The Going Down of the Sun
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.
At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.
We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.
About Bello:
www.panmacmillan.com/bello
Sign up to our newsletter to hear about new releases events and competitions:
www.panmacmillan.com/bellonews
Contents
Jo Bannister
1. Saturday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
2. Tuesday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
3. Thursday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Jo Bannister
The Going Down of the Sun
Jo Bannister
Jo Bannister lives in Northern Ireland, where she worked as a journalist and editor on local newspapers. Since giving up the day job, her books have been shortlisted for a number of awards. Most of her spare time is spent with her horse and dog, or clambering over archaeological sites. She is currently working on a new series of psychological crime/thrillers.
1. Saturday
Chapter One
After the hole in his chest had healed and the strength was returning to his right shoulder, his doctor recommended that Harry take a holiday. Since Harry’s doctor had known my husband longer, and hardly less intimately, than I, I presume he made this suggestion from the safety of a locked room adjoining the surgery, through the keyhole.
Our first matrimonial bust-up had arisen when I asked where we were going on holiday. When I wouldn’t take “Nowhere” for an answer Harry lost his temper, thumped the table and went to sulk in the garage. We’d been playing chess. It was three days before I found the last pawn nestling among the fronds of a Mother-in-Law’s Tongue. For my holiday that year I went sailing off the west coast of Scotland. For his, Harry stripped down the engine of his Riley.
The police surgeon had taken the precaution of tidying any potential missiles out of sight, and since Harry wanted his approval to return to work he couldn’t storm off and sulk somewhere either. He had to grit his teeth and bear it “Holiday?”
A nice brisk holiday, said the doctor, with plenty of fresh air and exercise, would get his damaged lung working, free the kinks left by the bullet, build up his strength and stamina, and generally restore him to the peak of physical fitness required of a Detective Superintendent in the modern police service. Nobody outside the firm appreciates the toll that paperwork exacts; and tragically enough, it was his form-filling arm that was affected. There was a time when we seriously wondered whether he’d ever complete a 53b Drawing Pin Requisition again.
He had his back against the wall, but he gave it his best shot. “Car maintenance is a surprisingly energetic occupation—”
“No doubt, no doubt,” said the doctor briskly. “But what I had in mind was more a week’s sailing off the west coast of Scotland.”
We picked up the boat in Ardfern, a neat little sloop of about twenty-four feet. Rubh’an Leim was identical in every way—including the fact that no Sassenach could pronounce her name—to the Rubh’an Leanachais I’d sailed here the previous year, except in one strange particular. The cabins that had accommodated four of us quite comfortably last summer had unaccountably shrunk so that Harry banged his head, or his knee, or his healing shoulder on one projection or another every time he turned round. Getting him in and out of the heads was a shoehorn job.
He couldn’t get used to the idea that you can’t always stand upright and move in straight lines on a boat. He was like a drill sergeant from one of the taller Regiments of Guards trying to remain a fine figure of a man under a ceiling about five feet off the floor. I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of the enterprise before the man from the boat yard had finished his doom and gloom lecture about how easy it is to blow up a boat with its own gas and gone ashore.
For two pins I’d have followed him. If Harry had said, “I can get cold, wet and cramped in my own bath” just once more I would have followed him, and cast off the warps and shoved the Rubber Lion in the general direction of the Corryvreckan whirl-pool before my nearest and dearest could thread his way past the chart-table.
The essence of the problem was not that he was something over six feet and built to match, nor that his shoulder still made bending and twisting awkward, nor even that he had the same natural aptitude for life afloat as a brick. The essence of the problem was that he wanted to be miserable. He was here under protest and he wasn’t going to let me forget it. The police surgeon might have the power to send him on holiday, even if it did smack of cruel and unusual punishment, but by God nobody could make him enjoy it!
As soon as I’d familiarised myself with the gear again we got under way. I let Harry take us out on the engine while I got the sails rigged. I wasn’t planning on doing much motoring this week—if you get in the way of starting the engine when it’s handier than sailing you soon give up sailing altogether—but the throaty rumble and the vibration under his feet and the stink of diesel might help shift that martyred look off his face. I reminded him that you push a tiller left to steer a boat right, in time to avoid a rock if only just, then left him to play with the controls while I got on with the serious business of setting sail.
We had a choice of head-sails. With a breeze that was sturdy rather than stiff, I opted for the working jib. Later in the week, when I had the feel of the boat, I’d be using the genoa in stronger winds than this, but for now the jib was sufficient. The storm-jib was thoughtfully stowed in a red bag and I hoped not to need it at all.
I bent the head-sail onto the forestay, attached halyard and sheets, and sat back on the fore-hatch to admire the result. Then I took it all off again and put it back the right way up. I doubt if Harry would have noticed, but I’d have been the toast of Ardfern if I’d sailed out hauling my jib upside down.
The mainsail was rolled onto its boom, lacking only its battens and brute strength to set it. I unrolled it into the cockpit—Harry claimed I was trying to smother him—and fought bitterly with the battens until I realised that, while two of them were the same length, one was wider than the other and would never go into the top pocket however much I swore at it.
I moved up to the foot of the mast, bracing myself against the movement under me that always seems so pronounced on the first day and, barring hurricanes, is hardly noticeable after that. The burgee went up first and grafted itself firmly to the masthead, giving me a small thrill of success. It’s harder to get a clean hoist with a burgee than almost anything in the sail-locker.
The little scrap of nylon fluttered busily a little starboard of the stem. The wind was in the south, which meant we could set sail without altering course. The main went up, the jib went up, I scuttled back and sheeted them both in; then I took the tiller from Harry and turned the key in the ignition. “Finished with engines.”
He looked severely at me. “You’ve cut your finger.”
Of course I’d cut my finger. You’re constantly cutting your fingers aboard boats; also barking your shins, skinning your elbows and excavating holes in your backside by sitting on cleats. It’s all part of the fun.
“Why are you grinning?” demanded Harry.
But little by little, some of the magic of the day entered his soul. The sparkle of the sun on the jewel-blue water, the whisper of the foam creaming along the bow, the small creaking and snapping sounds of the sails and the rigging; and the way the mouth of Loch Craignish widened as we stood towards it, and a little fleecy cloud that hung over the violet Paps of Jura twenty miles down the Sound, all conspired to lighten the heart and raise the spirit. Although to be honest he’d still sooner have been up to his elbows in a nice grisly murder back home in Skipley, he was finally beginning to see that sailing had its charms too.
We beat down to Craignish Point and rounded the little headland through the gap marked on the chart as the Dorus Mór. With the wind behind us now we ran up past the northern tip of Jura, past infamous Corryvreckan—even in the moderate conditions of the day we could hear the thunder of the disturbed seas and see white water flung mast-high as the tide raced through the narrow channel—and past Scarba into the pretty region around Loch Melfort, where the hills of the mainland and the hummocks of the islands folded together in a concert of pastel greys as the day’s wind died towards evening.
We dropped the hook in a little bay on Shuna’s north shore, and I went below to get dinner on the stove. In the cockpit I could hear Harry softly whistling to himself as he tinkered with the engine. I smiled. I didn’t care what he did to the engine, as long as he got it b
ack together again before we had to return the boat.
After a time, with the stove humming under its breath and good smells beginning to rise from the saucepans, I heard the music from above break abruptly, then the unmistakable two-tone of a wolf-whistle. I was up the companionway before you could say “Rob Roy.”
“Now that,” said Harry, admiration thick in his voice, “is what I call a boat.”
Myself, I couldn’t see it. I could see plenty of money, plenty of power. I suppose there was a certain grace in the flare of the high bows, the strong sweep of the bull. Certainly she was making enough noise as she ran down through the long afternoon towards Craignish Point, but then so would a motor-home.
On the subject of sail versus power I’m a bigot. I reckon if you’re going to drive places you might as well stick to the roads: it’s quicker, it’s cheaper and you’re less likely to hit a rock. I accept, reluctantly, the place of power in maritime commerce, but a pleasure boat without sails is a contradiction in terms.
Harry, on the other hand, considers the internal combustion engine conclusive proof of God, so this high-stepping, highly polished little gin palace riding its bow-wave down the Sound regardless of wind and tide filled him with delight.
It was only as she drew level with our anchorage that we saw the woman at the helm, blonde hair flying in the slipstream. She saw us and waved. We waved back, but the glance Harry cast me was embarrassed. Middle-aged detective superintendents should not be caught wolf-whistling at blondes in power-boats. I chuckled. She’d been too far away to hear him over the roar of her engines, and I knew full well the bodywork he’d been admiring.
When she was gone, leaving only the taint of diesel on the air and a last glimpse of the name on her departing stern, I went back to the goulash bubbling spicily on the stove.
The name on the stern was Skara Sun.
The next day the wind had veered round into the north-west I had thought of pushing up past Luing, but we’d have the wind in our teeth all the way and this was supposed to be a holiday, not an endurance test. We headed back down the Sound, making for Loch Sween.
Corryvreckan was more tumultuous than before. It made you understand the early chart-makers who wrote “Here be dragons” in the places they dared not approach.
“Is there actually a way through there?” asked Harry.
“Oh yes, there’s a channel. But not too many people use it. It’s always treacherous. At slack tide, with a steady breeze and no sea, it’s just about passable. Most of the time it’s a death-trap.”
“Have you ever been through?” He was watching it, fascinated, like a man watching a snake.
“No. I’ve sailed hereabouts most every summer for eighteen years, and I’ve gone up close a few times to see what it looked like, but I’ve never found the combination of conditions and courage to try it. I’ve seen it done a couple of times, and I’ve known people come to grief there. I’d love to have done it, but I’m shit-scared of doing it.”
“Funny,” mused Harry. “I felt that way about marriage.”
I spent the day teaching him the rudiments of sailing. Through the morning we had the wind comfortably on the beam, and I could see the confidence growing to smugness in Harry’s face. He’d thought this was going to be difficult, and now he thought it was easy. There are many hazards awaiting the sailing man, from sudden squalls and breaking seas to rocks gnawing at his keel and pillocks driving power-boats with one arm round a blonde and a magnum of champagne within easy reach. But far and away the greatest danger facing a sailor is his own complacency.
You have to know what you can do, and more importantly what you can’t. After forty-four years of considering wind propulsion as wildly impractical and wholly pointless, one morning with the sun on the sea and a steady breeze on the beam had been enough to persuade him that he had this sailing thing licked. In his own interests, it was time to disabuse him.
We turned the corner round Danna Island, a low dark nail at the tip of the finger of land stretching down from Crinan, and began beating our way up Loch Sween. Immediately everything was different. The seas in the narrow waterway were restricted, but we were sailing into the choppy face of them. The wind in the sails heeled the little boat onto her shoulder, and made her tug at the tiller like a dog fretting on a leash. The sails thrummed, the rigging sang. Salt spray came at us over the gunwales. And every few minutes one rocky shore or the other bore down on us and we had to tack away.
Like many policemen, Harry is a cautious man. He likes to be in control of a situation—hence the love affair with engines, I suppose; they do what they’re meant to according to strict rules, and if they stop there’s a definitive mechanical reason for that too.
But sailing isn’t an exact science, sailing to windward least of all: you’re constantly seeking a point of balance between conflicting and inconstant forces. You don’t steer through the wind, you ride it—watching your burgee and the leading edge of the sails for the tell-tale lift that warns of stalling, you skim the eddies and billows of the wind as if it were something you could see and touch, using its sudden strengths to bring you up to windward, paying off before its unexpected hollows kill your thrust. The wind is like an animal that you have to manage, not so much conquer as reach an accommodation with. There is an equilibrium there to be used, but it’s a dynamic one, eternally changing. Sailing is a task for the instinct rather than the intellect.
Harry doesn’t much like trusting to instinct, except that instinct told him to give me the helm. I shook my head. “No, you sail her—I’ll tell you what to do.”
So he learned how to balance the boat on the edge of the driving wind and convert its fluctuations into a useful course even if it was not always a straight one, and I trimmed the sails and warned him of impending shores, and before the Fairy Isles hove in view he was singing “Lee-O” and shoving the tiller away from him as if he’d been doing it half his life. An unbiased observer might even have thought he was enjoying himself.
There are many magic places on earth, and I’ve been privileged to visit a few of them, both in company I cherished and alone. But perhaps God laid his hand most lightly of all on this little ring of rocky islets, their granite bones clothed in rowan and conifers, enclosing a tiny anchorage where the seals play and the otters visit, and the sea pales first to a milky brightness and then to the silken gleam of a steel mirror, as the stillness of the long evening comes on.
Luke brought me here first, when I was a brand new doctor with ambitions to change the world and needed dragging on holiday as now I dragged Harry. I’d been back almost every year since. I’d seen it in sunshine and rain; once I came in April and it snowed, decking the Christmas trees with tinsel and rimming the rocks, swallowing the view across the loch in a ballet of dancing, swirling white. Still the magic of it touched me every time, a purely Celtic magic woven of green and silver.
And it touched Harry too, which was a bonus I had not looked for. Because of the narrowness of the entrance and the confines of the anchorage itself, I took the Rubber Lion in under power. But as soon as the anchor was down and holding and the chain paid out, without any prompting from me Harry turned off the engine and we just sat, hand in hand on the cabin roof, listening to the twilight.
At length Harry said, a shade quietly, as if he found it difficult, “Was this one of the places you came with Luke? You know, special places.”
I didn’t know what he wanted to hear so I told him the truth. “Yes.”
His eyes slipped out of focus above the Knapdale Forest. He said softly, “I could find it in me to be jealous about that.”
I squeezed his hand. “You know that would be silly.”
“I know. He was dead before I knew you.”
“That too. But mostly because being jealous of Luke would be like being jealous of my sister. If he was alive today I’d feel about him the way I always did. But I wouldn’t love you any the less because of it.”
For a little while he said nothing more. I could feel him still troubled by the friendship he had never understood, the deep platonic friendship between me and Luke Shaw, over whose dead body—literally—we had come together. Finally he said, “I’m glad you brought me too.”