Isvik Page 22

I got her round on to the port tack, heeled right over and water hissing along the side deck as we gradually pulled away from the shore. Suddenly we were in a void, nothing to see but mist and breaking waves, the boat heavily over-canvassed, and what scared the life out of me was that we were into the Segunda Angostura, the second narrows, being thrust rapidly sideways by the tide. If we were thrust right through into the expansion area of the Strait between the first and second narrows, we would be into the area where the Pacific and the Atlantic tides meet. The Pilot gave the tidal rate through the even narrower Primera Angostura as anything up to 8 knots!

  The squall passed, the cloud-mist lifting to give us a visual impression of the grip the current had on us, Isvik moving sideways very fast, the shoreline slipping by.

  I don’t remember much about the next half-hour. Somehow we managed to get her reefed, but it took time and there were moments in the frequent squalls when I was afraid those old sails would be torn to shreds, even that we might break a mast. Twice we had to put about because she kept making up towards the Patagonian shore, and all the time at the back of my mind was the knowledge that if we were caught up in the first narrows we could be in trouble. There were four tides a day here, not two, and I had a horrible vision of our being forced to sail back and forth across this section of the Strait for the rest of our lives.

  By the time the ship was properly reefed and we were motor-sailing, the tide was past its full force, but even so it seemed for ever before we had left those second narrows astern of us. I steered as close to the shore as I dared and suddenly we were out of the tidal grip. After that I think we all had an almost euphoric sense of satisfaction as we switched the engine off and beat back under sail alone.

  A truck was waiting for us at the quay, the driver fuming as we bungled the first attempt to come alongside and tie up. Another freighter had come in and it was not easy berthing in the small space left between them. The truck had been there over four hours. It contained the first consignment of stores Iris had ordered and we had to turn to, unload the truck and hump the stores on board without even a break for a cup of tea.

  We had that some two hours later when all the boxes and containers had been transferred from truck to deck and roped down under a tarpaulin we had obtained for use in emergency. By the time Iris had a meal ready for us we were almost past caring about food, and at the end of the meal Iain served us coffee heavily laced with an almost black Jamaican rum.

  I slept like a log that night, surfaced late, and then, when I crossed the quay and went down to breakfast, there was another man sitting eating at the saloon table. He half turned as I entered, and Iris, standing at the stove, said, ‘Carlos.’

  I recognised him then. He had jumped to his feet, holding out his hand. ‘Carlos Borgalini.’

  I ignored the proffered hand, muttering my name and going straight to my usual seat. ‘Carlos came in on a special charter flight early this morning,’ Iris explained. ‘We are to pick up Ángel at Ushuaia.’

  ‘Ushuaia! But that’s in the Beagle Channel, down by Cape Horn.’

  ‘I know.’ She passed me my breakfast and turned back to the stove. ‘Coffee or tea this morning? You have a choice.’

  ‘Coffee.’ I said it automatically, prodding a sausage and biting into it on the fork. ‘It’s out of the question. Ushuaia means going out through a maze of rocks into the Pacific, then turning back into the Beagle. Not the way we want to go at all, headed straight into the prevailing wind.’

  ‘I can read that much from the chart.’

  ‘But why?’ I turned to our visitor. ‘Tell him to meet us here.’

  ‘No. As I have already told the señora, he will meet us in Ushuaia. Not here.’

  ‘Us? You said us.’

  He nodded, smiling, and I thought I saw a little devil peeping out of his eyes. I may have been mistaken, for the gleam of wickedness was gone in a flash, but I was convinced his presence here on board meant trouble. He was dark and very Sicilian, smooth-faced and handsome, almost too good-looking to be true. But the way he moved his hands, the little smile that indicated pleasure at the violence of my reaction, everything about him suggested a vicious streak of effeminacy.

  ‘He wants to come with us,’ Iris said.

  I began to argue, but she told me to wait until Iain was here, then we could all of us discuss it together.

  ‘I’ve done quite a bit of sailing. I can give you a hand on deck and I’m a good helmsman.’ His English was almost perfect, barely the trace of an accent.

  ‘What sort of sailing?’

  ‘Dinghies mainly, but some cruising out from Buenos Aires after the war.’ He meant, of course, the Falklands war. ‘My family has a small cruiser-racer.’

  ‘You were cruising with your father?’ It seemed unlikely from what little I had heard of Rosalli Gabrielli’s boyfriend, but perhaps he was referring to another member of the Borgalini family.

  He smiled and shook his head. He was very beautiful when he smiled. ‘You’re short-handed so I think you find me useful.’

  I nodded and got on with my breakfast. It did not really matter who he had sailed with. The point was that he had the best range of experience, dinghy as well as cruising. By then Nils had joined us and we were all sitting, drinking our coffee, when Iain came in. He was in a foul mood. He already knew about Carlos. The woman who looked after Captain Freddie and his house had told him. Carlos had knocked her up shortly after six, and because he had said he was related to the señora, she had made up a bed for him in the little box-room at the back. ‘You.’ Iain stood glowering down at him. ‘What the hell are ye doin’ here?’

  Carlos had got to his feet. Apparently he didn’t have to be told who Iain was. ‘Carlos Borgalini.’ He held out his hand.

  Iain ignored it. ‘Ah ken who ye are. Ah asked ye a question.’

  Carlos was smiling, full of charm as he began to explain.

  ‘Ushuaia! Why Ushuaia?’

  ‘Mario said you would understand.’

  ‘Mario? Our Connor-Gómez friend, ye mean, eh – Ángel?’ Iain stared at him a moment, then turned to Iris. ‘Gi’ me some coffee, fur God’s sake. It’s been a bad mornin’.’ He didn’t say why it had been a bad morning, but Nils had already told me he had arrived on board early, got some papers from his briefcase, which was locked in the security drawer at the back of the chart table, and then gone up into the town where he had found somebody with a fax machine. ‘Oh, an’ the snowmobile has been unloaded by mistake at Puerto Gallegos, God knows why. Ah’ve been tryin’ to sort that out, too.’

  Much to my surprise he seemed to accept that we would start off by heading west and ducking down into the Beagle Channel. And when I told him it didn’t make sense poking our nose out into the Pacific, then facing Cape Horn, just because Connor-Gómez preferred to join ship at Ushuaia rather than Punta Arenas, he turned on me and told me to mind my own business.

  ‘It is my business,’ I answered angrily. ‘A raw crew –’

  ‘Shut up, will ye!’ He had grabbed hold of me with that gloved steel claw, thrusting his face forward, his eyes gone cold. ‘Ye dae yer job, Ah’ll dae mine. We pick him up at Ushuaia if that’s what he wants.’

  ‘You mean he’s persona non grata here in a Chilean port?’

  ‘Ah told ye, mind yer own business.’ The claw bit into my arm. ‘Okay?’ He let the silence round the table hang a minute, finally releasing my arm, his face relaxing into a smile. ‘One good thing, the Anton Varga is due in around ten-thirty. Yer new sails should be off-loaded shortly after midday.’ Iris handed him his coffee and he sat back. ‘The first thing is to get all our stores listed and stowed. Then ye can go to work checkin’ the sails. Carlos can gi’ ye a hand.’

  To my surprise the boy proved very useful. He might look effeminate, but he had plenty of energy, and he was intelligent. In no time at all he had learned the ropes, so that the following day, when all the stores had been correctly stowed in order of use and I was free to deal with the s
ails, I found I could rely on him for quite a lot of the hard pulley-hauley and winching as we hoisted them one by one, testing them out as best we could with the wind coming at us round the bows of the freighter moored astern.

  Thrown into his company like this, I took the opportunity to try and clarify his connection with the Connor-Gómez family. It seemed unlikely I would get as good a chance again, for once we were all of us living on board, privacy would be at a premium with seven of us cooped up together, eight if he came as well. My main concern was his relationship with Iris and the reason for his apparent determination to join the expedition. Remembering the look on his face as he had peered down at us through the Cutty Sark’s skylight there had to be something between them.

  I tried a straight question first – ‘You’re Iris’s cousin, I understand?’ But he just laughed. ‘Some cousin she is, going off, pretending she’s dead and leaving me to pick up the cans.’ He wouldn’t say much more than that, and when I asked him what his connection with the Connor-Gómez family was, he answered that if Iris hadn’t told me by now, he was damned if he was going to.

  Later I tried another tack, complimenting him on the speed with which he had mastered the intricacies of Isvik’s rig and saying he must have had a good sailing instructor. ‘The best,’ he said, his eyes lighting up.

  ‘Who?’

  He glanced at me, a sudden wariness. ‘Mario, of course.’

  ‘Mario? Mario who?’

  ‘Mario Borgalini.’

  But when I asked him whether Mario Borgalini was his father, he shrugged and turned away, muttering over his shoulder, ‘I never know who my father is, only that I am a Borgalini.’ He said the name almost pretentiously as though he were proud of being a Borgalini.

  ‘You mean you don’t know who your parents are?’

  ‘No, I do not mean. My mother’s name is Rosalli. She is a singer, to the guitar mainly – a very passionate, very remarkable woman.’ His eyes were alight now with a luminous warmth. ‘She is also very beautiful, even now, though she is more than forty when I am born. And very talented,’ he added. ‘You have not heard her sing? She is Rosalli Gabrielli. All those records …’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I was suddenly remembering an advertisement in a King’s Lynn shop. Not my sort of music, but vaguely I recalled a very Romany face with a large open mouth full of teeth and very black hair. So that was his mother. A woman who had briefly been married to Juan Gómez. And Mario was Ángel Connor-Gómez’s first name.

  ‘It was Ángel who taught you to sail, Ángel Connor-Gómez. Is that right?’

  He nodded, turning away again. ‘At home we always call him Mario.’

  ‘So he is your half-brother.’ He had to be since Rosalli Gabrielli was his mother also.

  ‘Per’aps. You want me to get the fisherman up? Shall we try that next?’

  ‘Did you see a lot of him?’

  ‘Of Mario? No. I don’t see enough of him.’ He said it almost petulantly. ‘It was only during that one year, in the holiday. I was at school, you see, and he was at school, too, in a way, at the Escuela Mecánica. And then, of course, we were often away from our home in Buenos Aires. My mother’s engagements took us all over America.’

  ‘How old were you when he taught you to sail?’

  ‘Fourteen, I think. Why?’

  It was an impressionable age and I was beginning to have an uneasy feeling about their relationship. ‘What about Iris?’ I asked. ‘Did you see anything of her?’

  ‘Of course not. Why should I?’ He said it with what I thought was a touch of venom, adding by way of explanation, ‘As you can imagine, the Connor-Gómez and the Borgalini families don’t mix.’ He banged back the hatch on the foredeck, disappearing down into the sail locker, and that was the end of it.

  Just after dawn on the Sunday the cargo vessel astern of us pulled out into the Strait and I had Isvik warped round while we had room, so that she faced into the wind, and then once again I had the sails hoisted one at a time, Carlos and myself working as a team. Unfortunately, I did not dare test the set of the upper and lower squares’ls, having to be content with setting them flying. The fisherman stays’l, too. And there was another sail I didn’t quite understand. It was huge, with a hoist on both masts and filled all the space between, the foot of it reaching back almost to the rear of the deck housing. A block just aft of the upper squares’l boom that I had not understood now made sense. Carlos went up the foremast, rove a long nylon line to it, and with this round the belly of the sail, we were able to scandalize it into a roll as we hoisted it.

  Thankfully all the sails seemed to have been cut correctly, the luffs exact as to length and only the main requiring some adjustment to the leach. Also I decided to have the lower panels and batten pockets double-stitched.

  ‘Lucky we are not junk-rigged,’ Carlos said, smiling at me as he stood on the stern looking up at the flogging sail. The wind was gusting quite strongly now and I dared not sheet any of them in. ‘You ever sailed in a junk rig? I do it once. Only in the Río de la Plata. It is the lazy sailor’s dream of a rig, but too many battens for us, too much sewing. Do you have a machine for sewing on board this ship?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Then I sew for you. I do that on the boat I sailed in from Rhode Island to Plymouth when I come to study in England.’ It was then that I managed to extract one further piece of information from him. It was in connection with some wild plan of his to purchase a boat and sail round the world. ‘Alone?’ I asked him, and he laughed and said no, not alone. ‘With Mario, of course.’

  ‘You mean he plans to sell that hacienda in Peru?’

  ‘No, of course he don’t sell the Hacienda Lucinda. But when we get the money from the insurance people … There is a lot of moneys owed to us for the fire at the Gómez store.’

  Won’t that go to Iris?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ He smiled. It was a nasty little vicious smile. ‘Mario has seen to that. She gets nothing. Her father made all the shares over to Mario, and some to me. It is enough to buy several boats.’ He said it boastfully, his eyes as intense as a cat looking at a bird caught in wire netting. ‘And nothing to Eduardo. Or to Iris.’ The undertone of viciousness was back in his voice.

  I came to the conclusion then and there that, however good a hand he turned out to be, I wasn’t going to like the boy. And that’s how I thought of him, as a boy, though there couldn’t have been more than a few years between us in age. There was something immature about him, as though he had grown up outside of parental control and was mentally an undisciplined kid.

  However, I was certainly lucky to have somebody else on board who was not only hooked on sailing, but had transocean experience. And then, the next day, he suddenly announced that he was going climbing. The kit he had brought with him included a rucksack and into it he stuffed his oilskins, some cold weather gear, heavy socks, food, and strapped to the top of it a waterproof sleeping bag.

  ‘I am studying too much, then in a police cell –’ He was looking at Iris as he said this, but smiling still. He didn’t seem to bear her a grudge. ‘I need to harden up.’ He slapped his stomach.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked him.

  ‘Up there.’ He waved his hand vaguely towards the north. ‘There is some sort of a track leads back of the town and up over the top of the Brunswick Peninsula. Maybe I hitch a ride up to the ski slopes. That will save me eight kilometres. Once on the tops I will be able to have a look at the Seno Otway and all the rest of that sweep of water that makes an island of Riesco. Seno means womb, and that’s what it looks like on the chart – a secret place.’ He was looking at Iris, smiling. ‘If I don’t return the day after tomorrow send out a search party please.’

  He borrowed the lightest of our four ice picks, also a little plastic handbearing compass from the chart table drawer, which he slung round his neck. We were both on deck to see him off, and as his slender, boyish figure disappeared behind the sheds, I said to Iris, ‘
I don’t understand him.’

  ‘No?’ She was tight-lipped, her voice cold.

  ‘He talks about “us” and “we” all the time. He seems to think he’s coming with us. Is he?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘You’ll decide at Ushuaia, is that it? When your brother arrives.’

  ‘I have told you …’ She stopped there, turning away towards the wheelhouse.

  ‘Why does he want to come?’ I called after her. ‘Does he need to prove something?’

  She looked back at me then. ‘Per’aps. We’ll see what Ángel says – what their relationship is.’ She said this slowly, standing there, looking worried. ‘That boy –’ She shook her head, beads of moisture gleaming like diamond dust in the blackness of her hair. ‘You ask if he need to prove something. I think per’aps he need to prove he is a man.’ She smiled fleetingly. ‘I don’t think his life has been an easy one.’ She turned then and went below.

  That night, I don’t know why – possibly it was because the arrival of Carlos brought it home to me that we were very near to the point of departure – I started thinking about the purpose of life, my life, and why I was risking it on this crazy search for what would probably turn out to be a non-existent ship. What was the point? Was I trying to prove something?

  I looked back down the years, so little of achievement, not even the commonest of all – a home, a wife, children. Was that what I wanted?

  I thought of the ice ahead and almost laughed aloud. I wouldn’t find those sort of satisfactions down there. So why was I going? What the hell did I want? That question went rattling round in my mind until it merged into a welter of ice, and myself standing gazing up at an image of Iris stretched out like one of the carved angels on the hammer beams of a Norfolk church. No, more like the figurehead on the bows of an old sailing ship. She was staring down at me, bare-breasted and her hair flying, and the bows were bedded in ice, the long bowsprit reaching up into scudding clouds. She was trying to tell me something. I could see her lips moving, but I couldn’t catch the words. And then the figurehead changed into my mother, watering cans in her hand, and she was calling to me to help her with the flowers. But there were no flowers, only a great berg of ice hanging over the broken stump of a mast and the gaunt figure of a man staring at me out of a bearded face. And all the time there was the tinkling sound of crystals falling.