. There was little wind and a lot of sea in the protection of the island, but eventually, after fiddling and fuming for another hour and a half, chastised and silent,
Cresswell
finally crept in between the low moles. Sissie tied the boat up while I drank the tea she had made as soon as the “juicy bits” were over.

By the time we were settled down and shipshape, Sissie had all the gear which had been thrown about below back in place. The only thing onboard which showed any sign of wear and tear was yours truly, but after Sissie had shoved a plate of corned beef and chips, peas and radish in front of me, it didn't take long for the brass lamps to be glowing again down below in
Cresswell
.

Sissie wanted to get her shore-boots on and head for San Francisco, the hamlet where Miss Pomeroy lived, right away. I stopped her. “There's no lights. There's no moon. You'll fall into one of those bloody great holes in the road. Anyway, I can't go with you. When the wind backs around it'll be blowing its head off from the north all night. It'll send in quite a sea. If the anchor drags inside this harbor the boat will be smashed against the wall, just like poor old
Fanny Adams
was . . . I just have to be here and watch her. Anything else, with this weather, would be downright stupidity.” I wasn't kidding Sissie. This was the case.

Finally, the sense of my argument settled into Sissie's head, and she settled down in her cubbyhole forward. Soon the chinkling notes of her Booth's London Dry Gin bottle and glass tinkled through the forward bulkhead of the main cabin. A little while after, the hushed rustle of her Bible leaves told me that the English lioness was at peace in her lair.

I turned again to my
Oxford Book of English Verse,
in the glimmering light of my oil lamp, and waited for the wind outside to back around to the north, and to do its worst as it started to send worried, frenetic little seas into the narrow mouth of Formentera harbor.

Sure enough, by two a.m. a heavy swell was beating against the seaward sides of the tiny moles, sending wide streams of angry seawater right over the tops of the walls. Through the entrance, like eager fans crushing their way into some darkened concert hall, alive with energy, over-busy with a dozen competing rhythms, crowded with confusion, sea-swell after sea-swell, one after the other, pushed, shoved, surged, and broke through the entrance, against the excited, angry resistance of everything else in the small harbor, including
Cresswell
.

By that time I had run my heavy storm anchor out, in the madly bobbing rubber dinghy, almost clear across the harbor. Then I had delved for my heaviest storm dragline—an inch-diameter rope almost 600 feet long. Sissie and I hauled that, too, right around the harbor and secured it to a bollard on the seawall.
Cresswell
now had two anchors and a heavy storm-line out to windward, to hold her off the wall downwind.

As the wind gathered strength through the night, often driving slashing rain before it, Sissie and I watched the storm-line and anchor cables take the tremendous strain, and we tautened them up from time to time, until they were finally as tight as violin strings. Still the ever-increasing jerking of the boat threatened to drag the anchors or snap the line.

“Oh,
deah,
” yelled Sissie, her oilskins streaming rain and spray, about four a.m. “Ai
do
wish that dretted wind would ease a
teeny
while, so you could get some sleep, dahling. Oh deah, you must be
ebsolutely fagged
out. Oh, you poor thing . . . Just a teeny tick—Sissie'll make you some hot cocoa.”

As I waited for the cocoa I crouched against the driving rain in
Cresswell
's cockpit. I pumped out the bilge betimes (she was not self-draining) and hoped that the storm-line would not give to the incessant jerking of the hull, time after time after time—four or five feet up and down, up and down, in the middle of the harbor. I tried to look around me: Nothing but black night, even to leeward. Nothing but a pale, ghostly beam of light every ten seconds, skittering through the myriad drops of spray and rain, from the tiny lighthouse at the harbor entrance; and the ghostly dim glimmer of the cabin oil-lamp down below in
Cresswell
. With the boat bouncing, straining, jerking, and heaving, and the wind roaring, rushing, and screeching all around the little port, it was like being in some nightmarish maelstrom—until Sissie, her oilskin cap streaming water, handed me a steaming mug of cocoa, covered with a saucer. I felt as if she had handed me a reprieve on Death Row.

All night it went on, until just before dawn. Then the wind, exhausted, slumped and shuffled off to its usual quarter in the east. Another half an hour later, about six a.m., I could finally go below and sleep—but not until I had hauled back onboard again the storm-line and the heavy anchor, so that the Ibiza ferry would not foul them when she arrived.

Even in haven, a mariner's lot is not always easy.

It was noon before Sissie woke me. “Yoo-hoo, Skip-pah, dahling—lunch time! Ai've made us some of your very own favorite . . . Look!”

She passed a pot of steaming burgoo under my nose—porridge and bacon and bits of liver, kidney, heart, chitlins—all well-laced with rum. I knew it must be some kind of reward—or enticement—for me. Sissie couldn't abide burgoo. For her to sit with me and eat a whole bowl of the stuff, and pretend it was delicious, there simply had to be something in the wind.

After I finished my lunch I went topsides. The breeze was almost down to light airs by now, and the sky was clear. It had been a typical Mediterranean bitch-night, the storm gone just as quickly as it had arrived. No wonder it's so bitchy, said I to myself. What else can be expected with a sea where the blokes that live around it drink wine all day and wear bloody scent? Then, as I frowned, thinking about the effects of regional weather on human temperament, I almost started out of my tee-shirt.

The whole of
Cresswell
's topsides—the cockpit, the poop, the side-decks, the coachroof, the foredeck—all had been thoroughly washed with fresh water! The varnish of the masts was polished and shining. Not a grain of salt was to be seen anywhere onboard. Not a sign of salt on the green and red navigation lights hanging on the shrouds. Not one speck of white on the compass glass; and the brass binnacle shone as if it were brand-new instead of sixty years old. The brass plates atop the mooring posts; the bronze metal rail trim around the foredeck and poop whale-backs; the brass ship-shields that decorated the companion-way doors—all sparkled, clean and highly polished. Topsides,
Cresswell
looked like she was headed for a boat-show. Hmm, I said to myself—something
is
in the wind.