All The Nice Girls (23 page)

‘Are those them?’ Julia said, pointing at two red posts set in the nearer hillside.

‘That’s them. You must have good eyesight, Julia. I can only just see them and I know what to look for.’

‘I’m not just a pretty face, you know,’ said Julia.

‘Ah, I asked for that,’ said The Bodger, grinning.

The shelter of the hills blanketed the wind and the harbour was so still that they could hear the sound of the engine echoing clearly off the hill-sides and the sucking of their wake against the rocks on the shore. The setting sun flooded the harbour in a luminous golden glow. The water was a shining mass of gold except where the wake split it into coins and pools of light.

‘What a heavenly place,’ said Julia.

‘We’re not the only ones who think so,’ said The Bodger.

The Bodger nodded ahead at the yacht anchorage which was an unbroken armada of hulls with a bristling crop of masts.

The Bodger anchored where he could, finding the bare amount of swinging room next to an elegant green yawl whose only crew was a black and grey clumber spaniel barking from the top of the cabin.

‘Julia and I are inviting ourselves to dinner with some people we know up on the hill there,’ The Bodger said. ‘Do you two think you can entertain yourselves for the evening?’

Dagwood and Caroline looked at each other.

‘I think so,’ said Dagwood.

Dagwood ferried The Bodger and Julia ashore in the dinghy and came back for Caroline.

’Let’s see what this place has to offer,’ he said.

The village did not have much to offer. It consisted of a church, a few dozen houses set on the hill, two shops and the ‘Skylark.’

The landlord of the ‘Skylark’ had evidently exerted himself to attract the custom of yachtsmen. The saloon bar was furnished like a very superior bosun’s store; it looked like a Fortnum & Mason’s among ship-chandlers. The walls were decorated with burgees, knots mounted on varnished boards, and paintings of sailing ships. The room was lit by ships’ steaming lanterns converted from oil to electricity. A port and starboard bow light burned at each end of the bar and above it hung a notice: ‘Do not leave your seats while the bar is in motion.’ In one corner a green parrot (addressed by the landlord as ‘Admiral’) sat in a cage and morosely cracked nuts. An anemometer on the wall by the door registered a wind speed of half a knot, direction variable. Near it hung a polished spoked steering wheel, a ship’s telegraph counter, and a binnacle. The bar was filled with young men in grubby polo-necked sweaters, canvas trousers, gym-shoes and two days’ growth of beard, all talking loudly about reefing, gybing, luffing and other nautical matters to subdued-looking girls in blue anaraks and untidy hair styles sitting on upturned barrels.

Dagwood was well aware that he was seeing only the summertime aspect of these young men. In winter, they would be inhabiting other bars and talking just as loudly and knowledgeably about slaloms, snowploughs and telemarks. Nevertheless the nautical jargon, hammered into his ears at such close range, slowly began to make Dagwood feel uncomfortable. Although he was probably the only person present who could possible be described as a professional seaman, these people were beginning to make him feel like a landlubber.

Caroline looked at the ‘Skylark’s’ clientele and then at Dagwood’s face.

‘Do be tactful,’ she whispered.

‘Tactful!’ cried Dagwood. ‘I’m always tactful.’

‘Oh no you’re not. You’re so prickly. Whenever anyone says anything you don’t agree with you ...’

‘Well?’

‘ . . . Well, you sort of
whip
round on them and run them through the heart.’

‘Never fear, I’m in no mood for an argument tonight. Let’s go outside.’

They found a quiet place on the harbour wall.

‘Those people in there quite frighten me, Caroline. I can’t understand what they’re talking about half the time. Once when I was a cadet I sailed about two hundred miles from Barbados to Trinidad in an open boat and I’ve done quite a lot of sailing on and off, but I hadn’t any idea it was so complicated! ‘

‘They were just showing off. I was afraid you were going to pick an argument with one of them.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes
you!
’

‘By the way, what’s happened to Nigel these days? I don’t see him around the bazaars any more.’

‘He’s been posted to Germany with his regiment.’

‘Ah,’ said Dagwood, smugly. So Nigel had been posted abroad. It was reassuring to hear of the Army suffering a fate normally reserved for the Navy.

‘He’s not really my boy-friend, you know. It’s just that we’ve known each other a long time. Daddy doesn’t really like him.’

‘Doesn’t he?’

Caroline glanced at Dagwood accusingly. ‘You mustn’t get the wrong idea about my father, Dagwood. He’s really very shy. He always puts on a big act when he goes into the yard. He always looks in the mirror before he goes out in the mornings. My mother says he’s practising his “Shipyard Face.” He hates it.’

‘Then why does he do it?’

‘He’s the only one left. It was my Uncle Bertie who used to run it. He loved it. But he died just after the war so Daddy had to leave the Army and take over.’

‘Is it true your father hates the Navy?’

Caroline considered the question. ‘He doesn’t like them much,’ she admitted. ‘He doesn’t like any ships much. He thinks the Navy has too much glamour and doesn’t do enough hard work.’

‘He’s got a point there! Does he know you’re spending the weekend on a yacht?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Caroline, guiltily. ‘I sort of glossed over it when he asked me what I was doing.’

‘Did you know I was coming on this trip?’

‘Of course.’

Dagwood was stunned into silence by the implications of that answer.

At closing time the saloon bar admirals emerged, still conversing of shoals, foul water and wreck buoys. Caroline put a restraining hand on Dagwood’s arm, but she need not have worried; Dagwood was thinking of other matters. ‘What would you say to going back on board and having something to eat?’

They rowed out to
Fancy That
in an intimate silence. In the cabin Caroline said: ‘I’m sorry I changed my mind the other night.’

‘I’m sorry I was so annoyed about it.’

‘I just felt . . . That I wasn’t ready somehow. I didn’t want to plunge in too far all at once. I lost my nerve, I suppose.’

Dagwood nodded. ‘I should have realised it. In fact I meant to ring you up. Somehow I just didn’t. I wish I had, now.’

Caroline looked carefully at the cabin deck. ‘I wish you had, too.’

Dagwood pulled her towards him. He was surprised at the warmth of her response. It was as though she had waited for him to make up his mind ever since they first met. Their kiss now seemed so inevitable that Dagwood wondered what they had been doing to avert it all this time.

‘Caroline . . .’

‘Yes!’

‘
Dagwood
,’’ A voice roared from the shore.

‘Crikey, what’s that?’

‘
Dagwood!
Ahoy there, Dagwood! Dagwood! ‘

‘Oh God, that’s The Bodger. He wants the dinghy. Damn and
blast
him!’

It was ironical that The Bodger himself should frustrate the very consummation he so devoutly wished. It was possible that he guessed at the emotional storm which had just taken place, but he only said: ‘Let’s hope we get a proper wind tomorrow. That wasn’t real sailing today.’

In the event, The Bodger’s wish was completely fulfilled, his cup pressed down and running over. The next morning grey clouds were scudding overhead, a swell surged up the estuary from the open sea and the array of masts bobbed wildly on either side. The Bodger immediately took in a large reef in the mainsail and exchanged the genoa for a much smaller foresail.

These precautions were well taken. As soon as
Fancy That
had crept out from the shelter of the headland, a stiff northerly wind laid her on her side and poured a torrent of water over the cockpit. Julia and Caroline hurriedly scrambled below.

After half an hour, while the yacht drew further and further from the coastline, it became obvious that even the smaller foresail was going to be too much for the boat and Dagwood spent a wet ten minutes in the pulpit above the bows changing the foresail for the storm sail.

Meanwhile, the wind had increased and Dagwood looked longingly back at the harbour they had just left. If it had been his decision they would have turned back, but The Bodger sat with his feet braced against the side of the cockpit, both hands gripping the bucking tiller, his yellow sou’wester hat tilted on the back of his head, singing exultant songs at the top of his voice, apparently welcoming the thought of a hard fifteen-mile beat back to Oozemouth dead in the eye of a strengthening wind. The sea roared and tumbled along the lee gunwale, smashed against the weather side and foamed over into the cockpit. The boat heeled until Dagwood, crouching on his seat, could look straight into the water without raising his eyes. Whenever Dagwood looked up he could see nothing but a dark livid sky, lightened by a white band on the horizon, and rows of advancing waves, their metal-grey flanks streaked with wind spume, the sure sign of a hard blow. Dagwood cowered on the deck boards, fully occupied in pumping out the cockpit and in handling the sheets when The Bodger went about. Julia did not reappear but about lunch time Caroline pushed open the cabin door, and balancing herself with her elbows, held out two cups of cocoa. Dagwood tipped his hat to her; he could only imagine what that cocoa had cost Caroline, down in the galley.

Just as they were about to take the cocoa a larger wave creamed along the deck, over the cabin and into the cockpit. Caroline’s cocoa was heavily diluted with sea water.

‘Never mind!’ thundered The Bodger above the wind. ‘It gives it that certain
je ne sais quoi!
’ He downed his cocoa in two colossal swallows.

Dagwood had also observed Caroline’s look of disappointment when the wave engulfed her cocoa and, steeling himself, drank his. It tasted like no other beverage Dagwood had ever sampled but, miraculously, he felt much better for it.

‘Ready about!’ sang The Bodger.

It was the last long tack before the fairway buoy. Dagwood sprang to the sheets.
Fancy That
came through the wind and, when Dagwood should have let go one sheet and hauled in on the other, the weather sheet jammed in the winch.

‘Get that sheet in!’ bellowed The Bodger.

With the storm sail acting as an awkward wind cup,
Fancy That
slowly lost steerage way and laboriously paid off down wind.

‘Get that bloody sheet in! ‘

‘It’s jammed sir!’

Wind and sea were pounding
Fancy That
flat on her side. The cockpit deck was almost vertical. Water was flooding into the cockpit so that Dagwood was standing thigh-deep as he struggled with the jammed sheet.

‘For God’s sake get that sheet away, Dagwood, we must get some way on! ‘

Dagwood braced himself against the side of the cockpit and wrenched with all his strength. The sheet gave way. Dagwood flew backwards and would have vanished overboard had Caroline not grasped one of his ankles and hung on to it.

For a moment there was a small tableau of The Bodger coaxing the boat under way again, Dagwood hanging head and shoulders in the sea. Caroline holding his leg in both hands, and Julia’s wan face in the cabin door, while up forward the loosened stormsail methodically set to work to flap itself to shreds.

Dagwood emerged, dripping, from the sea. ‘Many thanks,’ he said breathlessly, to Caroline. ‘Just as well you were there.’

‘I’m not just a pretty face, you know.’

‘Yes you are. Very pretty.’

‘Dagwood,’ said The Bodger, remorselessly, ‘do you mind taking up on that sheet?’

Dagwood sheeted in the thundering storm sail and the boat began to move properly through the water again.

‘How much longer is this going on?’ complained Julia.

‘Not much longer, darling. Just till we reach the buoy.’

When they reached the fairway buoy, The Bodger turned to bring the wind on the beam and ordered Dagwood to change the stormsail for a bigger foresail. At the same time he let out the main sheets until the mainsail bellied in a full rich curve. It was the fastest point of sailing and it gave
Fancy That
a chance to show her paces. Stern down, bucking and throbbing under power, the boat fled up the river. She was still under full sail when she passed through the yacht club basin entrance travelling, Dagwood estimated, at over eight knots. Dry-mouthed Dagwood watched the mole rushing towards them. A man in a blue sweater carrying a bucket along the jetty stopped to watch them and remained paralysed, like a man in the path of an avalanche, as they swept down on him.

Just as Dagwood was about to advise Caroline to lie flat on the deck so as not to be catapulted off when they hit, The Bodger heaved on the tiller and ducked to let the boom pass over.

‘Down with that foresail!’

Dagwood needed no second order. The foresail rattled down. The boat headed into the wind, hung for a moment and then gently paid off, grazing along the jetty with about the force required to crack an egg-shell.

Dagwood swallowed.

‘Sorry about that,’ said The Bodger apologetically. ‘I was showing off. I’ve been showing off all day. There was a bloke at dinner last night who pounded my ear all night long about
yachting
, as he called it. That annoyed me.’

‘It all turned out all right in the end, sir,’ said Dagwood loyally.

The Bodger grinned malevolently. ‘I’m not just a pretty face, you know,’ he said.

After the weekend in
Fancy That
Dagwood began to make up for lost time. It was a period of enchantment, a sort of temporary insanity where all his perceptions were lifted on to another plane. Never before had such a sun shone on the world. Never before had the most casual smile held such meaning. Never before had the wind so wonderfully moved the trees so that Dagwood walked lightly with his head cocked to catch the echoes of the flutes and horns of fairy land, heard on a summer evening far away. At the farm, Molly wondered at the abrupt halt in Dagwood’s promiscuous entertaining and his concentration on one girl. In the office, Ollie complained that Dagwood could not be trusted even to open the morning’s mail without falling into a day-dream. In ‘The Smokers’, The Bodger and Mr Tybalt gleefully rubbed their hands together and summoned Daphne for more pints of best bitter.