Chase the Morning

‘Well, I will tell you, dammit, and you can judge for yourself. I don’t want you dreaming up all kinds of crap about me, really. I met her in my first year at college, she was at the art school and we hit it off. We had fun – God, she was more fun than any English girl I’d ever met. Just so different, so – I don’t know. Outside all the rules. All the girls I knew – even the unconventional ones were unconventional along the same lines, if that makes any sense. She was Eurasian, by the way – half Chinese, from Singapore, pretty as hell. A beautiful body, near perfect. Like polished bronze. That was part of the trouble, in fact.’ Mall had both hands on the wheel again, and her eyes on the horizon, but she nodded slowly to show she was listening. I watched the play of curves between her breast and ribs as she steered, and the hollows in her muscular thighs. Jacquie’s shape was different, much smoother, more delicate – almost fragile. ‘She wasn’t rich. She was getting money from home, but never really enough. She used to model for life classes to earn more.’

‘And you were jealous?’

‘No,’ I said, slightly surprised. ‘Not really. I was proud of her, in a way. A bit uneasy, but proud. There was nothing dodgy about it, after all; she wasn’t the type. She was so damn beautiful …’ She’d been something of a status symbol round the college, if I was honest. ‘But she hated living off me, she wanted to pay her own way when we went out; she was obstinate like that, stupidly so. And, well, she went a bit far. She decided she’d earn most posing for magazines – and God, she went and did it without telling me.’

‘Why should she? Was that so different?’

‘Come on, there’s all the difference in the world between a few student’s scribbles and copies on every newsstand in the country! They’re permanent, photographs! They hang around! They could surface years later –’

Mall drew breath suddenly. ‘Hah! And you feared they would?’

‘Look, you’ve got to understand. I told you, I had it all planned out! And you know what it’s like – you’re young, you think it’ll all happen tomorrow! She could have wrecked everything! I couldn’t have some little hack turn up with these things – they were pretty damn broad – and slather them all over the papers when I was trying to get taken seriously as some kind of public figure! I mean, imagine it when I was fighting my first by-election, even! So –’ I waved my hands helplessly.

‘So you quarrelled?’

‘Well, yes – a bit. But I didn’t just drop her or anything like that, I wasn’t that cruel. I just let it peter out naturally over the summer vac. We’d talked about going out to Singapore – but, well … it lapsed. And come winter –’ I shrugged. A gull cried out, wild and lonely, and I shivered a little. ‘She married somebody else the next summer, so she can’t have been in that deep either. Not the type I’d have expected; one of her artists, a right talentless little sod. Last I heard he was graduated and designing soap wrappers. About her, nothing. Expect they’re still married, if she hasn’t wrung his scrawny neck by now. That’s the nearest I’ve come to what you’d call love, Mall; and it can’t have been that near, can it? Am I supposed to go on thinking about that?’

I don’t know what response I expected, but it wasn’t the mildly pitying look I got. ‘Few care to remember being cozened of something precious for a false profit; still less when they’ve cozened themselves. But consider two things. One, she’d not need snow in her mouth to feel winter come. Two, politics once was not a craft a man openly professed. The word meant doing what was expedient, not what was right and true.’

The sting was in the tail. And luckily the glib answer that leaped to my lips never got beyond them. The falling moon laid down a first tinge of silver on the horizon, the billows caught it and spread it, glittering, in a great streak. From up above in answer came the lookout’s voice, crackling with excitement into the exultant shriek of a seabird.

‘Sail ho! Sail ho!’

‘Whither away?’ bawled the master’s mate, through a speaking trumpet he hardly needed.

‘Hull down on the horizon, dead ahead!’ There was a general rush, and a snapping open of telescopes. ‘Three masts i’ the moonlight! And she’s a big’un!’

‘Then begad, that may be she!’ muttered the mate. ‘Hold the deck, Mall! Cox’n, go rouse the Sailing Master and the Captain. By’re leave, sir!’

‘Only a league or two the head of us,’ Mall gloated. ‘Is this not a sweet speedy little bird we ride? We’ll have ’em, Stephen, we’ll have ’em! If it is the Chorazin, mind; must needs be sure first. There’ll be all hell to pay if we open fire on someone’s plain ordinary merchantman; and a warship so big’d blow us to matchwood for a pirate, with one broadside.’