Death Comes First

One

The business activities of the men in Joyce’s life — principally her father, then her brother and husband, and now her son too — had long been a mystery to her. Wives and daughters were not privy to the workings of Tanner-Max; while male progeny were expected to join the family business, Henry clung to the outdated notion that a woman’s role in life was that of wife, mother, home-maker. Joyce’s mother, Felicity, had been a seventeen-year-old newly qualified typist on her first job with a temp agency when she met Henry, but the moment they became engaged her working life ended.

Not that Felicity seemed to mind. Far from it. They had married when she was only twenty and he twenty-two but even after forty-seven years of marriage they gave every impression of being a devoted couple, both of them content in their traditional roles. While Felicity stayed at home, raising the children, Henry provided for his family’s every need — and did so lavishly. Despite periods of recession and financial austerity, under his leadership Tanner-Max had gone from strength to strength with profits steadily rising year after year. In part this was due to the fact that he was not only an astute businessman but a natural leader. There was something about him that commanded respect. Certainly he had great presence, and he made sure he always looked the part, holding himself stiffly upright and dressing in tailored suits and handmade shoes. He reckoned his shoes were worth every extravagant penny because they lasted for ever, and he bought a new pair only once every five years. At sixty-nine he remained a handsome man, with a full head of white hair that complemented his tanned skin (courtesy of a passion for all-weather golfing).

It occurred to Joyce that, beyond the fact everyone deferred to him and appeared to be in awe of him, she had little idea what Henry was like outside the home. He certainly believed in sharing the fruits of the company’s success: whatever wealth the business brought in, he made sure that Tanner-Max employees were amply rewarded and that his family shared in the benefits. In return, however, everything had to be done his way. Charlie might have been a partner in the company, but Joyce doubted that he had ever done anything to warrant his generous salary. There was no question who ran Tanner-Max, quite autonomously, and would continue to run it until he dropped.

It was the same at home. Though Henry had been a good, caring father and she had never been given cause to doubt his love for his family, Joyce couldn’t help but think of him as a benevolent despot. Growing up, she’d always known he would give her anything she asked for — except the thing she came to desire most: her freedom.

She had pinned her hopes on university as the means of achieving her escape from the confines of Tarrant Park. Predictably, Henry had been opposed to the idea. It had taken Felicity’s subtle and patient intervention to bring him round, but even then he’d insisted that Joyce should apply only to West Country universities, making Bristol her first choice, and Bath her second. Playing the dutiful daughter, Joyce assured him that she was happy to remain in the West of England. Privately, unlike her elder son many years later, she was determined not to spend the next three years of her life commuting between campus and home. So she ignored Bristol and Bath in favour of Exeter. The old Devon county town was only an hour and a half’s drive from Tarrant Park. Henry gave his approval on condition that she would return home every weekend, and that he or his driver would chauffeur her.

Joyce had accepted the terms with alacrity. In the Tanner household that was a result.

Regardless of the restrictions imposed upon her, she’d felt she was well on her way to achieving her greatest goal: to be free to live her life in her own way. But the reality was that, apart from one fleeting exploratory fling, she ended up spending most of her first year buried in her studies — she was reading history, which had captivated her from early childhood — and in sport, at which she was rather good. She played tennis for the university and golf during her weekends at home, which remained rigidly implemented. Joyce didn’t mind. Not to begin with anyway. It was as if she needed to learn how to deal with freedom. Though she would never have admitted it, she welcomed her weekly break from her new world. It suited her to return to the closet at regular intervals.

And then everything changed.

It was the beginning of her second year at university. The new intake were gathered in the central hall. It was the usual meet-and-greet session with the principal and other members of staff. Joyce happened to be passing in the corridor outside. Nosily she sneaked a look through a glass-panelled door.

Across the room she saw Charlie. He seemed to stand out from the others, like a character in an arthouse movie, projected in vibrant colour whilst everyone else was in black and white. Charlie was standing by a window, side-on to Joyce, the light silhouetting his profile so that she could not see his face properly. It was clear that he was tall and gangly, with long limbs that seemed to have outgrown the rest of him. And he had unruly fair hair that skimmed the shoulders of his crumpled blue denim shirt.

She found herself staring at him. Then he turned and looked straight at her. Had he felt her eyes upon him? Neither of them had ever been sure.

He was far too thin for her taste. He had a long bony face and a crooked nose that looked as if it had once been broken. The signs of a nasty outbreak of teenage acne still lurked around his chin. He was by no means the best-looking man she’d ever seen. But when his eyes, surprisingly dark for one so fair, met hers, Joyce had felt a shiver run down her spine. And it had been a very pleasant sensation.

Then he had smiled. A small, uncertain smile. And she’d smiled back. Much the same way.

Charlie always said it had been love at first sight. And even though the sensible half of Joyce did not believe in such a notion, she supposed it must have been that. Or something damned near to it.

At the time she merely told herself to get a grip, and hurried off for her afternoon’s lecture.

When she emerged two hours later Charlie was waiting outside the lecture hall. She couldn’t understand how he had known where she would be.

‘Sixth sense,’ he’d said, beaming at her.

Long afterwards he confessed that he’d noticed she was carrying a copy of H. A. L. Fisher’s History of Europe, and upon making enquiries had discovered that there was only one history lecture taking place that afternoon.

Whilst their relationship had begun almost at once, it was several weeks before they slept together. Charlie and Joyce, perhaps unusually amongst students, became very much an item in every other way before embarking on the physical. Sex came second. They began to go everywhere together, do everything together, and were rarely seen apart. Around the campus they became known simply as JC. They were a unit. Everything they did, they did as one. Charlie was studying politics and liked to draw and paint in his free time; Joyce began to do so too, while Charlie took to reading Joyce’s history books when he had a spare moment.

Charlie’s political beliefs were far left and idealistic. In 1989, the year he arrived at Exeter, he was still a committed member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, even though communism was in steep decline throughout Europe. Joyce, whose interest in politics had hitherto been purely academic, found Charlie’s conviction magnetic. She joined the Party too, allowing herself to be swept along on the tidal wave of his philosophy, determined to embrace his grand vision.

As a committed Marxist, Charlie was never quite sure if he wanted to change the world or hide away from it in a garret somewhere with his easel. Joyce dutifully — like a good Tanner woman, she later reflected — went along with his whims, regularly attending Party meetings with him, although she didn’t share his conviction. She could see no harm in it; after all, communism in the West was over, whether or not Charlie was prepared to admit it.

The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, two months after Charlie’s arrival at Exeter and his fateful meeting with Joyce. But Charlie seemed to be the only person in the world oblivious to the significance. Looking back, Joyce could see that Charlie had behaved like an ostrich, blocking out this epic event because it didn’t suit his notion of how the world should be. At the time, Joyce hadn’t minded; in fact, she’d been vaguely amused. But that was before she discovered that Charlie would display a life-long predilection for denying the existence of anything which did not fit into his own scheme of things.

Charlie lived off campus on an old wooden sailing boat, the Shirley Anne, which had been left to him by his grandfather. Or the nearest thing he had to a grandfather. His parents, about whom he seemed to know very little, had been killed in a car crash when Charlie was three, and he’d been fostered by a childless North Devon couple who later adopted him. Their family became his family, Charlie always said.

The legacy from his adoptive grandfather had included an extremely convenient River Exe estuary mooring at Topsham, just outside Exeter. Charlie made the daily commute to campus aboard a rickety Lambretta motor scooter. It wasn’t long before Joyce moved in with him, keeping her new living arrangements from Henry and Felicity.

She continued to travel home at weekends. But not every weekend. And by train, having managed to persuade her parents that this was the swiftest and easiest form of travel between Exeter and Bristol, thus avoiding any inspection of her living arrangements by Henry or his driver.

With or without Joyce, Charlie spent his weekends scraping and patching the old boat, in order, he told her, to make it seaworthy for a voyage around the world. Joyce joined in, when she could. She met Charlie’s adoptive parents, Bill and Joan Mildmay, when they came to visit, bringing a picnic and wine. They seemed easy-going and totally accepting of her. She wondered if she would ever have the courage to introduce Charlie to her parents. She would have to, sooner or later, that was for certain. Because Charlie had already told her that, whatever he ended up doing with his life, he wanted to share it with her. And she felt the same.

Of an evening they would sit planning a gap-year odyssey aboard the Shirley Anne. They would allow the winds to take them where they willed, said Charlie one night as they sat on deck, oblivious to the cold, sharing a spliff.

Joyce thought it was the most romantic thing she had ever heard.

Since Charlie was a year younger than her and a year behind in his studies, Joyce intended to extend her time at university either by studying for an MA, if her grades were good enough, or a teaching qualification. That way they would leave Exeter at the same time and take off on their travels, roaming the oceans like the free spirits they were.

Living on the Shirley Anne was not easy. They had to contend with a cantankerous gas water-heater, which would provide hot water for the one sink only when it suited it. There was no shower, let alone a bath. Thankfully the university locker rooms provided those facilities. The boat was connected to mains electricity, in a Heath Robinson sort of way. If you overloaded it by plugging in more than one device at a time, the entire system was liable to blow. So the sole electric heater which warmed the old vessel had to be used with extreme care. On top of that the place reeked of damp, and mildew was rife. All Joyce’s shoes turned vaguely green with a persistent mould at which she resolutely scrubbed each time she wore them, although it never seemed to make much difference.

Their first winter in the leaky aft cabin was a cold and wet one. Joyce had never known what it was to be cold, and it amazed her that Charlie didn’t seem to feel it or be affected by it. She shivered and coughed and spluttered her way through until spring, but it didn’t faze her. Only one thing mattered: she was with the man she loved, living his dream.

Charlie was unlike anyone she’d ever met. With hindsight she wondered whether that was why she’d been drawn to him. He couldn’t have been more different to her father. In those days, anyway. To his daughter, Henry Tanner seemed an utterly conventional man, to the point of being boring. Whereas Charlie was wild and free, bursting with dreams, like a throwback to the sixties, when young people had been obliged to rebel, in their dress and appearance if nothing else. Joyce’s father had been a teenager during that era. She’d seen photographs of him, resolutely suited and booted in his classic style. He’d allowed his hair to grow a fashionable inch or so longer, but that was the extent of his rebellion. Even as a teenager, he’d refused to bend his ideas or principles to fit the times.

Charlie, on the other hand, declared that rules were made to be broken. He had an unruly nature to match his unruly hair. He loved and lived exactly as he pleased, and he carried Joyce along with him on a jet stream of youthful enthusiasm.

Joyce had known from the start that Charlie was unlikely to meet with the approval of her parents. Particularly Henry. Nevertheless a meeting was arranged. And the head-over-heels-in-love Joyce took her beau home to meet Henry and Felicity. Henry’s offer to send his car and chauffeur was, of course, spurned by the free-spirited pair. And since Charlie said he couldn’t afford train fares and wasn’t going to take charity from anyone, they ended up trundling their way to Bristol aboard Charlie’s Lambretta.

While it was obvious to Joyce that Henry Tanner did not share her enthusiasm for Charlie, he behaved with courtesy and was a warm and generous host. But during the course of the evening, when Charlie needed to use the bathroom and Joyce showed him where it was, she returned in time to hear her parents, unaware that she was in earshot, discussing her romance.

‘Don’t worry about it, dear,’ her mother reassured her father. ‘She’s so young. He’s her first serious boyfriend — they’re sure to grow out of each other.’

Joyce knew better. And her mother’s remarks incensed her. She burst into the sitting room, bristling with indignation.

‘Little do you bloody know,’ she began, pointing a forefinger at Felicity.

‘Don’t swear at your mother,’ said Henry.

‘I’m not,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m swearing at both of you. How can you be so bloody stupid? Don’t you know the difference between casual sex and proper love? You should do — you’ve been married long enough.’

Henry looked poleaxed. Felicity blushed. Sex was never mentioned in the Tanner household. Joyce sometimes thought her parents hoped that she and her brother believed there had been a double immaculate conception.

‘There’s no need for that sort of talk, dear,’ said her mother.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ said Joyce, as a bewildered Charlie re-entered the room. ‘Look, you two met each other when you were younger than either of us, and you’re still together. Anyway, you may as well get used to it. Charlie and I are going to be together for the rest of our lives, aren’t we, sweetheart?’

It was Charlie’s turn to blush.

Joyce nudged him in the ribs with her elbow. ‘Aren’t we, sweetheart?’ she repeated, a tad edgily.

‘W-well, yes, of course,’ stumbled Charlie. ‘Of course we are, darling. I just don’t want to upset your parents, that’s all.’

‘Do you know what,’ said Joyce, finding a courage she didn’t know she had. ‘I don’t give a damn whether they’re upset or not.’

And with that, leaving her parents dumb with shock, she led a spluttering Charlie from the room, out of the house and aboard the Lambretta.

Naturally, she telephoned to apologize. Throughout her life she seemed to have been torn between wanting her freedom and being afraid to grasp it. But she wasn’t about to give up Charlie for anyone.

Joyce’s mother later told her that she and her father had remained convinced the relationship would not last. One thing came out of the otherwise disastrous meeting, however. Having seen the Lambretta his beloved only daughter was travelling about on, Henry Tanner presented her with a new Mini Cooper. Just as he ultimately would his eldest grandson.

Charlie muttered something virtually incomprehensible about the moral dilemma of accepting lavish gifts from wealthy parents, particularly if you were a paid-up member of the Communist Party. But, for once, Joyce ignored him. And his conscience did not prevent him from spurning his rusting scooter in favour of riding with Joyce in her shiny new Mini at every opportunity. Particularly when it was raining.

If she hadn’t been head over heels in love she might have noticed the ease with which Charlie abandoned his principles, she thought, as she sat at her kitchen table so many years later, with that letter before her, desperately seeking to make sense of the senseless. But she’d been blind to such things back then.

Immersed in her new life, she’d continued to spend the occasional weekend at Tarrant Park, but her visits were nowhere near as frequent as Henry and Felicity would have liked. They raised no objection though, perhaps because they were still getting over the shock of Joyce’s ‘sex’ outburst. The Cooper made the journey to and fro both easy and fun, and more often than not Charlie accompanied her. While unfailingly polite in Charlie’s presence, Henry would invariably find some pressing reason to spend much of the weekend in his city-centre office or tucked away in his study at home, emerging only for meals. And Felicity would try, usually without success, to lure her away to the golf course or on a shopping trip, in order to spend time with her apart from Charlie. But her parents soon learned that if you wanted Joyce you had to take Charlie. They were, after all, JC.

If Joyce had thought about it at the time, which again she didn’t, she would have realized that her father was trying to drive a wedge between her and Charlie. He knew better than to confront his daughter directly, so instead he attempted to bribe her with solo treats such as a session with a top tennis coach in Spain, or getaways with one or other of her parents to London, Paris or New York. She turned down all his offers: no Charlie meant no Joyce.

Then, at the beginning of Joyce’s third year at Exeter and just as her parents were reconciling themselves to the idea of JC, tragedy struck. Her brother William was killed by a hit-and-run driver as he crossed Bristol’s busy Victoria Road right outside the Tanner-Max office.

The whole family was devastated. After the funeral Henry went into deep mourning and shut himself away for a month. The running of the business was left to his father, Edward, who came out of retirement to hold things together. Although well into his eighties, he was not the sort of man to sit in a fireside armchair while the business he’d created descended into terminal collapse through neglect.

After that month Henry re-emerged and once more took over the reins, conducting himself as if it were business as usual at Tanner-Max. But if anyone presumed to express their sympathy over William’s sudden death, or if William’s name cropped up in conversation, Henry Tanner simply purported not to hear.

Joyce was perplexed by his reaction. Felicity at least made no attempt to hide how devastated she was at the death of their only son. Every time Joyce saw her she seemed to be either in tears or red-eyed as if she’d been crying. But both parents seemed indifferent to getting justice for William. Their response to Joyce’s demands to know what the police were doing about finding her brother’s killer left her dumbfounded and dismayed.

‘I’m sure the police will let us know if they find out anything,’ they told her. ‘Anyway, what does it matter? It won’t bring him back.’

It mattered a lot to Joyce. She wanted to see her brother’s killer brought to justice. It became, for a time, her foremost motivation in life. She badgered the police on a daily basis, and at one point even attempted to conduct her own investigation.

In the end her father took her to one side.

‘You know, sweetheart, the longer this goes on the more upset your mother is going to get,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid she may be heading for a breakdown. Her only hope is to move on. William is dead and nothing can change that. If you persist in what you are doing you are only going to bring her more grief. Every time you talk about it you open the wound, just when it’s starting to heal. Let it go, sweetheart, let it go, for your mother’s sake.’

With considerable regret, Joyce did as her father asked and let it go, though for her the wound could never heal while William’s killer walked free.

Six months after William’s death, Henry suddenly expressed a desire to spend time with Charlie alone. He invited the younger man to join him for lunch at the country house hotel just outside Bristol which he habitually used for business entertaining.

Predictably, Charlie was not keen.

‘You must go,’ urged Joyce. ‘This is Daddy’s olive branch. It could mean he will accept you at last. You are the two men I love most in the world. Hey, the only two men I love in the world. It would be so great if you could be friends.’

Charlie had been unimpressed. ‘I reckon your dad’s more likely to make friends with a boa constrictor,’ he said.

‘Don’t think he couldn’t if he set his mind to it,’ countered Joyce.

‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’ enquired Charlie.

He agreed to the lunch, for Joyce’s sake, but made it clear that he had absolutely no desire to spend time alone with Henry Tanner. Neither had he any wish to lunch at a staid and achingly conventional hotel, the kind of establishment he had always despised. And his reluctance turned to alarm when Joyce informed him that there was a dress code.

‘Formal jacket and tie, I fear,’ she said.

‘Well, that’s the final straw,’ said Charlie.

‘What’s the matter, don’t you have a proper jacket?’ enquired Joyce, who had never seen him wear any such thing.

‘Course I do,’ muttered Charlie. ‘Somewhere. If it still fits me. I don’t have a tie though.’

‘Well, I think we could run to buying one of those, don’t you?’

‘I just don’t understand what your father could want,’ Charlie sighed.

‘He doesn’t want anything,’ said Joyce. ‘He’s trying to get to know you, that’s all. He’s finally come round to the fact that I’m determined to have you, for ever, and so there’s nothing left for him to do but accept you. I think it’s fab — now stop whingeing and let’s go buy you a tie.’

And so the appointed day came and Charlie set off to Mendip House in his one and only formal jacket, which turned out to be the top half of a suit that had been bought for him on his eighteenth birthday by his mum, Joan, who had apparently been determined he should go into adulthood with at least one presentable suit in his wardrobe. The plain but good quality navy-blue jacket had only been worn on a couple of occasions; although a little tight across the shoulders, it looked quite smart once a light dusting of mildew on the collar and sleeves had been dealt with.

Joyce knotted for him, over an old but honourable and very nearly white shirt, the subtly patterned silk tie in varying shades of blue, which he had reluctantly allowed her to purchase at Exeter’s Debenhams. Then she eyed him up and down approvingly. His hair, murky yellow or dark blond, depending on the light and how recently he had washed it, remained as unruly as ever and was even longer than when she’d first met him. It curled untidily over his shoulders, a bit like an avalanche of dirty snow. Joyce liked it. But she knew her father didn’t. She reached out to touch Charlie’s hair with one hand, wondering whether he might be persuaded to allow the lightest of trims around the ends.

Charlie read her mind.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said.

It had been arranged that Henry’s driver would pick Charlie up at Topsham, take him to the Mendip Hotel, more than an hour away, then drive him home afterwards. That way he could have a drink if he wanted, said Henry.

Charlie had muttered dissent, telling Joyce it was against his principles as a communist to ride in a chauffeur-driven car. But he said nothing of this to Henry, meekly accepting the arrangement.

Joyce spent an anxious afternoon awaiting his return. It was a sunny autumn day and there were any number of jobs on the boat she could have been getting on with, but she was too restless to settle to any task. Instead she threw a blanket on to the well-worn deck, lay back and tried to concentrate on the modern espionage thriller she was reading whilst enjoying the sun. But she was on edge. She so wanted this lunch between her two men to be a success. Maybe she was getting things out of proportion, but she couldn’t help feeling her whole life depended on a successful outcome.

It was well gone six before Charlie appeared, weaving unsteadily along the tow path. She waved a greeting. Charlie managed a half wave in response, gave her a weak smile, then lurched to his left and was sick in the water.

‘Good lunch then,’ Joyce remarked, more to herself than to him.

‘Oh God, I feel terrible,’ mumbled Charlie as he staggered towards her.

‘I should have warned you about the flow of booze at Dad’s lunches,’ said Joyce.

Charlie groaned.

‘Well, aren’t you going to tell me what happened? I want to know all about it. Are you friends for life or what?’

Charlie responded with another groan, his body swaying precariously as he stepped on to the gangplank. Convinced he was going to fall, Joyce hurried towards him, grabbed a flailing arm and pulled him on to the boat.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you to bed — I can tell I’m not going to get any sense out of you until you’ve slept it off.’

She’d never seen Charlie so drunk, but Joyce remembered that, far from being unhappy at the state he was in, she’d taken it as a good sign. If things had gone badly with her father he would have returned much earlier and stone-cold sober. And what she wanted more than anything was for the two of them to become friends. Lunching and drinking buddies had to be a good start.

Impatient for Charlie’s account of the lunch, she’d hovered close by as he descended to the lower deck after throwing up spectacularly over the rails. Then she’d climbed into the double bunk alongside him, but he fell instantly into a deep sleep and showed no signs of waking. Resisting the urge to wake him, she told herself she would have to be patient and wait till morning.

But when the morning came and Charlie emerged with a major hangover, he was no more forthcoming.

‘You know what, Joycey baby, I got so pissed I can’t remember a thing,’ he told her, running long fingers through his unruly hair.

No matter how much Joyce pressed him, Charlie persisted in dodging the issue. He remembered what he had eaten — seafood platter and roast beef — but next to nothing of the conversation.

Joyce couldn’t understand it. She had been to any number of parties with Charlie where the pair of them had drunk far too much, and on sobering up afterwards he’d always seemed to have total recall. Sometimes embarrassingly so.

Joyce called her father. Henry Tanner was equally evasive.

‘Oh God, darling, I don’t know what we talked about. This and that. Told me all about that blessed boat he lives on...’

Henry paused. As far as Joyce knew, her father was unaware that she too lived on the Shirley Anne. She wondered if he suspected, and whether he’d grilled Charlie on the subject.

‘Oh, and how much he cares for you,’ Henry continued. ‘But then I knew that, didn’t I?’

‘Come on, Dad, you can do better than that,’ Joyce urged, trying to make her voice light and teasing. ‘I want to know exactly what the two men in my life have been plotting. So come on. Spill!’

‘We haven’t been plotting anything,’ Henry answered quickly. Perhaps too quickly.

‘Trust you to be so bloody nosy,’ he laughed. ‘I can tell you, however, that I think you have a fine young man there.’

Joyce did a double take down the phone.

‘You’ve given every impression you couldn’t stand the sight of him from the first time I brought him home,’ she said.

‘Rubbish,’ responded Henry. ‘Like I said, I just needed to get to know Charlie a bit. And, anyway, I couldn’t be sure in the beginning whether or not he was going to stick around, could I?’

There was, Joyce realized, some truth in that. She told herself she should stop being such a control freak — a trait which ran in the family — and be thankful that a friendship appeared to be blossoming between the two men.

But over the next few days Charlie became progressively more withdrawn. The Charlie she had fallen in love with had been an energetic young man with a lively and active mind, who never stopped talking, and was seldom capable of sitting still for more than five minutes. Following the lunch with Henry, it seemed to Joyce that he’d become uncharacteristically quiet and introspective. And instead of seeking out every opportunity to be with Joyce, as he had always done before, he seemed to seize upon any excuse to be apart from her.

No longer did he hover outside her lectures, ready to whisk her off for a coffee or a chat. No longer did he study alongside her. A couple of times he ate alone in the refectory while she was busy studying, something he had never done before. And when they were together aboard the Shirley Anne he contrived to be on deck while she was below and below deck when she was up top.

They still slept together. They still had sex. Satisfying sex. But — and Joyce had never been able to explain this to herself — it wasn’t the same. Even in their most intimate moments, they were no longer really close.

JC, it seemed to Joyce, was no more.

Naturally she’d confronted Charlie. Told him she was hurt and puzzled. Asked him what was going on.

‘You’re imagining things,’ he responded, kindly enough. But he wouldn’t give her a straight answer or say anything to put her mind at rest.

Meanwhile Henry began to take Charlie out to lunch and dinner on a regular basis. The Mendip Hotel was their usual haunt, but there were also trips to London venues like the Savoy and the Ritz. Once the two men stayed over — at Henry’s club, they said.

Joyce continued to be surprised, because her father and her future husband didn’t seem to have much in common, apart from her. And both were frustratingly unforthcoming when asked about their meetings. She was accustomed to her father keeping his nearest and dearest in the dark; talking things through was not something Henry did. But Charlie was different — or so she’d thought.

There were other changes too. Charlie suddenly announced that he was giving up smoking; not just cigarettes — he had a fifty-a-day habit — but marijuana too. Though she knew she would miss the mellowing and sometimes aphrodisiac effect marijuana had on them both, Joyce was glad. She didn’t mind the odd spliff but had never cared for cigarettes.

Then, about four months after what Joyce came to regard as his fateful first lunch with Henry, Charlie had his hair cut. Joyce returned to the boat one evening, having not seen him all day on campus, to find that her wild and hirsute young man now sported a short back and sides. With a parting too.

‘Good God, this is a shock,’ she had said, as mildly as she could manage. It wasn’t the fact he’d cut his hair that bothered her; it was his failure to mention it beforehand.

‘I don’t see why,’ Charlie replied curtly. ‘You didn’t think I was going to have hair down my back for the rest of my life, did you? One can’t be a student for ever.’

‘But you’ve over a year to go,’ she reminded him.

‘Maybe.’ The response was short and sharp, and though further questions sprang to mind, Joyce dared not ask them.

A few days later she was emptying the bin from the galley when she noticed Charlie’s Communist Party membership card amongst the rubbish. It was one of his most prized possessions, a kind of badge of honour. When over-excited or a bit drunk, he was inclined to brandish the card whilst berating those around him who did not share his beliefs, which if anything had become stronger as communism’s influence waned.

Joyce fished the card out of the rubbish, scrubbed at a grease stain and presented it to Charlie.

‘I’ve no idea how this got in the bin, but I rescued it for you,’ she said. ‘Do I get a big kiss and an even bigger thank you?’

A bright flush spread over Charlie’s pale cheeks.

‘Well, actually, I threw it away,’ he said.

‘You did what?’ asked Joyce, staggered. ‘Why?’

‘I’ve resigned my membership,’ Charlie responded. ‘I don’t believe in it any more.’

‘But the Party is your religion. You’re a damned missionary for it. I only joined because of you. You know that. Whatever brought this on, Charlie?’

‘The small matter of the Berlin Wall falling might be a bit of a factor, eh?’

Ignoring the sarcasm in his voice, Joyce reminded him, ‘You always said you weren’t going to allow the fall of the Wall to affect your beliefs. You said the cause was the right one, and eventually the world would—’

‘I know what I damn well said,’ Charlie snapped. ‘And you always argued I was wrong. Well, you’ve got your way now. It’s over. So you’ve got what you wanted, haven’t you?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘C’mon, tell me the truth: what’s really behind all this?’

‘I’m growing up, I suppose,’ he responded with a shrug. ‘I’ve finally come to the conclusion that Marxism is nonsense, that’s all.’

Joyce had been stunned. One of the things that had attracted her to Charlie had been his conviction and passionate advocacy for the ideals he held so dear. It hadn’t mattered a jot that she had never really shared those ideals. That wasn’t the point.

‘Well, that’s rich! You’ve resigned from the Communist Party without telling me and I’m still officially a member, even though I only ever joined because of you and your alleged principles,’ she said, with more edge than she intended.

‘I shouldn’t worry about it. I doubt there will be a Communist Party of Great Britain for much longer,’ said Charlie prophetically.

‘So why the grand gesture?’ asked Joyce.

Charlie made no reply. Instead he walked away from her — something he’d been doing more and more. Even in bed, although they were still at the stage where they made love almost every night, Joyce found him increasingly detached. But if she dared to mention it he would not be drawn, and when she persisted he bit her head off.

She consoled herself with the thought that at least Charlie’s friendship with her father seemed to be going from strength to strength. There had been several more trips to London involving overnight stays at Henry’s club. Henry also took Charlie to the races at Cheltenham and to watch Bath play rugby. Neither Joyce nor her mother were invited. Joyce was not used to it. She was used to being the apple of her father’s eye, getting her own way with him. She was also used to going absolutely everywhere with Charlie.

‘I thought you wanted me to get to know your young man. I thought you wanted us to be friends,’ said her father when she remonstrated with him about excluding her from these invitations.

An expression of her paternal grandmother’s came into her mind: ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

What Joyce wished for right then was for things to go back to the way they had been. Her wish was to be emphatically denied.

At the end of a typical morning of domestic crisis aboard the Shirley Anne — the electric kettle had blown the entire system again, and then the bottled gas ran out as they tried to cook breakfast on the little two-burner gas hob — Charlie dropped the biggest bombshell yet.

‘Well, at least we won’t have to be putting up with this shit for much longer,’ he announced. ‘I’ve sold the Shirley Anne. Some twat of a first year has bought her. He’s got absolutely no idea what he’s taking on.’

‘You’ve done what?’ she asked. ‘You can’t mean it.’

‘Yep, I can. And I have. I’ve had enough.’

‘But she meant so much to you. And me, come to that.’

‘Time to move on, Joycey.’

He didn’t even sound like Charlie any more. ‘Time to move on’ indeed — the old Charlie would never have spoken to her in that patronizing way.

‘I can’t believe you’d do that, and without so much as a word to me!’

‘Why would I need to discuss it with you?’ Charlie asked curtly. ‘She’s my boat. And she was mine before I even met you. It was my decision to make.’

‘But the Shirley Anne is part of our life together...’ Fighting to hold back her tears, Joyce took a step away.

Seeing the hurt in her eyes, Charlie softened his tone. ‘Look, I’m sorry, sweetheart. I thought it was my responsibility — I didn’t want to burden you with it. You have to admit, it’s time we moved on. We can get a little flat in town...’

He didn’t want to burden her? For a moment Joyce was too stunned to speak; it was as if Charlie had suddenly morphed into her father.

‘And you have the money for a flat, do you?’ she snapped.

‘Well no, not exactly,’ Charlie continued, his tone patient and reasonable. ‘But your father has offered to help.’

Joyce couldn’t believe her ears.

‘My father? Have you two been plotting this? The Shirley Anne is our home, yours and mine, Charlie. Did you connive with my father to get rid of our home?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Charlie, reaching out to her.

‘And what about our gap-year odyssey?’ Joyce demanded, brushing away his hand. ‘What about sailing off into the ocean and letting the winds take us where they will? What about our dreams, Charlie?’

He shrugged. His face gave nothing away.

‘Maybe I have different dreams, now, Joyce,’ he said.

‘Well, you know what, Charlie, when you told me that was what you wanted to do and that you wanted me to do it with you, to sail away with you aboard this wonderful old boat, I thought it was about the most romantic thing I had ever heard in the whole of my life.’

Charlie stepped towards her, wrapped his arms around her and pressed his lips on hers, thus making it impossible for her to say any more. At least he could still be unpredictable, it seemed.

He stroked her hair tenderly and stopped kissing her only in order to speak.

‘I still have dreams, my darling,’ he said. ‘And I have one great big dream that only you can make come true. Will you marry me, Joyce Tanner?’

Joyce felt her jaw drop. She was taken totally by surprise.

She had always assumed that she and Charlie would marry one day. They’d both been certain from the start that they wanted to be together for ever. But the last thing she expected that morning, after Charlie had so unceremoniously blurted out about the sale of the boat, was a formal proposal.

She stared at him in silence for a minute or so.

‘Well?’ he enquired, and flashed the old lopsided resist-me-if-you-can grin, which had become, she thought, a depressingly rare sight.

His hair had grown a bit, thankfully, the parting was crooked, and there was just a hint of the old tousled tangle she’d so adored.

She continued to stare at him.

‘This isn’t what I expected...’ She struggled to find the words. ‘To tell the truth, Charlie, I thought you’d gone off me.’

‘Never.’ He kissed her again on the lips, but lightly this time. ‘I love you more than ever. Surely you realize that.’

She shook her head. ‘Oh, Charlie,’ she said. ‘I love you so much. But you’ve changed lately. I mean, if you get married, does it mean you can’t do daft things any more like bugger off in a boat and let the winds take you? ’Cos if it does, well, I don’t know...’

He interrupted, raising one finger gently to her mouth and placing it there.

‘Sweetheart, you didn’t seriously think we could sail around the world on this old crate, did you?’

She thought for a second. The answer to that was yes. Yes, she had thought they could. He had made her believe that. And she told him so.

‘I never had any doubts, Charlie,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d work on her until she was right, then take off. You and me and the ocean waves.’

‘Joyce, I doubt we’d have got Shirley Anne out of the estuary, let alone on to the ocean waves. She’s riddled with woodworm and rot!’

‘But, Charlie,’ she protested, ‘I believed you. Absolutely. I thought we were going to do it — fulfil our dreams, find our Shangri-La.’

‘We can still fulfil our dreams, my darling,’ he said. ‘But they’ll be different ones, that’s all. My dream is to marry you, for you to have my children, and to keep you and them safe and happy and well for the rest of our lives. Isn’t that even more romantic?’

He stroked her face, his touch warm and suddenly every bit as exciting as it had been in the beginning. He kissed her cheek. His lips were soft, deliciously soft.

‘Marry me, my darling,’ he pleaded. ‘Please, please, marry me. I cannot imagine that life could go on unless you say yes. Please, please, say yes. Say you’ll marry me. Go on. Say it. Say it.’

He kissed her forehead, the tip of her nose, raised her hand and kissed her fingers, pressed his lips to her ears, the top of her head, her eyes, and oh so lightly, her mouth, again and again.

She found herself laughing uncontrollably through the kisses.

‘Yes,’ she cried out eventually, her words half smothered by his kisses. ‘Yes, yes, yes, Charlie. Yes, I will marry you, my darling. Yes! Yes!’

He grabbed her by one arm and pulled her towards the bunk in the aft cabin. She noticed, and it made her laugh, that he was trying to get out of his trousers as they hurried to get there. He nearly tripped them both up. He tore at the buttons on her shirt, ripping one off, and tugged at her jeans whilst trying to get out of his own shirt at the same time.

The undressing was clumsy, terribly clumsy, but the love-making was fluent and seamless, as good as it had ever been, possibly better. Bold yet tender. Urgent yet without haste. Charlie was there. Right there. With her. On her. In her. No longer detached in any way. Instead, after so long, he was part of her again. At last.

And when it was over, for one crazy, wonderful, ecstatic moment, Joyce even thought they might be JC again.

She phoned her parents to tell them that she’d accepted Charlie’s proposal, and to her amazement they both expressed delight. In spite of Henry’s recent efforts to bond with Charlie, she’d expected him to urge caution, to point out that she was only twenty-two and Charlie twenty-one, too young to be taking such a step. Even though Henry and Felicity had been even younger when they’d married, Joyce had anticipated a long drawn-out argument before her father gave his blessing. His enthusiastic approval took her completely by surprise.

A date was set for the coming June, straight after Joyce’s finals. The wedding reception would be held at the Tarrant Park tennis club, following a traditional ceremony at a nearby church. Henry took charge of everything. And he would be footing the bill, of course. Gladly he said, beaming at his daughter and her husband to be.

It did occur to Joyce that the next stage in her life appeared to be evolving without her having much of a say in it. But Charlie had been far more his old self since she had accepted his proposal, and she was far too excited to let herself dwell on anxieties she couldn’t put a name to, let alone explain. Instead she gave herself up to the excitement and joy of becoming Mrs Joyce Mildmay.