Liner
Page 1
Table of Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Liner
Praise for Liner
Acknowledgments
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
PART TWO
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
PART THREE
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
About the Author
He died young whilst still in the prime of his writing career and after a few years, his books and his name disappeared from the public eye. It was only through the perseverance of one film producer who remembered the Author for his past successes and who sought to option the film rights for The Protagonists that the Author has been ‘rediscovered’. His books will now be available once again, although initially as eBooks. Almost five decades later, his fiction is as fresh as it was when first published, and each story can be seen to relate to the social history as it was then.
James Barlow was born in 1921 and educated in Leamington Spa, Stoke-on-Trent and North Wales. He became a gunnery instructor in the R.A.F. in 1940, but the following year he underwent prolonged treatment for tuberculosis and took to writing technical articles for Flight and Aeroplane.
He became a regular contributor for the magazine Punch in 1948 and in 1956 published his first novel, The Protagonists, to much critical acclaim in both the UK and the US. He wrote two further novels, The Man with Good Intentions and One Half of the World before hitting the big time with The Patriots. With this success in 1960, he gave up his post as a water rates inspector for Birmingham Corporation to devote his time to writing.
Barlow’s 1968 novel, The Burden of Proof, was made into a successful film (retitled Villain) starring the late Richard Burton. In 1962, Term of Trial was turned into a film starring Laurence Olivier (whose performance received a BAFTA nomination), Simone Signoret, Thora Hird and Terence Stamp. The television adaptation of his third novel, The Man with Good Intentions, starred Francesca Annis. In 1972, Barlow won an award from Pan Publishers for Liner. The research for all his books was meticulous and detailed, which underpinned their success, but he particularly enjoyed writing Liner which included a six week cruise taking most of his family along and learning all about the technicalities of radar, gyro-pilots, turbines, telegraphs and boilers.
Barlow also wrote a non-fiction book, Goodbye England, in which he explained his reasons for emigrating to Tasmania. In fact, he and his family only stayed there two years and brought his family to Ireland after his sister’s husband was killed in a tragic accident. He spent the remainder of his life in Ireland with his wife and three children of his four children.
The Spectator called him ‘one of the most able thriller writers in the business, with an alarmingly acute eye for the degenerate quirks of society’. His books often weave universal questions into fast-moving narratives.
James Barlow died suddenly (of pulmonary and cerebral emboli following an operation) on 30th January 1973 at the age of 51. He is buried in a beautiful little church on Long Island a few miles out of Cork, Eire.
His novel, Black Country, about the build up to a race riot set in Wolverhampton was never published and is currently being edited by his daughter, Gillian.
By the Same Author
The Protagonists
One Man in the World
Both Your Houses
The Burden of Proof
The Hour Of Maximum Danger
One Half Of The World
This Side Of The Sky
The Man With Good Intentions
The Patriots
Liner
The Love Chase
In All Good Faith
Term Of Trial
Liner
Aging, suffering from neglect and its equipment badly out of date, the Greek liner SS Areopagus heads east towards San Francisco, carrying all on board into the most shattering adventure of their lives . . .
Its crew and passengers are a mixture of the worst and best of humanity. Tornetta, a desperate murderer fleeing from a Mafia executioner, boards the ship but has no qualms about murdering again. On board too are the Burstons, a haunted family running from the memories of a grisly tragedy. Pauline is the beautiful but bi-sexual and self-degrading woman in desperate search of kindness and love. The ship’s doctor, Dempsey, cool and self-possessed, faces in one violent moment, his greatest trial of his career. And then there is Nikolaos Tomazos, First Officer, married to an faithless Australian, and who dreams of taking his wife and children back to Greece. He knows his ship better than anyone else on board, including the captain.
The Areopagus embarks on a voyage that changes many lives, most of all Tomazos’s, whose skill and mental strength is tested to the limits as the ailing ship enters the bulk of the storm.
Praise for Liner
‘James Barlow has been compared with Nevil shute; and like him he is a splendid, extrovert storyteller’
The Daily Telegraph
‘A great story, full of life, character and adventure’
Birmingham Evening Mail
‘Officers and crew have problems too; they explode in a deus ex marina from which the author squeezes every stormy possibility’
New York Times
‘Sure-fire…Lively… a violent storm, the most wicked since the Typhoon in the Caine Mutiny…’
Newsday
‘Gripping… a blessing on a stormy night next to a roaring fireplace!’
Newark News
‘The novel is often an absorbing and dramatic account of life at sea on a luxury liner.’
Sun News
‘The author’s fantastic knowledge of human behavior, both adult and juvenile, is surpassed’
Courier Post
‘Barlow writes… with compassion, a fabulous background of information about ships at sea and a lively sense of the dramatic.’
Alan Branigan
‘It is a long, long time since I have come across a novel as good as James Barlow’s Liner’
Richard Barkley, The Sunday Express
LINER
James Barlow
Copyright © 1970 by James Barlow
The right of James Barlow to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is sold subject to the condition it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be copied, lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated in print or electronic means without the publisher’s prior consent in any form.
ISBN 978-1-78036-242-7
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described, all situations in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincident
al.
Published by
Peach Publishing
To
JAMIE HAMILTON
Who laid the keel
Acknowledgments
For certain technical advice I am grateful to the following: Sperry Gyroscope Division, Sperry Rand Ltd.; Copes Regulators Ltd; Decca Radar Ltd.; Chadburns (Liverpool) Ltd.; P&O Orient Lines; Shaw Savill Line; and the Royal Embassy of Greece, Canberra.
I would like to thank the owners, agents, captains and crews for allowing me to look around various vessels, either at sea or in harbour.
I am also grateful to my friends Geoffrey Boughey, Norman Siberry and Captain Leslie Balliol Scott, whose imaginations were at times way ahead of my own.
PART ONE
Antipodes
new, powerful, large and splendidly fitted-up steamships, carrying mail from His Majesty’s Post Office.
ADVERTISEMENT, 1837
Men . . . full of activity, stirrers abroad, and searchers of the remote parts of the world.
HAKLUYT
Chapter One
‘We’ll talk about it,’ the man’s voice had suggested over the telephone.
He had spoken in Italian, and Bartolomeo Tornetta had been queasy. It, the subject of the telephone call, was, of course, money. His money, earned by work and organization, his skill in the peculiarly twentieth-century trade of titillation. The Italian might simply mean a knowledge of Tornetta’s background, but it might indicate Mafia. Tornetta lived on girls. He gave orders that weren’t questioned, but he had to cope with trouble quite often: drunken fools who presumed the girls were slot machines for pleasure. . . .
‘Listen!’ he had urged. ‘Last week I went to the dentist. Two small fillings. Today the postman brings the account. Eighteen dollars. It is crazy. What kind of a country is this for the poor?’
He said ‘poor’ like someone in the preliminary skirmishes of a battle with income-tax inspectors.
It was indeed a strange country.
Tornetta had been in Australia for five years, all of them in Sydney; he was still within walking distance of the docks where he had disembarked.
The Australian manner of life suited him, although he observed its many aspects with perplexity. Much of it had nothing to do with him. He fitted his profession into its vulgar segment and eventually thrived.
The rest meant nothing to him, although it was noticeable, even exploitable. There were two Australias. At first he found both so inelegant and gauche that he had considered returning to Italy. There was the old Australia, dying with anger: Victorian trees, high and mighty by the side of the ubiquitous gums; colonial public buildings with tin roofs; temperance; social conformity; middle-class gentility; the Returned Servicemen’s League and its corollaries, beer drinking and patriotism; Gallipoli’s disaster celebrated as a sort of Antipodean Dunkirk by men and their sons who crept annually out of sprawling suburbia.
Then there was the new Australia: articulate academics; consumer goods; the beaches littered with beer cans and rubbish, while well-built youths asserted their qualities on the surfboards, and tall supple girls toasted their breasts brown on sand too hot for the feet, ready to prove their equality, and transistors blared pop from station wagons.
Tornetta had never belonged to this or to any of Australia except Kings Cross, even though he spoke good English now and had not been called ‘dago’ for over three years. He adapted the world to what he was capable of; he never offered himself to an environment; he was essentially there to exploit it . . . He had climbed quickly in Sydney’s hedonistic atmosphere. The hot, matey, vulgar city could be exploited. It wanted what he had the gift of supplying. He had found the city so close to frontier crudity that anything was an improvement. The first time he’d been in a big bar of suburbia he’d been astonished that men who had good wages should stand around barefoot, rancid in sweaty vests or shirt sleeves, in this cube which was tiled like a public lavatory and smelled like one. They stunned their senses with beer and listened to the gabbled radio shouting about dogs or horses. It was so aggressively masculine that it suggested a need.
Now Tornetta supplied girls for this rough masculinity to look at. Sydney’s Kings Cross area boasted a school for strippers. There were discotheques and bookshops, pop art, pastry shops, delicatessens, pizza parlours and girls . . .
The voice on the telephone had suggested a few days’ consideration. There was no need to be alarmed; this was something you needed, like insurance. The terms could be discussed. They – Zito and Attolico – would call on Friday at nine o’clock.
In the three days Tornetta had experienced terror in anticipation. He could not pay. A day later anger asserted itself, fury boiled up. He would not pay. He was aware that they would hurt him, smash the place up, slash a girl or two. Death was a possibility. It was a city proportionately four times as violent as London.
He had thought and thought and in the end decided on escape. If they were Mafia they’d bleed him white anyway. If they were not, so much the better. No one in Sydney was sure if the Mafia operated or not. Some journalists felt it would add spice to the night life if it did . . .
Tornetta moved quietly behind the small crowd that was watching Prudence Peeler – a big long-limbed Australian girl with black hair parted in the middle. She had a wild beautiful face. Tornetta had had her on his shabby bed upstairs twice. On a sultry day with a temperature of 106 degrees she’d lain there naked and allowed him to do what he liked – and what Tornetta cared to do was very crude – and after pawing every part of her and then grinding his weight on top of her, he had been filmed with sweat. It had even saturated his hair. ‘That was good,’ he’d told her, and she’d commented in a devastating drawl which belonged to Brisbane or somewhere: ‘Ar, get your breath back and do it properly!’
She was peculiar, far gone, and disturbed her audience, who sensed that she despised them.
Four long-haired youths were giggling, drunk. One had his fly unfastened. Kids from some suburb with only an isolated milk bar or continental fruit shop open after six o’clock. Nearby a taxi driver, his forehead glistening with sweat, and a man who looked like a lifesaver, pickled in brine, with his teak-tan body bolt upright. There was a man there whose wife was a hundred yards away, sipping beer in a sedan. And an old wharfie with a belly like a balloon, tattooed arms folded, police and fireman braces over this undershirt, who was actually asleep. . . .
Tornetta ran up brick steps to the entrance and advised the hustler, ‘There are two men coming at nine o’clock. Get a girl to bring them to the kitchen.’
He went to the kitchen and waited, fright accumulating in lumps in his belly, and wishing he’d fled without discussion. He was not new to violence, but it had been some years now since he’d last experienced it. Two of them, Zito and Attolico. He didn’t know what size of men they were, if they carried knives or guns or something peculiar to the Australian scene. Or just thumped with fists and kicked with fancy shoes.
Tornetta laid the rough table for one, and put the metal jug full of soup onto the stove behind this position. At ten minutes to nine he poured himself a plate of soup and sat staring at it, while his knees trembled under the table. Behind him eight pints of soup bubbled in the jug. For one man? For the girls? Would the two notice? He placed two chairs more or less opposite himself, so that in one arc of the jug . . .
He heard the jangle of the band at the discotheque in another street. If necessary he would pay. If they were reasonable. . . .
A stripper brought them into the kitchen without knocking, their approach unheard, so that he was caught napping.
The stripper was Anatomical Anne and Tornetta knew at once that the two men were Mafia because in the light of the kitchen they did not take the opportunity to scrutinize with rapacity while she was there. Anne was in something like a bikini, was tall and voluptuo
us, but they didn’t even look; nor did they indulge in trivial expressions like ‘Thank you.’ It implied that strippers and suchlike were available two a cent where they came from.
They hesitated just long enough for Anne to get beyond the door and close it. Then the small slim one, neatly dressed, with a long wedge-shaped face, announced with an indicatory hand to his chest, ‘Zito.’
‘Attolico,’ supplied the other dully.
He was middle-aged, fat, but it meant nothing, did not prove any weakness.
‘Sit down,’ suggested Tornetta, but they smiled at the absurdity, not likely to be put at such a disadvantage, and remained standing. This filled Tornetta with foreboding. He had lost already.
‘A drink?’ he invited.
They ignored the pleasantry.
‘It is nice,’ said Attolico. ‘A good place you have here. Twenty people in there. Good for any early Friday night show.’
‘Not bad,’ agreed Tornetta.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘In Sydney?’
‘Here.’
‘Six months.’
‘And no trouble?’
‘Trouble? Why should I have trouble? It is pleasure –’
‘That is good.’ ‘Good’ seemed to be a favourite word of Attolico. ‘You pay no protection?’
‘Who needs protection in Australia?’
They smiled at that too.
‘A lot of gangs here,’ Zito pointed out.
‘The protection we offer is better than any insurance company’s,’ explained Attolico. ‘If there is damage we repair the destruction, but we also seek out the perpetrators and a little social justice is carried out. If you are threatened we attend to that. If you have financial worries . . . And girls, we have plenty if you find them difficult to employ.’