by John Harris
Two
For a second, Ash and Grace stared at each other, unspeaking, then Grace tumbled her chair over backwards as she swept Teresa to her.
Ash reached the porthole in one long stride and stood staring out, his red hair ruffled by the breeze. Even as he looked, narrow-eyed, he saw a flash on the Punta de las Rosas and realized he was gazing a straight down the barrel of a gun.
He ducked at the crack of the explosion and the water of the river seemed to be wrenched out by a great fist and flung at them.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘It’s that shower with the battery on the point! That bloody clot of a major couldn’t have warned them!’
The door slammed back with a jingle of the ring in the handle, and the steward stood framed in the opening, his thin face white with indignation.
‘The bastards are shooting at us,’ he shouted. ‘I tell you, this is what comes of hanging about.’ His voice cracked on the last word and as he disappeared again they heard his feet clatter in the alleyway and mount hurriedly away into silence as though he had climbed a ladder to the deck above.
They were left staring at the swinging door and the black bulkhead and beyond with its dingy white paint and the oily finger-marks that were streaked along its surface, then there was another explosion and they became aware of the sound of shells tearing across the sky with a racket like the rending of a giant piece of canvas. An appalling crash above their heads brought down a shower of dust and a few yellow cockroaches, and grabbing the other two, Ash dragged them to the deck and fell on top of them, the stink of rust and dislodged dust in their noses.
They heard the crash of dishes sliding from a shelf in the steward’s pantry as a cupboard door burst open and scattered the contents on the deck. The ship seemed to shudder under the explosion, halting in her stride. The shock of it felt like a punch in the face, and their teeth grated with the jar as the deck seemed to rise and hit them in the stomach. Then as the lights went out they realized the saloon had filled with smoke that made them cough and brought tears to their eyes.
Somewhere above them, they could hear shouting, high-pitched and urgent, and the ringing of engine-room telegraphs. Someone was moaning, in a thin fretful way, as though the numbness of shock had worn off and laid bare the pain beneath. Boots thumped along the deck and there was another explosion outside that slopped half a bucketful of water through the open porthole across them, then as suddenly as it had started the shelling stopped and they could hear the excited shouting on deck, and the violent sound of escaping steam, and the faint subdued moaning somewhere down in the background.
For a moment, stunned, half-blinded by the dust and numbed by the confusion of noise which followed, they lay on the deck among the scraps of broken crockery that had fallen from the table and the dresser, listening to the racket outside. Ash could feel the soft angular body of the child beside him and Grace shuddering under his arm. She was biting at her lip as all the dammed-up courage she had been drawing on seemed to flow out of her, destroying her strength and the will to move, then Ash’s hand came up alongside her cheek, pressing her face against his shoulder, and the whimpering cry that was rising in her throat died unborn.
The explosion had flung open the saloon door again and they could see by the dim light from the alleyway. As they climbed unsteadily to their feet, they heard the clatter of shoes and the lanky disjointed shape of Grundy, the Second Mate, appeared. He burst into the saloon, his pale face distorted and close to hysteria.
‘Blood,’ he said shrilly. ‘There’s blood everywhere.’
As he faced the mate, Ash could see Grace’s face and that of Teresa huddled close to her, blank with fear. Grundy was trying to light a cigarette, his hands trembling, and Ash realized for the first time that the mate was younger than they had thought, with the pitted pimply skin of a youth and lank strengthless hair that fell over his eyes.
‘Smack on the wing bridge,’ he was babbling. ‘Wiped the lot of ’em off. The Old Man, the Mate, the Second Engineer.’
Ash turned to the porthole and peered out again. The Punta de las Rosas light was visible again now, but on the other beam.
‘We’ve swung round,’ he said. ‘We’re going back. Christ, what’s happening? We’re slowing down.’
He divided towards Grundy and shook him angrily. ‘Is there anybody on the wheel up there?’ he demanded.
‘I dunno.’
‘What about the Third Mate? Where’s he?’
‘Don’t carry a third.’
‘Who’s in charge then?’
‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ Grundy’s voice was rising hysterically and Ash brought his hand back and smacked him hard across the face. Grundy’s eyes seemed to recover a little of their life and he looked up startled, his mouth hanging open.
‘Who’s in charge, you silly little clot?’ Ash repeated fiercely.
‘Chief, I suppose, Jim Dainty, Chief Engineer.’
‘Where is he?’
‘God knows.’
Ash glanced across to Grace. She was kneeling, trying to quieten Teresa, who was sitting on the deck, howling with fright. He caught a brief whiff of cordite and the acrid scent of burning, and heard someone’s voice yelling, ‘Bring a fire extinguisher – and be quick about it! and the sudden pounding of feet.
There was more shouting for a while, then Ash glanced at the stricken Grundy and, opening the door, went along the alleyway and out on to the deck.
The ship appeared to have turned completely round where the Saolito ran into the main stream and he could tell from her wake as he stared back that they had passed right round the Isla des Flores and had come close to running aground.
They were now a few hundred yards back in the tributary, partly hidden from the mainstream by a belt of willows, and were engulfed in the blue smoke that came curling down from the deck above.
Looking upwards, he saw that part of the starboard wing bridge had been torn away and a shamble of splintered planks and charred woodwork hung lopsidedly above his head. Below it the steelwork was bent and torn like tin, and orange flames were licking at the paint round the debris. In their light he could see the dun-coloured surface of the wheelhouse pitted and chipped where splinters had struck and glanced off, screaming into the darkness. Smoke in clouds boiled down and drifted away across the river, lying low on the water and curving towards the far shore.
Ash snatched at burning scraps of woodwork and threw them uselessly overboard in glowing arcs that died with a sizzle as they hit the water, then he saw someone open the splintered door of the wheelhouse and had a brief glimpse of a fire extinguisher. As the flames sizzled out, he was pushed aside by a group of men dragging a hose along the deck among the littered papers and smashed planks and torn clothing, shouting at each other in panicking voices. The engine-room telegraphs clashed out again and the ship seemed to shudder to a stop as the engines went into reverse and the propeller thrashed at the water, then someone on the bridge shouted and the heard the crash of the anchor chain rushing through the hawse-hole.
A coloured man stumbled through a door to the deck at the opposite side of the bridge and wrenched at a valve wheel so that foamy water roared past him from the hose-pipe, glowing with phosphorescence, and began to saturate his feet as it carried the cigarette ends and the match sticks and papers of the ship’s long stay at anchor with it to the scuppers.
The smoke slowly died away and the flames disappeared, the water turning to clouds of steam on the hot wood, then with the water still swirling in a bubbling stream round his ankles, he heard the sound of running feet astern and the screech of the blocks.
‘Come back, you cowardly bastards!’ The shout was echoed by the splash of a boat hitting the water and the rattle of oars in the rowlocks.
Dodgin half-fell down the bridge ladder and picked himself up in the front of him.
‘It’s the bloody Lascar firemen,’ he shouted to no one in particular. ‘They’ve abandoned. Where’s that slimy bastard, Grundy?’
&nb
sp; Joining him at the rail, Ash could see one of the ship’s boats pulling away from the side of the ship, and the dark upturned faces of the men in it. The Lascars of the deck crew, still dazed by the suddenness of the outrage, were hanging over the rail, yelling abuse at them, to which the men in the boat replied with high, frightened shouts, then they disappeared out of the range of the feeble lights on the ship’s deck and vanished into the darkness.
Three
To Grace, waiting in the saloon, the period after the ship came to a stop was a nightmare of noise and running feet and the smell of steam and smoke and charred wood.
Her mind was a blank of confusion as she held Teresa to her, wondering wildly how she could possibly have wandered into this madhouse of outrage and uproar. She went on stroking the child’s hair automatically as she tried to think, then she realized Teresa was asleep again in her arms and she forced herself to calm down, to accept what had happened and was still happening, to adjust her mind to the frightening possibilities and to behave accordingly. Even in the wildest moments since she had left Córdoba, she had hardly expected this. She had been prepared for almost anything but this was something that had never crossed her mind. Until now she had even managed a measure of vicarious excitement at their escape, but what had been merely serious before had now become tragic, disastrous and, she could see quite clearly, dangerous to them in more senses than one.
She placed Teresa on the settee and as she lowered her coat over her, the child opened her eyes drowsily for a second and smiled.
‘We’ll be all right, won’t we, Gracie?’ she asked.
Grace nodded. ‘Yes, we’ll be all right.’
‘He’ll see we’re all right, won’t he? The child looked up at her earnestly. ‘Gracie, I wish he’d take us back to England. It was never like this in England.’
As she fell off into a deep exhausted sleep, Grace’s generous heart was stricken by the appeal, the cry of a child separated from familiar things and torn by fear, caught up in an adult world which in its selfishness never paused to consider the small and the old and the weak.
‘Dear Lord,’ she said under her breath, startled to find herself praying spontaneously in a way she hadn’t done for years, ‘take care of her. Give her a chance. Help me to help her and give me strength not to give up.’
After a while, she heard a scuffling in the alleyway outside and, putting her head out, she saw Ash there, with Dodgin, the steward, and two coloured sailors. They were carrying a plank with the twisted figure of a man on it, splashed with blood and swathed in scruffy stained blankets, who shouted and swore bitterly every time they jolted him.
For a long time after they had disappeared, she sat alone with the sleeping child, listening to the cries of pain and the sounds of panic outside, uncertain what to do and aware of the depressing dreariness of the saloon. After a while, she began to feel hungry and realized she hadn’t eaten much all day. For lack of anything better to do she went into the pantry and started picking up the sharp-edged pieces of shattered crockery, then Ash appeared briefly and she faced him, pale-faced and strained-looking, but filled with an incredible relief at the sight of him.
He appeared to be wiping splashes of blood from his trousers as he straightened up and looked at her, smiling in a way that had completely dispersed the sometimes infuriating breeziness.
‘Gracie,’ he said. ‘It looks as though we’re stuck. We can’t do a bunk now even if we want to.’
‘Why not? What’s happened?’
‘Talk about hitting a man when he’s down. It’s enough out there to make you weep. For God’s sweet sake, keep the kid in here till we’ve got it cleared up. The Captain’s dead. And the pilot and the Second Engineer. At least, we think they are. We haven’t found the Captain or the Second Engineer. That was the First Mate you saw us bringing down to his bunk. I think he’s smashed both legs and some ribs.’
She stared at him, still holding the fragments of broken crockery. In the stillness, a yellow cockroach emerged from under the dresser, appeared to sniff the air for danger, then scuttled across the deck and disappeared below the scrap of carpet beneath the table. Its pale shining body hurrying for the darkness seemed symbolic of her own fears and her own desire for shelter.
Ash was fishing in his pockets for his cigarettes now and he stood with the case in his hands and looked up at her.
‘No bloody morphia on the ship, of course,’ he said, still speaking quickly. ‘Nothing. No drugs. No medicines. We gave him a gulp or two of neat rum. Best we could do. At least the poor devil’s in a stupor now. He’s in his bunk. The bosun’s in there with him. Seems they’re old chums, or something. Played dominoes together every night.’
As he became silent again, Grace realized she was grasping the fragments of pottery in her hands so hard that the sharp edges were digging into her palms. She put them down abruptly and turned to Ash once more.
‘What happened?’ she asked again in an unsteady voice. ‘Tell me, for God’s sake!’
He studied her for a second, then he offered her a cigarette and lit one himself.
‘We’re in a mess,’ he said. ‘I wish to God I’d never seen the blasted ship.’
‘It was my fault,’ she said quickly. ‘You suggested going by road. I chose the ship.’
‘It was nobody’s fault,’ he replied. ‘We’re here and we’re stuck again. That’s all. Properly stuck this time, though. Still, don’t worry. The kid’s all right, at least.’ He glanced towards the little huddle on the settee where Teresa lay, lopsided and uncomfortable-looking but fast asleep.
‘There’s not much we can do,’ he went on. ‘The wireless’s smashed to pieces. Shell splinter. Not that I think it ever went anyway. Nobody seems very sure. They seem a bit dim all round, as a matter of fact.’
He seemed quite calm and completely in control of himself, and she began to realize he was the type of man who thrived on chaos and danger. There was something in the raffish uncertainty of the life he’d led which added a guttersnipe’s nerve to a calm efficiency, so that he could find nothing but contempt for the uselessness of the Ballaculish’s wretched crew and their inability to cope with the situation, for the beaten apathy that had allowed their equipment to become worn out, used up and never replaced; and a flaring anger at their complete indifference to the simple necessities of an emergency.
‘We ought to get a doctor,’ he was saying, as though he were thinking aloud. ‘Do you know anything about nursing?’
She shook her head, vaguely ashamed that she didn’t.
‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ he commented. ‘There’s nothing we could do that we haven’t done already. But we ought to get ashore and contact someone about it all. The shipping agents. The consul. The ambassador. Uncle Tom Cobley and all – whoever they do contact at a time like this. But the wireless’s smashed and we’ve got no boats. One’s holed and those bloody Lascars took the other. We’re stuck until morning at least. We can sort it out then, though. We’ll be all right.’
She found herself recovering her powers of thought as the confidence and optimism that he radiated reached out and touched her too.
He glanced at the door where they could still hear confused shouting and the sound of gushing water, as though the hose pipe were still flowing on deck.
‘They’ve been flashing the shore since it started,’ he went on. ‘But no one’s answering. I suppose the whole thing was a mistake. That bloody clot of a major,’ he said viciously, his yellow eyes glowing. ‘It was his fault. They’d no reason to shoot at us. By God, if I could get hold of him, I’d split the fool from navel to fire-iron.’
He lifted his head at a burst of shouting outside. ‘They’re all on deck now,’ he said. ‘Blaming each other. They’ve put the dogs on us too, though it was nothing to do with us. She was going, with us or without us, and they’d have fired at her just the same. For God’s sake’ – he put a hand on her arm – ‘don’t tell ’em who you are or who the kid is. That steward’s
looking for somebody to take it out of. He’s the sort to hit out anywhere, too, and he won’t look who he’s hitting.’
He grinned at her until she had to smile back at him, weakly, borne up by his competence and confidence alone.
‘If it hadn’t been for me and Tess,’ she said, ‘you might have missed all this.’
‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,’ he said, and she felt for a moment that he really meant it.
Then the smile faded quickly from his face and he was looking around him, his mind alert and leaping ahead. ‘They’ll all be down here in a minute,’ he said. ‘Looking for someone to shove in the old tumbril. Let’s hope it’s Grundy and not us. He’s up there, shaking like a vinegar bottle over a pennyworth of chips. I think they suspect already he left the bridge when he shouldn’t. How about getting some tea on? That’ll help keep ’em occupied and sweeten their tempers a bit. I’ll show you how to work the stove.’
The saloon seemed crowded by the time she had filled Dodgin’s big brown teapot and put it on the table, though there were only three others in addition to themselves – Dodgin, Grundy and an elderly Chief Engineer who still seemed dazed by the responsibility that had devolved on him with Phizacklea’s death. He was a small, shrivelled old man in singlet and trousers, his thin turkey neck swathed in a sweat rag, and he peered about him almost as though he were lost on his own ship.
They were an unprepossessing lot, she realized, even allowing for the smoke that had rimmed their eyes with red, and the shock that was still in their faces; and watching them as they gestured wildly with an excitement that animated their tired faces, she was filled with compassion and pity for them. Tired as she was, she felt she wanted to cry. Life should never be like this, she thought even through her own misery; defeated, ugly, grey-faced with weariness and warped with poverty. Life meant colour and laughter and enjoyment of God’s gifts, something she felt these men had never known, and she suddenly understood the influence of the sad old ship and the reason for their hostile reception aboard her.
