Trustee From the Toolroom (2 page)

Jo shook her head. 'We don't need anybody,' she said. 'John and I can sail her by ourselves.'

Katie was perplexed. ' But what happens at night, when you want to go to bed ? I mean, do you anchor or something?' A sudden doubt assailed her. 'You have
got
beds, haven't you?'

'We've got very good beds,' said Jo. 'I sleep marvellously on board. No, we couldn't anchor. It's too deep. Sometimes we can let her sail herself while we both sleep.' She tried to make the matter simple, but it was rather difficult. ' She'll do that with the wind forward of the beam, or running under the twin spinnakers. Otherwise we keep watch and watch - one up in the cockpit steering and the other one down below sleeping.' She smiled. 'It's quite all right. We're very used to it.'

'You wouldn't be sailing all the way, though, would you?' Katie asked. 'Keith was saving you could go some of the way with the motor.'

Joanna shook her head. 'We shall sail all the way,' she replied, 'except perhaps just getting in and out of harbour. We have got a small motor, but we don't use it at sea. It's only a little one, and it's dirty, and it makes a smell.' She paused, and then she said, 'John's such a seaman.'

Presently Katie reverted to her own problems. ' It's just the holidays,' she said thoughtfully.' School time - well, I'm back in the house by a quarter to six, always. School finishes at four so she'd be back here by a quarter past, but Keith is almost always here then, unless it's a Friday. It's really just the holidays.'

'The Christmas holidays,' Jo said. 'We don't sail till the first of August. I'm going to take her up to the Dungannons in Tyrone next week. I think school starts — Miss Pearson's school, here - I think she said term starts on September I5th. That means she'd be coming to you about the I3th, I suppose. I think you'll have to meet her at Euston, but I'll make sure that the Dungannons let you know.'

Katie nodded. 'Keith would meet the tram and bring her down here. He'd like doing that.'

'I think we'll be sending for her about February,' said Jo. 'We should be there by then, and if we haven't got a house she can live on the boat with us. But anyway, I'll be writing to you from each place. It's just the Christmas holidays.'

Katie said, ' Of course, Keith is in the house most of the time, down in the workshop. They're not very long, the Christmas holidays.'

'I don't want her to be a burden on you and Keith.' -She won't be that — honestly she won't.' Katie paused. .'.'I think it would be nice to have children's parties, and crackers, and presents, and all that.'

'Joanna eyed her uncertainly, wondering how far she meant it. 'I'm sure Margaret would have her.'

'Do whatever you think would be best
for
her,' said Katie. 'But don't do it. for us. Keith's always wanted to have kids about the place. I mean, with a great big garden,

In the room below Keith turned off the gas at the two cylinders, hung the torch up on its hook, took the copper box to a sink in one corner of the room, and scrubbed the brazing with water and a wire brush. He dried it on a dirty towel, and examined the seam carefully, inch by inch. Then he handed it to his brother-in-law. ' She's tight now,' he said briefly.

John Dermott took it from him. ' No chance of seawater getting into it? Corrosion?'

'Not in a hundred years.' He paused. 'When you want to open it, just cut the top off with a hacksaw - round here.'

The naval officer hesitated. 'I'm going to set it in concrete,' he said diffidently. Keith stared at him, surprised; he had thought the box was to go into the yacht. 'Do you know how to mix it?'

'I know how to mix concrete,' the mechanic said. 'You mix it in different proportions, depending on what it's for -what its got to hang on to. How much would you want ? '

The naval officer hesitated, and then indicated the box upon the bench before them. 'About as much as that, or a bit more.'

Keith frowned; this was getting difficult. ' I should grease it before setting it in concrete,' he suggested, trying to be helpful without knowing the job. ' Come out easier when you want it out.'

'I see.' The naval officer hesitated, irresolute; he had never had to do this sort of work before and he wanted a good job made of it. 'You wouldn't like to come down to the boat and do it for me?'

'Down to Hamble?' John Dermott nodded. 'When?'

' We're going down tomorrow, in the car. Would it take long?'

'If it's,a straight job it might take about an hour,' Keith said. 'Then you ought to leave it for a while to set - two or three days. .I could come tomorrow, but I'd have to be back tomorrow night.' His eyes strayed to a corner. 'I've got half a bag of cement there, but I'd have to slip up to the builder for some sand. Got some aggregate down there?'

'What's that?'

'Little clean stones - just a few pounds. Not salty -washed in freshwater.'

'There's plenty on the beach. We could wash them under the hose, couldn't we?'

Keith nodded. ' Doesn't matter if they're wet.'

They left it so, and turned to go upstairs. The naval officer paused by the littered desk with the drawing board beside it. 'This where,you do your stuff?'

Keith nodded. ' I used to do it up in the parlour, but it's better down here. You'd be surprised at the number of letters that there are - all over the auction. I save the foreign stamps and give them to the boy next door -Jamesie Morris, he collects them. Six or seven in a day, some days. You'd be surprised."

John Dermott opened his eyes.' How many letters do you have to write - say, in a week ?'

'Twenty or twenty-five,' the mechanic said. 'It's letters all the time, and then there's the articles each week. I spend more time writing than I do working.' He paused, and added a little resentfully,' It's fifteen bob a week for stamps - more, sometimes. Of course, one has to do it. Some of them send international reply coupons, though.'

'Do a lot of them come from foreign countries, then?'

'About a third.'

John Dermott went back to the bench and picked up the copper box. ' I'll take this along with me,' he said. He hesitated. 'You'll keep this under your hat?' he inquired diffidently. 'I mean, it's quite all right. They're just Jo's rings and bracelets and things - they're all her own property. But the regulations are so stupid about taking things like that out of England, and she'd be miserable without them. I mean, a woman sort of values her little bits and pieces when she's away in a strange country. And we may be away for years.'

Keith said, 'Oh, that's all right. I shan't talk about it.' He paused, and then he asked, 'You're going to live out there?'

' I think so - if we like it. Jo says she wants to live in Tahiti, but I don't go much on that, myself. It's French, ; and it's a very little place, you know.^Still, she wants to see it. I think we'll probably end up in British Columbia - it's a grand country, that. I'd like to bay a house in Victoria, on Vancouver Island.'

Keith nodded. He had only the vaguest idea where Vancouver Island was, but it was the sort of place that people like his brother-in-law who sailed about the world in little yachts would want to go to. 'Suppose I tell Katie that I'm going down to rig up an electric light over the compass, so you can see it at night?' he suggested.

John Dermott smiled. 'That's just the thing.'

They went up the narrow wooden basement stairs to the main floor and Keith went to wash the grime off his hands. When he rejoined them in the parlour his sister and her husband were standing, ready to leave, having pleaded a somewhat formalized dinner engagement to Katie. He , did not press them to stay for tea, because he had learned long ago that they pursued different meal habits. Katie and Keith had their main meal in the middle of the day. Their evening meal was high tea at six o'clock when Katie got back from work, a meal ,of perhaps a kipper, bread and jam, and a piece of plum cake, washed down with tea. They knew that Jo and John ate differently at eight o'clock, favouring perhaps potted shrimps followed by soup, a grilled steak, and mushrooms on toast, the meal preceded by a couple of gifts and followed by coffee. The couples got on well together, but they had long ago accepted differences springing from their ways of life.

Jo and John Dermott called for Keith at about nine o'clock next morning, driving their vintage sports Bentley open four-seater, nearly thirty years old and with many prosecutions for noise and speeding to its credit. They loved it very dearly. Katie had already left for work, so she did not see the two small sacks that Keith put into the back compartment beside him, or she might have wondered why a small electric light required cement and sand. It was a warm summer morning in late July, and Keith enjoyed the drive through southern England. They got to Hamble on the creek that runs into the east side of Southampton Water, parked the car near the entrance to Luke's Yard, and carried the sacks out on to the long wooden walkways above the tidal mud, the yachts moored bows-on in tiers. Presently they came to the Dermotts' ship,
Shearwater IV.

Shearwater
was a healthy looking, modern Bermudan cutter about twenty-eight feet on the waterline and nine feet beam. On deck she was practical and well equipped for deepsea cruising, the dinghy stowed upside down over the cabin skylight between the mast and the aft hatch, the twin spinnaker booms in chocks beside it. She had roller reefing to the mainsail and a very short bowsprit no more than four feet long for the jibstay. -Aft, she had a self-draining cockpit well protected by the vertical extensions of the cabin top, and a sail locker in her canoe stern. Below, she was conventional in her arrangement. A roomy forecastle served mainly as a sail store. Aft of that there was a washroom and toilet to starboard, a galley and pantry to port. Aft again came the saloon with the settees on each side and a table in the middle; a small chart table was arranged against the forward bulkhead. Aft again there were two quarter berths, the companion ladder leading up on deck, and a small petrol motor underneath this ladder, rather inaccessible.
Shearwater
was such a yacht as is to be found by the hundred cruising the south coast of England, though rather better equipped than most.

John Dermott led Keith, down, below. The linoleum on the deck of the galley and the washroom had been taken up, and the floorboards lifted. What was exposed to view was a smooth level floor of concrete into which the frames disappeared and in which the mast was stepped. About two feet behind the mast step was a fairly deep, rectangular recess in the concrete, large enough to hold the copper box that Dermott carried, and about two inches deeper.

'That's the place,' he said. 'That's where I want to put it.'

Keith wrinkled his brows. ' What's all this concrete doing here?'

'Internal ballast,' said the naval officer. 'They often do it like this. Pour it in when she's building, and bury pig iron or any old scrap iron in it. She'd be too lively with all the ballast on the keel. She's got about three tons of lead outside, as well.'

'I never knew that,' said the mechanic. 'What's this hole been left here for, then ?'

' I don't really know. She's got another like it at the stern, but that's used for a sump; the bilge pump suction goes down into it. Perhaps .they thought she'd want another sump up here. I don't know. She never makes any water, anyway.'

Keith knelt down and fingered the concrete hole. ' It's a bit oily,' he remarked. ' I think I'll chip it a bit first - clean it up and make a sort of rebate, so it'll hold.' He fetched his toolbag, and set to work with hammer and cold chisel.

Half an hour later he was mixing a little concrete of cement, fine stones and sand. He made a bed of it at the bottom of the hole, greased the copper box, and set it carefully in the middle. Then he filled in the spaces round it with the wet mixture, working it carefully into the corners and the newly cut recesses. 'Look your last on it,' he said, and covered it over with a smooth layer of the mix, patting it, working it with a little builder's trowel, taking up the surplus, till it was smooth and level with the original concrete floor, only the darker wetness of the new material showing the difference. He gathered his tools and the remainder of the mix in newspaper, cleaned up the mess, and got up from his knees a little stiffly. 'I'd leave the floorboards up for a day or so, till it's set hard,' he said. 'It'll take a week to harden properly, but you can put the boards back.'

His sister asked, 'What do we do when we want to get it out, Keith?'

'Just cut around the edge with a cold chisel and a hammer, like this,' he said. ' You'll probably be able to see where the concrete's a bit different, but even if you can't, it'll sound hollow when you tap it with a hammer. The top layer of concrete'll come off easy enough, because it's only an inch or so thick. Then when you can see the box you'll have to cut around with the chisel till you can get it out. You won't have any trouble.'

He stayed for a cold lunch with them on board, and while the meal was in preparation he examined the ship, a short, white-faced, plump little man completely out of his element. He knew nothing of yachts and the sea. She seemed to him to be cosy enough downstairs, though a bit cramped; upstairs he was confused by the complexity of her and by the unfamiliar materials, the sisal, nylon, flax, cotton, hemp, and teak. He was unfamiliar with the sea
^v
and did not like it much; it was a place that made you cold and wet and sick. His brother-in-law was a sensible man in most ways though not in matters technical, and he liked the sea, so there must be something in it for some people, though not for him. They had asked him once or twice to go down with Katie for a weekend on the yacht in the Solent, but he had always made excuses, and they had not pressed the pbint. The Stewarts had their way of life, and the Dermotts had theirs.