by Nevil Shute
Keith frowned; this was getting difficult. ‘I should grease it before setting it in concrete,’ he suggested, trying to be helpful without knowing the job. ‘Come out easier when you want it out.’
‘I see.’ The naval officer hesitated, irresolute; he had never had to do this sort of work before and he wanted a good job made of it. ‘You wouldn’t like to come down to the boat and do it for me?’
‘Down to Hamble?’ John Dermott nodded. ‘When?’
‘We’re going down tomorrow, in the car. Would it take long?’
‘If it’s a straight job it might take about an hour.’ Keith said. ‘Then you ought to leave it for a while to set — two or three days. I could come tomorrow, but I’d have to be back tomorrow night.’ His eyes strayed to a corner. ‘I’ve got half a bag of cement there, but I’d have to slip up to the builder for some sand. Got some aggregate down there?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Little clean stones — just a few pounds. Not salty — washed in fresh water.’
‘There’s plenty on the beach. We could wash them under the hose, couldn’t we?’
Keith nodded. ‘Doesn’t matter if they’re wet.’
They left it so, and turned to go upstairs. The naval officer paused by the littered desk with the drawing board beside it. ‘This where you do your stuff?’
Keith nodded. ‘I used to do it up in the parlour, but it’s better down here. You’d be surprised at the number of letters that there are — all over the auction. I save the foreign stamps and give them to the boy next door — Jamesie Morris, he collects them. Six or seven in a day, some days. You’d be surprised.’
John Dermott opened his eyes. ‘How many letters do you have to write — say, in a week?’
‘Twenty or twenty-five,’ the mechanic said. ‘It’s letters all the time, and then there’s the articles each week. I spend more time writing than I do working.’ He paused, and added a little resentfully, ‘It’s fifteen bob a week for stamps — more, sometimes. Of course, one has to do it. Some of them send international reply coupons, though.’
‘Do a lot of them come from foreign countries, then?’
‘About a third.’
John Dermott went back to the bench and picked up the copper box. ‘I’ll take this along with me,’ he said. He hesitated. ‘You’ll keep this under your hat?’ he enquired diffidently. ‘I mean, it’s quite all right. They’re just Jo’s rings and bracelets and things - they’re all her own property. But the regulations are so stupid about taking things like that out of England, and she’d be miserable without them. I mean, a woman sort of values her little bits and pieces when she’s away in a strange country. And we may be away for years.’
Keith said, ‘Oh, that’s all right. I shan’t talk about it.’ He paused, and then he asked, ‘You’re going to live out there?’
‘I think so — if we like it. Jo says she wants to live in Tahiti, but I don’t go much on that, myself. It’s French, and it’s a very little place, you know. Still, she wants to see it. I think we’ll probably end up in British Columbia — it’s a grand country, that. I’d like to buy a house in Victoria, on Vancouver Island.’
Keith nodded. He had only the vaguest idea where Vancouver Island was, but it was the sort of place that people like his brother-in-law who sailed about the world in little yachts would want to go to. ‘Suppose I tell Katie that I’m going down to rig up an electric light over the compass, so you can see it at night?’ he suggested.
John Dermott smiled. ‘That’s just the thing.’
They went up the narrow wooden basement stairs to the main floor and Keith went to wash the grime off his hands. When he rejoined them in the parlour his sister and her husband were standing, ready to leave, having pleaded a somewhat formalised dinner engagement to Katie. He did not press them to stay for tea, because he had learned long ago that they pursued different meal habits. Katie and Keith had their main meal in the middle of the day. Their evening meal was high tea at six o’clock when Katie got back from work, a meal of perhaps a kipper, bread and jam, and a piece of plum cake, washed down with tea. They knew that Jo and John ate differently at eight o’clock, favouring perhaps potted shrimps followed by soup, a grilled steak, and mushrooms on toast, the meal preceded by a couple of gins and followed by coffee. The couples got on well together, but they had long ago accepted differences springing from their ways of life.
Jo and John Dermott called for Keith at about nine o’clock next morning, driving their vintage sports Bentley open four-seater, nearly thirty years old and with many prosecutions for noise and speeding to its credit. They loved it very dearly. Katie had already left for work, so she did not see the two small sacks that Keith put into the back compartment beside him, or she might have wondered why a small electric light required cement and sand. It was a warm summer morning in late July, and Keith enjoyed the drive through southern England. They got to Hamble on the creek that runs into the east side of Southampton Water, parked the car near the entrance to Luke’s Yard, and carried the sacks out on to the long wooden walkways above the tidal mud, the yachts moored bows-on in tiers. Presently they came to the Dermotts’ ship, Shearwater IV.
Shearwater was a healthy-looking, modern Bermudian cutter about twenty-eight feet on the waterline and nine feet beam. On deck she was practical and well equipped for deep sea cruising, the dinghy stowed upside down over the cabin skylight between the mast and the aft hatch, the twin spinnaker booms in chocks beside it. She had roller reefing to the mainsail and a very short bowsprit no more than four feet long for the jibstay. Aft, she had a self-draining cockpit well protected by the vertical extensions of the cabin top, and a sail locker in her canoe stern. Below, she was conventional in her arrangement. A roomy forecastle served mainly as a sail store. Aft of that there was a washroom and toilet to starboard, a galley and pantry to port. Aft again came the saloon with the settees on each side and a table in the middle; a small chart table was arranged against the forward bulkhead. Aft again there were two quarter berths, the companion ladder leading up on deck, and a small petrol motor underneath this ladder, rather inaccessible. Shearwater was such a yacht as is to be found by the hundred cruising the south coast of England, though rather better equipped than most.
John Dermott led Keith down below. The linoleum on the deck of the galley and the washroom had been taken up, and the floorboards lifted. What was exposed to view was a smooth level floor of concrete into which the frames disappeared and in which the mast was stepped. About two feet behind the mast step was a fairly deep, rectangular recess in the concrete, large enough to hold the copper box that Dermott carried, and about two inches deeper.
‘That’s the place,’ he said. ‘That’s where I want to put it.’
Keith wrinkled his brows. ‘What’s all this concrete doing here?’
‘Internal ballast,’ said the naval officer. ‘They often do it like this. Pour it in when she’s building, and bury pig iron or any old scrap iron in it. She’d be too lively with all the ballast on the keel. She’s got about three tons of lead outside, as well.’
‘I never knew that,’ said the mechanic. ‘What’s this hole been left here for, then?’
‘I don’t really know. She’s got another like it at the stern, but that’s used for a sump; the bilge pump suction goes down into it. Perhaps they thought she’d want another sump up here. I don’t know. She never makes any water, anyway.’
Keith knelt down and fingered the concrete hole. It’s a bit oily,’ he remarked. ‘I think I’ll chip it a bit first — clean it up and make a sort of rebate, so it’ll hold.’ He fetched his tool bag, and set to work with hammer and cold chisel.
Half an hour later he was mixing a little concrete of cement, fine stones and sand. He made a bed of it at the bottom of the hole, greased the copper box, and set it carefully in the middle. Then he filled in the spaces round it with the wet mixture, working it carefully into the corners and the newly cut recesses. ‘Look your last on it,’ he said, and c
overed it over with a smooth layer of the mix, patting it, working it with a little builder’s trowel, taking up the surplus, till it was smooth and level with the original concrete floor, only the darker wetness of the new material showing the difference. He gathered his tools and the remainder of the mix in newspaper, cleaned up the mess, and got up from his knees a little stiffly. ‘I’d leave the floor-boards up for a day or so, till it’s set hard,’ he said. ‘It’ll take a week to harden properly, but you can put the boards back.’
His sister asked, ‘What do we do when we want to get it out, Keith?’
‘Just cut around the edge with a cold chisel and a hammer, like this,’ he said. ‘You’ll probably be able to see where the concrete’s a bit different, but even if you can’t, it’ll sound hollow when you tap it with a hammer. The top layer of concrete’ll come off easy enough, because it’s only an inch or so thick. Then when you can see the box you’ll have to cut around with the chisel till you can get it out. You won’t have any trouble.’
He stayed for a cold lunch with them on board, and while the meal was in preparation he examined the ship, a short, white-faced, plump little man completely out of his element. He knew nothing of yachts and the sea. She seemed to him to be cosy enough downstairs, though a bit cramped; upstairs he was confused by the complexity of her and by the unfamiliar materials, the sisal, nylon, flax, cotton, hemp, and teak. He was unfamiliar with the sea and did not like it much; it was a place that made you cold and wet and sick. His brother-in-law was a sensible man in most ways though not in matters technical, and he liked the sea, so there must be something in it for some people, though not for him. They had asked him once or twice to go down with Katie for a week-end on the yacht in the Solent, but he had always made excuse, and they had not pressed the point. The Stewarts had their way of life, and the Dermotts had theirs.
After lunch John Dermott drove Keith into Southampton and put him down at the West station to catch a train to London. They would meet again before the Dermotts started off across the world in Shearwater; they parted cordially, the naval officer grateful to his dissimilar brother-in-law for his help. He drove back from Southampton to Hamble; they would live on the yacht now till they sailed but for one last trip to London. There was still much to be done.
He parked the car and went on board. Jo met him in the cockpit. ‘Catch his train all right?’
He nodded. ‘Ten minutes to spare.’
‘Oh, good. I’ve just put on the kettle for a cup of tea.’
They had their cups of tea sitting in the cockpit in the sun. The naval officer glanced down into the forward end of the ship, to the rolled-back linoleum and the floorboards piled beside it. The dark wetness of the concrete patch was already drying, turning a lighter grey at the edges that would match the original surface. ‘Well, that’s the most important job done,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘I was worried about that, but it’s all right now.’
Joanna nodded. ‘Keith’s awfully good at that sort of thing,’ she said quickly. ‘When he’s got somebody to tell him exactly what to do.’
She seldom talked openly to him about her brother; now in their shared satisfaction and relief that remark had slipped out. He glanced at her. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Not much initiative.’
She sat silent for a minute. ‘Poor old Keith.’ she said at last. ‘I always feel he’s missed the boat, somehow. That I’ve had everything, and he’s had nothing.’
‘Everything?’ he asked. He was morbidly conscious of his truncated career, of the failure inherent in his early retirement, of the forty years of idleness that might lie ahead of him unless he could reorganise his life.
She knew what he was thinking, and he mustn’t think it. She turned to him. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve had Janice, and money, and the Navy, and this boat. And I’ve been to China, and to Italy, and Malta. And now we’re going off across the world, and we’ll see the coral islands, and Hawaii, and Canada, and the States. I’ve had everything. But poor old Keith, he goes on in that ghastly half-a-house in Ealing and just makes his models and gets practically nothing for them, and Katie has to work in the shop. And he’s so good at what he does. It isn’t fair.’
He tried to comfort her. ‘I don’t think he’s unhappy.’
‘No.’ she agreed, ‘he’s not. Nor Katie, either. They’re neither of them a bit jealous of the things we’ve got. I think it’s going to do Janice a lot of good to be with them for a bit. But he’s so much better than I am, he ought to have so very much more.’
He smiled. ‘Wants somebody to put a squib up his behind.’
‘He always has to be told what to do,’ she agreed.
‘Apart from making models,’ he remarked. ‘He seems to be original enough in that.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But that doesn’t get him anywhere.’
Keith Stewart got to Waterloo at about half past four, and travelled out to Ealing Broadway on the Underground. From there he took a tram to West Ealing and walked up to his house. He got in about ten minutes before Katie and put the macaroni cheese into the oven as she had told him to, and took the mail from the letter box in the front door and shuffled it through; there was one letter for her and eleven for him, three from the United States. He sighed a little. You could produce an induced current on the surface of a metal sphere that would act as a gyroscope, and from this you could devise a tiny automatic pilot for ship or aircraft models that would weigh only a few ounces. He was aching to get on with the experimental work on that, but first he had to write the last instalment of his serial upon the Congreve clock. After that this heavy mail must be dealt with, and he would be too tired then, and it would be too late, to start off on experimental work. He was already inclined to be sleepy from his unaccustomed day in the open air.
He sat with Katie at the kitchen table over the macaroni cheese and the cups of strong tea. ‘Get the light fixed up for them all right?’ she asked.
‘The light?’ And then he recollected. ‘Oh, the compass light. Yes, I fixed that for them.’
‘What’s it like in the boat?’ she asked. ‘How do they cook anything?’
‘It’s like a caravan,’ he told her. ‘They cook on Primus stoves.’
‘Oh. With everything rocking about?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘It must be ever so uncomfortable.’
‘I think it is,’ he agreed. ‘It looks all right when she’s tied up in calm water, like she is now, but even then she goes up and down a bit. I don’t know what it’s like when she gets out to sea, where it’s rough. Wouldn’t suit me.’
‘Would the water come in, say in a storm?’
‘I think it would. Of course, she’s all decked in. I don’t suppose that much would get inside.’
‘It sounds awful. I mean, Jo was saying that one of them must be on top to steer. Why do they want to go like that, K? I mean, they’ve got plenty of money. Why don’t they take a cabin on a proper ship, or else fly?’
‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘I think they just like doing it.’
They sat in silence; they would never understand the Dermotts and there were times when they abandoned the attempt. At last Katie said, ‘They won’t get shipwrecked, will they?’
Keith shook his head. ‘That’s one thing they won’t do. John’s a naval officer and he knows all about it. They’ve got two sextants to take sights with to tell them where they are, and all the rest of it. They’ll be safe enough. But if you ask me, they’ll be darned uncomfortable.’
Katie gathered the plates together and put them on the draining board. ‘I’m glad it’s not me going with them.’
‘So am I,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine anything much worse.’
Chapter Two
Shearwater rolled lazily upon the ocean swell as she forged ahead under her twin spinnakers, making about three knots and towing the log line behind her. It was early in the morning and John Dermott was taking a sight upon the sun on their port quarter, dressed only in a pair
of faded shorts. Jo sat at the tiller in blue jeans and shirt, watch in hand and pad and pencil at her side, taking the time for him.
They were three and a half months out from England, and now it was the middle of November. They had crossed the Atlantic to Barbados without incident though more slowly than they had anticipated; they had been delayed a little in the West Indies for a broken gooseneck to the boom, and they had been delayed for a long time at Panama after passing through the Canal waiting for a permit from the Ecuadorean Government to call for water at the Galapagos Islands. In the end they had sailed without a permit, had watered at Floreana without trouble, and proceeded on their way. They were thirty-four days out from Floreana, and all was well.
They had not hurried on their way. Thirty-six hours previously they had lain hove-to all night rather than approach the island of Reao in the darkness, their first landfall in the Tuamotu group of islands. With the coming of the dawn they had seen cloud forming above it and had sailed close enough to see the tops of the trees; then they had borne up and resumed their course towards the south and west, leaving the island ten miles to the north. They would not set foot on land until they reached the island of Tahiti, more than eight hundred miles ahead. They did not particularly want to do so; they had settled into the rhythm of their life at sea, the rain squalls, the warm easy days, the unending maintenance of sails and gear, the cooking and the housework down below. They had grown accustomed to this routine and liked it. For John Dermott it meant full occupation in the way of life that he preferred; shore life to him was now a matter of frustration and unwanted idleness. For Jo, this way of life meant a happy John.
She jotted down the altitudes as he called them out and the exact time from the watch in her hand, and gave the pad to him. He disappeared below to work the sight and plot it on the chart. He came on deck again after ten minutes. ‘It was Reao?’ she asked.
‘It was Reao all right,’ he replied. ‘I think we’re getting set just a bit to the north, though. You’re still steering two four zero?’
