by Stuart Woods
“I’ve been in Plymouth helping Annie provision Wave. They got your wire at the yacht club.”
“Why didn’t you let me know you were coming to Plymouth?”
“I wrote. Must have missed you at the other end.”
We got my luggage into the car and were quickly on the M4, headed West.
“How are Mark and Annie?”
“Never better, I’d say. Mark limps, but you’d hardly notice.”
“How’s everything going with the boat? I wish I could have been here sooner to help, but graduation was … day before yesterday, I guess it was. I couldn’t cheat the folks out of that.”
“Oh, it’s gone very smoothly. They’re putting the boat next to the inner quay at Spedding’s today, to dry her out and clean her bottom. So—how was law school?”
“First in my class.”
“My word!”
“Well, first my senior year, anyway. But even after averaging that with my first two years, I made the top ten percent, which is what the best law firms want.”
“Got a job yet?”
“I’ve got an offer from Blackburn, Hedger, Acree, Abney and Susman, in Atlanta. That’s the firm my father worked for briefly before World War II. He’s still pretty close to them.”
“That’s a mouthful. Family connections got you that, huh?”
“Of course not. You’re chauffeuring a highly sought-after young attorney. I’ve had a couple of other nice offers, too, one of them in New York, but I’m more inclined to stay in Atlanta. Dad’s running for the senate this fall, and he wants me to help. So what’s new with you?”
“I’m assistant principal of the school now.”
“Moving into management?”
“You might say that.”
“I read about Maeve and Denny in Time.”
She nodded. “Everybody in Cork is stunned by the whole business. We’ve had no end of reporters coming around the school, asking what she was like as a girl. The mother superior finally posted a notice at the door, barring them. Maeve and Denny have made us famous,” she said wryly.
“They haven’t been caught yet, then?”
“No; they’ve had a couple of close shaves, I think, but they’ve been either very clever or very lucky; probably both.”
“Would you have ever thought it could come to this with Maeve?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not that surprised. She was always a zealot about whatever she did, and I was relieved when she took the veil. I thought she’d pour everything into that.”
“Were there any repercussions after our little sea battle?”
“Not really. Red O’Mahoney spent a couple of weeks in the hospital with burns, and he lost the boat, of course. He tried to get Finbar to rebuild it after it was raised, but he was told to get stuffed.”
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow,” I said. “What time do you reckon we’ll be in Plymouth?”
“Oh, late in the afternoon, what with the new motorway mostly finshed."
Plymouth couldn’t come quickly enough for me. I wanted to see Annie, to put things right with us again. I had been rehearsing an apology all the way across the Atlantic. Connie and I chatted on through the morning, then stopped for lunch at a motorway café. After that, I let the jet lag take me, while Connie drove on.
I woke on the outskirts of Plymouth, groggy, and with a sudden feeling of unease. Something I had dreamed? I looked about me. The skies were still sunny, I was with a girl I had missed terribly and on the way to see Mark, Annie, and the boat; still I was uncomfortable. I have never before nor since been prescient, but as we drove into Plymouth I was weighed down by a pervasive sense that something was wrong. By the time we reached the Cremyl ferry my unease had turned into an unreasoning fear. As we parked the car I saw a blackened brick wall that must have been where Andrew and Roz Fortescue had been consumed in the ball of fire when their car exploded, and that didn’t help.
As the ferry reached the center of the Tamar River, the inner quay at Speddings opened up, and I was relieved to see Wave leaning against the quay wall, high and dry, the tip of her keel just being lapped by the water. I could see Annie, in the yellow sweater and jeans I remembered from the first time I had laid eyes on her at Cowes, standing under the boat with a bucket in one hand and a brush in the other. Mark was on a ladder at the stern, apparently scrubbing the propeller.
Still, by the time the ferry had docked, my anxiety had almost reached the stage of panic. Connie and I were first ashore, hurrying across the hundred and fifty yards to Speddings. As we approached the quay, I dropped my gear and ran over to the edge of the wall. What happened then always comes back to me in slow motion. Wave’s decks were some six feet below. An electrical cable ran from a quayside power point down to the boat, ending in an electric sander lying on deck near the opposite rail. I couldn’t see either Annie or Mark from where I stood. In too much of a hurry to use the ladder at the stern, I jumped for the deck, and as I did so, the heel of one of my street shoes caught momentarily on the rough, stone surface. I landed on my feet, but off balance, and reeled across the boat, coming to rest against the lifelines opposite, knocking the sander over the edge of the deck.
I could see Annie standing below, her jeans rolled up, in water to her knees. She looked up and saw me, and her face opened in her broadest, most welcoming style.
“Willie!” she cried. She saw the falling power sander at the same time and stepped neatly out of its path as it struck the water.
Then I heard Mark scream. “No!” he cried out at the top of his lungs. But he was too late. Reflexively, Annie stooped and grabbed the sander. There was a blue flash and a loud crackling noise; Annie’s back arched and an arm was flung out as she fell back into the water, still holding onto the sander with her other hand. The crackling noise continued.
Mark was splashing toward her at a dead run from the yacht’s stern, forty feet away. “The cord!” he screamed up at me, “The cord!”
I grabbed the cable at my feet and yanked; the plug came out of the power point, and the crackling noise stopped. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than two seconds. I looked back over the rail; Mark had picked up Annie and was struggling through the knee-deep water toward the slip, just around the bows of the boat. I ran for the ladder, hoisted myself up onto the quay, and ran to meet him. Connie, who had seen him from the quay, was well ahead of me. By the time I got to them Mark had laid Annie out on the grass next to the slip and was listening at her chest. Then he sat back, struck her, hard, in the chest with his fist, then began pushing on her breastbone with both hands, one on top of the other. He did that for a moment, then stopped, tilted her chin back, held her nose and blew into her mouth.
“I’ll do that, you do the massage,” Connie volunteered, catching his rhythm.
“You!” Mark shouted to one of the yard workers who had just run up. “Stop the ferry. We’ve got to get her to the other side! You!” he said to another, “Get me something rigid to use for a stretcher! Willie! Call the Royal Naval hospital, and tell them to get an ambulance and a respirator to the ferryport on the Plymouth side, now!”
I ran for the phone. It took an eternity to find the number, four rings for it to answer, and only seconds for me to relay what had happened and give the instructions. When I got back to the slip, Annie was being shifted onto an old door somebody had found. Three or four of us carried it to the ferry while Mark and Annie continued to work on Annie. The ferry ride seemed to take an hour, and the ten minute wait while the ambulance screamed toward us through Plymouth’s rush hour traffic seemed longer still. Two paramedics piled out, one carrying what looked like a large, black brief case.
“We’ll take over, now, sir,” one of them said to Mark, brushing Connie aside and placing a rubber cup attached to a hose from the case over Annie’s nose and mouth. Mark refused to move, simply kept up his massage, as Annie was transferred from the door to a stretcher and put inside the ambulance. As the doors closed, I could sti
ll see him working on her, while one of the paramedics operated the respirator and the other closely watched Mark’s work.
“Keys!” I said to Connie. She gave them to me; we piled into the car and quickly fell in behind the ambulance, keeping as close to it as possible during the wild drive. At the hospital, Annie was hustled into the emergency room, and a doctor pried Mark away from her.
“Severe electrical shock,” Mark said to him. “We started CPR no more than thirty seconds after.” Then he stepped back and let the doctor do his work. A nurse with a clipboard hustled Connie and me out into the corridor and began taking information: name, age, nature of injury … . She finished and went back into the emergency room.
“So clumsy,” I said, half to myself. Then I remembered that sander; I had used it after we hid the boat at East Ferry. The power cord had been frayed; it had been on my list to repair.
“She’s going to be all right,” Connie said quietly. “I know she will. We all did everything that could be done, and now she’s in a hospital. She’ll be all right.”
I think she was trying to convince herself as much as me, but I believed her. Annie might be in the hospital for a day or two, but she’d be all right.
Mark came out of the emergency room and leaned against the opposite wall, facing us. “She’s dead,” he said softly. “No heartbeat, no brain activity, nothing. She’s gone.”
59
WE SAT in Wave’s saloon, our half-eaten dinner before us. We were on a mooring at Spedding’s, now, to get away from the press and the curious who had descended on Cremyl after word about Annie had got around. I had been exhausted when I had arrived in Plymouth, and now I was barely able to remain conscious.
“Willie,” Mark said, “there’s something I want to say to you, and then I don’t ever want the subject brought up again.”
I looked at him dumbly. Mark seemed in much better shape than either Connie or me. Within an hour after Annie had been pronounced dead, he had called Annie’s mother, called an undertaker, rung the vicar at the village church near his farm in Cornwall and arranged a service, called Royal Marine headquarters to ask for pallbearers from among his and Annie’s friends, and called the Royal Western to post notice of the funeral and to withdraw from the race. He would receive visitors on the boat after the funeral. “What happened to Annie was an accident,” he said. “You are not to blame. You took reasonable care when you jumped onto the boat. I am the one who left the sander there on deck. If I had not left it there, this would not have happened.”
“I knew about the frayed power cord on the sander. I should have replaced it at the time.”
“You did a fine job in Cork under difficult circumstances. You could not have been expected to think of absolutely everything. I have some very strong feelings about fate. I think that some things are meant to happen. I don’t think Annie’s death is without meaning. I don’t know what the meaning is, but I believe it has meaning. But remember this, you are not to blame. Apart from Annie you have been my closest friend. We will remain friends, and close ones, I hope. Now, let’s say no more about this. Let’s get some sleep, and tomorrow we’ll do the things that must be done. In the morning I’d like to talk with you about something else, when we’re all a bit less tired.”
Connie finished clearing the table, and we each took a cabin and went to bed.
We ate better at breakfast. Mark’s brisk attitude, as he ran through a list of things to be done on the boat, seemed to buoy us a bit. If he could carry on, so could we.
“That’s it,” he said, making a check against the last of the items on his list. “Those things and she’ll be ready.”
“Ready for what?” I asked. He had already taken himself out of the race, quite understandably. He couldn’t just lose his wife on a Wednesday, bury her on Friday, and sail off into the sunset on Saturday. Besides, there’d have to be an inquest.
“I want you to do the race,” he said.
For a moment I didn’t get his meaning. Then I did. “What?”
“You know this boat every bit as well as I do. You helped build her. You’ve sailed on her in all sorts of conditions. I want her to do the race she was built for; I can’t do it myself, and you’re the only person who can in the circumstances.”
“But I haven’t qualified with the committee,” I protested. “Entries closed months ago; they’ll never accept me at this late date.”
Mark shook his head. “When you sailed the boat from Cork to Plymouth singlehanded, you completed the two-hundred-mile qualifying cruise. When I made my final application to the committee after the Azores passage, I listed you as alternate skipper, just in case. You were accepted at that time. I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t think it would ever come up.”
I could only stare at him.
“You do see this is the only way, don’t you?”
I didn’t feel strong enough to resist him. When I tried to picture myself in the race, it seemed a better alternative than moping around on shore. “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it if you’re absolutely sure that’s what you want.” Even as I said it, I was overwhelmed with the idea. I had never even contemplated doing such a thing.
“Good.” He grinned. “I told the committee yesterday that you would.”
I gripped the cold, brass handle of Annie’s coffin and, with five Royal Marines, lifted it and walked down the stone aisle of the tiny village church. For a day and a half I had kept going, ticking off the items on Mark’s list of things to do. Now the list was complete, I was where I least wanted to be, and everything was catching up with me.
Mark had been extraordinary, especially at the funeral. He had greeted each of the two hundred or so people who came—race competitors, marines, and other friends—putting them at their ease, thanking them for their sympathy and offering his. From the moment of Annie’s death, Mark had seemed to accept that she was gone—unlike everyone else, especially Connie and me, who still couldn’t believe it. I had been barely coherent and, at this moment, could hardly get one foot before another. We marched in step out of the church and down a path to the open grave, where we rested the coffin on planks across the hole in the ground and waited for the final words. As the vicar intoned them, we removed the planks and lowered the coffin with ropes. The obligatory handful of earth was thrown into the grave, then everyone began moving away. Annie’s mother was led away, sobbing, by her brother, to be driven back to London. She had been inconsolable.
Mark and I were left at the graveside, with her for one last moment. Our thoughts must have been similar. In this damp earth we were leaving one of those people who had had that rare talent of seeming the best possible person—a lovely young woman, not yet thirty who, in the brief time we had shared with her had imprinted herself indelibly upon our lives. Before I could burst into tears, I glanced up and saw Connie waiting down by the car and realized that there, with her, was where I belonged at this moment, not here. Mark belonged here. I left him and joined Connie.
At the marina, the crowd took up an entire pontoon. Mark was the perfect host, showing friends about the boat, seeing that everybody had a drink, putting everyone at ease, talking about Annie, avoiding no one’s eyes. It was like a party at which Annie had not yet arrived. I was glad that everyone, including even me, with Mark’s example, seemed to be bearing his grief well.
I was standing near the edge of the crowd, away from the boat, talking with Connie, when I looked up and saw a tall, bearded, rather seedy man in a rumpled, corduroy suit standing on the dock where it met the floating pontoon. He beckoned to me. I excused myself and walked slowly toward him. I was in no mood for a newspaper reporter or curiosity seeker.
As I approached, he extended his hand and said, “Hello, Will.”
I had already taken his hand before I finally recognized him. “Hello, Derek,” I said.
“I’m glad to see you; you’re looking well.”
“It’s good to see you, Derek, I … ” I was at a loss for words.
> “Forgive my appearance. I was … some distance from here when the news about Annie finally reached me. I … ” He seemed to be having as much difficulty talking to me as I to him. “Do you think you could ask Mark to come and speak with me for a moment? I’d rather not go down to the boat, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” I replied and went to look for Mark. When we came back, Derek offered a few awkward words of sympathy, then took an envelope from his coat.
“I’d like you to have this—please don’t open it just at the moment. It’s just … something I …” He foundered in embarrassment. “Ah, Mark, I really must be going. I didn’t want to intrude on such an occasion.”
“Nonsense, Derek,” Mark replied. “You’re very welcome here. Come and have a drink.”
“I … hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t. Mark, ah, do you have a pound note about you?”
Surprised, Mark dug into a pocket and came up with the money.
Derek shook hands with us. “Goodbye to both of you, then. I suppose we shan’t see each other again … for a time. Thank you both.” Then he was gone, striding up the dock and up the stairs to the car park, where we could see a man waiting with the Mercedes door open. The car drove away in a cloud of dust.
“That was very odd,” Mark said, opening the envelope Derek had given him. Then his eyes widened. I looked over his shoulder at the paper in his hand.
“I, Derek Thrasher,” it read, “do hereby sell to Mark Pemberton-Robinson for one pound sterling and other valuable considerations … ”
“Jesus,” Mark said. “He’s given me Wave.”
I was seized with a sudden conviction, one that I was later to look upon with regret. “Mark,” I said, “you have to do this race. It’s your boat, now, and … well, I think Annie would be extremely annoyed if you dropped out because of something to do with her. She was part of this project, too, you know, and she wouldn’t like to be the cause of aborting it.” She had been more a part of it than even Mark suspected, I thought, remembering how she had brought Derek Thrasher into it. Mark would never know about that.
