By The Sea, Book Three: Laura (17 page)

****

"September 24, 1934. I love him to
distraction, and I know Neil sees it. He's not blind. We try to be
discreet, and yet Neil—and certainly Billy and probably Stubby—seem
quieter and more withdrawn, as if they would prefer to look the
other way but there is no place to do it. So they skulk about as if
they are the guilty ones, and we do our best not to touch one
another accidentally, or gaze into one another's eyes while we are
talking to someone else, and all the time we fail miserably at
it.

"Colin says we ought to behave naturally and
let the chips fall where they may; he has no idea how appalling the
notion is to me. He thinks it's better for Neil to find out sooner
rather than later. I tried to explain to him that Neil is just a
little boy, one who has been raised in an extremely sheltered
environment among a close-knit family. (Colin never knew his
parents and was raised by an aunt until he was sixteen; he can't
possibly understand.) He insists it is better for us to be in
control, explaining things in our own way, than for Neil to deduce
them with a boy's lurid imagination.

"I am so miserable about it, and yet I can't
give Colin up, any more than I can stop breathing. I would not be
writing this at all, except that I feel that it somehow legitimizes
what we cannot have in the eyes of the law or the church or even of
those immediately around us. I'll bury this book in Pineapple Cay;
it will be a memorial to a love that never should have begun but
which, once begun, can no more be stopped than a boat under full
sail driven by gale-force winds."

****

The next day the wind backed to the
northeast and began to blow in earnest. They'd been without sun for
days; Laura hadn't used her sextant for all that time. Colin
continued to mark precise little "x's" on their trail southward,
but Laura's marks looked a little less convinced than they had
before. The
Virginia
had been traveling at what Laura
considered a disgustingly efficient clip. Now they were moving at a
frightening clip. Steering was becoming tiring, and everyone's
trick at the wheel was shortened to an hour.

It was ten in the morning. Stubby was at the
wheel, Billy was in his berth, and Neil was trying, without much
success, to complete an exercise in multiplication: they had had to
clear him away from the table to make space for the chart.

"As near as we can make out, then, we'll be
making our landfall just before dawn? We'll raise San Salvador just
before dawn?" Laura's voice had lost a good deal of its confidence;
this was the first landfall of which she was in charge.

"Looks that way," said Colin, his voice
sounding reassuringly casual about it as he pored over the chart
with her.

Laura knew that he'd been responsible for
the safe delivery of a dozen different boats in his lifetime. But
the wind, beginning really to howl through the rigging, was getting
on her nerves. "The seas are running awfully high; we won't see the
light on the east side until it's too close for comfort."

As if to prove her point about the seas, the
Virginia
fell heavily off a wave, throwing Laura into
Colin's arms. "Oh, I'm so sorry," she said with elaborate
politeness, aware that her son was curled up in a cabin chair
nearby, waiting to reclaim the table.

"The lighthouse is on good elevation," Colin
answered, unperturbed.

"It may not be working; we can't rely on
it."

"I'm not planning to rely on it," he said
with some surprise at her anxiety. "It'll be dawn when we sight San
Salvador, and we'll make our way around to Pineapple Cay sometime
around noon. By the time we get to the west side of the Cay the sun
will be behind us; we should see the entrance in the reef easily.
We've been through all this, Laura. What's on your mind?" He looked
uncomfortable, as though he hated to question her in front of
Neil.

"I think we're farther to the southeast than
we think. The rotor on the taffrail log was clogged with seaweed,
after all. I think it's thrown off our calculations."

"We cut away the sargassum soon enough," he
argued.

"I don't think we did. I know the boat; it
seemed that we were going faster than the log was showing, for
quite a while. I think we're farther to the southeast," she
persisted.

"Well, then. What do you suggest,
captain?"

It was put to her with the utmost
politeness, and it sickened her; it signaled a withdrawal, and she
needed him more than ever now. She tried to catch his eye, but he
was bent steadfastly over the chart, studying the island that had
brought a cry of
"Tierra, tierra!"
from the lips of
Christopher Columbus in 1492.

"I think we should drop the sails and
heave-to for the night," she said flatly. "It's the safe thing to
do."

"What! Just spin our wheels! If we heave-to,
we'll slide our schedule by half a day and end up raising San
Salvador tomorrow at dusk—just in time to pick our way around to
Pineapple Cay in the pitch black. That may be your idea of safe,
Laura, but it's not mine." The detachment had gone from his voice;
in its place was rising anger and something which to Laura sounded
like old-fashioned resistance to female authority.

But she wasn't sure about his bearings. He
might have been right, and she might have been wrong. She wasn't
sure.

He was sure. "At least—captain—may we wait
until tonight to make the decision to heave to? We're safe enough
until then. If we get within spitting distance of San Salvador in
broad daylight, I'm sure Neil will let us know, won't you,
mate?"

Neil, who had been dividing his attention
between his math tables and his elders, nodded uncertainly; he
wasn't sure the question was genuine.

No one spoke after that; the only sounds
were of the
Virginia,
gasping and creaking. She was getting
tired; it had been a long haul, longer than she had hauled in
years. She was beginning to relax her planks—the way a middle-aged
woman without a girdle will give up after a while and let her
stomach hang out—and the crew was pumping her at every change of
the watch.

Laura rubbed the edge of the cabin table
absently with her fingers.
Don't give up now, girl. Just a
little while longer.

She had a habit of communing with the
Virginia,
one she had picked up from Sam. It came almost as
an interruption to a conversation when Colin finally said, "If you
don't need anything more from me, Laura—"

She looked up absently, saw the burning look
in his eyes, blushed, and stammered, "I ... no ... I guess not."
She had not wanted there to be anything, ever, between them; and
now there was. It made her almost physically sick, as if someone
had cut them apart from each other with a butcher knife. But what
could she do? What could she say, while Neil was in the cabin?

"I think we should all try to rest as much
as we can," she said softly. "The next twenty-four hours are going
to be hard."

She threw Colin a look of abject misery. His
eyes, which had made Laura whisper,
"Vive la France,"
as he
brought her to a climax last night, softened and he said, "I
agree." Still holding her with a look of molten intimacy, he said
to Neil, "Put away your math tables, mate. Today you get a lesson
in life instead."

"I know all about life," Neil muttered
petulantly. "What I don't know is how much is eight times seven."
He slid off his chair and made his way past them to the narrow
passageway that joined the main cabin to the forecastle.

"He'll never forgive me," Laura mourned as
he left their view.

Colin slipped one arm around her waist from
behind and kissed the curve of her neck. "He doesn't know. And
anyway, boys always forgive their mothers," he murmured. "I forgave
mine."

"Forgave her—for what?" she asked,
surprised. "You never knew her."

"Exactly." He buried his face in her hair
and breathed in the scent of her. "I adore you, Laura. Don't ever
leave me."

****

The
Virginia
roared on, occasionally
staggering under her load in the steep, following seas like a
drunken thing. As the afternoon wore on, the crew wore out. A mere
half hour at the wheel became a wet, grueling exercise in strength
and coordination. Worse, it left each crew member only an hour and
a half before the next trick in which to rest and complete his
chores. It seemed to Laura that no sooner had she peeled away her
wet foul-weather gear than she was putting it all back on again.
And still the
Virginia
careened on her way, hell-bent for
San Salvador and Pineapple Cay, while her crew got thrown around
like loose cargo.

"We can't go on. I can't go on. We must
heave-to," Laura said tiredly to Colin as they passed one another
on their way to and from the cursed steering wheel. "If we have to,
we'll just stay hove-to for the next two nights—for the next two
weeks; I don't care. What's our rush? We'll have a picnic."

Colin took her by her shoulders and studied
her face with alarm. "You're punchy. I should have realized you
weren't up to this. Stay below. We'll take care of heaving-to."

She closed her eyes in a sigh of relief.
"Thank you, sir." But immediately she forced herself to rally. "No.
It's my boat. We'll all do it. But I want Neil out of the way. Is
he below?"

"I saw him crawling forward a little while
ago." Colin tied his Gloucester hat under his chin and grinned.
"That kid certainly understands where his center of gravity
is."

"The motion must be horrible in the
forecastle. Maybe I should—"

"He'll be fine. You worry too much. You
don't want a mama's boy on your hands, do you?" he asked, sounding
very much like Sam, very much like a man.

It was still early afternoon, but the sky
had a mean look to it: gray and sullen. The rollers were higher
now; the wind was blowing the surface of the sea into spindrift. On
deck Laura braced herself against the cabin and watched the
Virginia's
stern lift, lift, and lift some more as Stubby
lined up the boat's quarter to take the brunt of the curling wave,
which broke underneath and moved harmlessly away, another in an
endless procession of mounting crests. Stubby, dauntless ex-truck
driver, called out a cheerful greeting and spun the wheel over to
the other side.

To Laura his serene ignorance of the danger
around him was a source of wonder. He did not see, apparently, that
unlike a highway, here there were no scenic overlooks, no quiet
shoulders to pull over and rest on, no all-night diners in which to
grab a cup of coffee before hitting the road again. No: on the
ocean, the road hit
you
—again and again and again—and if
your ship was strong enough, and you were strong enough, you lived
to talk about it. Undoubtedly Stubby was strong enough.

She took the wheel from him. "We're
heaving-to, Stubbs," she said loudly over the wind. "Stay close to
Colin and do what he says. Consider this as a kind of pit-stop,"
she added with a brave laugh.

It was not until Laura headed the
Virginia
up into the wind for them to drop the sails that
she realized its full fury. Her hat blew off her head and skipped
along the deck like a leaf across a lawn; the wind drove salt spray
hard into her face, stinging her eyes and making it impossible to
see ahead. She felt suddenly demoralized and isolated from the men
who were struggling to hold their footing in the lift and plunge of
the boat as they brought down the main and foresails and lashed
them fast. It took five times longer to get them down; five times
longer to set the small scrap of a storm-jib.

It seemed to Laura that there was something
personal in the wind's fury, that it had a special grievance
against her. She had seen bad weather before, and she knew the
Virginia
was up to it, but she had never before felt such an
element of
passion
—she could think of no other word for
it—in a storm such as the one they were in.

When at last they all went down below,
dripping and rather stupid-faced from their efforts, Neil was
waiting to take their jackets. Laura realized that they had not
been all together in the saloon cabin since the day they'd left New
London. They shed their gear rather awkwardly, as if they'd been
thrown together from different social strata into a cocktail party.
The reason for their diffidence was obvious: even now Colin was
being hopelessly, irresistibly indiscreet by lifting what was left
of Laura's soggy braid and letting it fall with a plop across her
back. It could have been nothing, a friendly gesture, but when two
people were suspected lovers ….

"Well! Here we all are," she said with a
brightness she did not feel. "The motion is so much better now,
isn't it?"

They looked around them, trying to gauge
whether it was or not. The smiles came gradually, starting with
Colin: it really was quieter below, as if someone had stopped
rocking a cradle wildly back and forth while banging on it with a
wooden spoon. The
Virginia
was a hobbyhorse now, bobbing
gently in the big swells.

"Can you hear that?" asked Stubby,
awestruck. "The
Ginny
has finally stopped her bitchin' and
moanin'. Finally I can hear m'self think."

Billy grinned and gave his friend a shove.
"We'd have to be in a
tomb
for that."

Just then a wave slammed hard against the
hull, sending all of them tumbling into one another. By the time
they'd unscrambled themselves, the boat was back to hobbyhorsing
quietly. Laura looked from Neil's apprehensive face to Billy's,
then smiled and said, "Nobody said the system is perfect. After
all, the boat is steering herself. But I'll tell you what: we
deserve a special treat for this. Will it be honey cakes or tapioca
pudding?"