Scend of the Sea

by Geoffery Jenkins

  Lee-Aston remained remote, unmoved. 'Maybe - maybe not. Fortunately I am not called upon to judge your motives. I am only a naval officer, doing his duty.' He gestured to the lieutenant who had come to the door.

  'Lieutenant, see Captain Fairlie back to his ship. Cast off the line. Get a tow aboard the weather ship.'

  'You . . . are . . . not . . . going . . . for . . . the . . . Buccaneer . .. ?'

  'Captain Fairlie, my orders were to find you. I have. If Walvis Bay was a navigational hazard, my orders were to sink her by gunfire. If she was afloat, I was to take her in tow to Cape Town. The search for the Buccaneer is being well cared for, I assure you. Unlike you, I obey orders. Now please get back to your ship and make fast the tow.'

  'You can't. . .' I expostulated.

  'Subordination to orders is the heart of the Navy,' he replied. 'It has also been recommended, in another context, as a true philosophy of acceptance in life. I commend it to you. I shall let the C-in-C have a full report of our conversation. He is acting on behalf of the Weather Bureau since it concerns the sea and ships. Now, may I wish you good morning?'

  I went.

  The tow was secure, and I was pulling off my boots on my damp bunk before trying to snatch some exhausted sleep. Smit and I had heaved the cabinet off the bunk. The wetness and chaos made the place doubly depressing. There was wreckage everywhere.

  Smit knocked at the door and handed me a paper.

  'Signal from the frigate, sir. To be passed on to you personally.'

  I unfolded the slip and read the relayed telegram.

  Until we see each other, please keep away from the Waratah. Tafline.

  Tafline!

  So that was her name.

  So she knew.

  So did the Navy.

  So did the Weather Bureau.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  'Captain Fairlie will report to the C-in-C, Simonstown, at 10 sharp tomorrow.'

  The frigate's snapping signal lamp had come to symbolize my rejection by the Navy and Weather Bureau during the past four days of the tow. Orders from the warship to the labouring weather ship had been restricted to what was strictly necessary. Their brevity indicated Lee-Aston's intention to demonstrate his basic philosophy of subordination. He had passed on equally brief messages from the Weather Bureau. They had to do with towing, getting the ship safely to port and docking. There was no word of sympathy for my casualties, not a hint of appreciation for what my crew or I had gone through to save the ship.

  I had forced Nick Scannel to go aboard the frigate to have his burns treated by the ship's doctor.

  He reported back, grim-faced.

  'They're building up the case against you, skipper,' he told me. 'Ably assisted by that rat Feldman.' 'Case, Nick?'

  'I'm damned if I go aboard again,’ he burst out, 'burns or no burns. Wanted me to make a statement about the other night. What were you up to? What was behind the meeting between your brother and yourself ? What-' he shrugged angrily, and then winced from the pain.

  'What did you say, Nick?'

  ' "I take orders," I told that iceberg frigate captain.' He grinned mirthlessly. '"I was in the engine-room. You don't see or hear anything down there, except what comes down the voicepipe. Unlike some of the arse-licking sons-of-bitches who frequent bridges." '

  I could not help laughing at Scanners vehemence.

  'It's bad enough, without taking cracks as well,' I said.

  Scannel mimicked the cold preciseness of the Navy captain.

  ‘ "I would have you know, Mr Scannel, that Mr Feldman has been of the greatest assistance to us in our preliminary investigations." "I'll bet he has," I said. "If he sucks up and gets the command of Walvis Bay, you'll find yourself with a weather ship and no crew." "May I remind you, Mr Scannel, the Walvis Bay is not a naval unit. We are acting at the request of the Weather Bureau. I am simply collating facts for my superiors." "And you can go and stick your collation right up the frigate's condenser pipe," I told him, and walked out.'

  'Thanks, Nick,' I replied.

  The engineer stared hard at me and said. 'You're going to fight them, aren't you, skipper?' I avoided his eyes. I did not reply.

  'You've got something to fight them with, haven't you, man?'

  'Yes and no, Nick,' I answered slowly. 'I don't know whether it'll do any good anyway.'

  'There's not a man of us in the crew who holds the other night against you, skipper. I'd like you to know that. We've all watched you for a whole year slave your guts out to make this ship something really special.' He became almost pleading. 'You wouldn't have thrown it all away for the sake of nothing, would you? You found something which will get you off the hook, didn't you, skipper?'

  'Yes and no, Nick.'

  He came and crashed his big hand on my shoulder. 'Don't keep saying, thanks Nick. Yes and no, Nick. Get your head up, boy!'

  Now the tow was virtually at an end. Walvis Bay lay wallowing under Tafline's lighthouse at the approaches to Table Bay harbour. The frigate had cut her speed to barely steerage way in order to hand us over to the care of a port tug. I had hoped to make Cape Town at dawn, but the crippled whaler had laboured so after rounding Cape Point, the extreme tip of the Peninsula, that it was mid-morning before we made port. A thin, wintry rain on a nor'wester added to our difficulties, and visibility was poor. I was already

  bracing myself against the publicity which would attend the ..battered ship's arrival; except for our small portable, we had been without news from the outside world during the slow plug round the southern tip of the continent.

  The warship's light blinked.

  'Acknowledge C-in-C's order forthwith.'

  'Acknowledged.'

  'Cast off the tow.'

  The warship gathered way and swung in a wide arc seawards, heading back round the Peninsula to the big base at Simonstown. No goodbye. No good luck. None of the usual courtesies of the sea.

  The docks were cheerless when we tied up. The men who threw the securing hawsers were only too glad to get back to their shelter rather than pause and gape at the damage. Either the weather or some other scoop had mercifully kept the press away.

  'Finished with engines,' I rang down.

  It was a pure formality since we had merely used the auxiliaries during the tow The ship had an end-of-school-term air; I had been ordered to send the crew ashore while the dockyard took over Walvis Bay.

  And Tafline?

  Where, I asked myself again and again during the long slog of the tow, where did she come in? I did not - dared not-reply to her telegram. What construction had the probing Lee-Aston put on her words in the first place when he relayed it to me? Would she misconstrue my silence as resentment at her unfortunate interference? I wondered, as the low blur of the mountainous Cape coast slid by, I wondered many things. I had no answers. I did not know of her night's vigil.

  The gangplank went down, and the first men hurried ashore, laughing and joking. The cranes, the concrete quays, the dripping black tarpaulins over the railway trucks and the shrouds of steam above the shunting locomotives were as a desert to me through the weather ship's gaping, glassies’ bridge windows. I went below to my cabin, down the shori companionway, still bent from the impact of the wind barrel. Unshaven, weary from nursing the whaler all nigh round the Cape of Storms, and exhausted by the tumult within me, I did not bother to take off my oilskins but stoo< looking disconsolately at the cabin.

  Where would I begin? I would have to prepare a detailed report for submission to the C-in-C, and then amplify it verbally when I was interviewed by him. By bringing in the Navy and the C-in-C, the Weather Bureau gave the whole affair a quasi-courtmartial aspect which did not appeal to me. I could see why, when ships and the sea were in question, of which the Bureau had no real knowledge, but it started things off on the wrong foot as far as I was concerned. I would far rather have explained to the people I knew in the Bureau, and who knew me.

  Soon, too, there would be the official inquiry, to be hel
d in public as they always are, into the loss of the Buccaneer, and I would have to appear as a key witness. My heart sank at the thought of still further painstaking, carefully considered reports, and consultations with lawyers, no doubt. I turned to the tiny chart table, thinking to make a start by rolling up the annotated chart.

  Then she stood in the doorway.

  She stood and simply looked at me. I looked back, not speaking either.

  She just walked past me and went to the photograph of the Waratah with its broken glass.

  In all the time I knew her, she always curbed her emotions, but now her voice was unsteady.

  She said, ‘It had even to throw something at the picture of itself, didn't it?'

  'Yes.'

  She was very quiet. I know now that the way she stumbled over the quotation, looking at the Waratah, that there was no gainsaying the still, soft call. 'Built in the eclipse, and rigged 'mid curses dark.'

  She faced the other photograph, of the airliner, perhaps so that I could not see her face.

  'He's dead, isn't he?'

  'Yes. I saw him go in.'

  'You saw him go in! The papers didn't say that.'

  I told her briefly of our rendezvous, the beat-up of the weather ship by the Buccaneer, the way Alistair's lights vanished.

  'Mock attacks on shipping are strictly forbidden in flight orders,' I added. 'Alistair knew that. Discipline is razor-edged in the Buccaneers. He simply laughed it off when I raised it.. .'

  She came and stood by me at the chart. She had never been as close to me as this. The line of her profile was exquisite against the chart's parchment. The tell-tale question mark with its circle at the end of the plot near the Bashee Mouth told her everything.

  There? Waratah.

  'Waratah - there,' I replied.

  'Was it your idea, or Alistair's, or both?'

  It was the only time she hurt me. I did not know that the detachment almost in the curt query meant that she had clamped on the rebellious emotions which, when she saw me, threatened to run riot.

  I replied slowly. 'Almost the last words Alistair said to me about the Waratah were that if he had me in his squadron, he'd ground me and send me to a psychologist.'

  She pretended to be studying the chart. I thought the way her lips moved meant that she was repeating the plot to herself. She could not trust herself to speak.

  I waited, and she waited in her own unique fashion, shaping things her way. She wanted to give me the comfort I needed, soothe the rawness of having killed my own brother, and the censure of the authorities. How then did she manage to square that with the cyclone of feeling within her heart?

  I had to lean down to hear her murmur. 'It reached out for you, too, that night - remember that. And I bless it while I hate it, whatever it might be, that it missed.'

  She looked up from the chart and I saw her eyes, and the double pain was gone. Currents greater than Agulhas were carrying us along; our incomplete words were the snow-plumes blown from the iceberg while the great mass of it remains out of sight, inarticulate, known but only hinted at.

  'I came to the cabin that night,' I said. 'I - remembered.'

  'I... I... watched a lighthouse. I was - aware.'

  There were a thousand banalities which I might have resorted to, but each one would have denied her, Tafline. She pretended to be studying that circle on the chart ringing the question-mark whose name was Waratah; she played unconsciously with the big navigational dividers with her left hand. Her hair was short and soft, and I could see the white skin in the nape of her neck as she bent forward.

  I said, picking my words in order to navigate my tumultuous inward current. 'Walvis Bay did not catch it immediately. Alistair's lights went out, all of a sudden. He had started to bank. I thought - Feldman did too-that he was coming back. The Air Force refused to believe that. Their plot put Alistair well to the north of where I last saw him. They said my positions were too uncertain to work on. They maintained that, because the weather was bad, he would have gone .straight on to make his attack on East London, once he had identified the Walvis Bay.’

  She still played with my dividers and pencils.

  'What about the low-flying?'

  ‘I’ll have to do my best at the inquiry. It'll be held in public. I should hate them to put his death down to negligence, or breach of discipline, or anything that he really wasn't'

  The search hasn't been called off yet, though they've found nothing,' she replied. 'You talk of an inquiry already.' She looked up at me then. 'You believe he's dead, don't you, Ian?'

  'Yes. When his lights snapped off, that's when it happened. Don't ask me why, but it is so. If I had been a few miles further to the south, I might have seen what took him.'

  She made a quick gesture to take in the shattered photograph and the wrecked deck above our heads. She lifted a corner of the veil on her night of agony.

  'If you had been to the south, it would have been Alistair and not you I would be talking to now-if ever I had got in touch with him.'

  She drew an unconscious pattern with the V of the dividers: its apex settled on my circled question mark, and a pencil on either side completed the doodle. She had formed the letter 'W'.

  She smiled a little crookedly. 'It always comes up that way, doesn't it?'

  'Yes,' I answered. 'It's been that way for a long time with me.'

  ‘I didn't know it could be so big,' she murmured, and I had to crane my neck to hear her speak, as if to the chart. 'A dead ship, ruling the living. Superimposed on everything one does, says, thinks. Reaching into recesses. Reaching into . . .' She did not go on. I longed to hear more, but there was her curb.

  She gave a slight shake of the head as if to dispel her thoughts, and said levelly, ‘I want to know from you, yourself what happened that night.'

  'The gale was working up to full strength,’ I said mechanically. 'A full-blooded southwesterly buster. After Alistair vanished, I knew that Walvis Bay couldn't take much more at the Waratah's speed .. .’

  She glanced sharply at me for my reconstruction and her lips twitched, but she did not interrupt.

  'Then, when the speed was off her, I sensed that something-don't ask me specifically what, because I've thought and thought about the answer and haven't got it_-something maybe in the conjunction of the gale and the Agulhas Current, something maybe about the counter-current with the weight of that gale behind it, something maybe about an unexplained upcurrent caused by the sea-bottom contour thereabouts - something was different. Jubela sensed it too. It was what so bedevilled things later when they pressed me as to my exact position when I last saw Alistair. Frankly, I don't know. Not within miles.'

  'They found a lifejacket,' she said. 'The papers were full of it. Near Port St John's.'

  I shrugged. The drama was starting to get cold for the newspapers after a couple of days, I expect. I heard about it on the radio. It seems it was the sort of lifejacket ski-boaters wear.'

  She came close to me, searching my face. My pulse raced. The shadows were in her eyes.

  'Why did they push you aside, Ian, the very man who saw the Buccaneer vanish? They had everything to gain from consulting you.'

  'I defied an explicit order from the Weather Bureau and the Navy to clear out of the storm area. I still have to answer for it. I smashed up a fine ship and thousands' worth of valuable equipment. They won't forgive me for that in a hurry. When I tried to explain my motives to the Navy ... I am branded as unreliable, overwrought, a nut chasing a crazy notion. That is why they wouldn't listen to me about the search area, despite the fact that I made no secret of the fact that I wasn't sure of my position at the time.'

  'South of the Bashee?'

  She let the words fall slowly, deliberately.

  I nodded, and there was silence.

  Then I said. 'South of the Bashee! You'll find with this thing that the same words keep coming back, recurring like a symptom in a disease that mocks every change of treatment Some have a rhythm, and see
m to beat about in your brain. You claw for meaning, light, anything. Bashee - I don't know what it means. The experts say it is lost in time. Yet I beat against it!'

  I pulled myself up. 'Walvis Bay wasn't in danger immediately after the Buccaneer disappeared,' I resumed. 'At that stage she was taking a bad beating, but she wasn't damaged. Yet-there was something peculiar about those seas which I've tried again and again to define. It was the same for all of us.' ‘Us?’

  'Four Fairlies’ I replied. 'Our gale was from the southwest. Our run of the sea was from the southwest. Our courses were all southwest. That is our one common factor. Two of us were flying at 300 to 600 miles an hour. Two of us were doing thirteen knots ...'

  'No!' she burst out. I was startled at her sudden outburst. 'No! Not you-and the Waratah! You're here-alive, well, unhurt in the present. She's dead, gone, wrecked, in the past! No,' she corrected herself, 'it isn't like that at all, is it, Ian? The Waratah is here and alive, as much as you and me, isn't she?'

  'Yes.' Outwardly the answer was reserved; inwardly, my heart exulted. In that outburst I had seen in her things more precious for me than all that long-dead secret.

  I therefore almost regretted that she controlled herself. 'I'm sorry. The Waratah reached out for you, still another Fairlie. The fourth. Please show me every detail. I want to know.'

  I showed her on the chart. The nearness and warmth of her sent my blood tingling.