The cameraman said that he’d heard a bang, sure. What he wanted to know was who hired that perishing boat in the first place, when it was obvious that the man driving it was as pissed as a rat. He must have been, or he wouldn’t have run into that buoy. The buoy we collided with. Just before we sank.
The owner of the boat said that he had almost certainly heard a bang, and he would be suing the BBC for every penny they’d got. It was definitely the last time he hired his boat out to film people. They should have warned him that all that electrical gear was liable to blow up when it got water on it. Some people have no consideration for others. They just don’t think.
Danny Bennet didn’t say anything. He wasn’t there. He was on the deck of the
∨ Flying Dutch ∧
EIGHT
Never a particularly dressy man, Vanderdecker had not taken much trouble choosing an appropriate outfit to visit Jeanes’ Boatyard. He hadn’t even stopped to consider whether his shirt went with his trousers; he’d just flung open the lid of his sea-chest and grabbed. As a result, he was wearing a good, solid herringbone overcoat which had blossomed on the loom when George V was on the throne, a pair of flared slacks, a coarse Venetian doublet from the early seventeenth century, and Hush Puppies.
Jane Doland, on the other hand, didn’t share this lilies-of-the-field attitude to clothing. By nature and inclination she was very much a baggy pullover and pleated skirt person, but she had realised quite early on that accountants are not as other women are; that it stands as an edict in destiny that unless you wear a suit nobody will believe you can add up. She therefore affected the imitation Austin Reed look, and wore her light grey dogtooth check as if it had broad arrows running down the sleeves.
Most people who frequent Jeanes’ Boatyard either buy their clothes in the army supplies shop or find them in the corners of fields. As a result, both callers at the yard looked rather out of place.
The problem of dealing with the House of Jeanes had been a constant source of worry to Vanderdecker for longer than he could remember. Usually he only went there once every generation, so there was no danger of being recognised and rebuked for not being dead yet; on the other hand, there was the equally difficult job of explaining himself from scratch every time he called. By now the words flowed out of his head without conscious thought; but the worry was still present, like a submerged rock.
The speech, as perfected over the centuries, went like this:
“Mr Jeanes? My name’s Vanderdecker, I wonder if you can help me. I have this very old ship, and it needs some work doing on it.”
So far, so good. Mr Jeanes is expecting, at the worst, something that was last a tree in the 1940s. He says something noncommittal, like “Oh”. Although it was completely wasted on him, Vanderdecker had over the years acquired enough research material to write a definitive study of heredity among the seafaring classes; the only part of which that had registered with his conscious mind was the fact that every Jeanes since 1716 had said “Oh” in precisely the same way.
“Yes,” Vanderdecker now replies. “She’s down in the cove half-way to Burton at the moment. Do you think you could come out and look at her?”
The invariable reply to this suggestion is “No”. If by some wild sport of genetics a stray proton of politeness has managed to get itself caught up in the Jeanes DNA this quarter-century, the “No” will be coupled with a mumbled excuse concerning pressure of work, but this is not to be taken too seriously. The truth is that deep down in their collective unconscious, the members of the Jeanes tribe believe that the world outside the Yard is populated by werewolves, particularly if you venture out beyond Eype, and consequently they try to go out of the curtilage of their fastness as infrequently as possible. Once a week to the bank is plenty often enough, thank you very much.
“Right then.” Vanderdecker replies, “I suppose I’d better bring her in. There’s not a lot needs doing, actually,” he adds, “just a general looking-over, if you could manage that.”
This rarely gets a reply from a Jeanes, and Vanderdecker goes away and comes back with a sixteenth-century galleon. This is where the fun starts.
“Here she is,” Vanderdecker will now say. Jeanes will stare out of small, ferret-like eyes and say nothing. We have reached the unsolicited explanations stage, the trickiest part of the whole undertaking. The knack to it is not to look as if you have anything to explain, and it is best achieved by seeming to boast. The preferred gambit is something like “bet you haven’t worked on anything like
A flicker of a Jeanes eyebrow will communicate “no”, and we’re away. We explain that the
a film prop; or
a rich man’s toy; or
