The Main Cages Page 13

  Three times a week that season the Petrels’ cream sails had lined up off the quays for the start. Their dart-thin hulls appeared to fly above the water. Two new additions to the fleet had taken their number to eight. For the regatta they had been joined by four more from Porth. But the two to watch, as always, were Harmony and Grace. Ralph Cameron usually won in Harmony, at least when he could persuade Charlie Treneer to crew for him. For Grace, Lawrence Rose had a regular crew in Red Stephens.

  That summer, for the first time, the Stephens brothers found they earned more from sailing than fishing. Their lugger remained unused while they pulled on the guernsey sweaters they had been given for racing – Red Stephens’s was embroidered with Grace. Joe’s had the name of the Dane Soren’s Charity. Parliament Bench nicknamed them ‘the angels’.

  The twelve boats sailed back and forth along the starting line. Short little white-caps spotted the bay. At three forty-five exactly, a puff of grey smoke rose from the quays and the Petrels fell in beside each other to cross the line. The spectators cheered. They watched the boats beat out to the mark off Pendhu, then bunch up for the run up to the lifeboat station.

  On the first round, Harmony had a minute over Grace; by the time she took the final gun she was five minutes ahead. Ralph Cameron rowed into the inner harbour and was greeted with applause.

  ‘Harmony!’

  He sauntered up the steps, flashed his airman’s smile and clapped a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. ‘All down to my crew!’

  Charlie grinned shyly. He took his winnings straight to the Fountain Inn. Visitors and locals alike congratulated him. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’ Half an hour later, he was bellowing out that he would never sail again. ‘Rather drink my own piss than go yachtin’! Bloody pansies’ game!’

  To raise funds, Coxswain Tyler assembled those of his crew who had been on the Constantine rescue and brought the Kenneth Lee in through the Gaps. Croyden had fished his brother Charlie out of the Fountain. On board, he and Jack stood on each side of Charlie to stop him falling over.

  A steady flow of people passed the gauntlet of rattling collection tins to see the boat. They were curious, hushed, admiring. They stood on the quay and looked down at the blue-and-orange hull and said to each other how small she looked. The lifeboatmen stood on board like fattened geese, roasting inside their lifejackets and sou’westers.

  A group of boys came aboard. Tyler showed them into the shelter. They looked at the engine, the flares, the axe. They went forward, whispering to each other. When one asked a question about the Constantine, they all did.

  ‘Sir – did the ship have a hundred sails?’

  ‘Was it a bad storm?’

  ‘Were the waves this tall?’

  ‘Sir, sir – did you have to swim?’

  ‘Only him!’ Charlie Treneer pointed at Jack. His face was glaring and shiny with sweat. ‘Only ’ee took a swim! Him and the bloody Captain!’

  ‘Did you fall off?’

  ‘Was the Captain in the water?’

  ‘How did you get him back in?’

  Jack took a warp and said: ‘Look.’ He wrapped the rope around one of the boys’ waists and with his eyes closed did a Spanish bowline. ‘Like that!’

  ‘And me! And me!’ shouted the others.

  The carnival was next. Croyden and Jack and Charlie hurried back from the lifeboat station to join the parade at the Antalya. In the field behind the hotel, between the frames of two half-built villas, the Walking Class had just begun to file out into the square. Leading it was the Emperor of China (Brian Walsh – First Prize). He was followed by OK But not Saucy (Sue King – Second Prize). There was a spindly, tea-stained Gandhi behind her, and a Bottle of Pop, Miner and Bad Girl, Drink More Milk, Cinema Litter, Russian Peasant, and Scarecrow.

  The square was filling. The floats were lining up in reverse order in the field. From the upper windows of the Antalya, guests leaned out to watch. Jack and Croyden stood by the harbour wall. Charlie was slumped between them, murmuring drunkenly: ‘Get ’em away … they got breeches ’n tags ’n all …’

  At that moment Jack spotted Anna on the far side of the parade. When she saw him, she put a hand to her mouth in mock horror. ‘What is this?’ she mouthed, pointing at her chin. As the Walking Class ended, he crossed the road towards her.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘A few weeks on the sea and you come back looking like a mad pirate!’

  ‘As bad as that?’

  ‘Maybe not mad –’

  ‘I can’t see!’ shouted a woman and Jack stood aside.

  The floats were passing in front of them. Speed featured a number of Stephenses as a train, a motor car, and a boy whom Jack thought was a downhill skier but Anna said was definitely a ‘parachuter’. Cornish Desert took third prize with its cart-mounted desert (sand from the beach, palm fronds from the churchyard and four miniature wooden camels plundered from the Christmas crib). Several people in rags stumbled beside it, raising empty water bottles to their lips, hissing: ‘Water … water …’

  ‘There’s the Treneers!’ said Jack.

  They had won second prize. On the side of the float was written ‘DEPRESSION FROM ICELAND’. Croyden’s three eldest girls, with two of Charlie’s children and a number of other Treneers, were all whooshing as the West Wind in their grey-stained shrouds. In their midst was Betty. As well as her yellow dress she wore a yellow cardboard ruff, and she was waving her arms in a very convincing way. She enjoyed being the sun and waving her yellow arms as the cart rolled forward and everyone looked up at her and clapped. But she didn’t like all the bigger children standing around her making whooshing noises. They too enjoyed the crowd and whooshed with more and more vigour until at last the sun sank and its rays dropped, and it was just visible between the legs of the wind and beneath their shrouds, lying on the bottom of the cart and wailing.

  First prize in that year’s carnival was taken by outsiders. From the field beside the hotel, pulled by the rectory donkey Job, came King Constantine and his Women. Around the cart were members of the Constantine’s crew. They were wearing sack-cloth skirts, high heels, wigs and strings of limpet shells around their necks. They sang Finnish drinking songs. They winked, they flirted, they blew kisses at the crowd. On the cart above them, sitting on a makeshift throne and wearing a cardboard crown, with an orange for an orb and a belaying pin for a sceptre, was Captain Henriksen.

  The crowd fell in behind to follow the float and Jack and Anna joined them. Captain Henriksen waved sadly at the people. He clutched his orange, his belaying pin rested on his chest, and the sadder he looked and the more his women hammed it up, the more everyone cheered. By the end the burden of state had lifted from the Captain and even he was smiling.

  At the quays the floats assembled and lingered for some minutes. As they dispersed so the St Blazey Silver Prize Band took over with the Floral Dance. The shuffling mass of people began to quicken and spin. Up towards the Golden Sands Hotel, the band turned back and Jack and Anna slipped away and made their own way up towards the lifeboat station.

  The last of the sun glowed on the back of Pendhu Point. They sat on the cliff while the sound of the band faded into the distance. The water below them was dark and evening-calm. Anna leaned back against Jack and said, ‘How long are you here this time?’

  ‘We go back tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s a tramp life, your fishing!’

  He leaned forward and kissed her neck. ‘We’ll have lots of time soon,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Ow!’ She sat up and pinched his beard. ‘This – he must go!’

  ‘He will go.’ Jack pulled her to him again. He undid the top buttons of her cotton dress, assuring her with each one, ‘He will go, he will go …’

  His hand slid up her thigh and she settled back onto the grass. Afterwards they lay close together on their backs and slept and it was the cold that woke them and Jack put his coat around her shoulder. She pressed her head against his chest and look
ed up. The sky was clear.

  ‘Look at the stars. Like sand.’

  They lay in silence for a long time and she said quietly, ‘What will happen, Jack, what is going to happen to us?’

  ‘We will go to sea and live a tramp life and never go to the same place twice.’

  She did not reply and as he held her he felt her shoulders start to shake. ‘What is going to happen?’ she said through her tears. ‘I don’t know, I just can’t see.’

  He could think of nothing to say. He held her more tightly. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he told her. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  When he woke again it was dawn. His coat lay across his chest. Pendhu Point was a pale smudge in the distance and he turned over and Anna had gone.

  He rowed up to Ferryman’s in the mid-morning. She was sitting outside, half asleep in a wide-brimmed hat, and she opened one eye when she saw him. ‘Hello, you.’

  ‘Bad news,’ said Jack.

  ‘What?’ she sat up quickly. ‘What is it, Jack?’

  He smiled. ‘Poor old Croyden’s gone down with the Reeds. We’re going to have to stay in Polmayne until he gets better.’

  CHAPTER 20

  In years to come Anna would think of those borrowed mid-August days as the happiest of her life. She forgot the strange shadow that hovered over them, the stabbing anxieties and doubts, the future that she seemed unable to project, the pain of her wasted marriage, the horror she now felt for her life in Hampstead and the uncertainty of a world that was suggesting itself here in Polmayne. Instead she recalled only the sunny half-week that began that Sunday morning on the bar outside Ferryman’s Cottage when she sat Jack in a chair, put a towel over his shoulder and started to snip off the ugly black growth that covered his chin. The hair fell in dark curls around the chair. It dropped inside his shirt and he scratched at it while she cut, until he threw off the towel and ran into the water. He dunked his head and then stood there half-submerged and half-shorn. ‘Let me finish it – please!’

  She remembered the nights in the room beneath the rafters and the moon in the curtainlesss windows and the pale light on his rising-and-falling chest. She remembered him on Ferryman’s beach leaning against his dinghy, eating redcurrants from a jug, and standing in the kitchen talking of the beauty of certain nights at sea. She saw him at the table outside, the ground spread with coils of hemp rope, the slate heaped with off-cuts while he spliced a rope hand-rail for the stairs.

  It was a week of very big tides. At midday, they were able to wade across the river and picnic in the woods and before the flood Jack collected lug-worms and then fished for gilt-head bream as the tide rose to its height. In the evening the water was at its warmest and they swam and each day the tide was higher and they watched it seep into the grass, towards the home-made slate oven where Jack cooked the fish.

  So the time passed. They rowed, they walked, they slept late and each morning found the dew a little thicker on the thwarts of Jack’s boat; each evening the dusk came a little earlier. Across the river, Ivor Dawkins started harvesting the top fields.

  On Wednesday, Jack rowed into town. He climbed the hill to Rope Walk and found Croyden feeding his pigs. He was better. They would leave for Newlyn in the morning. ‘Expect you’re keen to get back to sea,’ said Croyden – half teasing, half accusing.

  When Jack rowed up to Ferryman’s again he brought with him Whaler’s sea-chest. ‘Have it,’ Mrs Cuffe had told him. ‘Save me burning it.’ It was made of age-blackened mahogany. Jack had already replaced its becket handles but the varnish was badly chipped. On its lid was a lozenge of crude paintwork, done by Whaler himself, and showing, as far as Jack could see, a scene on a tropical beach. Palm trees curved out over a group of three dark men selling to some sailors an animal which looked like a giraffe but may have been a horse.

  Anna said she would touch it up and paint the sides. She bent close to look at the scene. ‘What is it, Jack, this? Is he a tortoise?’

  That afternoon they crossed the Glaze River and walked over to Pendhu and down the cliff to Hemlock Cove. The sea was a deep blue, the sand pale and smooth. They swam out beyond the wave-line and then came in and lay on the rocks.

  ‘When will you be back again?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Two, three weeks. Depends on the fish. You’ll be gone?’

  ‘No.’ She made up her mind in that moment. ‘I’ll be here.’

  Beyond the arms of the cove the long seas broke white against the side of Maenmor. They rose high up its sides before dragging back, to leave the oarweed limp and glistening in the sun.

  ‘Close your eyes!’ Jack said suddenly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll show you something.’

  He took her hand and led her over the rocks. She had difficulty treading blind and in bare feet.

  ‘Jack!’ she laughed. ‘Let me see!’

  ‘Wait – right foot there. Now your left foot.’ He guided her step by step around the point, then held her by the shoulders.

  ‘Open!’

  They were in another cove. Here there was no beach and no sand, just boulders at the foot of the cliffs. The seas hissed in among them. Dominating the cove were the masts and rigging of the Constantine.

  Anna stared at it for some moments before whispering, ‘It’s horrid.’ She turned her head, then hurried back to Hemlock Cove. Jack caught up with her on the sand.

  ‘Why did you have to show me that? Why?’

  It was spring tides that week, and they brought some strange things down the Glaze River. Into Polmayne Bay came the bloated carcase of a fox, a pair of torn red trousers, a hay-rake, two fish casks, a broken paddle, and an entire oak bough which caused the Petrels to delay the start of their Wednesday-evening race.

  Parson Hooper stood watching two punts drag the great log clear of the yachts. He was returning home from the Golden Sands Hotel where he had been involved in a most interesting discussion. The Frankses were there with their friend the Master and he was putting the case for the existence of a universal morality. Hooper had been quite dazzled by the range of his talk – from avatars to mathematics to German philosophers. Such a mind! He had spoken for a full hour. Hooper looked back at the town. Evening glowed on the sides of the houses. The tide had shrunk the quay walls, narrowed the new defences along the front, and suddenly he had the impression that it was not the tide rising but the town sinking. He broke into a sweat and for a moment felt quite dizzy.

  Fatigue, he told himself, just fatigue – and carried on towards the rectory.

  At seven-thirty Captain Henriksen came into the study and placed himself despondently in his leather chair.

  He made an exaggerated wave action with his hand. ‘Today, Rector, no launching. Too much waves.’

  ‘Don’t worry – there’s always tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, tomorrow and then one day but no more after. Last possible tides.’

  For two days the salvors had tried, and for two days the swell had prevented them. The tides had reached their peak and were now growing smaller again; with September coming it was unlikely the ship would survive until the next big tides.

  Thursday was the same. Parson Hooper suggested a game of chess but Henriksen said he was too tired for chess.

  ‘If you cannot save your ship, Captain, what will you do?’

  Henriksen folded his arms and sighed. ‘I don’t know. I was thinking today of that passage in the Apocryphal book of Esdras – “Come let us go and make war against the sea, that it may depart away before us, and that we may make more woods …” I suppose I will find a little house in a wood and never again look at the sea.’

  On the third day the wind held off. At three o’clock Captain Henriksen went to the wardrobe as he had every day that week and unhooked his lightweight sailing reefer. He attached his watch and chain, dusted off his braid cap, and took his cane from the umbrella stand. With Mrs Henriksen he walked to the ferry, crossed the Glaze River and walked slowly over the top.

  Three steam tug
s were manoeuvring just to seaward of the ship. One by one they dropped in and threw a line to their own men on board. With half an hour to go before high water, everything was in place. The tugs waited, the crowd on the clifftop waited. Fulmar cries echoed off the rocks, and the gentlest of seas ran along the ship’s rock-lodged hull.

  Fifteen minutes later, a smudge of black smoke rose from the tugs’ stacks and the lines whipped up out of the water. As the tugs pulled, a deep creaking noise came from the ship’s holds – and the crowd cheered. But there was no movement. The Captain sensed in his own bones the immense stubborn weight of his ship. He looked at the tugs and thought: this is impossible.

  They pulled again. The line tightened. The tugs strained. Everyone watched for the first sign of movement – but instead there was a sudden crack and one of the lines parted. The two frayed ends sprang back and a collective gasp rose from the crowd.

  Captain Henriksen checked his watch; high water had already passed. ‘These,’ he said to Mrs Henriksen, ‘are the last moments of our ship.’

  ‘Look – they are still trying.’

  It took them a quarter of an hour to secure another line. The tugs hurried back into position. For some time, there was only the sound of their engines. The water was beginning to ebb. Then the Constantine’s top-masts shivered once. A low groan came from somewhere deep inside the ship and suddenly she moved. The fulmars were startled. They left the cliffs and circled their nests. The ship moved a yard, before sticking fast. The tugs pulled again, and with a prolonged scraping that made Captain Henriksen wince, the Constantine was dragged over the reef and dropped, bobbing into the water.

  The crowd clapped and all at once everyone was congratulating Captain Henriksen. He stood with Mrs Henriksen and said, ‘Yes, yes. Very satisfactory. Thank you, thank you.’

  They brought the ship into the bay. A few days later, Captain Henriksen announced that they were ready to leave for Falmouth and an extensive programme of repairs. That evening there was something of a celebration at the rectory. Sixteen people – officers of the Constantine, members of the Mission and the Frankses – gathered in the dining room. Parson Hooper was persuaded to bring up a case of pre-war claret from his cellar. Mrs Henriksen had ordered a goose from Ivor Dawkins at Crowdy Farm.