The White Voyage

by John Christopher

  Sam Youd as

  John Christopher

  The

  White

  Voyage

  The SYLE Press

  About the author

  Sam Youd was born in Lancashire in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm.

  As a boy, he was devoted to the newly emergent genre of science-fiction: ‘In the early thirties,’ he later wrote, ‘we knew just enough about the solar system for its possibilities to be a magnet to the imagination.’

  Over the following decades, his imagination flowed from science-fiction into general novels, cricket novels, medical novels, gothic romances, detective thrillers, light comedies … In all he published fifty-six novels and a myriad of short stories, under his own name as well as eight different pen-names.

  He is perhaps best known as John Christopher, author of the seminal work of speculative fiction, The Death of Grass (today available as a Penguin Classic), and a stream of novels in the genre he pioneered, young adult dystopian fiction, beginning with The Tripods Trilogy.

  ‘I read somewhere,’ Sam once said, ‘that I have been cited as the greatest serial killer in fictional history, having destroyed civilisation in so many different ways – through famine, freezing, earthquakes, feral youth combined with religious fanaticism, and progeria.’

  In an interview towards the end of his life, conversation turned to a recent spate of novels set on Mars and a possible setting for a John Christopher story: strand a group of people in a remote Martian enclave and see what happens.

  The Mars aspect, he felt, was irrelevant. ‘What happens between the people,’ he said, ‘that’s the thing I’m interested in.’

  Chapter One

  There was a ragged sky over the city, the clouds grey-black, laced here and there with silver by an invisible sun, scudding away to the south-east. Up to and beyond O’Connell Bridge the Liffey was in motion, its usually placid oily surface whipped into waves that licked against the side of a Guinness barge going empty upstream. It had stopped raining, but the streets were wet and water ran along the gutters. The flanks of the dray-horses steamed in the mild, damp air.

  Carling, striding along the quay, had the look of a man going to a trysting place – his demeanour was at once eager and furtive. He was a big man, tall and broad-chested, and but for the grey in his hair and beard might have been taken for someone in his middle thirties. He was forty-six. For forty-five of those years he had accepted life without question or complaint; strength and appetite had been enough. Now the questions were rampant in his mind, and he sought for answers with the simple childlike directness that was characteristic of him, and with a savage unbending brutality that was equally so.

  He stopped by a door that stood between a seedy tobacconist’s shop and another, as dingy, selling bicycle parts. There were three bell-pushes; by the second a card, protected by yellowed and air-bubbled Scotch tape, announced the Church of Holy Light. Carling pressed the button, holding his large thumb on it for perhaps half a minute. He released it when a window slammed open above his head. A woman looked out. She had long red hair, which must once have been beautiful. Her face was white and had a shapeless look, as though the bones were melting away beneath the flesh. She called down, in a soft, hoarse voice:

  ‘Ah, is it you, then? You can come up. The door’s not fastened. Come on up.’

  Carling climbed dirty, crumbling stairs to the first floor. The dirt offended him, but in a way he felt that it was reasonable. He had lived in cleanliness and neatness and order, and had found there only frustration and despair. It did not surprise him that hope had its lair in a noisome country.

  He went through the tiny kitchen into the parlour. The smell of stewed bacon and cabbage was less pungent, but it still pervaded the room. He was aware of it more strongly again when he sat down, at Mrs Guire’s direction, on the sagging red plush sofa; the cloth breathed out vapours received over thirty or forty years, and this, clearly, was the prevailing one. There were only four others in the room: he recognized them as the hard core of the faithful – Mrs O’Donovan, Mrs Walsh, Miss Pettigrew and old Gentrey. Sometimes there had been as many as a dozen, cramped and crowded together among the aspidistras and the coloured vases.

  ‘We were only just after starting,’ said Mrs Guire. ‘We hadn’t even sung the hymn. Is it this morning you’ve docked?’

  ‘Only just now,’ Carling said. ‘I came straight here.’

  ‘It will be terrible seas you’ve had,’ Mrs Walsh said, ‘with the kind of weather it’s been the last week.’

  Carling nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was listening on the wireless only yesterday,’ Mrs Guire said, ‘to them telling of ships in distress all round the coasts of England, and I thought of you, Mr Carling, I prayed for the spirits to watch over you.’

  ‘That was kind,’ Carling said.

  They looked at him with pleasure and respect; he was so large a man, handsome, in the prime of his life, and his presence enhanced and justified theirs. The hard gleam of determination in his eye sparked their own drifting dampness of spirit.

  ‘When I was a young man,’ Gentrey said, ‘I sailed to America. Ah, that was a crossing. I’ve feared the sea since. And you meet it in all its conditions, year in, year out. It takes courage for that.’

  ‘I had a brother,’ Mrs O’Donovan said, ‘who drowned off the coast of Spain, God rest his holy soul. He was a lad of twenty, and I was two years younger. I mourned him greatly. For a time I thought of taking the veil. But I met O’Donovan and was married instead.’

  ‘It’s the priests,’ Mrs Walsh said. She was a thin, dark woman, who had been bitter until life defeated her. ‘They’d talk a young girl into that kind of thing. God, is there a nation in the world as beset with priests as Ireland!’

  Mrs O’Donovan had a reminiscent look on her round, slightly whiskered face.

  ‘Not that time it wasn’t,’ she said. ‘It was Father Green, a young fellow not ten years older than myself, who counselled me. He told me to have a good look at the world, before I gave it up. There was a sadness in him. I’ve wondered since what became of him. He had the makings of a Cardinal, or a renegade.’

  ‘Renegade’s the word they use,’ Gentrey said, ‘for such as open their eyes and use the minds God gave them.’

  Carling said restlessly: ‘I have delayed you – but we can begin now?’

  ‘Sure we can,’ Mrs Guire said. She spoke soothingly. ‘Let me just get to the piano.’

  She sat down at the upright piano, with brass candlesticks at either end and faded red silk cloth in front. She struck a note and went straight into the hymn, Lead Kindly Light. Carling heard the voices quavering and scraping about him for a few bars before he permitted his own deep, heavily accented baritone to join in. They sang the usual two verses and then Mrs Guire turned round from the piano to face them.

  ‘Jesus Christ Almighty,’ she said, ‘bless our gathering this day. Grant us, Lord Jesus, the knowledge we seek, the power and the wisdom. Remembering Thy conquest of Death and the Powers of Evil, grant us that Thy Spirits may come to us as they have done before. In the name of the Sacred Holy Cross, look down on us and pity us. Amen.’

  While the other voices were echoing the response, she moved briskly back to her armchair and sat down. Her arms rested along the threadbare plush, her fists clenching and then relaxing. Her eyes closed and she began to moan.

  Gentrey said: ‘It’s quick today.’

  ‘And it’s in need of the words of comfort I am,’ said Mrs O’Donovan, ‘with the hard times we’re having.’

  The moan became articulate. ‘The sailor,’ said Mrs Guire. She spoke through her teeth. ‘The sailor!’

  ‘Is it my brother, then,’ Mrs O’Donovan sa
id, ‘that I’ve prayed to hear from since the first day I came here? Is it little Paulie?’

  Her eyes still closed, Mrs Guire turned her face fully in Carling’s direction.

  ‘Great peril,’ she said, ‘– the wind like a thousand banshees, and the great green waves that would pull a man down into the deeps.’

  ‘Is it she?’ Carling asked. There was sweat on his forehead. ‘Is it she that warns?’

  She appeared to strain for words, at first finding none.

  ‘I see horses … and a savage brute beast in a cage … and the waves and the water and the peril of death …’

  Carling leaned forward. ‘Does she say it?’

  ‘A wave like a wall of doom, like a hammer of Hell. I see death, death. Death for the horses, death for the brute beast that stands as a man stands … death for men in the deeps of the sea …’

  ‘Glory be to God,’ whispered Mrs O’Donovan. ‘I haven’t heard the power of that in the five years I’ve been coming here.’

  ‘It is she I would speak to,’ Carling said. ‘Let me speak to her!’

  ‘Death for some – but not for all … a ship doomed, but not all doomed who sail in her. There are three signs. The first is when the beast walks free. The second is when water breaks iron and breaks a man. The third is when horses swim like fishes. Then comes the moment of peril. Then some will die and some will live … Death in the savage waters …’

  ‘Is she there?’ Carling demanded. ‘Tell me that!’

  Mrs Guire’s head sank down on her breast. She moaned two or three times, and opened her eyes. She tossed back her hair and looked at Carling.

  ‘The kettle’s on,’ she said. ‘I’ll make the tea.’

  Mrs Walsh asked her: ‘Is it all, then, Maeve? Is there no word for the rest of us?’

  Mrs Guire shook her head. ‘If there is, I’ve no strength for it. When I’ve had a drop of tea, maybe. The power has gone out of me.’

  Carling followed her into the kitchen. He watched as she tipped tea from the painted tin caddy into the teapot, and poured on the boiling water from the kettle.

  ‘There will be no more for me,’ he said. ‘She will not speak today?’

  ‘No.’ She looked at him. In the look there was desire, and curiosity, and some fear. ‘Jesus in Mercy, I have a headache from it. Can you come round tomorrow? There might be something then.’

  ‘We sail tonight. The storm delayed us; we should have come yesterday, but we are late.’

  They were standing close together in the tiny kitchen. She put her hand out and touched his brown, muscled wrist.

  ‘There’s truth in it,’ she said. ‘Danger from the sea, and not so far off either. Don’t go back.’ She shook her head. ‘I saw it – I wouldn’t believe it, but I saw it.’ Her hand tightened on his wrist. ‘Stay behind this trip. You can put up at the Mission.’ Her fingers moved lightly. ‘Or I could put you up on the sofa next door.’

  ‘I have to go,’ Carling said.

  ‘Ah, there’s no sense in risking your neck for no good cause.’

  ‘I will come back,’ Carling said. He took a note from his wallet and placed it on the table. Mrs Guire did not look at it.

  ‘You’ll stay for a cup of tea, anyway.’

  ‘No. Thank you. There is much to do on the ship. I ought not to have left, but I thought … In the end, I will speak to her? That is certain, is it not?’

  ‘Ah God, and how can I tell?’ She turned from the look in his eye. ‘Yes, yes, you’ll speak to her.’

  ‘She had a little voice,’ he said. ‘Like a small bird.’

  ‘Will you not have a cup of tea now? It’s ready to pour.’

  Carling shook his head. ‘Good-bye. I must go now.’

  Chapter Two

  The m.v. Kreya was berthed on the more sheltered northern side of the quay, but even so she rocked a little on the swell and her anchor chain creaked in monotonous rhythm. Captain Erik Olsen stood on the bridge, beside his First Officer, and watched the loading. He was a small man, with a small, handsome head, and eyes that, much of the time, surveyed the world with bleak amusement. Niels Mouritzen, the First Officer, was on a different scale: handsome in a more virile fashion, an inch or two over six feet in height, blue-eyed and fair-haired, with a slightly bent nose. He was deep-voiced, and spoke with a hesitance that was not quite an impediment.

  He said: ‘We are getting through it faster than I had expected. There’s not much this time, is there?’

  Olsen looked at his watch. ‘Not fast enough.’

  ‘We will be ready by eight.’

  ‘Eight is not six.’

  ‘We’ve gained a day. The men were hoping we would miss the tide. They could have done with a night ashore.’

  Olsen did not bother to answer this. After a time, Mouritzen said:

  ‘She will be riding light – nothing in the forward hold except the horses and the caravan.’

  ‘How many horses now?’

  ‘Ninety-five. Sixty for Dieppe, thirty-five for Amsterdam.’

  ‘If they don’t start loading soon we shall not be clear by eight even. When are the passengers coming on?’

  ‘After five o’clock, I told the office.’

  ‘Six here, and the other two at Fishguard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Poles, Irish and English?’ He switched into English from Danish. ‘We speak English then on this voyage.’ Pointing to a figure that approached the gang-plank, he reverted to his native tongue. ‘I didn’t know Carling had gone ashore?’

  ‘He asked me if he could, just for an hour.’

  ‘With what reason?’

  ‘Some kind of spiritualists he’s picked up with here. They were meeting this afternoon and he wanted to go.’

  ‘You thought that reason sufficient?’

  ‘He’s a good man. It isn’t the reason that matters, surely.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Olsen said, ‘when a man of his type becomes mixed up in that kind of thing.’

  ‘There are circumstances to explain it.’

  ‘That does not interest me. And it was a year ago. By now he should have returned to normal. Instead, he gets worse.’

  ‘It doesn’t affect his seamanship.’

  ‘No? The man is more important than the skill. Religion is like drinking; you should develop a head for it when young or leave it alone altogether.’

  ‘Some begin late.’

  ‘Then it’s bad.’

  Mouritzen put his hands on one of the spokes, and rocked the wheel to and fro.

  ‘Did you ever meet her?’ he asked.

  ‘Who? Carling’s wife? No.’

  ‘Twenty-five years younger than he. She looked like a child, too. Small and pretty – a nice figure, what there was of it. A happy little innocent soul, one would have thought.’

  ‘And wasn’t she?’ Olsen made a gesture of dismissal and distaste. ‘You are a moralist, Niels. You should learn to judge no actions but your own.’

  Mouritzen shrugged. ‘It’s not I who objects to Carling going ashore to listen to the stories the spirits tell him.’

  ‘But you should! This is a matter of the ship. I condemn no man or woman, however savage and enormous their sins, as long as they do not touch the Kreya. But anything that touches the ship is different. In this small world, I am God. I judge, I punish, and I need not give my reasons.’

  Mouritzen grinned. ‘Perhaps you would have been happier on a strictly cargo ship. You cannot play God to passengers.’

  ‘A different God – a modern, liberal God, who exists but does not act.’ He pointed his finger at the First Officer. ‘Action I leave to my angels – to you and to Thorsen. One can argue with angels. God is in the background, unchallengeable, unarguable-with.’

  Mouritzen was looking down towards the quay. The loading crane was aft, taking on steel rails. A woman and child stood to one side of it, looking, with some hesitance, in the direction of the gang-plank.

  ‘That will be Mrs Cleary a
nd daughter,’ Mouritzen said. ‘The clerk should have come with her. I suppose Thorsen and the boy are below. I think I must go down and see her aboard.’

  Olsen said sardonically: ‘Can you see from here that she is pretty? Go on, then. But you are a working angel, remember, not a fallen one.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mouritzen said. He smiled. ‘My respects to God.’

  The couple were still hesitating by the gang-plank when he walked down it to greet them. The woman was certainly pretty, he noticed with satisfaction; she had an attractive, compact figure, with silky blonde hair, brown eyes, and a pink and white complexion. She was young, also – not far into her twenties. The child was a small copy, and about six years old. The mother was neatly dressed, but in a coat and shoes that had seen better days. The child’s clothes were newer and looked more expensive. She had a wine-red coat lined with white fur, and a white muff.

  He said: ‘Mrs Cleary? I am Niels Mouritzen, First Officer of the Kreya. May I show you on board?’

  ‘Thank you.’ She looked at him, with some nervousness but with a pleasant frankness. ‘I was wondering if it would be all right. I think we’re early.’

  Mouritzen bent down to the little girl. ‘And what is your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Annabel.’

  ‘That is a nice name.’

  ‘You speak English very well,’ the mother said. ‘I was wondering about that, since it’s a Danish boat.’

  Mouritzen smiled. ‘We Danes have become civilized since we first came to Dublin. Most of us speak English. Do you have your baggage with you?’

  ‘It’s over there.’ She pointed. ‘Where the taxi put us down.’

  There was one large suitcase and one small, both made of pressed fibre material and secured by cheap yellow leather straps.

  ‘It will be all right there for a few minutes,’ Mouritzen said, ‘I will tell the steward and he will bring the cases on board. We will go on first. Shall I carry you, little Annabel?’

  She looked at him gravely, coldly. ‘Thank you, but I can walk by myself.’