The Going Down of the Sun (2 page)

It was only as she drew level with our anchorage that we saw the woman at the helm, blonde hair flying in the slipstream. She saw us and waved. We waved back, but the glance Harry cast me was embarrassed. Middle-aged detective superintendents should not be caught wolf-whistling at blondes in power-boats. I chuckled. She'd been too far away to hear him over the roar of her engines, and I knew full well the bodywork he'd been admiring.

When she was gone, leaving only the taint of diesel on the air and a last glimpse of the name on her departing stern, I went back to the goulash bubbling spicily on the stove.

The name on the stern was
Skara Sun.

The next day the wind had veered round into the north-west I had thought of pushing up past Luing, but we'd have the wind in our teeth all the way and this was supposed to be a holiday, not an endurance test. We headed back down the Sound, making for Loch Sween.

Corryvreckan was more tumultuous than before. It made you understand the early chart-makers who wrote “Here be dragons” in the places they dared not approach.

“Is there actually a way through there?” asked Harry.

“Oh yes, there's a channel. But not too many people use it. It's always treacherous. At slack tide, with a steady breeze and no sea, it's just about passable. Most of the time it's a death-trap.”

“Have you ever been through?” He was watching it, fascinated, like a man watching a snake.

“No. I've sailed hereabouts most every summer for eighteen years, and I've gone up close a few times to see what it looked like, but I've never found the combination of conditions and courage to try it. I've seen it done a couple of times, and I've known people come to grief there. I'd love to have done it, but I'm shit-scared of doing it.”

“Funny,” mused Harry. “I felt that way about marriage.”

I spent the day teaching him the rudiments of sailing. Through the morning we had the wind comfortably on the beam, and I could see the confidence growing to smugness in Harry's face. He'd thought this was going to be difficult, and now he thought it was easy. There are many hazards awaiting the sailing man, from sudden squalls and breaking seas to rocks gnawing at his keel and pillocks driving power-boats with one arm round a blonde and a magnum of champagne within easy reach. But far and away the greatest danger facing a sailor is his own complacency.

You have to know what you can do, and more importantly what you can't. After forty-four years of considering wind propulsion as wildly impractical and wholly pointless, one morning with the sun on the sea and a steady breeze on the beam had been enough to persuade him that he had this sailing thing licked. In his own interests, it was time to disabuse him.

We turned the corner round Danna Island, a low dark nail at the tip of the finger of land stretching down from Crinan, and began beating our way up Loch Sween. Immediately everything was different. The seas in the narrow waterway were restricted, but we were sailing into the choppy face of them. The wind in the sails heeled the little boat onto her shoulder, and made her tug at the tiller like a dog fretting on a leash. The sails thrummed, the rigging sang. Salt spray came at us over the gunwales. And every few minutes one rocky shore or the other bore down on us and we had to tack away.

Like many policemen, Harry is a cautious man. He likes to be in control of a situation—hence the love affair with engines, I suppose; they do what they're meant to according to strict rules, and if they stop there's a definitive mechanical reason for that too.

But sailing isn't an exact science, sailing to windward least of all: you're constantly seeking a point of balance between conflicting and inconstant forces. You don't steer through the wind, you ride it—watching your burgee and the leading edge of the sails for the tell-tale lift that warns of stalling, you skim the eddies and billows of the wind as if it were something you could see and touch, using its sudden strengths to bring you up to windward, paying off before its unexpected hollows kill your thrust. The wind is like an animal that you have to manage, not so much conquer as reach an accommodation with. There is an equilibrium there to be used, but it's a dynamic one, eternally changing. Sailing is a task for the instinct rather than the intellect.

Harry doesn't much like trusting to instinct, except that instinct told him to give me the helm. I shook my head. “No, you sail her—I'll tell you what to do.”

So he learned how to balance the boat on the edge of the driving wind and convert its fluctuations into a useful course even if it was not always a straight one, and I trimmed the sails and warned him of impending shores, and before the Fairy Isles hove in view he was singing “Lee-O” and shoving the tiller away from him as if he'd been doing it half his life. An unbiased observer might even have thought he was enjoying himself.

There are many magic places on earth, and I've been privileged to visit a few of them, both in company I cherished and alone. But perhaps God laid his hand most lightly of all on this little ring of rocky islets, their granite bones clothed in rowan and conifers, enclosing a tiny anchorage where the seals play and the otters visit, and the sea pales first to a milky brightness and then to the silken gleam of a steel mirror, as the stillness of the long evening comes on.

Luke brought me here first, when I was a brand new doctor with ambitions to change the world and needed dragging on holiday as now I dragged Harry. I'd been back almost every year since. I'd seen it in sunshine and rain; once I came in April and it snowed, decking the Christmas trees with tinsel and rimming the rocks, swallowing the view across the loch in a ballet of dancing, swirling white. Still the magic of it touched me every time, a purely Celtic magic woven of green and silver.

And it touched Harry too, which was a bonus I had not looked for. Because of the narrowness of the entrance and the confines of the anchorage itself, I took the
Rubber Lion
in under power. But as soon as the anchor was down and holding and the chain paid out, without any prompting from me Harry turned off the engine and we just sat, hand in hand on the cabin roof, listening to the twilight.

At length Harry said, a shade quietly, as if he found it difficult, “Was this one of the places you came with Luke? You know, special places.”

I didn't know what he wanted to hear so I told him the truth. “Yes.”

His eyes slipped out of focus above the Knapdale Forest. He said softly, “I could find it in me to be jealous about that.”

I squeezed his hand. “You know that would be silly.”

“I know. He was dead before I knew you.”

“That too. But mostly because being jealous of Luke would be like being jealous of my sister. If he was alive today I'd feel about him the way I always did. But I wouldn't love you any the less because of it.”

For a little while he said nothing more. I could feel him still troubled by the friendship he had never understood, the deep platonic friendship between me and Luke Shaw, over whose dead body—literally—we had come together. Finally he said, “I'm glad you brought me too.”

I pressed into the curve of his body. I thought then that there was nothing in my life, nothing I had or was, that I would not want to share with him.

We had been lucky in that the lagoon was empty when we arrived, and we had it to ourselves for half an hour longer. But it was a popular anchorage, even at the beginning of the season, and another boat arrived with the last of the light, a big power-boat with a flared bow to her long white hull, and though they had throttled the twin engines right back to ease into the lagoon, still the rumble of them echoed off all the rocks and filled the anchorage.

They found a spot astern of us and dropped their hook, and after a moment longer the big engines died. In the sudden silence we could hear the murmur of voices from the cabin. The name on the bows was smaller than that on the stern, but it was the
Skara Sun
again.

I shrugged, freed my hand from Harry's and went down to the galley. “If there's one thing that lowers the tone of these places,” I said, “it's noisy neighbours.”

But I hadn't anticipated just how much noise we were going to be subjected to. It wasn't so much their voices that disturbed us—there seemed to be only the two of them, the woman and a man, and I wouldn't say they were any rowdier than Harry and I were. It wasn't the radio, which was playing dance music and the occasional snatch of Verdi at a pitch suitable for late evening in a secluded anchorage; or even the big engines, which in the event we never heard again.

It was the fact that, at ten-fifteen the following morning, while the seals were catching their breakfast and I was cooking ours, the
Skara Sun
blew up.

Sky-high. It was as if someone had dropped a match into the Wool-wich Arsenal. One moment I was chivvying eggs and sausages in a pan, and Harry was trying to shave with too little hot water in too little space, and the next a percussion that was sound and force inextricably combined hit the
Rubber Lion
from astern, the pressure wave throwing her up the anchor-chain like an elderly and unfit racehorse startled to find itself back in the starting stalk.

With the boards lurching under me I lost my footing and hurtled towards the mast-step. The breakfast followed, the hot pan missing me by inches and one hot sausage not at all. Harry, better braced in the open doorway of the heads, bounded off one bulkhead after another but at least kept his feet. As the boat resumed an approximately even keel, he was up the steps of the companionway ahead of me, roam and whiskers on one half of his face, bellowing, “What the
hell
—?” as he went.

On the top step he stopped abruptly, blocking my view. I pushed him and he stepped aside.

A column of dense black smoke reached a hundred feet into the scrubbed morning sky. At the top it broadened into a boiling anvil-headed cloud. There was some flame, but not much—there was almost nothing left to burn. Debris in small shards was pattering back into the water almost gently, some of it hitting the
Rubber Lion
and some of it further away. Angry little waves were bouncing off the shore and the islets. Birds had exploded upwards from all the surrounding trees. The seals had stopped their fishing, too stunned even to dive.

Of the
Skara Sun
there remained only a shapeless knot of rubbish that sank even as we watched it, and the upturned hull of a dinghy, and a child's toy—a clear plastic globe filled with coloured fancies that danced within it as it spun and swirled on the afrighted sea. The scurrying ripples brought it bobbing gently against the hull of the
Rubber Lion
and, with nothing else to do, I leaned over to pick it up.

Harry touched my arm. “There.”

It was a body, spread-eagled in the water by the capsised dinghy. It was face down and unmoving except for the movement of the stained water. It was the man whose voice we had heard. At least, it wasn't the woman we had seen; the floating hair was short and dark, not long and fair. Of her body there was no sign at all.

Harry was kicking his shoes off. I stopped him. “I'll need you to pull him on board.” I took the horse-shoe lifebelt from its cradle in the stern and cast it, trailing its line, in the direction of the floating corpse. Then I followed it.

The water flowed like cold silk along my body. As I got closer it grew thick with particles of floating refuse. I tried quite hard not to think what some of them might be.

Before I reached him I was getting that sense of urgency, like a tiny alarm bell sounding deep in my brain, that said he wasn't yet dead—that some fragment of life lingered in his floating, broken body. I can't explain that, but I've known it too often—in myself and others—even to consider it a phenomenon.

There might be half a dozen of you clustered round a coronary case, and the sister can't get a blood pressure reading and the ECC has gone flat, and you keep plugging away at the massage and the stimulants and the defibrillator because that's what the book says you do; but you know, from sources other than the evidence of your clever equipment, whether this is one you're going to save or lose, and mostly you all feel the same way, and it's not often you're wrong. It's as if a viable body, one which has the physical and mental capacity to take up a restored life, has some way of signalling the fact to others close enough to help it—a kind of telepathic distress call: “Don't leave me, get me out of here!”

That's what I got from him then. Oh, not the words, nothing articulate and inarguable, but a tiny powerful sense of panic that I wouldn't have got from a floating log or a dead man, that made me lengthen my stroke to the limit of my strength although common sense dictated that a man who had been on that boat, in that explosion, and was now floating face down in the lagoon, should be beyond any help I could give him.

When I reached him, using the lifebelt for support I rolled him onto his back and got his face out of the water. He wasn't breathing but my instinct had been right: there was a faint thready pulse at his wrist. I cleared his mouth and breathed air into him.

If he wasn't dead yet, he was deeply unconscious. His face was slack, unknowing; his eyes were rolled back, a thin white line showing between the wet lashes of his slightly parted lids. There was the mark of a heavy blow to his temple. I breathed into him again, still without response.

“Harry, pull us in!”

Weak shoulder notwithstanding, Harry hauled the two of us in on that line faster than I could have swum alone. I had the lifebelt round the casualty now and let myself be towed along beside him, still breathing oxygen into his drowned lungs. I didn't know yet if I could save him, but that urgent instinct said he could be saved.

Harry helped me out of the water and together we pulled the boy out. A boy was all he was: he might have been twenty-three, not more, and the way he looked now he'd never make twenty-four. He still wasn't breathing. I stretched him out on the boards and pumped all the water I could out of him, and kept breathing fresh air in, but nothing was happening. He wasn't breathing, his pulse wasn't picking up—only this tiny, terrified voice in my head pleaded, “Don't give up—
please
don't give up on me, don't let me die.”