Sea Lord Read online

  Slowly, not certain if that was what she really wanted, I lifted the oxygen mask away. The paroxysm of coughing had left flecks of blood on my mother’s lips, while the plump rubber mask had printed a red mark on her white cheeks. Her eyes, against her skin’s chalky paleness, seemed very dark and glinting as she stared up at me.

  “Hello, Mother,” I said again. She tried to say something in reply, but the effort threatened to turn into another racking cough. “It’s all right,” I said soothingly, “you don’t have to speak.” I moved the oxygen mask towards her mouth, but she shook her head, then closed her eyes as though she was concentrating on preventing another coughing fit. It took an immense effort of will, but she succeeded and, instead of coughing again, she opened her eyes and looked straight up into my face.

  “You bastard,” she said.

  Then she began to cough again, and no amount of oxygen could help this time and, though I pressed the emergency call button, and though nurses and doctors thrust me aside to bring her relief, there was nothing anyone could do. Within twenty minutes of my arrival at her bedside, my mother was dead.

  When it was all over a young doctor joined me in the corridor. He wanted to know if I was a relative and, though I said I was, I did not say I was the dead woman’s son. “I’m just a distant relation,” I said instead.

  “She smoked too much,” the doctor said hopelessly.

  “I know.” I guiltily fingered the pipe in my oilskin pocket. I kept meaning to give up smoking. I’d succeeded once, but only because I’d run out of tobacco a thousand miles out of Auckland. After three weeks I’d been experimenting with sun-dried seaweed which tasted foul, but was better than abstinence. I dragged my attention back to the doctor.

  “She was very keen to see her son.” The doctor peered dubiously at my gaudy oilskin jacket. “He’s supposed to be at sea, isn’t he?”

  “I think so,” I said unhelpfully.

  The doctor looked like a man who’d just sailed through a force twelve storm, but he was gallantly fighting the weariness in an effort to be kind. “She received the last rites yesterday,” he told me, “and it seemed to calm her.”

  “I’m sure it did.”

  The doctor stifled a yawn. “Would you like to meet the hospital chaplain? Sometimes, after a death, it can be helpful.”

  “I wasn’t that close a relative,” I said defensively.

  “So I suppose we should telephone the eldest daughter about the arrangements?”

  “That would be best,” I said, “much the best.” Two men pushed a trolley into the ward. I didn’t want to see the shrouded body wheeled away, so I walked back to the Devon rain.

  You’re supposed to feel something, I thought. You’re not supposed to see your mother die and feel nothing. At the very least you’re supposed to weep. My God, but a mother’s flawed love and a son’s reluctant duty should add up to one miserable tear, but I could find no appropriate response. I could feel neither joy nor sorrow nor surprise nor anything. All I felt was an irritation for a wasted trip, and an aggravation that I was forced to wait two hours in the rain for a bus back to Salcombe.

  Once back at the harbour I phoned Charlie’s house, but there was no answer. So I rowed myself out to Sunflower and spliced a new rope-tail on to the staysail’s wire halliard.

  I’d come home and I’d felt nothing. Not even a tear.

  Five days later, at ten o’clock in the morning, the family assembled at Stowey.

  Stowey was the family home. Pevsner, in one of his books, called it ‘perhaps the finest late mediaeval dwelling house in England’, which really meant that the family had been too poor to trick it out with eighteenth-century gallimaufry or nineteenth-century gingerbread. Yet, in all truth, Stowey is pretty. It’s a low stone building, just two storeys high, with a battlemented tower at the east end. Halfway through building the house there came the happy realisation that Devon was at peace, so the western wing was left unfortified. Instead it was given cosy mullioned windows which now look out on gardens that bring hundreds of visitors each summer weekend. Today Stowey is a country house hotel, but it was part of the sale agreement that my mother’s funeral party could gather in the old state rooms, and that the funeral service could be held in Stowey’s chapel. The chapel was no longer consecrated, but the hotel had kept it unchanged and the local priest was happy to indulge my mother’s wish. She was to be buried in the family’s vault beneath the chapel, perhaps the last of the family to be so interred, for I could not imagine the hotel’s owners wanting any more such macabre ceremonies. Indeed, they only endured this funeral because they had no legal alternative, but I noted the distaste with which they received the scattered and decaying remnants of the Rossendale family.

  That family received me with an equal distaste. “I’m surprised to see you here, John,” one of my least decrepit uncles said.

  “Why?”

  “Well, you know.”

  “No, I don’t,” I challenged him.

  He backed down, muttering something about the weather being dreadful and how it always seemed to rain when a Rossendale was buried. “It rained on Frederick,” he said, “and on poor Michael.” Frederick had been my father, Michael my elder brother. He was always ‘poor Michael’ to the family; he’d blown his brains out with two barrels of number six shot and the Rossendales had been lumbered with me instead. My brother Michael had been a dull, worried man, hiding his chronic indecisions behind a bad-tempered mask, but ever since his death he had been something of a hero to the family, perhaps because they preferred him to me. If only Michael had lived, they seemed to be saying with their reproachful glances, none of this unhappiness would have happened.

  One member of the family was glad to see me. That was my younger sister who smiled with innocent joy as I walked towards her chair. “Johnny?” She held both hands towards me in delighted greeting. “Johnny!”

  “Hello, my darling.” I held Georgina’s hands and bent to kiss her cheeks.

  She smiled happily into my face. This had to be one of her good days, for she had recognised me. She had a young plump nun with her, one of the nursing sisters who looked after her in a private Catholic hospital in the Channel Islands. “How is she?” I asked the nun.

  “We’re all very proud of her,” the sister said, which might simply have meant that my younger sister was at last toilet trained.

  “And Sister Felicity?” I asked. Sister Felicity was Georgina’s usual companion.

  “She’s not well,” the nun said in a soft Irish voice, “she’d have liked to have come today, so she would, but she’s not a well woman. We’re all praying for her.”

  “Sister Felicity is going to heaven soon,” Georgina said happily. She is twenty-six and has the mind of a backward two-year-old. No one knows why. Charlie put it best when he simply said that God left out the yeast when he made Georgina’s loaf. She’s beautiful, with an innocent face as heart-breaking as an angel’s, and a head as nutty as a squirrel’s larder.

  “Sister Felicity’s not going to die,” I said, but Georgina had already forgotten the comment.

  “I like it here.” She was still holding my hands.

  “You look well,” I told her.

  “I want to live here again, Johnny. With you,” Georgina said with a touching and hopeless appeal.

  “I wish you could, my darling. But you’re happy at the convent, aren’t you?” The convent hospital specialised in the care of the mentally subnormal. Before my father’s death, and the subsequent collapse of the Rossendale estates, a trust had been established which would provide for the rest of Georgina’s life. It was ironic to think that the only family member who did not have money problems was the mad one.

  “I like it here,” Georgina said again with a cruel lucidity. “With you.”

  For the first time since my mother had died, tears threatened me. We were a rotten family, but Georgina and I had always been close. When she was a little child I used to make her laugh, and I sometimes thought t
hat it would only take a small miracle to jar the sense out of the place where it was locked so deep inside her head. That miracle had never happened. Instead my mother had found Georgina’s presence oppressive, and so my younger sister had been put safely away, out of sight and out of mind, in her convent home. I crouched in front of her chair. “Are you unhappy?” I asked.

  She did not answer. The bubble of sense had burst and now she just stared vacantly into my eyes. I doubted she even knew why she had been brought back to Stowey.

  “People are very kind,” she said dully, then looked up as someone came to stand beside me. It was my other sister, my twin Elizabeth, but there was no recognition in Georgina’s eyes.

  Elizabeth did not acknowledge Georgina’s presence. Like my mother, she had always been offended by having a mental defective in the family. Whatever, she ignored Georgina and waited for me to disengage my hands gently and stand upright. Elizabeth carried a glass of the hotel’s sherry. Her husband Peter, once my sailing companion, but now a failing Cotswold landowner, glowered at me across the room. I was the ghost at the funeral feast. They all blamed me for losing the family’s money and for bringing the disgrace of poverty on a lineage that had owned this patch of England since the first Rossendale had taken it with his bloody-edged sword. That man had come to Devon in the twelfth century, while now his twentieth-century descendants shuffled with embarrassment in an hotel’s drawing room. All except for Elizabeth, who had a superb if rancorous poise. She drew me away from Georgina’s chair. “I don’t know why she’s here,” Elizabeth said irritably.

  “Why shouldn’t she be?”

  “She doesn’t know what’s going on.” Elizabeth sipped her sherry, then gave me a long, disapproving examination. “I don’t know why you’re here either.”

  “A vestige of filial duty,” I said, a little too lightly.

  “You look disgustingly healthy.” Her words were grudging. It was an effort to be polite, to pretend that we were not bitter enemies.

  “Sun and sea.” I was glib. “You look well yourself. Are you still riding?”

  “Of course.” Elizabeth had very nearly made Britain’s Olympic team as a horsewoman. Perhaps, if that success had come to her, she would have been less bitter with life since.

  A flurry at the door announced the arrival of Father Maltravers from London. Father Maltravers had been Mother’s favourite confessor and would now bury her. The sight of the priest made Elizabeth drop her small pretence of politeness. “Will you be taking Mass?” she challenged me.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Mother would have liked it if you did.” She paused to look into my eyes as if she expected to read some message there. Elizabeth is very tall, just two inches beneath my own six feet. She has our family’s bright gold hair and more than her fair share of the Rossendale good looks. “Of course,” she went on with a very poisoned indirectness, “you’ll have to make your confession first. Have you made confession in the last four years, John?”

  “Have you?” I countered feebly. The Rossendales are one of the ancient Catholic families. We’d been persecuted by the Tudor fanatics, but had tenaciously clung to our land and put the five oyster shells beside Stowey’s front door. That was the source of the line in the nursery song: ‘Five for the symbols at your door’; the five marks being a sign that the old religion was practised inside and that a priest could therefore be found to say Mass. Today the hotel delights in showing its guests a priest hole where the illicit clergymen had hidden from Elizabeth I’s searchers. The hotel’s priest hole was in what had been my father’s bedroom, and the guests were told that a Jesuit had starved to death in the hole in the 1580s, but that was a nonsense. The real priest hole was in Stowey’s stables, because a Rossendale would never have let a priest into the private rooms. The so-called priest hole was actually the low cupboard in which my grandfather had kept his riding boots, but the invention keeps the tourists happy.

  “Did you see Mother before she died?” Elizabeth now asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And?” she prompted me.

  I shrugged and decided the truth of Mother’s last words had better stay my secret. “She wasn’t in a fit state to talk.”

  Elizabeth paused, evidently suspecting an evasion. “But you know why she wanted to see you?” she asked after a few seconds.

  “I can guess.”

  Elizabeth did not pursue the topic. I noticed how the other family members kept deliberately clear of us, as though making an arena for a fight. They must have guessed that Elizabeth would tackle me and consequently there was a sense of expectancy in the panelled room. They pretended to ignore us, fussing around Father Maltravers, but I knew they were all keenly alert to my confrontation with Elizabeth.

  “Have you seen Mother’s will?” The question, like her earlier questions, was yet another probing attack.

  “No.”

  “There’s nothing in it for you.”

  “I didn’t expect anything.” I spoke gently because I could sense the danger in Elizabeth’s mood. She had the Rossendale temper. I had it too, but I think the sea had taught me to control mine. Yet now, in Elizabeth’s bright eyes, I could see the anger brimming.

  “She left you nothing, because you betrayed her.” My sister’s voice was loud enough to make the nearest relatives turn to watch us. All but Georgina who was solemnly counting her fingers. “She hated you,” Elizabeth went on, “which is why she left me the painting.”

  The statement showed that Elizabeth had been unable to resist a full-scale assault. “Good,” I said carelessly, which only annoyed her more.

  “So where is it?” she asked with a savage bitterness.

  We’re twins, born eight minutes apart, and we hate each other. I can’t explain that. Charlie often said we were too much alike, as if that was the answer, but I can’t find the venom in my own soul to explain Elizabeth’s obsessive dislike of me. Nor do I think we are so much alike; I lack Elizabeth’s driving ambition. It was an astonishing ambition; so nakedly obvious as to be almost pitiful. She craved after a status in life which would reflect the past glories of our family; she wanted wealth, admiration and success, yet, like me, she had a knack of failure. I had accepted my lack of ambition, turning it into a wanderer’s life at sea, while Elizabeth just grew more bitter with every twist of malevolent fate. She had married well, and the marriage had soured. She had been born wealthy, and now she was poor, and that failure seemed to hurt her most of all.

  “Where’s the painting?” she asked me again, and this time so loudly that everyone else in the room, even the uncomprehending Georgina, turned to watch us. Elizabeth’s husband, leaning against the far wall, seemed to sneer at me. Father Maltravers took a step forward, as though tempted to be a peacemaker, but the intensity in Elizabeth’s voice checked him. “Where’s the painting?” she asked me again.

  “I’ll tell you once more,” I said, “and for the very last time, I do not know.”

  “You’re a liar, John. You’re a snivelling little liar. You always were.” Elizabeth’s anger had snapped, torn from its mooring by my presence. She would be hating herself for thus losing her temper in public, but she was quite unable to control it. My silence in the face of her attack only made her anger more fierce. “I know you’re lying, John. I have proof.”

  I still kept silent. So did the rest of the family. I doubt if any of them had expected to see me at the funeral and, when they did, they had doubtless half feared and half relished that this skeleton from the family’s crowded bone cupboard would make its ghoulish appearance. Now it had, and none of them wanted to stop its display. Elizabeth, sensing their support and my discomfiture, attacked once more. “You’d better run away again, John, before the police discover you’re back.”

  “You’re hysterical.” My anger was like a gnawing bitch in my belly, but I was determined not to show it; yet, try as I might, I could not keep its venom from my voice. “Why don’t you go and lie down, or take a pill?”


  “Damn you.” She twitched her wrist and the sticky sherry splashed up on to my face and on to the cheap black suit I’d bought in honour of the occasion. “Damn you,” she said again. “Damn you, damn you, damn you.”

  Sherry dripped from my chin on to my black tie. None of the relatives moved. They all agreed with Elizabeth. They thought I was the bastard who had made them poor. If it wasn’t for me then Stowey would still be in the family, the port would flow at Christmas, and there would be no importunate bank managers and no genteel shame of an old family driven into penury. I had not played their game, I wasn’t one of them, and so they all hated me.

  So I didn’t stay for the funeral. I glanced at Georgina, but she was in a world of her own. Father Maltravers tried to detain me, but I brushed him aside and walked out, leaving the family in an embittered silence. I washed the sherry from my face in the hotel’s loo, collected my filthy oilskin jacket from its peg, then walked through the Devon rain to the village street. I dialled Charlie’s number on the public phone outside the Rossendale Arms, but there was no reply. I threw my sticky black tie into the gutter, then lit a pipe as I waited for the bus. The tooth suddenly began to ache again. I explored the pain with my tongue, wondering whether it truly was psychosomatic, but decided that no such sharp agony could be purely mental, not even if it was provoked by a lacerating homecoming.

  Damn the family. I’d come home, and they did not want me. Above the thatched roofs of the village the green pastures curled up to the thick woods where, as a child, I’d learned the skills of stalking and killing. Charlie had taught me those skills. He’d grown up in one of my family’s tied cottages, but we had still become friends. We had become the best of friends. My mother, of course, had hated Charlie. She had called him a piece of village muck, a dirty little boy from an infamous family, but he had still become my best friend. He was still my closest friend; four years away had not changed that. I wanted to see him, but I wouldn’t wait for him. I wanted to be back at sea, riding the long winds in Sunflower. My family would accuse me of running away again, and in a sense they were right, but I wasn’t running from fear, just from them; my family.