Out of the corner of his eye, as the boat bucked and dipped between two buffeting waves, he spied the woman.
She was wearing a see-through plastic rain cape and carrying an umbrella like a London stockbroker’s. She was gazing out over reeds pressed low by the gusty wind. She raised her hand in greeting before (he could barely believe it, but it was actually happening) unzipping her cape, tossing it aside, turning around and spreading her arms, the open umbrella in her right hand.
Then, arms outstretched like the statue of Christ on Rio de Janeiro’s Corcovado, she let herself topple backwards into the heaving river.
‘What the …?’ hissed Perdu. ‘Salvo! Woman overboard!’ he cried, and the Italian came barrelling out of the galley.
‘Che? What have you been drinking?’ he cried, but Perdu merely pointed to the body now rising and sinking in the whipped-up water. And to the umbrella.
The Neapolitan stared at the foaming river. The umbrella sank.
Cuneo’s teeth were grinding.
He made a grab for the mooring lines and the lifebuoy.
‘Bring us in closer!’ he ordered. ‘Massimo!’ he called. ‘Get off the piano! I need you here, right now … subito!’
While Perdu wrestled the book barge nearer to the bank, Cuneo took up a position beside the railing, tied the rope to the lifebelt and braced his short, pudgy legs against the boards. Then he hurled the lifebelt with all his might towards the bundle in the water. He handed the other end of the rope to the watching Max, who had turned as white as a sheet.
‘When I get hold of her, you pull. Pull like a carthorse, boy!’
He kicked off his shoes and dived headlong into the river. Streaks of lightning rent the sky.
Max and Perdu watched Cuneo swim through the ravening water with powerful crawl strokes.
‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Max pulled his anorak sleeves well down over his hands and gripped the rope again.
Perdu dropped anchor with a rattle. The barge pitched and tossed as if it were being thrown about inside a washing machine.
Cuneo reached the woman and put his arms around her.
Perdu and Max tugged on the rope and heaved them both aboard. Cuneo’s moustache was dripping; the woman’s heart-shaped face was framed by sopping, ruddy-brown hair like curly seaweed.
Perdu dashed to the wheelhouse, but as he reached for the radio to call the emergency doctor, he felt Cuneo’s heavy wet hand on his shoulder.
‘Don’t! The woman doesn’t want you to. She’ll be all right as it is. I’ll take care of her – she needs drying off and warming up.’ Perdu trusted Cuneo’s words and asked no further questions.
Sometime after they had hauled anchor, Perdu saw Cuisery marina emerge from the mist and steered Lulu into the harbour. Amid the lashing rain and waves Max and he tied boat to pontoon.
‘We’ve got to get off!’ cried Max over the whistling and wailing of the wind. ‘The boat’s going to take one hell of a battering!’
‘I’m not going to leave the books and the cats all alone!’ Perdu called back. The water was running into his ears, down his neck and up his sleeves. ‘And anyway, I’m the capitano, and a skipper doesn’t abandon his ship.’
‘Aye aye! Then I’m not going anywhere either.’
The boat groaned, as though they both had a screw loose.
Having set up camp in Perdu’s cabin, Cuneo had helped peel the castaway out of her clothes. The woman with the heart-shaped face was lying naked under a huge heap of blankets with a blissful expression on her face. The Italian had decked himself out in his white tracksuit, which made him look ever so slightly silly.
He kneeled down beside her and fed her Proven?al pistou. He spooned the garlic, basil and almond paste straight into a cup and diluted it with clear flavoursome vegetable broth.
She smiled at him between two sips.
‘So it’s Salvo. Salvatore Cuneo, from Naples,’ she said.
‘Si.’
‘I’m Samantha.’
‘And you’re gorgeous,’ said Salvo.
‘Is it … is it not too bad out there?’ she asked. Her eyes were really very large and deepest, darkest blue.
‘Nah!’ Max shot back. ‘Huh, what do you mean?’
‘A light shower. There’s a little moisture about,’ Cuneo reassured her.
‘I could read something aloud,’ Perdu suggested.
‘Or we could sing a song,’ added Max. ‘In the round.’
‘Or cook,’ suggested Cuneo. ‘Do you like daube, a stew made with herbes de Provence?’
She nodded. ‘And beef cheeks too, right?’
‘So what’s the problem?’ asked Max.
‘Life. The water. Tinned whorlfish.’
The three men stared at her, completely baffled.
On first appraisal Perdu thought that this Samantha might say and do some mad things, but she neither appeared nor was in fact mad. She was just … peculiar.
‘Three times nine, I’d say,’ he replied. ‘What are whorlfish, though?’