We had stopped rowing and all around us was the murmur of the sea. Another rock appeared out of the grey curtain of the fog, a sinister pillar of rock like a crooked finger that slid stealthily by with a froth of white water at its foot as though it were sailing past us. For a moment that damnable fog almost convinced me that I was in a geological nightmare in which the rocks steamed through the water under their own power. And then a swell came up, grew big and broke suddenly. Water surged over the gunn’l and we were thrown backwards as the dinghy hit a submerged rock. The tide swung us round and dragged us clear before the next swell broke. We were soaked, the dinghy half full of water. It was hopeless to go on with the tide swirling us through a maze of dangerous rocks. We had reached the Minkies, but in an area of reefs almost twenty miles by ten we had no hope of getting our bearings. ‘We’ll have to wait till the fog clears,’ Patch said. ‘It’s too dangerous—almost dead low water.’
In the lee of an ugly island of rock we found a little inlet where the water was still, like glass, tied the dinghy to an up-ended slab and clambered stiffly out. We stamped and moved about, but the sweat still clung to us in an icy film and we shivered under our sodden duffle coats. We ate the last of our chocolate and talked a little, grateful for the sound of our voices in that cold, dismal place.
I suppose it was inevitable that Patch should have talked about the Mary Deare. We were so close to her, frustrated by the fog. He talked about Rice for a bit and then he was telling me about Taggart’s death. He seemed to want to talk about it. ‘Poor devil!’ he whispered. ‘For the sake of that girl of his he’d sold his soul in every port in the Far East. He’d ruined his health and drunk himself stupid, engaging in every shady deal that would pay him more than a captain’s wage. That’s why they got him up from Singapore.’
‘Did Gundersen engage him then?’ I said.
‘Probably. I don’t know.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Whoever it was, they picked the wrong moment. The old vulture was going back home to his daughter, and he wasn’t going to sink a ship on his last voyage.’
‘And so Dellimare got rid of him—is that what you’re suggesting?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think he intended to kill him. I think he just got hold of his liquor and was waiting until the old man was sufficiently softened up to do what he wanted. He couldn’t have known he’d die that night.’ He smiled at me out of the corner of his mouth. ‘But it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?’ He had sat with Taggart for several hours that night, listening to a life story told in scraps of delirium—the risks and the crookery and the shady deals . . . and then two men had been drowned. That was what had started Taggart drinking. ‘Like most of us, he just wanted to forget.’ And he went on, conjuring up the ghost of that dreadful old man, completely absorbed in the tragedy of it, standing there on that rock like a Trappist monk, his body shivering under the limp brown folds of his duffle coat.
He switched suddenly to the daughter . . . that photograph, what it had meant to him. Her image had been his confidant, his inspiration, a symbol of all his desperate hopes. And then the meeting in St Malo—the shock of realising that there were things he couldn’t tell her, that she knew he was hiding something from her.
‘You’re in love with her, aren’t you?’ I said. We were strangely close, alone together in the eerie stillness of the fog with the sea all round us.
‘Yes.’ His voice had a sudden lift to it, as though even here the thought of her could raise his spirits.
‘Despite what she did to you in court?’
‘Oh, that!’ He dismissed it. That last night in Southampton—she had come to apologise. And after that he had told her everything—all the things he had confided to her picture. ‘I had to tell somebody,’ he murmured.
He lifted his head suddenly and sniffed at a breath of wind that came to us out of the dripping void. ‘Still westerly,’ he said, and we talked about how soon the fog would clear. He hadn’t liked the look of the dawn. ‘That depression,’ he muttered. ‘We’ve got to reach the salvage ship before it starts to blow up dirty.’ The words were ominous.
And shortly after that we had to go back to the dinghy. The tide had risen, covering the rocks of our inlet, and it kept us constantly on the move then. We were in a strange submarine world where everything dripped water and the floor of the sea rose steadily until the towering bastion of rock had dwindled to a miserable little island barely two feet above the level of the sea. It was two o’clock then and the swell had increased and was showering us with spray as we sat huddled together in the dinghy.
I was barely conscious of time. The fog hung round us, very thick, so that it seemed as though nothing could exist in the whole world except that miserable strip of rock and the ugly, surging water.
We didn’t talk much. We were too desperately cold. We took it in turns to sit and drift into a sort of coma. The tide went down again and the rock re-emerged like some monster lifting its dripping body out of the sea.
It was just after five that the fog began to clear. A wind sprang up and gradually the greyness lightened until it was an iridescent dazzle that hurt the eyes. Shapes began to emerge, forming themselves into rocks, and the sea stretched farther and farther away from us. Above our heads a patch of sky appeared, startlingly blue, and suddenly the fog was gone and the sun shone. We were in a sparkling world of blue-green water littered with rock outcrops.
We made the dinghy fast and scrambled up the barnacle-covered, weed-grown fortress of the rock. It was suddenly very warm, and from the top, which only a few hours before had been a bare, wave-worn little island, a fantastic sight met our eyes. All round us the sea was islanded with rock—mile upon mile of sinister reefs and outcrops—the Minkies at one hour before low water. Beyond the rock islands, we had glimpses of open sea—except to the south-west; to the south-west the islands became so numerous that they merged to form a solid barrier.
The beacon on Maîtresse Ile, which stands 31 feet at high water, was easily identified, and from it Patch was able to get our bearings. The rock on which we stood was on the northern side of the Minkies, about a mile inside the outer bastion of the Pipette Rocks, and he reckoned that the Mary Deare must lie almost due south of us. I have checked since with the large-scale chart and find that he was just about right. But the three miles that separated us from our objective constituted the main body of the reefs. We didn’t appreciate this at the time, nor did we fully understand the extraordinary change in configuration of the above-water reefs that could occur in the last stages of the falling tide.
The wind was blowing quite fresh and an ugly little chop was forming on the long swell that marched steadily eastward through the reefs. Already there was a good deal of white water about, particularly in the vicinity of submerged rocks, and I think we should have been more cautious if we hadn’t suddenly caught sight of Higgins. He was standing on a big rock mass not half a mile to the east of us. It was probably the Grand Vascelin, for there was a black and white beacon on it, and even as Patch pointed him out to me, I saw Higgins move and begin to scramble down to his dinghy, which we could see bobbing about at the base of the rock, its blue paint looking bright and cheerful in the sunshine.
We moved fast then, slithering and tumbling down to our own dinghy, scrambling into it and pushing off with no time to plan our route across the reefs, knowing only that the tide, which was west-going at that time, favoured Higgins and that we had to cover those three miles and reach the safety of the salvage company’s vessel before he caught up with us.
Of course we should never have shown ourselves against the skyline at the top of that rock. If we had thought about it at all, we must have known that, the instant the fog cleared, he would be standing on some vantage point watching for us. It wasn’t that we had forgotten about him. You can’t forget a man when he has followed you all night through a treacherous, abandoned stretch of sea with murder in his heart. But I think the fog had so isolated us mentally that
the moment it cleared we rushed to the highest point to get a sight of the world that had been hidden from us for so long. It was an instinctive reaction, and in any case we were dull-witted with cold and exhaustion.
The one sensible thing we did was to put on our life-jackets and then we pushed off from the rock that had been our perch for almost twelve hours and Patch began to row, heading south-west across the tide. Away from the lee of the rock we were conscious immediately of the weight of the wind and the way the sea was kicking up; it was a west wind, blowing over the tide, and already the waves were beginning to break. It crossed my mind that this might be the beginning of the depression. The sunshine had a brittle quality and long tongues of pale cloud, wind-blown like mares’-tails, were licking out across the sky.
The tide wasn’t strong, but it carried us inexorably towards the greatest mass of the dried-out reefs. This mass is actually split by two channels, but we couldn’t see that and for a time Patch attempted to make up against the tide to pass to the east of it, where we could see there was open water. But then, suddenly, he altered course. I was baling at the time, using a sou’wester, and I looked up enquiringly. I thought perhaps the tide had become too strong or that he felt we were shipping too much water.
But he nodded across the stern. ‘Higgins,’ he said, and I turned to see the big blue dinghy emerging from behind a jagged huddle of rocks. It wasn’t more than two cables behind us.
We were in open water then, in the broad channel that separates the outer wall of reefs from the main fortress mass. There were no rocks to shelter us and the breaking wave-tops constantly slopped over the gunn’ls so that, though I never stopped baling, the water in the bottom of the dinghy steadily increased. I could hear Patch’s breath escaping between his teeth and every time I glanced aft, it seemed that Higgins was nearer, the big metal dinghy riding higher and easier than ours. He was keeping a little to the east of us, heading us off from the open water, and all the time the outer rocks of the main reef were slowly closing in on us, the swell breaking all along their edge, the white water piling in over the black teeth of the outer fringe.
‘You’ll have to turn into the wind,’ I shouted.
Patch glanced over his shoulder, still rowing steadily, and then nodded. The twenty-foot wall of rocks was very close now. But each time he turned, the starboard bow of the dinghy caught the full force of the breaking waves and water poured in, threatening to sink us. There was nothing for it but to hold our course, head for the rocks and hope for the best.
The tide helped us here, sliding us westward, along the face of the rampart, into a bay where the swell built up to 4 or 5 feet and broke on outlying ledges in a cataract of foam. Every stroke of the oars carried us deeper into the bay, making escape from it more impossible. ‘We’ll never get out of this,’ I shouted to Patch.
He said nothing. He had no breath left to talk. I glanced over the stern and saw that Higgins had closed the distance to less than two hundred yards. Patch had to go on rowing. And then, over his shoulder, I saw the rocks at the inner end of the bay draw apart and, unbelievably, there was open water between them. ‘Look!’ I pointed.
Patch glanced quickly over his right shoulder, saw the gap and turned the dinghy towards it. We were in the first of the two channels with the wind behind us. The dinghy rose and fell to the steep swell. We shipped hardly any water now and I was able to bale her right out so that we rode light and easy. ‘We’ll make it now!’ Patch’s voice came to me through the wind and the noise of the sea breaking along both sides of the channel and it was full of confidence. He was grinning through his bared teeth, recklessly squandering his energy as he rowed with quick, straining tugs at the oars.
As soon as I had finished baling I took my place on the thwart beside him and we rowed in unison, not saying anything, just pulling and watching Higgins as he fell into the troughs of the endless waves and was borne aloft again on the next crest. The world smiled with the brittle glitter of white water. Only the rocks were ugly and their menace was oddly enhanced because the sun shone.
We reached the narrowest point of the channel, guarded by a single rock outcrop, and then it suddenly opened into a broad area of water with a reef mass ahead, but plenty of water round it. It was protected somewhat from the wind so that, though the swells still surged across it, there were few whitecaps—just patches of broken water here and there.
But as we moved out into that broad patch of open water, a strange and terrifying change began to come over it. The first indication of something wrong was a swell that suddenly reared up behind the dinghy’s stern and broke, slewing us broadside in the surf and very nearly turning us over. Patch shouted to me that we were on a reef and we pulled the dinghy clear of the danger spot. The swell was building up and breaking continuously at that point. And now, looking round, I noticed it was breaking at many other points—places where it hadn’t been breaking only a few minutes before.
‘The tide!’ Patch yelled in my ear. ‘Pull, man! Pull! It’s the tide!’
I needed no urging. I would have pulled both arms out of their sockets to get out of that fearful place. All round us now were patches of white water, patches that joined up with other patches till there were irregular lines of surf breaking. What had been, only a few minutes ago, open water, was now, suddenly, transformed into a seething, roaring cauldron of broken water as the tide dropped like a lift to expose the rocks and gravel of the sea bed contained within the ramparts of the central reef mass.
I had only just grasped what was happening when a sudden wave lifted us up and crashed us down on to a rock. The jolt of it ran right up my spine like a blow to the base of the head. Water boiled all round us, white in the sunshine, glittering like soapsuds; rocks and boulders showed for an instant and then vanished as another wave of green water swept in, lifted us up and crashed us down again. And in the instant of being uplifted I have a sort of panoramic recollection of the scene: black reefs piled round that arena and the water all brittle white and boiling mad and little sections of sea bed showing—all passing before my eyes as the dinghy was swung violently round and then finally smashed down upon a little exposed hillock of grey gravel. It was a tiny oasis in the middle of chaos that came and went as the surf rolled across it.
We stumbled out, knee-deep in the spill of a wave, and, as it receded, we tipped the dinghy up, emptying it of water. But one glance told us that it was damaged beyond any repair we could effect on the spot—two planks were stove in for practically the whole length of the boat. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Patch shouted. ‘We’d have to abandon it, anyway. Come on!’ He bent down and removed the hand-bearing compass from its case. It was all he took. ‘Come on!’ he repeated. ‘We walk and swim the rest.’
I stood and stared at him. I thought for a moment that he’d gone mad and imagined he was Christ, capable of walking the surface of that surging carpet of broken water. But he wasn’t mad. He was a seaman and his mind worked quicker than mine. Already a change had come over the scene—there was less white water, and rocks and boulders and patches of gravel were appearing as the tide receded. And two hundred yards away Higgins was ploughing through water up to his knees, dragging his dinghy after him.
I bent to pick up the painter of our own dinghy and then realised it was useless. ‘Come on!’ Patch said again. ‘We’ve got to be out of here before the tide comes back.’ He had started to walk south and I followed him, stumbling over hidden boulders, floundering into pot-holes, wet and dazed and exhausted.
The noise of the surf rolled back till it dwindled to a distant murmur, and in a moment, it seemed, all those acres that had been a roaring holocaust of tumbled water were suddenly still and quiet. No waves broke. Little raised beaches of boulder-strewn gravel shone wet in the sun and about them lay pools of water ruffled by the wind, and all round were the black rocks of the reef.
The sense of isolation, of loneliness and remoteness, was appalling. And it was enhanced by something that Higgins did, following o
n behind us. He came to our dinghy and, glancing back, I saw him pick it up in his two hands and smash it down against an outcrop of rock. The splintering crash of the wood breaking up was a sharp, savage sound. All the bows were stove in and my last contact with Sea Witch was wantonly destroyed.
And then Higgins started after us again, still dragging his dinghy. The tinny sound of it striking against the boulders was with us for a long time as we stumbled across stretches of exposed beach or waded through water that was sometimes so deep we had to swim. And at the back of my mind was the thought that we were twenty miles from the French coast, in an area that only a few of the local fishermen ever dared to visit. And in six short hours all this area of rock-strewn debris would be thirty feet below the sea, compressed, imprisoned, flattened by countless million tons of water. The only thing that kept me going was the thought of that salvage ship, so close now. It couldn’t be more than two miles away, three at the most . . . and there’d be a bunk and dry clothes and hot soup.
I saw Patch stumble and fall. He got up and staggered on. We were halfway to the black southern bastion of the reefs, floundering over a stretch of jagged, up-ended rocks. He fell several times after that. We both did. There was no strength left in us and when a foot slipped, the muscles gave. Our sodden clothing weighed us down, tripped us up.
The sun gradually died amongst the mares’-tails. Thicker clouds came up. I didn’t see them come. The sweat was in my eyes. I saw nothing but what was immediately at my feet. But rock and gravel became drab and sombre. And later, much later, there was a light drizzle on my face. The sound of the sea began to come back, but by then we were crawling amongst the great up-ended slabs of rock that lay strewn about the main outcrop.
The Wreck of the Mary Deare Page 24
