Betrayal (27 page)

The wind was westerly and fresh. It was
Ellie
’s weather, a steady force five on the quarter, downhill all the way. As the old girl gathered pace she groaned and creaked in grumpy contentment, like a grandmother exercising her stiffened joints. Water hissed and surged along the hull, the crockery rattled in the galley, somewhere wood moved complainingly against wood. Hearing such long-forgotten sounds, feeling the movement of the boat under my feet, it seemed to me that, in abandoning sailing for all these years, I had left something important behind, a part of my past, a part of myself.

Sylvie sat in the cockpit for an hour or so, chatting desultorily, before going below to sleep. After lunch, I dozed for a couple of hours while she kept watch. When I came back on deck she was in one of her more ebullient moods. She told me a little more about her life in France, though not so much that I could piece many facts together. There had been a house in the Midi, with, it seemed, several people in residence, though she wouldn’t be drawn on their relationship to each other. Lovers, husbands, wives; it was all very vague. Had it been a happy time? I asked. Oh, happy enough, she said. Then she turned her almond eyes on mine and said in that low sonorous voice of hers: But not happy like we were happy, Munchkin.

That was all it took, one small remark, and my heart squeezed with foolish joy, and, for a short time at least, the doubts that constantly lurked at the edges of my feelings for Sylvie faded away. In a moment of euphoria all my romantic notions of undying love came rushing back, I thought in ludicrously grandiose terms of the great wheels of fate that had brought Sylvie and me together again. For a short while, until the unease returned, I was besotted again.

As dusk fell and we sighted the beams of the Casquets and Cap de la Hague, the breeze stiffened and
Ellie
picked up her skirts and rushed headlong for land at a galloping six and a half knots. We tied up in the marina at half past midnight. The strange thing was that, though I had nurtured visions of sleeping beside Sylvie in some quiet harbour ever since our affair had begun, something made me retreat. I still wanted her terribly, but it was an ugly craving that drove me to make love to her that night, an urge to possess her at all costs, almost an act of retribution for the helplessness she engendered in me, and once I had left her body, once she had curved against me ready for sleep, something about the intimacy of the position and its implications of domesticity unsettled me and after a few minutes I crept away to a bunk in the saloon.

I woke to find Sylvie on her way out to buy croissants and bread. There was a tautness about her that morning, a barely concealed impatience, and no sooner had she returned than she announced she wanted to go out again.

The shoe shops open? I grinned.

She shrugged: And other things.

I asked if it could wait half an hour while we had our coffee.

You don’t have to come, she said, and behind the empty smile there was a dark cold look in her eye.

But I want to, I said lightly, trying to dispel the tension.

She sat still for a minute or two, then climbed up the companionway. I thought she was waiting for me in the cockpit, I didn’t hear her step onto the pontoon, but, light-footed as she was, she must have gone immediately, because by the time I had taken a last gulp of scorching coffee and gone up to find her she had vanished. Suppressing a fury, I locked the boat up and walked briskly towards the town.

Approaching the shopping area I saw her distinctive figure a long way ahead, turning a corner into a side street. I accelerated to a jog then a steady run but on reaching the corner she had disappeared. It was a street of small family shops: a brilliantly lit
boucherie
, a musty
librairie
, a
boulangerie
with a queue snaking out onto the pavement, then – I congratulated myself – a shoe shop. The window was plastered with sale signs so it wasn’t until I went inside that I realised she wasn’t there.

My resentment flared again, I felt a surge of anticipation. For the first time I imagined hurting her, taking her arm and squeezing it until she yelped.

At the end of the street was an open market set in a small square. The place was crowded, the stalls tightly packed, but I saw her almost immediately. At first I thought she was eyeing the baubles on a trinket stall, but then she turned to the young man beside her and spoke to him, and I realised with a jolt that they seemed to know each other.

Stupefied, I watched as they walked purposefully towards a narrow lane radiating off the square to the south. Following at a distance I saw them pause halfway down and turn into a doorway. For ten minutes I waited a few yards away, my imagination ballooning uncontrollably, my temper simmering. I was on the point of beating on the door when she calmly reappeared, alone.

I stepped forward so that she could not fail to see me.

She showed no surprise. Rather she gave a vague sign of recognition, as if she’d half expected to find me there, like someone who, having been kind to a stray dog, can’t shake the animal off. She walked past me without breaking her stride so that I was forced to catch up with her. This small act was typical of her insensitivity, one of the many small humiliations that she perpetrated quite thoughtlessly and indiscriminately in pursuit of her own interests.

I grabbed her arm and spun her round. How dare you waltz off like that, I hissed.

I thought you’d be bored. I had this errand to do.

Errand? I crowed sarcastically. What, meeting someone?

She shook her head in exasperation or dismissal, and then I did something I had never done in my life before – I hurt a woman. Living out my violent imagining, I gripped her arm until she went white and winced with pain.

Don’t ever treat me like that again! I shouted before walking blindly away.

I had lunch alone, going over and over the affair in my mind, wondering how one person could push me to such terrifying extremes of emotion. I had always considered myself a mild man, someone who kept his reason under pressure, yet when I had gripped her arm I had been shaking with rage. It frightened me to have lost control so completely; it terrified me to think it might happen again.

When I returned to the boat Sylvie was sitting on the foredeck reading a book. Ignoring her I went below. She followed and, coming up behind me, circled her arms round my waist and laid her head against my back.

Don’t be cross, she sighed. We were having such a good time.

But you just walked off!

I wasn’t going to be long. Please, Munchkin, life is too short.

How do I know you won’t do it again?

I won’t, I promise.

I cross-examined her about the man at the stall, I demanded to know what they’d been doing together in the flat or whatever the place was. He was just a friend of a friend, she said, someone who worked in the market; she’d simply been collecting something from him, a favour for the mutual friend.

I gave up then, because no answer would ever satisfy me nor quell my darker suspicions.

And I forgave her. I forgave her because I wanted the pain and humiliation to end. And because the dreadful sick longing was still dragging at my heart.

Just don’t do it again, I said weakly.

Later we went to an expensive restaurant and had a mediocre seafood dinner which took over an hour to arrive. We had agreed to start the return trip immediately after the meal, though that didn’t stop me from drinking far too much, and it was more by luck than judgment that we bumped only one boat as we manoeuvred out of the berth.

The wind was dead on the nose, force four or five. After half an hour bucketing about in a nasty chop I returned my dinner to the ocean and, leaving much of the helming to Sylvie, spent a miserable night between the cockpit and the guardrails, retching on an empty stomach.

Dawn brought little improvement. The wind rose to a stiff six or seven and showed no signs of backing. In her day
Ellie
had been a tough old girl, but with all the talk of fastenings and planking I didn’t dare drive her too hard. By midday we had made good a paltry thirty-five miles and I was beginning to despair of ever getting home. Seeing my exhaustion, ignoring my half-hearted resistance, Sylvie took a long watch in the morning and again in the afternoon, leaving me to curl up on a sodden bunk and, oblivious to the drip of a persistent deck leak, catch some sleep. I loved Sylvie then, I loved her toughness and her resilience and the fearless face she turned to the wind, a wild child in a wild sea.

At six the wind finally backed, and we began to make up some time, but it was still four in the morning before we turned up the path of the Kingswear light. Motoring past the Blackstone, Sylvie handed me a brandy and I drank it in one.

Any lingering anger I might have felt about the Cherbourg episode was lost in the euphoric camaraderie one always feels at the end of a hard trip and my gratitude to Sylvie for being such a game crew. We had another brandy and she blew an alcoholic kiss against my mouth, and I felt ridiculously happy again.

We rounded the Kingswear bend in that strange time before the true dawn, when the shadows seem to play tricks, when shapes form and instantly dissolve again. Glancing towards the fishermen’s quay beside the station, I saw a large motor launch against the piles, and in my imagination it seemed to me that men were standing on the deck.

As we continued up river, Sylvie kept looking astern and when I asked her if she would go below and find the searchlight she didn’t respond. Instead she made a hiss of intense irritation.
Shit! Merde!
she cried angrily. They’re coming! Hurry! Hurry!

I looked behind and saw nothing. What the hell do you mean? I demanded.

But she would only growl: Hurry! And when I didn’t react she grabbed for the throttle and pushed it as far forward as it would go.

For Christ’s sake! I argued, trying not to succumb to the atmosphere of panic. As we charged through the lines of moorings, I kept glancing over my shoulder and finally I saw what Sylvie had seen: some way astern, against the myriad illuminations of the town, the steaming lights of a motor vessel were moving, coming our way and gaining steadily. When I looked ahead again Sylvie had gone below. Controlling my fury with difficulty, I kept shouting at her, asking what the hell was going on.

When she finally reappeared she was almost naked. In the ruby glow of the compass light I saw brief underclothes and a dark band around her waist. Touching the band I felt the smoothness of heavy parcel tape which she appeared to have wound around herself several times. I couldn’t work out what the tape was for until she turned to clamber onto the side deck and I saw the bulging packet held to the small of her back. I reached out and prodded the packet: under the plastic it was soft, like flour or sugar.

I kept shouting: What the hell, Sylvie? But it was more of a cry of disbelief than anything else. Even I could no longer ignore an interpretation of events which sickened my stomach and deadened my heart.

I went on yelling at her above the engine noise but she didn’t answer. She was too busy working out where we were along the river, how far from Dittisham and where she might be able to climb ashore if she swam for it now, and balancing these factors against the speed of the approaching customs launch.

Above the throb of the engine Sylvie shouted: I wasn’t on board, you understand? Not on any of the trip! You went alone! Stick to it or we’ll both be in trouble!

Then she clambered over the rails and lunged headfirst into the darkness. Her dive made hardly a ripple. I kept looking back but I didn’t see her surface. It was part of her luck, or possibly her judgment, but just a few seconds later the customs boat’s powerful searchlight sprang on and bathed
Ellie
in a blaze of blinding light.

I slowed down, I let the launch catch up and come alongside. I answered their challenge. Name of vessel? Where from? Home port? I hesitated over ‘How many aboard?’ before replying with an uneasy heart: One.

The launch towed
Ellie
to a mooring and two officers came aboard. They went through the ship’s papers and my passport. They did not seem surprised that I was alone. They asked me if I had notified them of the boat’s departure for France. When I admitted that I had failed to do so they asked me if I realised I had broken the law. I did now, I said. I explained that I had not sailed for some years, that I was out of touch, but all the time I was waiting wretchedly for the moment when they would search the boat and find Sylvie’s handbag and passport and all the other signs that there had been someone else on board.

In the end their search was pretty cursory, just a rummage through the lockers and bilges, a hand thrust into the sail bags. They took no notice of the fact that some of the clothes were female. Wherever Sylvie had hidden her handbag she had made a good job of it.

Maybe it was the reference to having lived on the river for many years or the mention of a doctor brother having charge of the boat, but they let me off with no more than a stern caution.

I took
Ellie
up river to her mooring in a state of blank exhaustion. I found Sylvie’s handbag in a side pocket of her holdall. It contained hairbrush, lip salve and moisturiser. No passport, no money, no identification. I realised she must have put them in the bundle so artfully strapped to her back. Clever Sylvie. Sly Sylvie. Not missing a trick. Never missing a trick, even with me.

Once ashore I drove straight to the cottage. I told myself that I needed to be sure that Sylvie had survived her swim, but the truth was far uglier and less altruistic. My anger was cold and bleak, I wanted to have it out with her, I wanted to know if my deepest suspicions were correct and she had been using me all along. I wanted to hear it from her mouth.

I walked into the cottage without knocking. There was no one in the lower rooms. Taking the dingy stairs two at a time, I peered into a back bedroom so strewn with clothes and junk that the floor was virtually invisible. Approaching the front room, I heard a slight sound from inside and, heart hammering, hesitated for a second before thrusting it open.