by Isobel Chace
“Before the war, they used to pay the Islanders in gold,” he told her. “Now they have to accept paper like everyone else.” He laughed. “There’s a fortune down there in this ship, if we can ever get it out!”
“Why shouldn’t we?” she responded gaily.
He looked at her with amusement. “The ship is pretty badly mauled,” he warned her. “And that reminds me, look out for the coral. If you jag yourself on it, it takes a long, long time for the wounds to heal.”
“I’ll take care,” Helen promised.
By day, the whole island looked different. She had thought she had known what to expect from films and pictures in geographical magazines, but the reality was more alive than any of these. True, it was dingier too, but she so very much preferred it. She particularly liked the older part of the town which they were walking through now: there was still the old tin-roofed trading post, now abandoned, and a whole series of houses in various stages of dilapidation, with thatched roofs and walls of woven palm leaves. Here and there, a new house shone pale green and gold amongst the dark browns and greys of the older homes, some of which had been long left to decay in their own time where they stood. Children peeked out through holes in the walls and came out laughing when they saw Gregory striding past. Dogs dashed hither and thither about their own business, but even they apparently thought it worth while to follow Gregory down to the rickety jetty. By the time they arrived there, Helen felt something of a Pied Piper, but Gregory showed no signs of even noticing the train of children at his heels.
He grinned when Helen, clad in shirt and slacks, jumped easily aboard the Sweet Promise, bag in hand, but he said nothing. He swung his own long body up over the bows and squatted down to check the diving equipment that he must have put there earlier.
“Look out, pidgins!” he shouted to the children, and they scattered away from the jetty, running for all they were worth. “Their parents will kill them if they interfere with my things,” he added with a smile to Helen.
“They weren’t doing any harm,” Helen replied, her voice tinged with disapproval.
He laughed. “They talk big round here—bigger than their actions! Killing is only a light tanning, and most of the parents are too gentle even to think of doing that! You don’t have to worry about the little beggars.”
Helen was annoyed that he had seen through her so easily. “Where are the rest of the crew?” she asked to change the subject.
“Na-Tinn is just coming. His brother is down below, stowing some of the stuff away that we won’t need today. His name is Taine-Mal.”
Helen practised both names in her mind so that she wouldn’t forget them and, at that very moment, one of the Polynesian sailors she had met the evening before came running along the jetty and leaped on board beside her.
“This is Na-Tinn,” Gregory told her. Helen shook hands with the mountain of a man beside her. When he grinned at her, she saw that his teeth were hideously disfigured by being filed into points, giving him the expression of a shark rather than a man. “Welcome on board,” he said warmly.
Gregory came over to them and stood a few feet off with his hands on his hips. “She’s Michael Hastings’ wife,” he drawled.
Na-Tinn withdrew his hand hastily. “That pidgin made life bad!” he said hoarsely, forgetting his precise English in the heat of the moment.
Helen’s smile fell from her face and she turned away so that they would not be able to see the sudden tears which had rushed into her eyes. “I’m his widow, not his wife,” she said huskily.
Na-Tinn shook his head sadly. “Same thing,” he muttered. “Why you come here?”
“Now that’s a good question,” Gregory agreed under his breath.
“Does it matter?” Helen said pugnaciously. “That’s my business. As long as I can dive properly, I don’t see that you need to know anything else!”
Gregory shrugged. “We’d better get going, then,” he said. “Cast off, will you, Na-Tinn?”
Everybody had their own task once the boat was under way and Helen felt frankly in the way. As yet, no particular task had been assigned to her and she felt excluded, by Gregory and by the others, for something that was not her fault and which she didn’t understand.
“Do you want to take a turn at the wheel?” Gregory asked her, when they were clear of the little harbour and its flotilla of fishing boats and canoes. It was uncanny the way he was able to read her thoughts! But on this occasion she didn’t mind. She went aft as quickly as she could and squeezed into the cockpit beside him.
“May I really?” she asked eagerly.
“May as well see what use you’re going to be on the boat as well as in the water,” he grunted.
He took one hand away from the wheel, steering it casually with the fingers of one hand while she got herself into position. She had to get very close to him to put her own hands on the wheel at all and she was surprised by the hardness of his body and the disturbing quality of his warm breath on the back of her neck.
“Have you got it?” he asked her almost immediately.
“I think so,” she said. It was hard to concentrate with him being so close to her, and that annoyed her. She had thought that she had long ago outgrown such adolescent reactions.
“Good,” he said briefly, and was gone, a faint smile on his face, leaving her to steer the Sweet Promise out and away from the main island towards the reef where the Navy ship had come to grief so many years before.
It was a wonderful sensation to feel a deck under her feet again, to feel the lifting of the timbers straining against deep waters. She had forgotten how good it was, how much she loved the salt water on her face and the smell of the billowing canvas when the engine had been shut off, and the creaking sound of rope against tackle, augmented by the slapping of the boat’s hull against the deep green waves.
Na-Tinn came and relieved her at the wheel after a while, when the wind had caught their sails and they were slipping through the sea with an easy lilt that delighted her.
“Taine-Mal will give you a cup of coffee if you go below,” he told her with his wide, shark-faced grin. “Time to get ready to dive too. Boss, he say that!”
Helen was reluctant to give up the wheel that was tugging gently in her hands as if it were a living thing, but when he pointed ahead the water was so clear that she thought she could make out the tip of the reef they were aiming for and knew that it was indeed time for her to get ready for her first dive in the Pacific Ocean. She was nervous, but not abominably so. She was glad though of the hot coffee that Taine-Mal liberally supplied her with, grinning like his brother to show pointed teeth, all neatly filed in some terrible ceremony in his youth.
Gregory was already sitting on the edge of the deck with his feet dangling over the edge when she went back up on deck, her bathrobe pulled tightly about her. His body was burned gold in the sun and made hers seem whiter than it really was.
“Hi there!” he greeted her. “You’ve made it!” His smile was more friendly than she had expected.
“I do my best to please,” she smiled back.
His eyes crinkled with sudden laughter. “You please all right,” he said. “If you can only dive as well as you look, I’ll take you on, I swear by Neptune and all the others that I will!”
Helen looked down her nose and frowned. “Do you know the legend of the boy and the dolphin?” she asked him.
“Only that it brings good luck,” he admitted.
“My father once thought he saw a boy riding a dolphin,” she said solemnly. “He was the luckiest man I’ve ever known. I was just wondering if there was any equivalent symbol of good luck for these waters.”
He frowned. “If you’re a good diver, you don’t need good luck,” he said smartly. “I should have thought you’d have known that?”
She nodded, not looking at him. “One always needs good luck,” she said.
He didn’t answer her. The sails came rushing down and hit the deck and Na-Tinn shouted to Gregory
to drop the anchor.
“If he cuts it any finer, one of these days we’ll end up on that reef ourselves!” Gregory swore to himself. He pulled the pin out of the anchor-chain and it dropped overboard in a clatter of metal links, gaining a firm purchase on the coral bank below them.
Helen stared over into the water, astonished at its clearness. It was quite easy to make out the rises and falls in the coral shelf and to watch the fish swimming in their shoals of fleeting colour, flashing to and fro up and down the reef in a constant search for food. She could even make out the lines of the sunken frigate that her father-in-law had once commanded. She shivered at the sight of it, already encrusted and looking quite unearthly under the fathoms of clear water that covered it and the valuable cargo that was somewhere still inside it. She could see where Gregory and, she supposed, Michael had torn back the welded metal in their efforts to gain an entrance, and she wondered why they had not forced a hatch, or even broken in the portholes. She would soon know, she thought, and took a deep breath to calm the nervous quiver of fear within her that came and went just as though she had never dived before.
Gregory fitted the compressed air cylinders to her back, but she tied her own leather belt around her waist, filling it with leaden weights to enable her to sink from the surface. If she were not careful, she would breathe too deeply, like any amateur, and need more weights to get her down, so she restricted the amount of air she took into her lungs with a calm desperation born of her urgency to succeed. For the first time it had come home to her that Gregory might not take her on, that she might fail to prove her worth to the expedition and that he would be only too pleased to turn her away because she was a woman and he didn’t like employing women. When she shut her eyes, she had a clear vision of her mother-in-law’s delight at her failure, and that steeled her determination as nothing else would have done.
“Ready?” Gregory asked her.
She nodded and he bent and adjusted the flippers on her feet and checked the meter on the breathing apparatus.
“Okay, you’re go!” he said.
She took her mask in her hand, spat into it and washed it in the bucket of salt water that Na-Tinn held out to her. Carefully she adjusted it over her nose and eyes and then allowed herself to be lowered gently over the side in a kind of rope basket that Gregory had rigged up for that very purpose. The water was deliciously cool and she couldn’t wait to be free to dive deep down into it. Above her, Gregory released the ropes and the basket fell away from her. She kicked out away from the Sweet Promise, then allowed herself to fall down and down until she was almost level with the coral shelf where the frigate lay and could see in intimate detail how the coral had been built up in the last few thousand years, the skeletons of more millions of tiny creatures than man could count, adding to one another and slowly forming a whole mountain beneath the sea to appear here and there as Pacific islands and the typical coral reefs that surrounded them.
Now that she was under water, Helen felt better. Her nervousness had gone. She wished she had prepared her mask with greater thoroughness, for it had misted slightly on the left-hand side. She had probably missed it when she had smeared it with saliva before rinsing it out, she thought, but it wasn’t bad and she could see quite well enough for anything she wanted to do.
In all she must have allowed herself quite five minutes to acclimatise herself to her new surroundings. She kept remembering earlier dives she had made with her father and for an instant she longed for his comforting presence swirling through the waters towards her, just as he always had, releasing a fish straight into her face, or pulling one of the half dozen tricks he had never been able to resist. She was remembering the dive on which she had met Michael too. It was here that Michael had died, she thought in a sudden panic. Her skin prickled with fear, but then she looked upwards and saw the dark hull of the Sweet Promise above her and the panic subsided. What could go wrong? She wasn’t one to take stupid risks. She would approach the frigate only when she was ready to do so and when she could see her way dear to doing so. So why worry? Gregory couldn’t make her take risks she didn’t want to take!
She was ready then to go along the shelf to look at the frigate. She saw for the first time how she had fallen away from her original position on to her side, exposing the large, gaping hole where she had battered herself against the reef, causing her to sink. The edges of the hole were too jagged for it to be safe to enter there and Helen could see now that the hatches had become encrusted and joined to the main shelf of coral. It was true that the strands were tenuous enough to be easily broken, but the frigate was right on the edge of the shelf even now and it wouldn’t take a great deal to send her over the edge and down into water where it would be too deep to follow her.
Helen moved from her first position to where Gregory had tried to cut away the side of the frigate. It was obviously a long, slow job and it was obvious too that he needed help. She wondered if they had already decided to make their entrance that way when Michael had been there, but she doubted it. All the work looked too recent for that.
She had been down a good time now. The fish accepted her presence and swam in and out of her arms and legs casually as they did through the branches of coral that surrounded them. She was playing with a small green fish that blew itself up until she thought it would burst when she stroked its back, when she noticed that Gregory had come down to join her. He tapped his watch significantly and pointed towards the surface. Helen glanced down at her own watch and was astonished to see that she had only ten minutes of compressed air left. She breathed deeply to facilitate her rise to the surface, enjoying the bubbles that spun out from her breathing apparatus and danced up to the surface ahead of her. Then at last she broke through the surface and could feel the heat of the sun on her face. A second later Gregory was there beside her, and they had both whipped off their masks and had wrenched the air nozzles out of their mouths. To Helen’s inexpressible relief, Gregory was smiling.
“Well?” she challenged him.
He shook his head so violently that drops of water sprayed all over her. “It was a nice, cosy dive,” he agreed. “Now we must get down to some work. Come on board and I’ll explain what I’m aiming at.”
Helen needed no second invitation. She climbed aboard, as agile as she had always been, and stood watching the water drip off her on to the deck, laughing with a sudden warm gaiety that she hadn’t heard from herself for a long, long time.
“I take it you enjoyed yourself?” Gregory suggested, amused.
“I certainly did! I’d almost forgotten what a feeling of freedom diving gives one.”
“It’s hard work too,” he warned her.
She shook out her hair and grinned. “Who’s afraid of hard work?” she retorted.
“Now that’s what I like to hear, a dedicated woman,” he drawled. Helen wasn’t sure how to take that, so she didn’t bother to answer. She followed him meekly down into the cabin and looked at the plans he spread out on the table for her benefit, trying not to drip water all over them. It was clear that formerly the frigate had lain the right way up and she wondered what had happened to turn her on to her side, as she was lying now.
“When did you start to cut your way in through the metal plates?” she asked.
“After Michael—” Gregory broke off, his face solemn and angry. “No matter, it’s what we have to deal with now that matters. And we don’t want anyone rocking the boat from now on, or she’ll fall off the ledge altogether. You can see that, can’t you?”
Helen nodded. “You have all the equipment?” she checked with him.
“Enough. I’ve been trying to do it all myself so far. It’s been a difficult season and the weather was against me too. It’s difficult to believe now what it can be like in the rainy season and what can happen when a typhoon comes along!”
“Here?” Helen exclaimed surprised. “I didn’t know there were any extremes here in the Islands!” She blushed, conscious that she was exposing h
er ignorance to eyes that might well not be kindly. “I’d imagined that the weather was always like it is today,” she finished lamely.
“I suppose it mostly is,” he agreed equably enough. “But when it does choose to do something different, it’s pretty wholehearted about it. The rains go on and on for weeks when they come. The typhoons are usually short, sharp and unpleasant, but we get warning of them now, so it isn’t as bad as it was once.”
He turned away from the maps abruptly and got out the blowlamp equipment, which was so designed and fuelled that it worked well under water.
“Have you used this before?” he asked her.
Helen shook her head. “But I’ll learn,” she said eagerly.
“We’ll see,” he answered dryly. He went on to explain exactly how it was to be used and she repeated the lesson like a half-witted child until she felt she would burst if he made her go through it even once again.
“You may be impatient now,” he told her, “but things look different down there. You can burn yourself pretty badly and do untold damage to your breathing equipment. If you don’t know exactly what to do, it can be the difference between life and death.”
He was right, of course. She admitted that. But she could well imagine how Michael would have reacted to being told the obvious again and again by a man who didn’t even trouble to wear shoes around the Islands.
And yet she couldn’t fault him when it came to his administration of the salvage operation. That worried her too, she admitted to herself, for she could well imagine Michael underrating such a man. She might have done so herself if she hadn’t been startled into awareness by the animal attraction the man had for her. She was so aware of him that she couldn’t possibly miss the dedication he had for his job under that lazy, charming buccaneer exterior, but as for Michael she couldn’t be sure. She racked her brains trying to remember what he had written to her about Gregory de Vaux, but she could remember nothing that wasn’t the merest platitude. Oh, Michael, she thought, was that why you died?
