Authors: John Christopher
Annabel was in the bottom bunk, but not asleep. Mary sat on the edge of the bed, dressed and wearing her overcoat. There was, of course, no heat in the pipes with the engines stopped.
Mouritzen said: ‘I have had no chance to speak to you. Are you all right?’
Mary smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘And little Annabel?’
Annabel said: ‘I thought the ship was going to sink, but it didn’t.’
Mouritzen smiled at her. ‘The ship will not sink.’
She said accusingly: ‘You said that when I woke up we would be in Amsterdam.’
‘The storm blew us the wrong way.’
‘Are we
nearly
in Amsterdam?’
‘We were blown a long, long way. It may be a little time before we find our way back.’
Annabel looked at him. ‘I know something.’
‘What is that?’
‘The bear is in the cabin we were in first.’
‘That is exciting – to have a bear in a cabin. Do you think she sleeps in the top bunk or the bottom one?’
Disappointed, she said: ‘I think you knew already.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you weren’t surprised. I thought you would surprised.’
‘She is a clever bear, that one,’ Mouritzen said. ‘That is why I am not surprised. Her grandfather was the big bear who decided he would live like a man. I will tell you that story some time.’
Annabel sat up. ‘Tell it now.’
Mary said: ‘Not now.’ She made the child lie down. ‘Mr Mouritzen has been working very hard, and he’s very, very tired.’
Annabel nodded. To Mouritzen, she said:
‘Good night. You can kiss me good night, if you want to.’
‘Very much.’
In the extremity of fatigue, movements were dream-like and unreal. He walked to the bunk, bent down, and kissed the child on her forehead, between the darker brows and the silky golden hair.
‘Sleep well,’ he said.
‘You, too.’
He turned from her to see Mary looking at him. With the same sensation of being in a dream, he reached towards her and kissed her on the lips. Her lips were warm, accepting, not responding.
Mouritzen stood away from her.
‘There is a compensation,’ he said.
‘Compensation?’
‘For the storm. By now, you should have been in Amsterdam, beginning your new life, already forgetting the
Kreya
and those you met on her.’
She frowned. ‘He will be worried for us.’
‘Your Dutchman? Not too much, I think; you are nothing to each other.’
‘I won’t have you talking like that.’
‘It is true. One cannot rise above the body – our souls live within us. A touch of the hand means more than a hundred letters of passion. To him, you are an abstract thing, a photograph, as it might be a photograph of a film star. But I have kissed you, and you are the woman I love.’
She smiled then. ‘Go to bed, Niels. You are drunk with tiredness.’
He went to the cabin door and opened it. Looking back, he said:
‘Yes. With tiredness and love. Good night.’
Jones moved restlessly in his bed, and after a time Sheila got up from her own and sat by him.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. Thoughts race round my head.’
‘What kind of thoughts?’
‘This is a front-page story – do you realize that? A ship lost and drifting in a storm, the crew mutinying and abandoning ship – sensations and murders – wherever we end up the reporters will be waiting for us.’
She nodded. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Our pictures in the papers – on the television newsreels. Someone is going to recognize us. And when that happens, we’re finished.’
‘No.’
He looked up at her. ‘I promised you a lot, didn’t I?’
‘Only one thing that mattered.’
‘How long will I get? Seven years – ten? I should have looked it up. Or you should have looked it up for me. Part of the secretarial duties.’
‘Try to rest.’
‘Will you wait for me?’
‘If there were need, I’d wait.’
‘No need.’ He spoke with unhappy conviction. ‘She’ll be waiting. First she’ll try making up the deficiency with her own money again; but she’ll realize it’s too serious to get away with like that. She’ll brief the very best counsel. All through the trial she’ll sit in the front row, a brave little figure in sober, elegant clothes. She’ll smile courageously at me as sentence is passed – with any luck she’ll be worth a couple of years’ reduction. And then she’ll set about getting things ready for the day when the gates clang shut behind me. A new life, maybe in Canada or Australia.’
‘If all that happened, would you go with her?’
‘What else? This was my last throw, and I left it late. Even in three or four years’ time I couldn’t start again.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’re young enough to ask that. You wouldn’t understand if I tried to explain.’
She asked him: ‘Do I matter to you at all – except as a part of getting away from her?’
‘You matter. You matter more than anything.’
‘Well?’
‘One loses the things that count – strength, youth, faith. And love. It’s not that they don’t matter. It’s just that a time comes when you know you’ve lost them, and there’s no point in going on pretending to yourself.’
‘Is that what you’ve been doing – pretending?’
He stared at the cabin ceiling. ‘I suppose I have – about some things anyway.’
‘About us?’
‘Yes. Pretending it was possible.’
There was silence for a time, except for the sound of wind and waves, and the ship’s creaking. Then Sheila said briskly:
‘No.’
He looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re with me now, not with her. I won’t have you talk like that.’
He lay without speaking. She looked and saw that there were tears in his eyes. She knelt beside the bed.
‘Darling, darling. You’re tired and miserable now. You’ll feel better when you’ve had some sleep.’
‘By yourself,’ he said, ‘you’d be all right.’
‘Hush.’
‘She’ll have you vilified. In court, in the press. I should have thought of that. I could have made the dash on my own, and you could have followed if it was safe.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I wouldn’t have let you.’
He began to say something, but stopped. ‘It doesn’t matter now anyway.’
She put her head against his chest. ‘How would you manage without me? Who would do all the planning? Look at you now – ready to give up because there may be some reporters waiting when we get back on dry land.’
‘And photographers, and the television people.’
She stroked his chin and pushed her fingers against the bristle so that it crackled.
‘You haven’t shaved for two days. Another two days and you’ll be unrecognizable. I suppose it could be a week before we get back to a port, and by then you’ll have a beard. I’ll hide your glasses for you – you can say you broke them – and I’ll put dark ones on myself. Then let them take what photographs they like.’
He held her hand with his. ‘Do you think it would work?’
‘Why not?’
‘It might,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think of that.’
‘We only need a couple of days,’ she said. ‘We can disappear again, can’t we? It isn’t as though anyone will be expecting us to be on the
Kreya
. They’ll think we went by air to Paris. We can be away long before anyone gets suspicious.’
He pulled her down and kissed her. ‘You make me feel better.’
‘You fool,’ she said, affectionately.
‘I know. Middle-aged, bankrupt, a thief, and a fool. Why do you bother?’
‘You know why. Look. Something to make you sleep.’
She opened one of the cases and brought out a bottle of brandy.
‘How did you come by that?’
‘I got it from the steward. I think it goes on our bill at the end, if the ship doesn’t go down. Drink it. There. Now go to sleep.’
He still held her hand. ‘Sit beside me for a while.’
‘All right.’
Olsen, on the bridge, paced to and fro, stamping his feet harder than was necessary against the deck to keep tiredness at bay. There was little that could be done – nothing of practical value before morning – and his thoughts revolved unprofitably about the central fact of his failure.
He accepted no blame as to seamanship. The rudder had failed him and after that the ship had been at the mercy of the storm. He had done all that a man could do, and the
Kreya
was still afloat. If the weather got no worse, and if she didn’t finish up on a lee shore, the
Kreya
would come through. The owners could not criticize him for his handling.
Nor would they criticize him for the mutiny. With Carling mad and Herning killed, it was not surprising that there had been panic – that someone like Stövring should have taken advantage of it and that, after the attack on himself and the murder of Møller, there should have been no alternative for them but to carry it through. It would not damage him. He would remain skipper of the
Kreya
.
And it did not matter that there would be talk – that he would be known always as the ‘Captain of the Mutiny’. Talk made no difference. Talk was for little people, who were afraid to act. He feared neither talk nor the talkers.
But the failure remained, unaffected by the justification or condemnation that might come from others. Always the one thing that counted had been his own judgment of his own acts, and in the judgment now he was found wanting. It could not be explained away – he would have disdained to try.
As far back as he could remember, the deviousness of the acts of other men had surprised him. Life, to him, was a simple matter, conditioned by straightforward rules. A man had needs and appetites, and he satisfied them as the law allowed. There had to be law, for without it there was no security; within it there was all the freedom that a man could want – that a sane man could conceive.
A seaman, in this respect, was the citizen writ large. At sea, the law was paramount, more circumscribed and more evidently tangent than in the outer world. Olsen had served before he had commanded, and of these two forms of conformity, it seemed to him that the former was the easier to follow. Leaving madness on one side, he did not understand how it was that a man could reject allegiance. He recognized that it happened, but he did not understand it.
Now it had happened to him, and he sought as best he could for reasons. There had been the moment in which he had felt sure that, by a lie, a moment’s deception, he could have won them back. All had turned there on Stövring and himself, and he had only to dissemble to be victorious. But he felt none of the obvious remorse of the man who looks back and wishes he had done otherwise than what he did. To Olsen it was clear that, given the prescient backward leap into time, given the episode unrolling again towards a variable end, he would have done exactly as he had done before – there was nothing else that was within his powers.
Command and obedience. Wherever there were men these two necessities must rule. And yet, wherever there were men, they were flouted.
Thus I refute God, thought Olsen. I do not need to look for wastefulness and cruelty and riot in the jungle or the sea. In the crown and apex of creation there is confusion, disorder, and that is enough.
The depressions continued their majestic chase across the North Atlantic, but their westward tracks were moving to the north. The anti-clockwise gales that accompanied them moved north too, sweeping new and colder seas. Each tossed the
Kreya
to its successor. Day after day the wind blew from the south and east. It dropped at times to Force 4 or 5, but only, it seemed, to gain breath before blowing a gale again. They encountered no other ships and made no landfall. In the second night, Mouritzen thought he saw a light on the port side, and sent up flares. He continued to send them up at half-hourly intervals, but when the dawn came there was nothing to be seen but the grey, heaving sea, stretching all round them.
There was no break in the clouds which would have enabled them to get a fix on their position. All that was certain was that the storms had driven them to the north-west. It was Olsen’s guess that they had passed between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, and were being carried on in the direction of the Faroes.
There was plenty to occupy the time of the men. Under Mouritzen’s supervision, a crude jury-rudder was constructed; part of the shattered foremast provided a vertical shaft, and planks were sawn and nailed on to make the blade. This took most of a day. In the late afternoon they tried putting it into action, using a metal pipe, lashed to the stern rails, as a sleeve. The bindings tore away, and the salvage operation, though finally successful, proved difficult and dangerous.
The next morning, a new attempt was made, the sleeve being lashed more firmly and secured with hawsers to the anchor capstan. This time the blade tore loose as it entered the water. Olsen, who had come down from the bridge, watched them as they hauled the mast section up over the rails. The wood showed splintered edges where it had been ripped away.
‘You waste time with this,’ he commented.
Mouritzen drew noisy breath. ‘I think so, too. In a calm sea one might do something. For the present, there is no hope of success.’
Olsen nodded. ‘Then we wait for a calm sea.’
Mouritzen straightened his back. ‘Good.’
‘Instead,’ Olsen said, ‘there are the horses. I do not like rotting carcases aboard my ship.’
‘It will mean opening the hatches.’
Olsen shrugged. ‘We are no longer shipping seas.’
Mouritzen thought about it. ‘God in Heaven – what a job! Thirty-five of them. And how are we to wrestle dead horses on to a loading mat?’
‘I leave you with that problem.’
It was the first time Mouritzen had been down to the hold since the night the hatch shattered. The scene, as he flashed his torch from point to point, had a grotesque and savage eeriness. The broken hatch cover cut off most of the view from the forecastle door – one corner rested on the bottom of the hold and two other corners were wedged against the bulkheads – but when Mouritzen had ducked under the overhang of jagged metal, the horrors were in full view.