Epilogue

FOWEY IS AS PRETTY as a place can be, the perfect Cornish harbor town with steep, wooded hills tumbling down to the still waters of its estuary. In the autumn, after I came back from the Americas, Ana and I drove there from Sussex to spend a weekend with Patrick and his family. We had a notion about moving that way and starting again with the sheep, although in truth I was having a hard job wrenching my mind back from the sea. My brain seemed to have been so addled by salt water that it teemed with boats and nautical allusions.

As we breasted the ridge above the harbor town, I was expounding a pet theory to Ana, that being an island race we have the sea embedded in our very language.

“Take the phrase ‘To the bitter end,’” I told her. “You’d think it meant the conclusion of something pretty negative and drawn out but—hah!—no, it doesn’t. The bitt, you see is a post for fastening the rope on a ship, so when you reach the bitter end it means the rope is all played out. Amazing, isn’t it?”

A silence. Ana ignored me pointedly. Indeed, she stayed a bit quiet until she was introduced to Patrick’s wife, Rosemary, and immediately recognized a fellow sufferer at the hands of the returned seadog, the transoceanic bore.

Ana was normally tolerant of my ways—after a few years of living with a person like me, you learn to make allowances—but I fear that this time my new obsession was getting beyond a joke. Perhaps I really was insufferable. I’m told I would walk with a roll, with what I took to be a seagoing sort of a gait, pepper my speech with nautical metaphors, and sigh at the merest thought of the sea.

Over breakfast of beans and eggs it occurred to Patrick that we might want to take his dinghy for a sail—“She’s small, but she’ll give you a feel of the wind and the water,” he said. I looked across the table at Ana.

“Come on,” I cajoled her. “You’ll see what I’ve been going on about. It’ll be a really nice morning’s sail.”

“It might be nice for you,” she replied, “but I think it looks extremely unappetizing out there. Besides, it’s hardly very warm, is it?”

“You’ll be in good hands,” Patrick assured her. “Your man knows his stuff. He’s a good man in a tight spot.”

This, from Patrick, was praise indeed. I strutted and preened a little and put a manly arm around my girlfriend’s shoulder. “If we only ever put to sea on a sunny day, then where on earth would we be? What would have become of our island race?” I insisted. This ought to give you some indication of just how bad things had become.

With untypical forbearance, Ana denied herself the obvious retort. “Well, all right, if we must,” she said. “We’ll see what you’ve learned out on the high seas.”

Patrick took us down to the dock where he kept his neat little fiberglass dinghy and helped me prepare it for sea. It was the work of a few minutes—child’s play after our Atlantic voyaging.

Ana, however, was wearing her womanly disapproval hat, the sort a woman wears when she can think of a dozen good reasons not to do a thing but knows you’re going to do it anyway. But as we bounded across the wavelets of the sheltered harbor, the sheer exuberance of it all blew that expression away and she, too, was soon wreathed in smiles. I swelled a little with pleasure and pride as she smiled back at me, then I hardened up (which means here to turn toward the wind), tightened the sheet, and ran closer to the wind.

We rocketed across the open water toward the yacht club, where, in spite of the coolness of the morning, a small group of yachty-looking coves stood gathered on the terrace. They were certainly dressed for the part, in dapper yachting caps and blazers and white ducks, sipping gin and tonics and scanning the water with a hand shielding the brow. I hardened up a little more and then, to my dismay, realized that we were heading fast for the rocks beneath the terrace. “READY ABOUT?” I yelled.

“What on earth do you mean by that?” asked Ana. She stared at me in amazement, as if I’d shouted something mildly distasteful.

“It’s what you say when you’re going to go about,” I explained quickly, with one eye on the rocks racing toward us. “I say, ‘Ready about?’ and then ‘Lee ho,’ and …”

“Why can’t you just say, ‘We’re going to turn now,’ like you did in Greece?”

“Because it’s not so concise and it’s open to misinterpretation and also it’s not what you’re supposed to say … right? And we’d better make this snappy now; the shit’s about to hit the fan. READY ABOUT?”

“All right,” Ana said begrudgingly. (Although “Ready about?” is in fact a rhetorical question and as such does not require an answer.)

“LEE HO,” I howled and whipped the tiller over.

“What the …!” yelled Ana as the boom slammed across and smacked her hard on the ear. The boat tipped over, quick as a bucket, leaving Ana and me flailing about, half in and half out of the water. Thus discomposed, I lost control of the tiller and the boat kept on coming round.

“LET GO THE SHEETS!” I shouted.

“WHAT SHEETS?” Ana shouted straight back.

Then the wind burst into the sail on the other side and, with all our weight on the wrong side, we rolled into the water and the boat on top of us.

“Bugger!” I burbled as the icy water closed over my head. I scrabbled my way out from beneath the sail and scanned the water for my girlfriend.

Before long she bobbed to the surface and we clung together to the upturned hull. I looked sheepishly over at her. She shook the water out of her hair and spat out a mouthful of sea. “I knew this was going to happen,” she said and nodded toward her wrist. “Look, I even left my watch behind with Rosemary.”

And as she said this she smiled—a big, broad, watery smile over the upturned bottom of the boat—and then laughed out loud. It was a moment of epiphany for me. This is a most singular woman, I thought to myself. There she is down on her beam ends, bobbing about in the water, and she’s laughing. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the cut of her jib. I realized then, fully and emphatically, that I’d found the woman that I wanted to live the rest of my life with. You might even say—though perhaps best not in front of Ana—that I’d finally come ashore.