The three of us had just spent four weeks off the western coast of Andros where Wavebreaker had been hired to make a television commercial for cat food. The notion of the commercial had been that an extremely wealthy cat had chartered the schooner to search the world’s oceans for the best-tasting fish, only to discover that Pussy-Cute Cat Food had already caught and canned the taste. The commercial must have cost Pussy-Cute millions of dollars, and Wavebreaker had been overrun with camera crews, designers, visualisers, scriptwriters, cat-handlers, fish-handlers, directors, account executives, make-up girls, hairdressers, line-producers, assistant-producers, real producers, as well as all the girlfriends and boyfriends and hermaphrodite-friends of everyone involved. Serious adults had argued passionately about the motivation of the rich cat, and even I, who had thought myself immune to the insanities of the film world, had been astonished when an elderly actor had been specially flown down from New York to imitate the beast’s miaow because the real thing had not been considered sufficiently authentic. The elderly actor, coming aboard Wavebreaker for the first time, had stared at me in astonishment; then, though he had never seen me in his life before, he spread his arms in familiar and lavish welcome. “Sweet Tom!” He had called me by my father’s name, and I had smiled wanly, then confessed that I was indeed Tom Breakspear’s son. “How could you not be?” the New York actor had demanded. “You’re the very image of him! Will you remember me to the old rascal?” Everyone knew my father. Everyone wanted me to know how they just loved my father. Everyone told me just how like my father I looked, though very few dared ask me from which of my father’s wives I had been whelped.

But now, thank God, I was free of miaowing Thespians, and Wavebreaker was sailing back to her home port on Grand Bahama where, in just twenty-four hours’ time, she would begin her last charter of the season. Then came Hirondelle to spoil the dawn.