‘Everything o-kay,’ he repeated, but still they stared back. He had begun his retreat when a man called out, the syllables short and sharp and loaded with conviction like pistol shot.
‘Everything no good!’
The noise welled up again and the speaker rose to his feet, two or three others following suit. Stevenson found Thorpe was beside him.
‘Noisy lot of slant-eyed bastards, aren’t they?’ said the Chief Steward flatly, wading into the saloon. ‘Sit down, sit down, too much makee noise, call Captain bottom-side very angry.’
Inexplicably as far as Stevenson was concerned, the refugees subsided, those standing sat down again and the glow of their cigarettes seemed, to Stevenson’s heightened perception, to glow with renewed brightness.
Number One Greaser sent in search of the Chief Engineer bent and shook Mr York.
‘Ay-ah . . .’ The man let out a double syllable that might have meant anything. He stood and retreated from the cabin. Having regained the engine-room he located the Second Engineer.
‘Chief dead man, Second.’
For a moment the young Tynesider stared uncomprehending at the elderly Chinaman.
‘Dead? Are you sure?’
‘I sure. I see plenty dead man.’
‘Okay,’ Reed said at last. ‘First we start engine, then go topside look at Chief.’ Reed had never seen a dead man; nor did he feel particularly curious.
Stevenson reached the smoke-room and found the easier motion of the ship had almost immediately pacified the women. The old woman was still awake and showed him her inane gold grin. He experienced a pang of extreme irritation, for Braddock was there, squatting close to Tam with something in his arms. Stevenson stepped over the inert bodies and crossed to the girl.
‘Braddock,’ he began, ‘what are you—?’
‘Hullo, Sec.’ The seaman looked up. In his arms he held the baby. ‘Got to turn to now, and thought I’d bring the little bloke up for a cuddle.’ He offered the child to Tam. ‘Can you look after ’im for a bit, love?’
Stevenson watched her. She stared uncertainly at the tiny bundle. Its swaddling clothes were none too clean, but Stevenson recognized a bath towel with Eastern Steam’s compass rose trademark.
Tam took the child and cradled it to her breast, rocking the tiny form as it whimpered and puckered its lips.
‘Is it hungry?’ Stevenson asked.
Braddock barked a short, dismissive laugh. ‘I doubt it, Sec, it’s eaten more than I’ve seen any kid stow away. I reckon it’s full of wind and shite.’
Stevenson grinned. ‘You okay?’ he enquired of the girl.
She nodded and smiled, then regarded the baby again. ‘Sure.’
‘You going forrard with the Mate, Brad?’ The seaman shrugged. ‘Mind how you go,’ Stevenson said.
Captain Mackinnon stood on the bridge and waited for the dawn. Patience and daylight, his twin watchwords. Silently he mourned his dead, for George Reed had telephoned the bridge with the news of the Chief’s fatal accident.
‘One leg in his boiler suit,’ Stevenson had reported after Mackinnon had sent him below to investigate, ‘and one out. Must have lost his balance and struck his head on the corner of his desk or the filing cabinet.’
Mackinnon knew the filing cabinet well enough. He used to stand the occasional beer on it when he and old Yorkie had a pow-wow. Poor Ernie. Mackinnon sighed; they had been shipmates a long time. He wondered how Brenda would take it, a sharp, dark little woman whom he had met upon the odd occasion. Now she would never have her man home again and all the long voyages, investments against a better day when the plans for a life together after retirement would be fulfilled, were wasted.
‘You all right down there, George?’ Mackinnon had asked Reed after digesting the news.
‘Oh, aye. Ah’ll manage reet enough.’ His voice sounded strained with shock and sudden responsibility. Old Ernie York had led a pretty sedentary life lately, but his presence had been reassuring to the younger man. Now Reed was on his own.
‘Do your best, George,’ said Mackinnon, ‘that’s all we ask, lad.’
‘Ah can fix her, Cap’n. I just need time. Aye an’ . . .’ Reed broke off.
Mackinnon smiled in the gloom. ‘I know. You want the bloody deck ornaments to stop rocking the boat.’
He was rewarded by the grin in Reed’s voice. ‘Ah’ll be getting on then.’
Mackinnon left him to ‘get on’. Reed would receive no reward for the effort he must put in. It was part of the job, the job which ended when the ship reached Hong Kong.
Captain Mackinnon did not permit himself to consider the ship failing to arrive at Hong Kong. There were some things best ignored at times.
Rawlings’s sortie had been an abject failure. A sea had come aboard in the darkness washing Able Seaman Braddock into the lee scuppers from which he had only been recovering with difficulty. Clearly frightened and very wet, Rawlings had returned to report nothing more than a confirmation that something, several things, were loose in Number Five ’tween decks as well as Number Two. The proximity of the Chief Officer to the thumps only increased his nervousness. Mackinnon regretted sending him; he should have relied upon Stevenson, or even Taylor, but you could not pass over the ship’s Chief Officer. He was all right with routine or simple tasks; he was a good organiser but . . .
And it was a bloody big but.
He thought of the boat people. He could let his mind drift a little. There was nothing to do until either Reed got the main engine going again or daylight came. Besides, the loose bulldozers would beat their way out of the ship’s side if they were going to and his fretting about them would do no good. So he thought of the boat people. They were part of his responsibility anyway.
Funny how he had had the premonition about them. And on his last voyage. Fate again . . .
But what about them?
What had made them leave their homes? The Vietnam War had ended years earlier, though what its aftermath meant to the South Vietnamese he could only guess. Were they just ordinary people, driven out by intimidation of one sort or another, victims of bullying, by whom did not matter much, beyond the fact of its hostile intent?
And what, the Captain’s imagination asked his soul, would he have done? Could he imagine it, from his comfortable, predictable western career-orientated point of view?
Well, yes; perhaps imperfectly, grasping a fraction of its effect. He did know what desperation was like, for he had felt it in the lifeboat and a hint of it was present aboard the Matthew Flinders on his last voyage, particularly among the young men. And he knew a little of surrounding hostility, for this, too, he had experienced, on Shelagh’s father’s Ulster farm when they had visited as young newlyweds. He had never understood it, or taken sides, a fact which had not endeared him to his father-in-law, but the sectarian hatred was palpable enough, and, for him, intolerable. He was always glad to leave, always glad to return to the crowds and squalor of Liverpool, for all the beauty of the Antrim coast.
But what would he have done at the final extremity of his wits and resources when escaping or driven from his home? Men liked to think they would fight, but they seldom did, or could, alone. They had first to think of wives and children. Single men and irresponsible men could run away and join bands of like-minded fools. And there were always cunning men to sell them arms. Men like that found it very easy to fight; it was courageous, a manifestation of the magnificence of the human spirit; a thing of primitive tribal satisfactions upon which whole civilisations were based. It possessed the grandeur of a selfless principle. Except that it was a lie, as the wastelands and refugee camps of Africa could testify. A vast lie, a lie so bloody huge the contemplation of its truth could so easily be covered up. Governments did it all the time and half their populations acquiesced, desiring the status quo and a quiet life.
It seemed sometimes to Mackinnon that the world (the ‘postwar world’) was composed of only two kinds of people: of young men in khaki drab, machine carb
ines clasped languidly at the extremity of their powerful forearms, muscled and well-fed; and the old, very young, infirm or female of the species, hurrying, hurrying away towards the illusory horizon. Even, Mackinnon thought, where prosperity reigned, both types existed in an uneasy truce, hidden under the veneer of civilisation, waiting to reveal their allegiance. It occurred to Mackinnon, in a flash of enlightenment, that mankind was nowhere civilised, merely sophisticated.
The temptation to lie down and wait for the end must be overwhelming after a while. When the belly had shrunk from hunger and after the first strike of death, a child perhaps, while you begged your retreating way. Every door would be closed against you because you spread the contagion of fear, and assistance rendered meant sympathy given. Sympathy invited reprisal and reprisal was too dreadful to contemplate.
Besides, where was there to go? What was it he and Sparks had said about it that morning in Singapore? Once you could relocate deprivation and dissent, now it goes to sea?
Perhaps. But it was so much easier to lie down and die, of hunger or disease or the bullet which was bound to find you eventually if you had the effrontery to go on being alive.
To cast oneself and one’s family adrift seemed both the height of folly and, at the same time, an act of magnificent faith and courage. Most ducked their heads and paid lip service and who could blame them?
But these people had taken to the sea! They were quite obviously not fisherfolk, therefore their act was a last resort. Or was it? You did not think of the awfulness of being adrift. You thought a boat and the sea led you to the rest of the world; to other places where things were different. Better.
Mackinnon remembered the message they had received from Hong Kong Radio and Sparks’s suspicions as to its underlying meaning.
The poor bastards were about to find out just how ‘different’ the rest of the world was. There were no more places to go. They would end up like those poor, utterly hopeless people they had seen towed into Singapore. At the utter extremity . . .
He caught himself on the wings of this fantasy. They were not. They had simply swapped the coffin of the junk for the catafalque of the ship. Perhaps, and here Mackinnon slid off into another flight of fancy, they had been picked up by the Matthew Flinders to draw the British and Chinese crew into a sharing of their fate; perhaps it was not a rescue after all, but the reverse. And Mackinnon could think of no English noun that served.
‘We are so used to success,’ he murmured. He could think of a cliché, though, and it assuaged his guilt to be able to do so. ‘We’re all in the same boat . . .’
And, despite his circumstances, he smiled.
Captain Mackinnon did not entertain the slightest doubt the encounter with the refugees was no coincidence. It was a conceit of his, albeit a small and private conceit, that his apprehension in Singapore had been premonition. Of what use was a man once his sexual appetites had dulled if he could not bring a little wisdom into the world? Premonition was no magic thing; it was generated by experience, circumstances, an awareness of what was happening around one – and a spicing of primordial fear. It was just that the process was obscure, misunderstood, automatic. Instinctive.
What the preoccupied, self-absorbed world of what it was pleased to call ‘everyday affairs’ knew as coincidence was rarely so, Mackinnon mused. Some reflection, or an examination into the whole, would reveal the linking threads. It was not only murders which were chained together by motive, cause and effect. They were merely solved by applying the rules governing most things.
He could enumerate several stories as proof of providence. Well, perhaps not quite proof, but suggesting something. They were marvellous, but not mystical. More conclusive evidence had come to Mackinnon after the war.
Having lost over half its ships to the enemy, as a temporary stop-gap until new tonnage had replaced these the Eastern Steam Navigation Company took over vessels surplus to the Ministry of War Transport’s requirements. Along with most major British liner operators their fleet spawned numerous ‘standard-ships’: United-States-built ‘Sams’ and ‘Victories’, British and Canadian ‘Forts’ and ‘Parks’.
Eastern Steam renamed the Fort Mackinac the George Bass and as such, in the spring of 1951, she had passed through the Kiel canal on passage to Målmo and Turku-Abo. It was a gloomy voyage and no one was looking forward to the Baltic. It was not only the ice, for to the south of them most of the former Reich and the countries of eastern Europe lay under the heel of Stalin’s Russia, while the unknown vastness of their quondam ally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself, lay beyond the sunrise.
The mood had been set during the canal transit between Brunsbüttel and Kiel. The enforced contemplation of Germany had awoken old emotions and their departure from the former Kriegsmarine base with its mixture of ruination and rebuilding had been complicated by the presence of an ice-pilot.
The man’s appearance was so much that of the expected stereotype that it was almost impossible to take him seriously. Tall and thin, of an indeterminate age with prematurely greying blond hair under his white-covered cap, he wore a black leather coat and calf gloves. Only a red scarf wound round his neck stopped him looking like the archetypical Nazi bully then currently causing the laughter of relief in British cinemas. Tolerated for his expertise on the George Bass’s bridge, he became a figure of fun, for neither Second Officer Mackinnon nor Captain McGrath wanted to enquire into his past; it would have made any kind of professional relationship impossible. Only the George Bass’s Chief Engineer, Mr King, was unable to conceal his true feelings.
‘The arrogant bastard,’ Mr King would say with compelling intensity, ‘he’d never dare wear a white-covered cap if he hadn’t been in command, and the only thing a Kraut of that age could have commanded is a U-boat.’
He said this with such conviction nobody considered the possibility of the ice-pilot having commanded a minesweeper. For the apprentices, boys who had not been at sea during the war, their figure of fun turned into an object of sinister curiosity (though still to be aped).
Although Mr King was not alone aboard the George Bass in having been torpedoed, nor in taking to an open boat several hundred miles north of the Arctic circle, he was unique in having been witness to an atrocity.
Alone, after being separated from any consorts of a convoy bound for Murmansk by a northerly gale, his ship, the Henry Hudson, was torpedoed and sunk with her load of tanks and chemicals bound for the Red Army.
In the half-light of the Arctic winter day, the blown-out gale was succeeded by a freezing mist out of which ghosted the sinister shape of the U-boat which had sunk them. Figures could be seen on her conning tower and she had stopped between the two lifeboats. Several of her hands had run down on to her casing and fished about in the water. They recovered a lifebuoy bearing the legend: Henry Hudson – Liverpool. An officer had called down asking which boat contained the ship’s Master. The Captain had held his silence and no one had betrayed him, for the masters of some British ships had been taken prisoners alone, as living trophies. The German officer had repeated the question, with the same result. The U-boat’s commander, distinguishable in the gloom by his privileged white cap cover, had given an order. Off the casing by now, the hands gathered swiftly about the conning tower machine gun. A few rounds stuttered and flashed, ripping into the boat on the far side of the U-boat. A moment later the barrel lengthened, then foreshortened as it swung towards King’s boat. A frantic scrabbling at the oars was swiftly terminated. Mr King was knocked to the bottom boards as an oarsmen cannoned into him from the impact of the bullets.
When King struggled up again, the grey shape had vanished in the mist. He could hear the noise of its surface diesel engine for a long time. By true nightfall he was the only man left alive, for the last of the wounded had succumbed to loss of blood, or the cold.
Mr King was picked up by the corvette Nemesia sixteen hours later. That much his shipmates knew; it was in incontrovertible print, part of the compa
ny’s history, though Mr King himself never spoke of it. They did not know they were to witness the delayed finale.
The ice in the Baltic was thick that spring, a northerly gale packing it southwards and impeding the progress of the George Bass through the Fehmarn Belt.
‘It is better we wait, Kapitan,’ the pilot advised McGrath, ‘these wartime ships, zey are not so strong, no?’
For two days they drifted slowly off the Lolland coast, engines stopped, waiting for the wind to change.
This enforced inactivity compelled the George Bass’s Master to offer a little hospitality to his guest. The ice-pilot said he preferred schnapps, but under the circumstances Scotch would do. This condescending attitude was characteristic of the man, and prevailed as several pegs of whisky were downed in McGrath’s cabin below the bridge. After a while Mr King loomed in the doorway seeking enlightenment as to how long the weather was likely to delay them. The barbed remark was addressed more to the ice-pilot, as the Captain well knew, being himself an easygoing and tolerant man well-used to his Chief Engineer’s embitterment. Chiefy King, as everyone in Eastern Steam knew, had had a bad war.
The ice-pilot shrugged with massive condescension. ‘Ach, the Chief Engineer comes mit de questions, ja? Always the engineers ask questions impossible to answer. You are too long working mit the logical things in life, my friend.’
King turned a glance of withering contempt at this insolence, but accepted a glass of Scotch from the Captain.
‘How you English say? Cheers, ja?’
King remained stonily silent, raising his glass to McGrath in appreciation. The Captain, slightly amused, watched the two of them.
‘You remember too much the war, eh? When we seamens all do our job. Dat is right, ja, kapitan?’
‘Sure.’
‘Now we have all to be together, soon we fight the Russians, eh? Then you will need our help.’ The ice-pilot smiled confidently. ‘The Russians, they build many submarines, eh? You British will need good help of Willi—’ and here he tapped his leather breast, and roared with laughter.
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