House of the Hanged

‘Her skinny lines make her look longer.’

Lucy dropped into the deep cockpit, running her hand along one of the benches before gripping the tiller and staring up at the tall mast. ‘Oh, Tom, you’re a lucky man.’

‘I thought we’d sail the rest of the way to Le Rayol.’

‘What about the car? My luggage?’

‘Pascal’s going to drive it over.’

She smiled, aware now that she’d been set up. ‘I’ll have to change my clothes first. I can hardly go to sea dressed like this.’

‘There’s a shirt and some shorts down below. No standing headroom in the cabin, I’m afraid, so you’ll have to crouch.’

The mainsail was already rigged, and while Lucy changed, Tom rigged the jib.

‘Good work,’ came a voice from behind him as he was finishing up. Lucy was barefoot and wearing an old cap tilted at a rakish angle.

‘Thanks, Skipper.’

Her face lit up. ‘Really?’

‘Take her away. There are winches for both halyards, so any half-decent sailor should be able to handle her solo, even in a blow.’

Her eyes narrowed at the challenge.

They slipped the lines and backed the sloop out between the pilings into the harbour. Tom made to paddle the stern around.

‘Stand down, bosun, if you know what’s good for you.’

Lucy raised the tall jib so that the wind brought the nose around and the boat began to make gentle headway.

‘So, tell me more about your antidote to Hugo Atkinson,’ she demanded.

‘Well, he’s American, and he’s a painter.’

‘A good one?’

‘Good enough for Yevgeny and Fanya to take him on.’

‘That sounds suspiciously like a no.’

‘He’s of the wilfully modern school. You know the sort of thing . . . a bowl of fruit can’t be allowed to actually look like a bowl of fruit, it has to look like it’s been hurled to the floor, trampled by a battalion of the Welsh Guards, scooped up with a shovel and dumped back on the table.’

Lucy laughed. ‘Well, obviously Yevgeny and Fanya see something you don’t.’

‘Large profits, I suspect.’

Yevgeny and Fanya Martynov were an eccentric couple, White Russian émigrés who ran a thriving Left Bank art gallery in Paris devoted to the avant garde. They had summered in Le Rayol for the past four years, following their purchase of a pseudo-Palladian villa up on the headland towards Le Canadel. They operated an open-house policy for artists of all kinds, and the steady stream of painters, sculptors and photographers passing through La Quercia was always a welcome source of entertainment.

‘They’ve put Walter in the cottage so that he can work in peace.’

‘Walter?’

‘He’s not as stuffy as he sounds, and he knows how to swing a tennis racquet.’

‘Have you played him?’

‘Four times now.’

‘Vital statistics?’

‘Won three, lost one.’

Lucy threw him a look.

‘Mid-twenties, although he looks older, probably because he’s on the portly side.’

‘Portly?’ said Lucy, unable to mask her disappointment.

‘Pleasingly so. Well-fed rather than fat. What else? He’s not tall, but you wouldn’t describe him as short . . . well, some might. And he still has most of his hair, which is dark and rather wiry.’

‘He sounds . . . intriguing.’

‘No he doesn’t, but he is. I’ve got to know him rather well over the past couple of weeks.’

Lucy brought the sloop about, falling in behind a forty-foot cruising ketch motoring towards the harbour mouth.

Beyond the breakwater, the wind piped up nicely, but Lucy seemed in no hurry to run up the mainsail. Her gaze was fixed on the ketch beating to windward at a fair lick, under full sail now.

‘I think that’s enough of a head start, don’t you?’

She cranked the winch, raising the mainsail.

The moment the ketch’s skipper saw them coming he began barking commands, not that it made any difference. The Albatross cut through the chop as if it didn’t exist, her big canvas sheets sucking every available ounce of energy out of the air. While the crew of the ketch scrambled about her topsides, trying to trim up properly, Lucy barely moved a muscle. When she finally did, it was only to offer a demure little salute to the skipper as she overhauled him.

‘Judging from his expression, I would say he hates you.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ grinned Lucy, her flushed face a picture of pure contentment. ‘The helm’s so balanced I could have tied off the tiller and taken a nap.’

They fell off, running dead before the wind to the eastward, making for Le Rayol. While Lucy put the sloop through its paces, getting to know its limits, Tom sat back and enjoyed the view.

There were any number of spots along the Riviera where the mountains collided with the sea, but for a short stretch east of Le Lavandou it seemed almost as if the two elements had struck some secret pact, Earth and Water conspiring together to create a place of wild, primitive beauty. The high hills backing the coast fell away sharply in a tumble of tree-shrouded spurs and valleys which were transformed on impact with the sea into a run of rocky headlands separated by looping bays. Dubbed the Côte des Maures – a reminder of a time when the Saracens had held sway over this small patch of France – the exoticism of the title seemed entirely appropriate. The beaches strung out along the shoreline, like pearls on a necklace, were of a sand so fine and white, the waters that washed them so unnaturally blue, that they might well have been transported here from some far-flung corner of the tropics.

‘Stand by to gybe!’ called Lucy.

‘Ready.’

‘Gybe ho!’