The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (7 page)

But for Crowhurst, too, this was the worst thing that could possibly have happened. It meant that he would be the clear winner of the prize for fastest voyage, and would come under intense media scrutiny. Already Rodney Hallworth was telegraphing him with news of the hero’s welcome that awaited him: the circling helicopters, the TV camera crews, the boatloads of newspaper reporters. His logbooks would soon be examined in the minutest detail – and he must have known, in his heart, that they would not pass muster. Unmasked as a fraud, how would he survive? Stanley Best would want his money back. Hallworth himself would be a laughing stock. His own marriage might even crumble under the strain …

Faced with the impossibility of his position – realizing that his audacious ‘Third Way’ had turned out to be just another cul-de-sac – Crowhurst simply gave up. Instead of racing, he began to coast. He drifted into the Doldrums and allowed the yacht to plod its way through those stagnant, seaweed-infested waters untended while he sat below deck, naked in the steaming heat, methodically trying to repair his broken radio transmitter – a task which involved rebuilding it from scratch, at some risk of severe electrical shocks and injuries from his soldering iron, and which took almost two weeks to complete. But at least this project kept him, for a while, from too much introspection. When it was finished, in the hot, lonely days that followed, Crowhurst blocked off all thoughts of the reception waiting for him at home, and retreated into a fantasy world of pseudo-philosophical speculation. Inspired by the only book he had thought to bring on the voyage with him (Einstein’s
Theory of Relativity
), he began to pour out words on to the pages of his logbooks, scoring the letters so deeply with his pencil that he frequently tore the paper. Thousands and thousands of words. Viewed now, they show in stark detail the process of a mind quickly unravelling under pressure. He began by addressing one of the greatest riddles of mathematics – the impossible number: the square root of minus one.

I introduce this idea √-1 because it leads directly to the dark tunnel of the space-time continuum, and once technology emerges from this tunnel the ‘world’ will ‘end’ (I believe about the year 2,000, as often prophesied) in the sense that we will have access to the means of ‘extra physical’ existence, making the need for physical existence superfluous.

Continuing this theme, but descending further into fantasy, he started to believe that the human race was on the verge of an enormous change – that a chosen few, like him, would soon be mutating into ‘second generation cosmic beings’, who would exist outside the material world altogether, thinking and communicating in a way that was entirely abstract and ethereal, breaking through the boundaries of space, so that there would no longer be any need to exist in a physical, bodily relationship with other people at all. As the bearer of this momentous news he began to see himself as a personality of huge importance, a kind of Messiah, while remaining aware that, to the rest of the world, he would always appear much less than that: he was resigned to being viewed as a ‘Misfit’ – ‘the Misfit excluded from the system – the freedom to leave the system’. Finally, on the last day of his life, his scrawls became even more incoherent and abstract (‘there can only be one perfect beauty/that is the great beauty of truth’), and his sense of having sinned, having lied, having let everybody down, became overwhelming:

I am what I am and I

see the nature of my offence

In his last writings, Crowhurst had also become obsessed with time – months of notating his real and fake positions on the earth’s surface having made him weary, perhaps, of thinking in terms of the space dimension any more. He had begun to preface every sentence with an exact note of the time at which he was writing it. And so we know that it was at some moment between 10:29 and 11:15 on 1 July 1969 that he wrote what were almost his final words:

It is finished —

It is finished —

IT IS THE MERCY

– and then, after scribbling a few more tortured phrases, he took his chronometer, and the logbook containing his false record, climbed on to the stern of
Teignmouth Electron
, and disappeared, never to be seen again.

We were not short of real heroes, in the summer of 1969. The news that Crowhurst’s yacht had been discovered in mid-ocean, and that he was missing believed dead, appeared in the Sunday newspapers on 13 July. Two weeks later, on the 27th, the front pages were dominated by him again, but this time, his logbooks had been read, his fraud unmasked, and all the stories were of his attempt to perpetrate a remarkable hoax on the
Sunday Times
and the British public. I read these stories with bewilderment, I remember, and perhaps a certain sense of youthful betrayal. But then, sandwiched neatly between those two Sundays, on 20 July 1969, came another story, not unrelated to man’s hunger for exploration, for feats of heroic achievement, for redefining his own position in the dimension of space: Neil Armstrong became the first human being to walk on the moon.

It was a summer of wonders, in other words. But strangely, the wonder of my erstwhile hero, Donald Crowhurst, and his tragic downfall, is the one which has stayed with me and haunted me most insistently over the years. Which is why I am fascinated, now, to see that other people – including Tacita Dean – have been haunted by it, too. Where does its resonance lie, I wonder? Crowhurst is hardly an admirable figure, after all. The men who emerge with the greatest stature from the Golden Globe saga are Knox-Johnston and Moitessier. The most heartbreaking story, in a way, is the story of Nigel Tetley – the ‘forgotten man’ of the race, who so nearly bagged that £5,000 prize, and who quietly – without leaving any messages or any trail of newspaper headlines – committed suicide in a wood near Dover two years later.

So … why Donald Crowhurst? Or, to put it another way, what does it say about our own time, the time we are now living in, that we find it easier to identify, not with Robin Knox-Johnston – an almost comically stubborn, courageous, patriotic sportsman – but with a lesser figure entirely: a man who lied to himself and those around him, a little man in the throes of a desperate existential crisis, a tormented cheat?

Well, Poppy, I have no doubt that we will not find the answer to these questions during our visit to the show on Saturday. And I’m sorry to have written to you at such length on a subject which, although it has always been very important to me, can hardly strike the same chord with you, or perhaps with anyone of your generation. But I think we will have an interesting morning anyway, and I hope a good lunch afterwards. Temperatures are due to go down at the end of the week, though, so we’ll not be dining
al fresco –
and remember to bring your scarf and gloves!

Looking forward to seeing you again.

Your always loving Uncle,

Clive.

5

When I finished reading this letter for the first time, my left shoulder was numb from the weight of Poppy’s head leaning against it. I gently eased her off, and instinctively she shifted her weight, leaning over to the other side of her seat, away from me. I took her pillow and, carefully raising the back of her head, slid the pillow behind it, until she was ready to settle down upon it. Her mouth was half-open and there was a little bubble of saliva at one corner. I rearranged her blanket, making sure that both of her shoulders were covered, and tucked it in around the edges of her body. She gave a little sigh and slipped even deeper into untroubled sleep.

I sat up, rubbed my eyes and listened for a while to the steady drone of the aircraft engines. Most of the passengers were asleep, and the cabin lights were giving out a strange, muted sort of twilight glow. On the screen in front of me, a perpetually shifting map showed the plane’s progress towards London: it told me that we were, at that moment, somewhere over the Arabian Sea, a few hundred miles west of Bangalore. As with anything technological, I had no idea how this miraculous device worked. Forty years ago, it seemed Donald Crowhurst could hide out for months in the mid-Atlantic, a speck in the ocean, surrounded by limitless miles of open sea but somehow hidden from everyone else on the planet. Nowadays, any number of orbiting satellites were trained on us every minute of the day, pinpointing our locations with unimaginable speed and accuracy. There was no such thing as privacy any more. We were never really alone. That should have been a comforting thought, really – I’d had enough of loneliness, more than enough, over the last few months – but somehow it wasn’t. After all, even when he’d been thousands of miles out to sea, even when there had been whole oceans lying between them, Crowhurst had still been bound to his wife, by invisible cords of feeling. He could have been certain, at almost any time of the day or night, that she would have been thinking of him. Yet here I was, with a kind, affectionate young woman sitting right next to me, sleeping by my side (the most trusting and intimate thing you can do with another person, I sometimes think) and the sad truth was that any closeness I felt between us was likely to be temporary. At the end of the flight, it would probably be gone.

I read the letter from Poppy’s uncle again, during those wakeful hours, and then a third time. It left me with far more questions than answers. Had Donald Crowhurst been a coward to do what he did? I found it hard to see it that way. He’d been only thirty-six when he set out on his voyage, and for my own part I still felt like a child by comparison, even though I was now forty-eight (having celebrated my birthday in Australia two weeks earlier, at a budget-priced Greek restaurant in Sydney, struggling to keep a conversation going with my father as usual). To be the master of a boat like that – let alone to convince yourself (and others) that you could pilot it single-handed around the globe, through the most dangerous seas on earth – suggested … what? Self-delusion? No, I didn’t think that Crowhurst had been deluded. Quite the opposite: by today’s standards, he seemed almost inconceivably mature and self-confident. Thirty-six years old! When I’d been in my mid-thirties, I was – like most of my friends – still agonizing over whether I was ready to have kids or not. Crowhurst had tackled that one long ago: he already had four. What was it about my generation? Why were we so slow to grow up? Our infancy seemed to stretch into our mid-twenties. At the age of forty we were still adolescents. Why did it take us so long to assume responsibility for ourselves – let alone for our children?

I yawned and felt my eyelids beginning to weigh heavy. The battery on Poppy’s computer was almost exhausted, too – about eight minutes to go, the meter said. I pressed the forward button in Picture and Fax Viewer and looked for one last time at the pictures of Donald Crowhurst she had scanned in. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something about them that bothered me; something that gave me a little shiver of unrest. Besides the photo of the abandoned yacht, there were three other pictures: Crowhurst in his weatherproofs, setting sail from Teignmouth – the scene Poppy’s uncle had witnessed himself; Crowhurst towards the end of his voyage, a self-portrait, with moustache, and a new, sun-hardened look to his face; and a startlingly younger-looking Crowhurst on dry land, in front of the BBC cameras, being interviewed prior to his departure.

This last one was a close-up, and was the most unsettling. His face was turned partly away from the camera, looking downwards, lost in anxious thought. He was chewing nervously on the knuckle of his thumb. Here, already, he looked like a man in torment, as if all too aware that the image he was presenting to the world was a false one; that the truth behind it was darker, more dangerous, and too painful to confront. This was definitely the one – this was the picture that I found so disturbing. But why should it affect me that way?

Then it dawned on me. Of course – it was obvious, now that I’d noticed it.

He was the spitting image of my father.

Watford–Reading

6

I missed her.

Already I missed her.

Poppy had gone fifteen minutes ago and already I missed her dreadfully.

Should I read anything into the fact that she hadn’t wanted to come and have a coffee with me? Of course not. She’d had a long flight, and she was tired, and she wanted to get home. We’d said goodbye in the baggage reclaim area. A bad place to say goodbye. Noisy, chaotic, oppressive. But she only had hand luggage, and I had to wait for my case to come up on the carousel, so that was where it had to be, our goodbye. After that, I collected my case, wheeled it outside, saw the queue for taxis (which was at least fifty-strong) and wheeled it back in again.

I took the escalator up to the departures lounge and bought myself a cappuccino. I think it was the hottest drink I had ever been served in my life. Twenty minutes passed before I even dared to put my lips to it. In the meantime I watched the comings and goings of the other passengers. Nobody, apart from me, seemed to be travelling alone. This can’t have been true, objectively speaking, but it was how things appeared that morning. After about ten minutes a man sat at the table next to mine. He looked roughly my age, apart from the fact that his hair was grey, almost white; and
he
was alone, so I was almost on the point of saying something to him, just for the relief of talking to someone again, but then his wife and two daughters turned up. The two daughters were very pretty. I guessed that the younger one was about eight, the older one twelve or thirteen – close to Lucy’s age. His daughters were very pale; in fact the whole family was very pale. I listened in to their conversation for a little while. He was going to Moscow for a few days, and his family had come to see him off. He sounded quite nervous about this trip, for some reason, but his wife was trying to be reassuring about it, and kept saying things like, ‘You’ve done this sort of thing dozens of times before.’ He mentioned that he was going to have to give lots of interviews, and I wondered if he might be famous, but I didn’t recognize him. They left after another ten minutes or so.

My cappuccino was still too hot to drink. I picked up my mobile phone and retrieved Poppy’s number from the memory and looked at it. I wished I’d been able to take a picture of her before she left, but I knew that it would have felt like a weird favour to ask. It would have put her off. So instead, all I had was her mobile number. A face, a personality, a pair of lively eyes, a body, a human being, all reduced to eleven digits on a screen. All somehow contained in that magical combination of numbers. Better than nothing, at any rate. At least I had a means of contacting her. At least Poppy was in my life, now.

I took a tentative sip of my cappuccino, which had been served to me twenty-five minutes earlier, recoiled as the still-scalding liquid sent scorching needles of pain through my lips, tongue and the roof of my mouth, and gave it up as a bad job. I dragged my suitcase out from under the table and went to try my luck with the taxi queue again.

It was about nine o’clock in the morning as I approached home. I was slumped in the back of a taxi, looking out at the monochrome grimness of urban Hertfordshire through sleepy eyes. It was the third week of February 2009, the skies were thick with cloud and to me, that morning, the world had never looked greyer, or felt chillier. I thought about the country I had left behind: so full of warmth, colour, vitality. The rich blue of the summer skies over Sydney; the dazzling play of light on the harbour waters. And now this. Watford, windswept and rainy.

‘Just drop me here, will you?’ I said to the taxi driver.

He looked at me in some puzzlement as I hauled my suitcase out of the front of the cab, and paid him his fare (fifty pounds, plus tip). But I knew – even though it was just putting off the evil moment – that I couldn’t go home just yet. I still needed a little more time to gather my strength. So I wheeled my case behind me again as I turned left off the Lower High Street and walked up Watford Field Road. When I reached the Field itself, I sank down on to a bench. The wooden slats were wet and I could feel the dampness seeping through my trousers and underpants and into my skin. It didn’t matter. My house was only about half a mile’s walk from here, and I would go there in a few minutes; but in the meantime, I just wanted to sit, and think, and watch the people walking by on their way to work – to check, I suppose, that I still felt some kind of bond with these people: my fellow humans, my fellow Britons, my fellow Watfordians.

It was tough going.

Someone must have passed by my bench every thirty seconds or so, but nobody said hello, or nodded, or made eye-contact. In fact, every time
I
tried to make eye-contact, or looked as though I might be about to speak to them, they would look away, hurriedly and pointedly, and quicken their step. You might have thought this would be especially true of the women, but it wasn’t – the men looked just as alarmed at the prospect that a stranger might be trying to engage with them, even fleetingly. It was sobering to see how even the little spark of common humanity I was trying to ignite between us made them panic, turn tail and flee.

For those who don’t know Watford Field, it’s a scrap of parkland, probably no more than about 200 yards along each side, not far from the main thoroughfares of Waterfields Way and Wiggenhall Road, so that the traffic noise is pretty much constant. It’s not exactly an oasis but I suppose that any green space to which you can beat a retreat is to be valued these days. After a while I began to feel oddly settled there, that morning, and despite the cold and the damp I sat there for much longer than I’d been intending. As it got later, of course, fewer and fewer people seemed to pass by. Soon it got to the point where I hadn’t seen a soul for ten minutes. And it was more than an hour since I’d spoken to anyone – if you can count my mumbled farewells to the taxi driver as speaking, in any meaningful sense. It was probably time to give up and face the forbidding emptiness of my house.

Then a man appeared, rounding the corner from Farthing Close and coming towards me. And there was something in the uncertainty of his progress, the hesitancy of his bearing, that made me think that this might be the one. He was probably in his early twenties, wearing a navy-blue fleece and stonewashed drainpipe jeans. He had a shock of thick, curly black hair and what seemed to be the beginnings of a moustache – tentative, like everything else about him. He was looking around him in apparent bewilderment, and twice, before he reached my bench, he stopped and turned, and looked into the distance, as if checking out alternative roads he might have taken. Obviously he was lost. Yes, that was it – he was lost! And what did people do when they were lost? They stopped to ask for directions. That was what he was going to do. He was probably trying to get to the railway station on the High Street. Or maybe the General Hospital. Both were nearby. He was going to ask me how to get there, and we were going to have a conversation. I could even imagine how the conversation would go. Even before he had spoken to me, I was rehearsing it in my head. ‘Where are you trying to get to, mate? The station? Well, High Street station is just round the corner, but if you’re heading for London you’ll be better off going to Watford Junction. About ten, fifteen minutes from here. Keep going straight down this road – back towards the Lower High Street – then hang a left and keep straight on till you get to the big junction with the ring road …’

I could hear his footsteps now, accelerating rapidly, and also his breathing, which was irregular and urgent. I saw that he had nearly reached me. And that he wasn’t looking quite as friendly as I thought he would.

‘Then you cross the ring road,’ I silently continued, none the less, ‘and you go past the entrance to the Harlequin on your right, and the big Waterstone’s …’

‘Give me your phone.’

The voice in my head ceased abruptly.

‘What?’

I looked up and saw him glaring down at me, his face a compound of malevolence and panic.

‘Give me your fucking phone. Right now.’

Without another word I stuffed my hand into my trouser pocket and tried to extricate my mobile. The trousers were tight and it wasn’t easy.

‘Sorry about this,’ I said, wriggling and struggling. ‘It doesn’t seem to want to come.’

‘Don’t look at me!’ the man shouted. (Actually he seemed more like a boy.) ‘Don’t look at my face!’

I’d almost managed to extract the phone from my pocket. It was ironic: my last model had been a super slimline Nokia which would have slipped out easily. I’d gone for this more chunky Sony Ericsson because it was better for playing mp3s. I didn’t think it was appropriate to explain this right now, though.

‘Here you are,’ I said, and handed him the mobile. He snatched it off me violently. ‘Was there anything else you wanted – I mean like … cash, credit cards … ?’

‘Fuck you!’ he shouted, and ran off down Farthing Way, in the same direction from which he’d come.

It had all happened in a few seconds. I flopped back down on the bench and watched his receding figure. I was shaking slightly, but soon became calm again. My first instinct was to dial 999 and call for the police, but then I realized I no longer had a phone to do it on. My second instinct was to start wheeling my suitcase back towards my house, stopping at the convenience store on the way so that I could buy some milk and make myself a cup of tea when I got there. Strangely, instead of worrying too much about the loss of my phone – which was insured against theft, at any rate – I was more disappointed that my long-awaited moment of human contact hadn’t quite panned out the way I’d been hoping.

Just then, I heard footsteps approaching again. Running, this time. And the same panting, irregular breath. It was my mugger. He ran straight past my bench, ignoring me, then stopped suddenly, looked this way and that, and ran a hand through his hair.

‘Shit,’ he was saying. ‘Shit!’

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

He wheeled round.

‘Uh?’

He looked at me more closely and registered, I think, for the first time, that I was the same person whose phone he had just stolen.

‘What’s the matter?’ I repeated.

It took him another few seconds to assess the situation and to decide that I was not just trying to wind him up. Then he said: ‘I’m lost, man. I’m completely fucking lost. Which way’s the station from here?’

My heart swelled when I heard these words.

‘Well there are two stations. Where are you trying to get to?’

‘Central London, man. I’ve got to get back to London pronto.’

‘Then your best bet is Watford Junction. It’s about ten, fifteen minutes from here. Keep going straight down this road – back towards the Lower High Street – then hang a left and keep straight on till you get to the big junction with the ring road …’

‘The ring road, yeah? Where all the traffic lights are.’

‘That’s right. Then you cross the ring road, and you go past the entrance to the Harlequin on your right, and the big Waterstone’s …’

‘OK – OK – I know the Harlequin, I know my way from there. That’s fine, man. That’s great. I’m sorted.’

‘Pleased to be of help,’ I said, smiling at him directly now – but this was a mistake, because it just made him scream, ‘And don’t look at my face, man, don’t you
dare
look at my fucking face!’ before turning and running at an athlete’s sprint towards the edge of the Field and the road that led down to Lower High Street.

I must have been seriously jet-lagged, because I wasn’t thinking straight. As I trudged over to the convenience store, all I could think about the mugging was ‘This will make a good story to tell to Poppy’, and in fact I was so pleased to have this story to tell her, so pleased to have a ready excuse for contacting her this morning, that I spent the time quite happily composing a quirky, downbeat text message about the episode in my head. It wasn’t until I reached the store and rested my suitcase outside that I realized I couldn’t send her a text message, because I no longer had my phone, and also, because I no longer had my phone, I no longer had her number, or any means of contacting her.

So, that was that.

I went inside to buy the milk.