Under the circumstances, justice had been swifly done. Alone among the boat people, Phan’s life imprisonment was a decision easier to reach than the fate of his fellow Vietnamese. The irony of the life-long detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure struck Mackinnon forcibly. Was it an old man’s indulgence to question so solemn an institution as the law? Somehow he found it impossible not to, to contrast the limbo into which the innocent boat people were cast with the solicitous incarceration meted out to Phan Van Nui. In a sense Phan had won.
Even now Mackinnon found the situation’s flaws outweighed the law’s remorseless majesty, so much so that the memory of the defence’s claim that in the person of Captain John Mackinnon Phan Van Nui had met ‘great and insupportable provocation’ only made him chuckle. Something had happened to him during the typhoon, something he was only just beginning to understand, to recognise as a profound change within himself. He was not yet certain what it was, but he seemed to see things with a bewildering clarity, as though for the first time. There had been a craziness about the courtroom proceedings to match his own madness in defying Dent and his gunboat cronies, a fact obliquely referred to at one point in an unwise attempt to demonstrate his, Mackinnon’s, despotism.
Fortunately the judge had directed the snide remark inadmissible and Phan had been sentenced to life imprisonment, but Mackinnon was uneasily aware that this collision of variant stupidities begged the question of which was reality.
In his exhaustion he shelved the matter. Since he had relinquished the bridge of the Matthew Flinders his power was diminished. Such lofty considerations were set aside in place of more lugubrious duties.
Chief Engineer York’s body had been flown home at the request of his widow, but they had buried Taylor and Macgregor side by side in the Anglican cemetery on Hong Kong island. The twin graves awaited the simple tombstones Mackinnon had paid for. Both would bear the ship’s name.
‘There’s a kind of satisfaction in that,’ Mackinnon had growled. The mission padre had agreed, assuring him matters would be concluded as he wished.
‘I wish,’ Mackinnon had responded fervently, ‘that James Dent had bothered to put in an appearance. After all Taylor died saving the last of his ships.’
‘I expect he’s a busy man, Captain,’ the padre had soothed.
‘That’s the excuse we always concede the likes of him,’ Mackinnon had said. ‘Whatever happened to noblesse oblige?’
He had almost drifted into sleep when Shelagh came out of the shower, her hair wrapped in a towel, the robe wet from contact with her body. She filled the room with her scent. He felt cheered by her pink presence and obvious contentment.
‘Oh, that does feel better; your turn now, darling.’
Inert, he watched her move to the window and shake her hair free.
‘You’ve not been asleep, have you? I don’t know, you seamen can sleep anywhere.’
‘I’m not a seaman any more. I’m a bloody tourist.’
‘Well you look like a beached whale.’
Mackinnon chuckled and threw his legs over the side of the bed. Shelagh vigorously rubbed her hair, staring out over the harbour.
‘Isn’t that the old ship?’ she asked suddenly. Mackinnon hove himself to his feet with dizzying speed, fumbling for the binoculars he had kept handy.
The Matthew Flinders was standing out past Wanchai, heading for the Lye Mun Pass and the eastward passage to the Taiwan Strait. Mackinnon focussed the glasses on her, an uncomfortable lump forming in his throat. Under her rusty flare, a patch of bright new paint reflected her bow wave as she increased speed. Her old name had been blacked out, a new one added in Chinese characters. Mackinnon wondered what her new owners had called her.
‘Well I’m damned!’
Over her stern the red flag of China lifted languidly in the following breeze. Mackinnon shifted his scrutiny. From the starboard yardarm on her foremast the red duster flew as a courtesy ensign. Even as he watched a sampan went alongside and the tiny figure of the pilot clambered down the ship’s side. Then a roil of water appeared under her stern as she increased speed, obedient to another’s hand. Forward, the red ensign fluttered downwards.
Mackinnon felt the tiny hairs on the back of his neck crawl.
‘God Almighty,’ he murmured, then coughed to clear his husky throat. ‘It looks as if Randy Rawlings was cheated of his command after all. He didn’t deserve that!’
Side by side, Mackinnon and his wife watched until the ship disappeared.
‘I remember . . .’ He stopped. What did it matter now what he remembered? Shelagh turned aside and picked up a paper bag.
‘Here, John, I found this today. I think it’s time we arranged our flight.’
He drew the large format book from the wrapping: it was about the Uffizi.
Mackinnon drew the strap on the last case and wondered how Shelagh had managed to collect in a fortnight more than he had garnered in a lifetime of ocean wandering.
‘Is there anything else?’ he called to his wife, but her reply was interrupted by a knock at the door. ‘Come on, Shelagh,’ he added, ‘the taxi’s below.’
But it was not the taxi. Alex Stevenson stood on the threshold, and behind him was a figure Mackinnon did not realise at first was Tam.
‘Hullo, sir. I hope you don’t mind . . .’ Stevenson’s smile vanished as he caught sight of the cases beside the door.
‘Come in, come in,’ said Mackinnon. ‘We’ve only a few moments, we’re catching a flight.’
‘Oh I didn’t know . . . well, perhaps we’d better go.’
Stevenson’s confusion and embarrassment held a note of desperation. He stepped back, but Mackinnon put his hand out and restrained him.
‘Hang on, you’ve obviously got a problem.’
‘It’s all right, sir . . .’
‘No it’s not!’
Neither man realised the incongruity of their continuing, unconscious adherence to the formalities of their dead shipboard existence.
‘But if you’re leaving . . .’
‘Mr Stevenson,’ Mackinnon was almost bawling, ‘come in and sit down!’
‘What on earth’s the matter?’
Mackinnon turned to his wife. ‘Shelagh, tell this young man to come in, we’ve got five minutes.’
‘We’ve got more than that, Mr Stevenson. My husband has a horror of being late for anything.’
Reluctantly Stevenson stood aside and motioned Tam into the room. Mackinnon hardly recognised the young woman in the pale blue cotton dress. Gone was the greasy, lacklustre hair, the thin, pinched face, the awkward, gauche stance.
An unsettling, guilt-laden image of Akiko intruded.
‘We were married this morning,’ Stevenson said. ‘The padre arranged things.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you tell us?’ Shelagh broke in, ‘we would have loved to—
‘We wanted to keep it quiet.’
‘My dear fellow, we must send down for a drink.’
‘No, Captain Mackinnon.’ Tam spoke, for the first time. The long, dark lashes lay upon her cheeks and then she looked up at him, her eyes dark, like Akiko’s. ‘We just come to tell you and say goodbye. I want to thank you for stopping your ship.’
‘We were the third ship, sir,’ Stevenson said, ‘two others went past them. Bit like the good Samaritan.’
‘We didn’t do very much for them,’ Mackinnon said deprecatingly. ‘Took them out of the frying pan and threw them into the fire.’
He had watched the boat people taken in police launches to the caged encampment on Stonecutter’s Island, a prison by another name.
‘You did something, Captain,’ Tam said.
‘Perhaps,’ Mackinnon said, unconvinced. His bold stand against authority seemed inconsequential now; an illusory victory, revealing no truth greater than his own self-conceit.
‘Well,’ he said, addressing Stevenson, aware his miserable tone was inappropriate to the occasion, ‘I’m glad you managed to rescue one.’
/> ‘Two, Captain,’ said Stevenson, a hint of mischief in his eyes. ‘I got Sparks to alter the list. We decided Tam should be a mother a little prematurely.’
Comprehension dawned on Mackinnon. ‘The baby?’
‘Yes. We wanted to let you know, sir, in case there were any questions asked.’
Mackinnon smiled and then began to chuckle. ‘Bugger the bureaucrats, Mr Stevenson. Shelagh, let’s get a drink organised.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ve ten minutes.’
‘No, Captain, we leave the baby at the mission, we must get back. The padre is a kind man, but he is not good with babies.’
‘Wait a minute’ put in Shelagh with a flash of perception, ‘you only married this morning, you say?’ Stevenson nodded.
Shelagh turned to her husband. ‘John, get those bags unpacked at once. Ring and cancel the flight. They came to see us to ask us to baby-sit. The poor padre . . . You came to ask us to baby-sit, didn’t you?’
‘But Shelagh . . .’
‘Cancel the flight, John, don’t fuss. Even we managed to have a honeymoon.’
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Mackinnon as the two men enjoyed a gin and tonic in the absence of the women who had taken the expected taxi to the Mission to Seamen to collect the baby.
‘Well, it’s rather an odd thing, really,’ Stevenson said, rolling the glass between the palms of his hands. ‘You recall the naval officer, Lieutenant Drinkwater? I met him again and he seemed quite friendly, as if he had been embarrassed to have been caught up in the boarding operation. He insisted on buying me a drink and in the course of our chat he mentioned his tour was nearly over. I asked him how he’d enjoyed it, and, well, to cut a long story short, he and his officers had formed a syndicate and bought a boat. There were three of them and they were looking for a buyer.’
‘You bought the boat?’
‘Yes; she’s a forty-two-foot ketch, a bit old and wanting a lick of paint, but,’ Stevenson shrugged, ‘we thought we’d go south to Borneo and Aussie.’
Mackinnon stared in open admiration at the young man. ‘You’re not bothered . . . I mean suppose you were caught out in weather like . . . ?’ The thought appalled him. He got up, walked to the window and stood looking out. ‘A few days ago I stood here and watched the Matthew Flinders on her way to China. She’s renamed now; God knows what the Chinks have called her. It was like the end of the world, you know. My world . . . your world. There aren’t many of us left, Alex.’
Stevenson rose and stood beside Mackinnon. He smiled. ‘I saw Sparks off on the plane from Kai Tak, sir. He and Rawlings were travelling home together. They were both a bit pissed. They wanted to take the ship to Shanghai, but Dent knocked it on the head. Poor Sparks was pretty emotional.’
‘He was a good man.’
‘Yes,’ Stevenson agreed. For a moment they stood side by side, staring out over the darkening waters of the ‘fragrant harbour’ as twilight fell, the shadows stretched out and the lights of the moored ships twinkled with increasing brilliance.
Suddenly, round the shoulder of the intervening land, a monstrous, glittering structure appeared. Like a fantasy spaceship in a film, it seemed to float, suspended above the sea, line after horizontal line of lights, some of which coruscated in variegated colours, others pulsed on and off in time with a faint, rhythmic beat that came up to them.
‘Christ,’ muttered Mackinnon, real shock making his voice tremulous, ‘is that a ship?’
‘It’s the Lotus Princess,’ Stevenson said, a tone almost of apology in his voice, as if embarrassed to be compelled to explain to Mackinnon, ‘they call it discotheque-shipping.’
‘We are diminished by such . . . such . . .’ Mackinnon fought for the right word. Contempt and anguish filled his voice, and something worse, much worse, some sense of ultimate worthlessness opening like a void.
‘They are very profitable,’ Stevenson went on. ‘The income generated from the cruise passengers’ fares is compounded by spin-offs in the duty free shopping malls, the bars . . .’
‘God save us.’ Mackinnon abruptly swung away from the window. Such rank commercialism on the littoral of China smacked of an obscene insensitivity. James Dent would approve, God damn him.
‘Tell me about Sparks.’
‘Nothing much to tell, sir. As I said, he was a bit emotional. As a matter of fact, he was pretty near to tears. He said we were extinct, dinosaurs . . . he gave a pretty good impression of a diplodocus,’ Stevenson laughed at the recollection. ‘Though it looked more like an elephant to me. Rawlings tried to shut him up, but you know Sparky he was having none of it and went roaring round the airport bar waving his arm in front of his nose and lumbering into people.’
‘Jolly jack ashore,’ Mackinnon said, smiling, ‘but he’s right. We’re finished, the last, and we thought it would never end, that there’d always be a red duster in every port in the world.’ He sighed, then added, ‘So good old Sparky danced the jig at our wake, eh? Well, what the hell?’
Mackinnon held out the bottle and Stevenson reciprocated with his glass.
‘It may sound an odd thing to say,’ Stevenson said, ‘but I am glad I had the experience of the typhoon, sir.’
‘That’s not odd, Alex . . . cheers.’
‘Cheers.’ Stevenson lowered his glass. ‘I don’t feel like a dinosaur.’
‘Well,’ said Mackinnon, suddenly brightening, ‘you’re not, are you? You’re off to Aussie with your lassie. We’re not dead yet, not quite.’
‘More an endangered species then.’
Mackinnon met the younger man’s eyes. ‘Endangered species?’ he said, as if repeating the words somehow validated them. ‘Yes, it’s not quite an epitaph, is it, though I doubt anyone will notice our rarity value before it’s too late.’
‘I’ll do my best to survive,’ Stevenson said, grinning, and Mackinnon smiled back, again envying him his youth.
‘I’m sure you will,’ he said as, from outside, there came the sound of the returning women.
Later, when he had persuaded the hotel to let them have the room another night and the airline to cancel their booking; after Shelagh had crooned and fussed to her heart’s content over the wrinkled yet alien bundle and gone at last to her bed, he sat in the darkness and stared out over the harbour. He could not look at the sleeping child without thinking of the shambles of the mother’s wrecked legs, or of how Taylor had rescued him and finished the operation only to be killed for his trouble; nor could he forget the utter pointlessness of it all, since the woman had not survived their clumsy ministrations. It seemed to him a parable of the futility of all human existence, of inevitable failure.
As he stared at the harbour he saw again in his mind’s eye the brilliant intrusion; the fantastic ship that was not a ship but seemed to float miraculously above the sea’s surface like a star ship, impervious to typhoons and acts of a mere omnipotent god. Events had overtaken him: he was an old man, thinking an old man’s thoughts, and the bitterest pill to swallow was the pill of obsolescence.
He tried to console himself with thoughts of Stevenson and Tam, and the bright promise of their youthful optimism. Yet even here he was disappointed. They would sail south, to Borneo, Stevenson had said, the land beneath the wind it was called by the sea-Dyaks, the land whose latitude lay below that at which the great wind, the taifun, was generated. What would they find? A land already being denuded of its hardwood jungle in response to humanity’s insatiable desire for the ramin and seraya timber of the rainforest.
It was all too depressing to think about and he was moved by the terrible thought of his own death. He stirred, chilled by the cool wind which at last blew into the stifling room.
How did the boat people feel, mewed in their cage across the bay on Stonecutter’s Island? Did they feel beleaguered, an endangered species like himself? Did he, Captain John Mackinnon, sometime a ship-master in the British merchant marine, share the sense of being an outcast with the refugees?
He shivered; not in the
material sense, certainly, for he had his uncaring country to return to, a modest house and the soporific comforts of modernity to pamper his old age. But something of their plight had touched him, marked him with the common bond all humans share.
‘John,’ Shelagh stood in the doorway, ‘are you all right?’
‘Yes.’ he said, ‘I couldn’t settle. I thought you were asleep. Didn’t want to disturb you with tossing and turning.’
‘I don’t mind.’ She was beside him and he felt her hand reach for his and smelt the warmth of her and the familiar fragrance of her hair.
‘Is the baby all right?’
‘Of course.’
‘I was thinking of those two. Alex and Tam.’
‘They seem very happy.’
‘Yes,’ he said abstractedly.
‘Romantic even,’ Shelagh added.
He grunted agreement. Yes, they were romantic all right; but what was romance other than someone else’s life, at a distance, uncomplicated by the minor irritations of daily trivialities?
‘But that wasn’t what you were thinking, was it?’ Shelagh asked.
‘No . . .’ He paused, uncertain how he could explain it, knowing the task was impossible, quite beyond him, the fruit of his own unique experience. Perhaps she too had arrived at similar conclusions by other paths; perhaps there had been another, Akiko-like, in her own life.
‘What were you thinking, John?’ Shelagh persisted, and her voice was huskily intense, a measure of her desire for intimacy.
It struck him then that he must explain, that he had time to explain if only he could marshal the words. Moreover he was obliged to explain, for no longer had he to discard a train of thought because she was not within a thousand miles of him; no longer had he to try and spell it out in his awkward way in a letter or, worse, abandon it as still-born, forgotten, a small piece of the deprivation suffered by every sea-estranged couple.
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