The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

5

When I finished reading this letter for the first time, my left shoulder was numb from the weight of Poppy’s head leaning against it. I gently eased her off, and instinctively she shifted her weight, leaning over to the other side of her seat, away from me. I took her pillow and, carefully raising the back of her head, slid the pillow behind it, until she was ready to settle down upon it. Her mouth was half-open and there was a little bubble of saliva at one corner. I rearranged her blanket, making sure that both of her shoulders were covered, and tucked it in around the edges of her body. She gave a little sigh and slipped even deeper into untroubled sleep.

I sat up, rubbed my eyes and listened for a while to the steady drone of the aircraft engines. Most of the passengers were asleep, and the cabin lights were giving out a strange, muted sort of twilight glow. On the screen in front of me, a perpetually shifting map showed the plane’s progress towards London: it told me that we were, at that moment, somewhere over the Arabian Sea, a few hundred miles west of Bangalore. As with anything technological, I had no idea how this miraculous device worked. Forty years ago, it seemed Donald Crowhurst could hide out for months in the mid-Atlantic, a speck in the ocean, surrounded by limitless miles of open sea but somehow hidden from everyone else on the planet. Nowadays, any number of orbiting satellites were trained on us every minute of the day, pinpointing our locations with unimaginable speed and accuracy. There was no such thing as privacy any more. We were never really alone. That should have been a comforting thought, really – I’d had enough of loneliness, more than enough, over the last few months – but somehow it wasn’t. After all, even when he’d been thousands of miles out to sea, even when there had been whole oceans lying between them, Crowhurst had still been bound to his wife, by invisible cords of feeling. He could have been certain, at almost any time of the day or night, that she would have been thinking of him. Yet here I was, with a kind, affectionate young woman sitting right next to me, sleeping by my side (the most trusting and intimate thing you can do with another person, I sometimes think) and the sad truth was that any closeness I felt between us was likely to be temporary. At the end of the flight, it would probably be gone.

I read the letter from Poppy’s uncle again, during those wakeful hours, and then a third time. It left me with far more questions than answers. Had Donald Crowhurst been a coward to do what he did? I found it hard to see it that way. He’d been only thirty-six when he set out on his voyage, and for my own part I still felt like a child by comparison, even though I was now forty-eight (having celebrated my birthday in Australia two weeks earlier, at a budget-priced Greek restaurant in Sydney, struggling to keep a conversation going with my father as usual). To be the master of a boat like that – let alone to convince yourself (and others) that you could pilot it single-handed around the globe, through the most dangerous seas on earth – suggested … what? Self-delusion? No, I didn’t think that Crowhurst had been deluded. Quite the opposite: by today’s standards, he seemed almost inconceivably mature and self-confident. Thirty-six years old! When I’d been in my mid-thirties, I was – like most of my friends – still agonizing over whether I was ready to have kids or not. Crowhurst had tackled that one long ago: he already had four. What was it about my generation? Why were we so slow to grow up? Our infancy seemed to stretch into our mid-twenties. At the age of forty we were still adolescents. Why did it take us so long to assume responsibility for ourselves – let alone for our children?

I yawned and felt my eyelids beginning to weigh heavy. The battery on Poppy’s computer was almost exhausted, too – about eight minutes to go, the meter said. I pressed the forward button in Picture and Fax Viewer and looked for one last time at the pictures of Donald Crowhurst she had scanned in. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something about them that bothered me; something that gave me a little shiver of unrest. Besides the photo of the abandoned yacht, there were three other pictures: Crowhurst in his weatherproofs, setting sail from Teignmouth – the scene Poppy’s uncle had witnessed himself; Crowhurst towards the end of his voyage, a self-portrait, with moustache, and a new, sun-hardened look to his face; and a startlingly younger-looking Crowhurst on dry land, in front of the BBC cameras, being interviewed prior to his departure.

This last one was a close-up, and was the most unsettling. His face was turned partly away from the camera, looking downwards, lost in anxious thought. He was chewing nervously on the knuckle of his thumb. Here, already, he looked like a man in torment, as if all too aware that the image he was presenting to the world was a false one; that the truth behind it was darker, more dangerous, and too painful to confront. This was definitely the one – this was the picture that I found so disturbing. But why should it affect me that way?

Then it dawned on me. Of course – it was obvious, now that I’d noticed it.

He was the spitting image of my father.