Medusa

He wasn’t looking at me as I backed away from the water’s edge and drove off. He had turned his head towards the harbour entrance again and was standing there, quite still, staring towards the horizon with an intensity that left me with the odd feeling that he was expecting some visitation from the sea.

The road from Fornells enters the outskirts of Mahon at the opposite end to where we live, and instead of heading straight along the waterfront, past the Aduana, the Customs House, and the commercial wharf, I turned left and drove out on to the naval quay where the boats we had laid up out of the water were parked. I drove straight up to the elderly Hillyard we were working on and called up to Carp. The Danish owner, who had picked the boat up cheap in Palma the previous autumn, had phoned me just before Christmas and I had promised to have it ready in time for him to leave for a family cruise in the Greek islands at Easter. We had left it a little late, particularly as there was a new engine to be installed.

I called again as I started up the ladder and Carp’s tonsured head popped out of the wheelhouse. He was his usual gloomy self as he showed me another frame with its fastenings gone, also at least three deck beams that needed replacement. ‘Won’t ever finish in time, will we?’ he grumbled as he indicated one of the knees rotted where water had been seeping from the deck above. ‘And the engine still to be fiddled in, all the rigging. I’ll ‘ave to take Rod off of the American boat for that.’

I told him that was impossible. He already had Luis varnishing the brightwork. With Rodriguez, that would make two of our locals, as well as himself, working on the one boat. ‘Well,’ he said, looking me straight in the face, ‘d’you want ’er finished on time, or don’t you?’ And he added, ‘Up to you. I didn’t promise nothing.’

In the end I agreed, as he knew I would. And all the time we were talking I had the feeling there was something else on his mind. It wasn’t until I was leaving that he suddenly blurted it out — ‘That man outside the shop this morning — did you see him? A little red car. He was there just as I left. Did he come into the shop?’

I was on the ladder then, beginning to climb down, my face almost level with the deck. ‘Yes. I sold him a couple of charts.’

‘Did he say who he was?’ I told him the man’s name and he nodded. ‘Thort so. He must have recognised me, but he didn’t want to know me, did he, so I thort I was mistaken.’ He leaned out towards me. ‘If it wasn’t for me that man would’ve died of cold. Well, not just me. There was four of us in the pilot boat, see, but it was me wot cut him down off the Woodbridge Haven buoy. Did he give you any sort of rank?’

‘No,’ I said, curious now and climbing back up the ladder.

‘Mebbe he hasn’t got one now. There was a lot of talk at the time.’

‘About what?’

‘Well, it was an arms run, wasn’t it, and he was a Navy lieutenant.’ And then he was telling me the whole story, how the Deben pilot at Felixstowe Ferry had seen something odd fixed to the Haven buoy and the four of them had gone out in the dawn to find a man fully clothed and tied to the side of the buoy with a mooring line. ‘Poor bastard. We thort he were dead. Cold as buggery off the bar it was, the wind out of the north and beginning to whip up quite a sea. Then later, when he’s out of hospital, he comes and buys us all a pint or two in the Ferryboat, so he knows bloody well I was one of those that rescued him. Funny!’ he said. ‘I mean, you’d think he’d come and say hullo, wouldn’t you? I’d seen ‘im before, too. When he were a little runt of a fella living with a no-good couple and their son on an old ‘ouseboat in a mud creek back of the Ferryboat, an’ I wasn’t the only one that recognised him. That’s what started tongues wagging.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, you bin there, when you was looking for a boat that spring. You know wot it’s like there, an’ a couple of kids, no proper man to control them. They broke into a yacht moored back of the Horse Sand and got at the drink locker. No harm done, but later they had a go at the RAF mess over at Bawdsey — for a lark they said. People remember that sort of thing.’

I didn’t see what he was getting at. ‘What’s that got to do with arms-running?’ I asked. ‘You said something about arms-running.’