The Angels Weep (87 page)

‘I’ll make us a mug of cocoa,’ she said.

‘I hate this drying-out period.’

‘It’s your own rule to have no liquor on board
– you’ll have to wait until South America or India,
or whatever.’ She ducked down into the saloon, but before
she reached the galley the radio above the chart-table
squawked.

‘Zulu Romeo Foxtrot. This is Cape Town marine radio.
Come in, please.’

‘Jan, that’s us. Take it,’ Craig yelled.
‘Someone at the yacht club saying goodbye,
probably.’

‘Cape Town marine radio, this is Zulu Romeo Foxtrot.
Let’s go to Channel 10.’

‘Is that the yacht
Bawu
?’ The
operator’s voice was clear and undistorted, for they were
still on line of sight to the antenna above the harbour.

‘Affirmative. This is
Bawu
.’

‘We have a radio-gram for you. Are you ready to
copy?’

‘Go ahead, Cape Town.’

‘Message reads: “For Craig Mellow regarding your
typescript
A Falcon Flies
STOP we wish to publish and
offer advance of $5,000 against 12½ per cent royalties on
world rights STOP reply soonest congratulations from Pick
chairman William Heinemann Publishers London.”’

‘Craig,’ Janine shrieked from below. ‘Did
you hear? Did you hear that?’

He could not answer her. His hands were frozen to the wheel
and he was staring directly ahead over
Bawu
‘s bows
as they rose and fell gently across the distant blue horizon of
the Atlantic Ocean.

T
wo days out,
the gale came out of the south-east without any warning. It laid
Bawu
over until solid green water came in over the rail
and swept Janine out of the cockpit. Only her safety-line saved
her, and Craig struggled for ten minutes to get her back on
board, while the yacht paid off madly before the wind and the jib
sail burst with a crash like cannonshot.

The gale lasted five days and five nights, during which time
there seemed to be no clear dividing line between mad wind and
wild water. They lived in a deafening cacophony of sound as the
gale played on
Bawu
‘s hull like a crazed violinist,
and the Atlantic grey-beards marched down upon them in majestic
succession. They lived with the cold in their bones, soaked to
the skin, and with their hands white and wrinkled like those of a
drowned man, and the soft skin torn by harsh nylon sheets and
stiff unyielding sails. Once in a while they snatched a dry
biscuit or a mouthful of cold congealed beans, and washed it down
with plain water, then crawled back on deck again. They slept in
turns for a few minutes at a time on top of the bundled wet sails
that had been stuffed down the companionway into the saloon.

They went into the storm as greenhorns and when the wind
dropped as suddenly as it had attacked them, they were sailors
– utterly exhausted and gaunt with the terror through which
they had lived, but with a new pride in themselves and the vessel
that had borne them.

Craig had just sufficient strength to heave the yacht to, and
let her ride the smooth but still mountainous swells on her own.
Then he dragged himself to his bunk, dropped his stinking wet
clothing on the deck and fell back naked on the rough blanket and
slept for eighteen hours straight.

He woke to a new tumult of emotions, uncertain of what was
fantasy and what was reality. Where before there had been no
sensation at all, his lower body was locked in an agonizing
spasm. He could feel each separate muscle, and they seemed pitted
against each other to the point of tearing or bursting. From the
sole of his foot to the pit of his stomach, his nerve-ends felt
as though they were scraped raw. He cried out as the pain
threatened to swamp him, and then in the pain found suddenly the
beginnings of exquisite, almost insupportable, pleasure.

He cried out again, and heard his cry echoed from above him.
He opened his eyes and Janine’s face was inches above his,
her naked body pressed against his from breast to thighs. He
tried to speak, but she gagged him with her own lips, and moaned
into his mouth. Abruptly he realized that he was buried deeply in
her heat and silken elasticity, and they were borne aloft on a
wave of triumph higher and fiercer than any that the Atlantic had
hurled at them during the gale.

It left them both clinging to each other, speechless and
barely able to breathe.

S
he brought him
a mug of coffee once he had
Bawu
sailing again, and she
perched on the edge of the cockpit with one hand on his
shoulder.

‘I want to show you something,’ he said.

He pointed at his bare leg that was thrust out in front of him
on the deck cushion, and as she watched he wriggled his toes back
and forth, then from side to side.

‘Oh, darling,’ she husked, ‘that’s the
cleverest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do.’

‘What did you call me?’ he asked.

‘Do you know something?’ She did not reply to the
question immediately. ‘I think that you and I are going to
be all right—’ Only then, she laid her cheek against
his, and whispered in his ear, ‘I called you darling,
okay?’

‘That’s okay by me, darling,’ he replied,
and locked in the yacht’s self-steering vane, so that he
had both arms free to hold her.

¹
‘Kaffir’ is derived from the Arabic word for an
infidel. During the nineteenth century, it denoted members of the
southern African tribes. Without any derogatory bias it was
employed by statesmen, eminent authors, missionaries and
champions of the native peoples. Nowadays its use is the sure
mark of the racial bigot.

²
Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army.