‘Tea, Cap’n . . .’
Mackinnon accepted one of the mugs Braddock held out to him and Stevenson took the other. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’ll be in the mess-room, Sec.’
‘Sure.’
Both white-shirted figures turned forward again, studying the bow wave curling out from the cutwater and the moonlit highlights along the lengths of the crutched derricks.
‘You’ll be staring out over a load of boxes next trip,’ said Mackinnon.
‘If there is a next trip, sir.’
‘You’re not packing it in, are you?’
Stevenson shrugged. ‘I think it’ll be a case of having to, don’t you? That or sailing on some rust bucket under a foreign flag with a crew that don’t know a reef knot from a refrigerator.’
‘We’re under a foreign flag now,’ said Mackinnon sadly. ‘Besides, you don’t need that acquired wisdom really, do you? The fruit of experience is just so much excess baggage. In fact you’re better off without it. It reminds you of what you’re not any more.’
‘You mean all the sailors died with Nelson?’ asked Stevenson.
‘A bit after his time, son, if you don’t mind.’ Mackinnon chuckled ruefully. ‘There was a time when you had to be bred to it, right enough. You had to serve your time and learn the job from the bottom up. It was tough, but we had to go through it one way or the other. Now technology has . . . well, you know . . .’
‘Depersonalised it.’
‘Yes.’ Mackinnon sipped his tea, then asked, ‘What’ll you do?’
‘I don’t know, sir. See what turns up, I suppose. When this ship goes it’s the end of Eastern Steam. Suddenly the phrase “on the beach” has a nasty ring to it.’
‘Aye. I read somewhere that to live a full life a man has to experience poverty, love and war. The first and last have little to recommend them.’
‘And the middle one has its complications, that I do know, sir.’
‘So does the Third Mate,’ Mackinnon threw in shrewdly.
‘Er, yes, so I believe, sir,’ Stevenson said guardedly.
Mackinnon drained his mug. ‘It’s downhill now,’ he said, staring out over the vast emptiness ahead of the ship. Somewhere away on their port bow beneath the rippled surface lay the wrecks of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, the British battleship and battle cruiser lost to overwhelming Japanese air superiority in the dark days of the Second World War. The bodies of their companies had long ago dissolved into the ooze of the seabed. No, not all the sailors died with Nelson . . .
He sighed and cast the Second Mate a sidelong glance: if only he and Shelagh . . .
‘I had a wee daughter, mister,’ he found himself saying. ‘If she’d lived she’d have been about your age.’ For a moment he regretted the confidence; he could not recall ever having mentioned the lost child before and wondered what had made him reveal the intimacy at that moment.
‘I’m sorry,’ Stevenson said. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘No reason why you should.’ Mackinnon lapsed into silence, then said, ‘I’m not complaining. But sometimes you wonder.’ He straightened from the rail, suddenly formal. ‘Well, good night to you, Mr Stevenson. Keep a sharp lookout and call me if you need to.’
The time-honoured formula uttered by every shipmaster leaving his bridge to a subordinate expressed the utmost discharge of Mackinnon’s duty before he could turn in. Stevenson responded in the time-honoured way:
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
It was as punctilious an exchange as the preceding remarks had been personal. Both men, the older with his hands on the ladder rails as he paused for a moment, staring astern at the orange glow in the sky above the city state of Singapore, and the younger as he began to pace the wide bridge of the Matthew Flinders, knew that its historical utterance would soon be a thing of the past.
‘Old bugger,’ Stevenson muttered affectionately to himself, smiling in the moonlight as Mackinnon’s bulk faded into the shadows of the boat-deck below.
In his cabin Mackinnon found he was unable to sleep. Perhaps he had brought something of the disturbing magic of the night with him from the bridge, magic which had prompted him to expose himself to Stevenson, for it was uncharacteristic of the Captain to be so candid. Oddly he felt no guilty regret over a momentary lapse of reticence, but an odd anxiety that the frankness did not disturb him. The paradox made him restless and he sat on the settee in the darkened cabin. It was lit only by the shaded desk lamp which illuminated the scattered remains of the bureaucracy of Singapore littering its top. He sighed. The windows which looked forward were uncurtained, the neat chintz fabric looped tidily up to hooks on either side of them. In the old, munificent days, the Master of the Matthew Flinders would have had his personal steward, his ‘Tiger’, a Chinaman whose sole task was to minister to his wants and one of whose duties would have been to draw the curtains at sunset. Now Mackinnon had to remember to attend to the matter himself, and since he had been on the bridge for the past three hours the task remained undone.
He declined to move; as long as the cabin remained lit only by the small, shaded bulb in the desk lamp it would not affect visibility from the bridge above.
How odd it was, the paperwork, the curtains, the trivial stuff of which his life had been made with its rituals and rather pompous little formalities. Some marked the point at which the machinery of a state touched him as Master of a foreign-going merchant ship, some irked him with their burden of responsibility, some reminded him of his diminishing status.
Woo still liked to call himself Mackinnon’s ‘Tiger’, because once he had occupied the office and could not now lose face; but he no longer attended to the Captain’s curtains at sunset and both men knew their respective positions had shifted upon the uncertain sand of social change.
Such changes, Mackinnon thought, made the leaving palatable just as they made confidences easier, though why he had felt the need to make them to Stevenson he was not sure. Was he expressing some quiet satisfaction that his own life had been full? He had known war and love, and if not abject poverty then something like it in the indigence of the merchant seaman. But the recollection of those lost warships, which he had never traversed this point on the surface of the earth without recalling, had tonight touched him with an almost potent poignancy. He well remembered news of their loss, remembered his boyhood sentiments as first they, and then Singapore, had fallen to the Japanese. His arrival at Singapore on the James Cook had seemed to his young and fanciful imagination to have been a renewal, a picking up of the torch of British maritime endeavour, a carrying on after the reverses of adversity.
How was it put in the words of the prayer alleged to have been written by Drake to support his near-mutinous crews in his circumnavigation?
It is not the doing of a thing that yields the true glory, but the continuing until it be ended.
Would it be ended when the Matthew Flinders was passed to the scrapyard? Or was he just morbid because it was the end of him personally?
No, it was Stevenson who had touched him tonight; Stevenson who had prompted the confidences; Stevenson who was a natural seaman and for whom there was no future. He liked and respected the Second Mate and would have wished to hand on the torch to the younger man, but he knew the thing was impossible, a sentimental chimera. Stevenson would wait in vain for something to turn up . . .
Sadly Mackinnon heaved himself to his feet and stood for a moment looking down at his desk. Something tugged at his memory which, he realised regretfully, was not what it had once been. His eyes fell upon the gilt title of the book about the Uffizi and he thrust aside any thought of Shelagh. Then he remembered, riffled among the litter of papers on the desk and picked up the telex the agent’s runner had left with him at the very moment of departure.
‘It’s not urgent, Captain,’ the runner had said, handing over the envelope, ‘you can open it when you have sailed.’
Mackinnon tore it open now.
To the Master, MV MATTHEW FLINDERS
From DENTCO, LONDON
Anticipate ship may be resold for further trading. Shanghai interests indicate this now likely. Do not prejudice vessel’s condition.
Dentco.
Mackinnon grunted and let the flimsy telex fall upon the papers on his desk.
‘Do not prejudice vessel’s condition,’ he murmured disgustedly. ‘What do they think I’m going to do? Sell the brass clocks?’
As Captain Mackinnon shuffled irritably to bed, Alex Stevenson lit a cigarette and settled to his watch. He was glad to be at sea again, clear of the taint of the land with its disquieting distractions. His envy of Taylor lost its immediacy and if he was still unable to think of Cathy without a deep yearning, at least here, beneath the majesty of the tropic sky, it was poetry that seeped into his mind, blunting the keen edge of lust.
He ground out the cigarette, took one last fix on the coast of Malaysia and marked up the departure position on the chart. Recording it in the log, he worked up a dead-reckoning position for 0400, after which he resumed pacing up and down. The ship cut through the smooth level of the calm sea with an occasional flash of bioluminescence. The dull rumble of her engines rose to a muted grumble; a faint cloud of exhaust gases and the occasional spark spewed from her tall funnel as she laid her wake straight astern to where the loom of the Horsburgh Light dipped below the rim of the world. Low on the eastern horizon a bank of cloud was building, the roiling heads of the rising cumulus catching the moonlight. Above them the impassive stars rolled their sidereal paths round the earth and it was as though the Matthew Flinders and her officer of the watch were at the very hub of the universe.
Alexander Stevenson was as near absolute and profound happiness as anyone has a right to be.
Far ahead a point of light caught his eye, vanished, then reappeared, to grow in intensity. Soon it resolved itself into the navigation lights of an approaching ship. The red and green of the sidelights indicated the two ships were on reciprocal collision courses. Stevenson studied the Singapore-bound stranger through his binoculars, then walked into the wheelhouse and gave the Matthew Flinders a five-degree alteration of course.
Out on the port bridge-wing again, he raised his glasses. The other ship’s lights were clearly opening their bearing on the port bow and an occlusion of her green starboard light indicated she too had responded. It was odd that the lookout had not yet indicated the presence of the oncoming vessel. Stevenson shifted his glasses to the forecastle head and adjusted the focussing. The powerful 10 × 50s that he favoured showed the moonlit forecastle clearly. He could see no solitary figure in the eyes of the ship and at once his mood of contentment vanished.
‘Shit!’
Striding into the wheelhouse he picked up the internal phone.
‘Yeah?’
‘That you, Brad?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, Sec, d’you want some more tea?’
‘No thanks. Macgregor’s on lookout, isn’t he?’ Stevenson asked, cautiously, double-checking his facts.
‘Yeah . . .’ replied Braddock, an edge of doubt creeping into his voice.
‘I can’t see him on the fo’c’s’le, Brad, and he failed to ring for a ship.’
‘Okay, Sec, I’ll take a look.’
Stevenson put the phone down and stared at the forecastle again in case Macgregor had nipped off for a leak, but the place remained deserted and now the passing ship was no more than four miles away, a fast container ship, Stevenson could see clearly, the flat surface of her cargo of boxes reflecting the moon in a smooth plane.
While he waited for Braddock to report back he wondered what story the able seaman would concoct. He fervently wished the Matthew Flinders had carried apprentices. This was just the mission for a lively apprentice. Braddock, though no lover of Macgregor, would probably cover for him, clinging to the mistaken solidarity of the peer group. Stevenson could see Braddock’s figure going forward and he was suddenly angry. He hit the forecastle telephone bell, expecting Macgregor to jerk into sight like a puppet, but nothing happened and already Braddock was ascending the forecastle ladder. A few moments later he rang the bridge.
‘I’1l take over the lookout, Sec. Macgregor’s in the shithouse; says he’s not feeling well.’
‘Is he pissed, Brad?’
‘He’s not feeling well, sir,’ said Braddock with flat and false formality.
‘Okay.’
Braddock would not be so indulgent towards his watch-mate after standing both his own and Macgregor’s stint as lookout, Stevenson thought with petulant satisfaction.
The passing ship was drawing abaft the beam and Stevenson pulled the Matthew Flinders back on her course, fuming at the turn events had taken. Somewhere below him, as immune from apprehension as if he was on the moon, Macgregor was sleeping off his binge. Shackled by duty to the bridge, Stevenson contemplated calling Captain Mackinnon, but old Gorilla had not turned in until very late and he had no wish to burden him unnecessarily. Besides, Stevenson had enough against Macgregor for leaving his post to drag him up before Mackinnon in the morning. Worst of all, and the most unforgivable element of the incident, was that Macgregor’s irresponsibility had ruined Stevenson’s equanimity.
‘Come in!’
Captain Mackinnon looked up sharply at Stevenson as the Second Mate, dressed in clean whites, complete with cap tucked formally under his arm, pulled the door curtain to behind him.
‘May I have a word, sir?’
Mackinnon could smell trouble and the cap confirmed it; he nodded and listened while Stevenson explained what had happened during the middle watch.
‘I see,’ he said when Stevenson had finished. ‘And you’re quite sure?’
‘I’m positive the man was not at his post when he should have been, sir. That’s the bottom line.’
Mackinnon grunted and picked up the telephone on his desk. ‘Ah, Mr Rawlings: pop in a moment, will you please? Alex Stevenson wants me to log that Glaswegian beauty of yours.’
A few moments later the Chief Officer came in. Mackinnon outlined what had transpired.
‘Right, I’ll get him up, sir.’ Rawlings turned away.
‘Hang on a minute, don’t be too hasty. We’ve got to be sure of our facts these days. What was Macgregor doing yesterday before we left Singapore?’
Rawlings scratched his head. ‘Well, I think he was out lowering the derricks like the rest of them just prior to sailing . . .’ Rawlings was clearly not too sure of the precise deployment of his hands.
‘Was he on derrick gang last night?’
‘Er, I’m not sure, sir. I’ll go and ask the Bosun.’
Mackinnon’s skin went a shade darker than usual. ‘You’ll do no such thing, mister. Perhaps you could contrive not to have so much to distract you from the ship’s business in future, Mr Rawlings.’
It was Rawlings’s turn to flush.
‘Macgregor was off duty last evening, sir, up until sailing,’ offered Stevenson, embarrassed for Rawlings but equally pleased Mackinnon had had a go at the Mate.
‘How d’you know?’ snapped Mackinnon.
‘Third Mate and I passed the mess-room several times when the gangs were closing up. I saw him in there myself.’
‘Drinking?’
‘Well, yes, sir, but I’m not specifically alleging . . .’
‘No of course not, Mr Stevenson, but a few beers, and so on,’ Mackinnon said, staring at Rawlings, ‘tend to make a man sleepy.’
‘Sir,’ Stevenson said, averting his eyes from the Mate’s face.
‘Right, Mr Rawlings, now let’s interview Macgregor; bring him up with the Bosun. Mr Stevenson, perhaps you’d pass word for the Purser to join us.’
Macgregor was deprived of a day’s pay on the charge of failing to keep a proper lookout. He took the punishment without demur, casting his eyes down with suitable acquiescence and murmuring an apology to the Master which reiterated the substance of his defence that he had been ‘caught short’ and had felt unwell. He denied drinking and Macki
nnon did not adduce Stevenson’s evidence. Macgregor assured the Captain it would never happen again. Indeed, he said it had never happened before. No one in the Captain’s cabin was deceived. It was a well-worn pantomime and after the verbatim entry in the Official Log was read out, Macgregor was asked if there was anything further he wished to add. His humble ‘no, sorr’ was contrite enough to melt the hardest heart. But the malice in the glance he cast Stevenson as he left the cabin told the Second Mate there was to be a curtain call as old as the pantomime itself.
Almost exactly twenty-four hours after Stevenson had discovered Macgregor missing from his post as lookout, when the two of them were alone on the bridge, the seaman uttered his threat. By then the Matthew Flinders was north of the Anambas Islands with the Natuna Archipelago some eighty miles on her starboard beam; Braddock was pacing the forecastle and Macgregor’s pretext for attending the bridge was a routine visit prior to going forward to relieve his watch-mate.
Tonight the moon was veiled, and the northerly breeze had an edge to it that did not belong to the tropics. Macgregor sidled up to the Second Mate to report, with punctilious correctness, his rounds of the ship had been completed.
‘Thank you,’ Stevenson responded, never once taking his eyes off the horizon ahead.
‘Aye, mister, ah’m no surprised you canna look me in the face. You’re a right bastard, that’s for sure, a right fucking bastard of a bluidy shit-face . . .’
‘All right!’ snapped Stevenson, swinging on Macgregor, his clenched fists held tightly by his sides before they gave way to the impulse to pummel this stupid troublemaker. ‘You’ve had your say. Now leave the bridge, Macgregor.’
‘Mister Macgregor, to you!’ the seaman said vehemently, his jaw jutting forward and his right index finger arrowing upwards to within an inch below Stevenson’s nose.
For a second the two men confronted one another, then a voice as chilling as the wind cut between them, imperious and compelling: ‘Get off the bridge, Macgregor!’
At the top of the ladder, his torso naked, a sarong flapping about his legs, stood Taylor.
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