Mackinnon found Sparks watching him. ‘He’s not a bad lad, sir.’
‘Did I say he was?’
‘No,’ agreed Sparks, with a wry smile.
‘And I’m surprised to find you leaping to his defence.’
‘Because he’s a sprig of the landed gentry?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s unhappy, and therefore redeemable.’
‘The whole bloody world’s unhappy, but it doesn’t appear to be redeemable.’
‘No. It was a bloody depressing sight.’ Sparks paused, then said, ‘There’s nowhere to go now, is there?’
‘What d’you mean?’ asked Mackinnon abstractedly.
‘Well, a century ago there were the colonies, and, earlier, we shipped our social misfits to Botany Bay. The Irish went to the States, along with the Poles, the Eyeties and the Russians, those that weren’t sent the otherway to Siberia courtesy of the Ochrana. Even the Yanks themselves went west and grew up with the country . . .’
‘What you mean is you could once relocate deprivation and dissent, today it goes to sea.’
‘Got it in one, sir. The world’s too crowded and distances have shrunk; so, like rats in a cage, we’ll end up fighting for space to live.’
‘I seem to remember someone else pleading the necessity of lebensraum.’
‘Who?’ Sparks frowned. ‘Oh, yes, Hitler.’ He shook his head and added, ‘Well, the more of us there are, the less our individual lives matter. That’s something the Chinese have known for generations. Now it seems we must digest the lesson.’
‘But it leaves us exposed to exploitation, to the assumption of power by the unscrupulous,’ protested Mackinnon.
‘Only if we remain governable, sir,’ Sparks said grinning wickedly.
In his microcosmic world it was not merely the fact that he was a ship-master that made Mackinnon believe in order and discipline, but a deep inner conviction that iconoclasm and anarchy produced chaos, and chaos was inimical to a full belly.
There was an atmosphere of anarchy prevailing in the saloon at breakfast, Mackinnon thought irritably when he took his place at table and exchanged greetings with Mr York, the Chief Engineer. It was a consequence of their being in port, of course; what old Captain Shaw had called ‘the trammels of the shore’. Had the Matthew Flinders been at sea the airy space would have been redolent of all the freshness of a tropic morning when, it seemed to Mackinnon, God’s act of creation could have been a comparatively recent event. Officers, deck and engineer, would have come in, muttered polite good mornings, taken their breakfast under the bobbing attentions of the Chinese stewards and then gone about their business. Their lives would have been subordinate to the overwhelming demands of the great steel soul of the ship. This morning, however, their private lives obtruded and their demeanour was a consequence of the night before.
First at table were the stone-cold-sober, those who had been on duty: Sparks, the Second and Fifth engineers. Then other engineers drifted in, sniggering over the events of a run ashore, and Sparks was joined by Stevenson who pulled a face at Sparks’s interrogatively raised eyebrow.
‘Tut-tut,’ ticked Sparks, mocking Stevenson with a smirk of exaggerated self-righteousness. It was not yet time for Sparks to go native, besides he had a mountain of correspondence to deal with from his wife who was somehow managing to move house and keep two unruly boys in the vicinity of their proper place of education. These were, he mused over his bacon and eggs, the small, irregular wars in life that people fought. It was not indifference they felt to the plight of those like the boat people, merely a more immediate preoccupation with the minutiae of their lives. He decided not to write and tell his wife about the refugees. Such problems were for politicians to sort out, otherwise there was no point in electing them.
Taylor joined them, his hair still wet from the shower he had taken as soon as he arrived on board. He sat down and ordered, avoiding the others’ eyes.
‘Good night?’ enquired Stevenson quietly.
‘Wonderful,’ grunted Taylor. Stevenson exhanged glances with Sparks who pulled another face.
Then the girl walked in. She was pretty and blonde, with an irresponsibly wide mouth and breasts prominent enough to stir both the monastic and the jaded in the gathering. The impression her entrance caused amused and pleased her; she was quite unaware of any improprieties it might engender, improprieties which choked Captain Mackinnon with their effrontery, and astonished Stevenson who recognised her. She paused, uncertain where to sit, yet unashamedly enjoying being the cynosure for all eyes. Behind her came Chief Officer Rawlings who ushered her to the seat next to Mackinnon.
‘Dirty old bastard,’ murmured an incredulous Sparks, scooping marmalade from the dish.
‘Bloody exhibitionist,’ agreed Stevenson.
‘I wondered who the extra place was for,’ growled Mackinnon, half-rising while the girl sat.
‘My niece Dawn, sir . . . Dawn, Captain Mackinnon,’ Rawlings drawled. An inquisitive silence hung in the saloon like a smell. ‘She was unable to get home last night,’ Rawlings explained. ‘Had to kip on my settee, didn’t you, my dear?’
The girl nodded, looking round her. She began to see that her behaviour was not passing as uncensured as her uncle had assured her it would.
‘I trust you had a good night,’ Mackinnon remarked, his voice heavy with sarcasm. Next to him the Chief Engineer made a scoffing noise and renewed sniggers ran among his junior staff. Sparks whispered, ‘Good old Gorilla.’
A flush began to suffuse the cheeks of the girl.
‘Pissed as a newt, Pritch,’ confided Macgregor, opening a can of beer as he shoved the grease-rimed plate away from him and belched.
Able Seaman Pritchard ignored him, scraped up the last of the egg yolk with the remains of a slice of bread and reached for the mug. It was decorated with the badge of Liverpool Football Club and contained an acidulous brew of orange tea. Holding it to his mouth with both hands he stared at Macgregor over its rim. ‘So will you be if you drink dat stuff at dis time of day.’
‘Fuck it,’ snarled Macgregor. ‘Nae shit-faced officer’ll be telling me what tae do this morning. Ah had the night watch, so ah did, an’ ah can tell you Stevenson was pissed, Rawlings was screwing a young piece of stuff, the dirty, lucky bastard, and Taylor was having his hole ashore. He didna’ get back till an hour ago.’ He belched again. ‘Sae fuck you. Ah’m for my pit.’
He tossed the beer can into the tin-plate rosy standing in the corner of the mess-room. It missed, clattered on the deck and rolled away. Macgregor ignored it and stood as the other men in the mess turned and regarded him with distaste.
‘Pick that up,’ said an older seaman at the next table.
Macgregor made a kiss with his lips. ‘Fuck you, Braddock,’ he said and walked out of the mess-room.
‘Good riddance,’ said Pritchard as Braddock dropped the can noisily into the rosy.
‘There’s always one fly in the ointment,’ he said as the Bosun came in with a handful of mail to turn the dayworkers to.
‘Three letters here for you lot,’ he said. ‘Two for Braddock and one for Pritch.’ He tossed the letters expertly, so they skidded across the Formica table top and were equally expertly caught by their addressees.
‘Ta, Bose.’
‘I’ll give you two five minutes to read ’em, then get cracking on those derrick runners for Number 6. They’ll be opening that hatch after dinner and the Mate wants them ready. The rest of you on the foredeck and let’s get the jumbo organised.’
Captain Mackinnon was drinking a final cup of coffee as the crew noisily went forward to rig the ‘jumbo’, a special derrick mounted on a trunnion abaft the ship’s foremast for handling extra heavy lifts out of the capacious hold below it. There were two enormous electric transformers to be discharged and the agent’s young Chinese runner, who had joined the Captain’s table for coffee and cast quizzical looks at the Mate’s niece, brought confirmation that the low loaders would be alongside the ship
at ten o’clock.
‘That’ll be the lads going forrard now to get the jumbo ready, sir,’ said Rawlings urbanely. He turned to the agent’s man, ‘Would you mind seeing Miss Dent ashore, Mr Chang?’ He rose and turned to the girl, who now looked awkward and embarrassed. ‘Well, Dawn, I think it’s time to go.’ The girl got to her feet and muttered her thanks to Mackinnon. Rawlings held her chair and escorted her to the door as the agent’s runner followed. ‘Tell your mother I’ll try to catch up with the family news tonight if I can get ashore. Nice to see you, my dear.’ He kissed her cheek and went back into the saloon. Resuming his seat he winked at the Chief. ‘Don’t be an old stick-in-the-mud, Chief,’ he said, stirring his coffee. ‘I remember you in Sourabaya . . .’
‘She wasn’t my niece, for God’s sake,’ spluttered Mr York.
‘She was somebody’s niece,’ remarked Rawlings facetiously.
‘I’ll see you in my cabin, Mr Rawlings,’ Mackinnon said, getting to his feet, ‘just as soon as you’re satisfied with the heavy-lift gear.’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Rawlings, unruffled and again addressing the Chief. ‘It’s the last voyage, Chief,’ he said, and left the air full of implications.
Mackinnon was well aware that Rawlings’s smart-arsed remarks to Ernie York were, in fact, addressed to him, a heading off of any reprimand Captain Mackinnon felt he might be entitled to give his Chief Officer. He opened the Straits Times but was unable to concentrate on its contents and sat discontentedly until Rawlings arrived, tapping punctiliously on the mosquito door that Mackinnon had left open to catch the growing sea breeze.
‘The jumbo’s ready for the low-loaders,’ Rawlings said smoothly, adding as a casual afterthought, ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’
‘You know what about, Mister,’ said Mackinnon, wishing he was not sitting down. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re playing at? That girl . . .’
‘Is my niece, sir. Her parents went out to dinner last night and she felt like paying me a visit.’
‘I remember her when she was a kid, for God’s sake! How old is she now?’
‘Eighteen. She’ll soon be starting a university course.’
‘Did she have to stay all night?’ asked Mckinnon. He knew he was going to lose this fencing match with words unless he made a direct accusation, but his old-fashioned sense of propriety prevented him from airing so horrible a suspicion, even of Rawlings.
‘You’re not, er, alleging that anything improper occurred, are you, sir?’ Rawlings enquired archly.
Out-manoeuvred, Mackinnon felt anger rise in him like bile. He suppressed it with difficulty. ‘What you and your eighteen-year-old niece do or do not do is of no interest to me, mister. What concerns me is that you flagrantly brought her into the saloon this morning.’
‘If I had sneaked her down the gangway this morning the whole ship would have said I’d knocked her off, wouldn’t it? You know how well a secret is kept aboard ship. She’s part of the family,’ he said, shrugging, ‘part of Eastern Steam. She’s known these ships since she was a kid.’
‘Aye, and this is the last voyage.’
‘Exactly, sir.’
‘Get on with your duties, Mr Rawlings.’
In the wake of the Mate’s departure what disturbed Mackinnon most was not Rawlings’s amoral conduct, but the girl’s immorality.
Any assertion that it was no business of his was a lie, for it disturbed him just as the plight of the boat people disturbed him. If he felt a measure of responsibility for the one, it followed he accepted a measure of responsibility for the other. As he paced back and forth across the forward end of the boat-deck, in front of his cabin windows and immediately beneath the now-deserted bridge (ostensibly keeping an eye on the preparations for the discharge of the transformers), he found the conundrum perplexing.
Why did he not feel quite the same about Taylor’s transgression? Below him cases of Guinness were following Ford Escorts out of Number Three ’tween deck and Stevenson, wearing the khaki drab of cargo duty, walked slowly forward discussing something with the Chinese stevedore. There, thought Captain Mackinnon indulgently, was a good officer, and he vaguely wished he had a son like Alex Stevenson.
He and Shelagh had no children. There had been a daughter once, who died mysteriously, a babe in arms. The doctors had called it ‘a wasting disease’, but this unsatisfactory diagnosis only masked their ignorance and insulted the intelligence of the grieving and separated parents. Mackinnon supposed himself lucky again, in that he had had a ship’s business to immerse himself in, and even had the child survived he would have had little part in her upbringing. No, the burden of loss had fallen, as always, upon Shelagh, and she had stood it better than he. It had been a bad enough voyage, that eleven-month jag on the William Dampier, without the sense of loss and the worry about his wife; it was not surprising (though it remained unforgivable in Mackinnon’s personal canon) that he had almost succumbed to the temptations of alcohol . . .
It was, of course, Miss Dent’s youth that made her conduct with Rawlings so inexplicable to Mackinnon. He had never debauched a woman in his life and the realisation reminded him that, for all his years, for all his imminent retirement, in some ways he was an innocent. The idea made him chuckle ruefully. At least privately he could laugh at himself. He felt the deck under his feet incline gently. The shock of fear never left him when the deck moved, for this was not the easy roll of a ship in a seaway but an induced heel, like the death throes of the old Matthew Flinders during the war. He immediately suppressed the instinctive reaction; this was no more than a gentle angle of heel as the jumbo, its threefold topping-lift purchase of heavy steel wire-rope taut with the sixty-tonne weight, swung ponderously over the side and lowered the huge transformer on to the low-loader on the quayside.
Well, he thought as the ship recovered and swung back, the purchase wires suddenly running slack and the low-loader creaking under its burden, thank God he could still laugh at himself! Those damned refugees had unsettled him rather more than he cared to admit.
But suppose he picked some up? The anxiety tormented him. He could ignore them – there were stories of such things happening, of patrol boats of various embarrassed governments towing the cranky craft outside territorial waters and leaving them adrift to their fate – but such a consideration was unthinkable to John Mackinnon, himself a survivor from a drifting boat. The notion appalled him. Had he sunk so low in his comfortable life that he could even contemplate such an action? He shied away from the selfishness of it.
Nevertheless it was early August. Navigational conditions in the South China Sea took a turn for the worse about now. The typhoon season was upon them and, judging from the news and the evidence they had seen, there were at that moment several hundred, perhaps thousands, of people afloat on the bosom of the ocean. Captain Mackinnon had a feeling of inevitability lurking in the pit of his stomach. A premonition. He swore again, recognising the existence of the law of imbuggerance: that if something could go wrong it would.
Captain Mackinnon was a seaman to his fingertips and what he lacked in knowledge of the seduction of eager young women he more than made up for in his knowledge of sea lore. Instinct played a significant part in the practicality of his mind; it was instinct that made him plan for eventualities, and it was instinct which combined with the discipline of his mind to make him the kind of shipmaster that he was. ‘Gorilla’ might be his soubriquet, but it was one containing its own kind of grudging admiration, expressing the impression of gentle strength Captain Mackinnon generated.
The Matthew Flinders was fortunate in having such a commander, though at that moment John Mackinnon privately thought he had run out of luck.
CHAPTER FIVE
The South China Sea
Stevenson straightened up from the gyro-compass repeater on the port bridge-wing, rubbing eyes tired from the last hours of cargo-working in Singapore. He let the Horsburgh Lighthouse flash a couple of times before bending again, aligning the needle
of the azimuth mirror with the winking light as it came on to the alter-course bearing.
‘On, sir!’ he called to Captain Mackinnon standing expectantly in the wheelhouse door, and hurried into the chart-room to plot the ship’s position.
Mackinnon spoke softly to the helmsman and the Matthew Flinders swung slowly to port, her deck heeling slightly under the influence of the rudder.
‘Steady on o-two-six, Cap’n,’ reported the shadowy figure of Braddock at the wheel as he took off the counter-helm and fingered the Turk’s head on the amidships spoke. Above him the illuminated tell-tale showed the rudder come to rest on the division between the red and green sectors. The ship eased out of her heel and Stevenson emerged from the chart-room.
‘Right on track, sir, making sixteen and a half.’
‘Very good, Mr Stevenson. You can put her on auto pilot now . . .’
Clear of the Singapore Strait the ship headed north-northeast into the South China Sea between the mainland of the Malay peninsula and the off-lying archipelago of the Anambas Islands. Stevenson set up the Arkas and dismissed the helmsman.
‘Okay, Brad. You carry on.’
‘Fancy a cuppa char, Sec?’
‘Good idea. Better ask the Old Man if he wants one.’
Stevenson waited by the Arkas a moment, checking the automatic responses of the machine’s sensors. Then, satisfied with its performance, he reported to Mackinnon. ‘She’s on auto, sir, steady on o-two-six.’
‘Very good.’ Mackinnon straightened up from the bridge rail on which he was leaning. ‘She’s all yours, then.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
But Mackinnon lingered, turning forward again, both elbows on the teak rail. ‘It’s a beautiful night,’ he remarked, ‘if you’ve an eye for these things.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Stevenson agreed, taking the remark as an invitation to join the Master. Both men stared ahead. The ocean lay dark, like rippled silk below the stars which twinkled in their millions, displaced in brilliance only where the moon shone among them. High and full, it lit the ship with a pale fire in which details stood out with almost unnatural clarity.
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