by John Bowen
A silence again. Muriel said, “There’s nothing else, Arthur?”
“Nothing?”
“Unless…. Unless you wanted anything, Arthur.”
“You must not be coy, my dear,” Arthur said. “It is not becoming in a widow of your years.” They did not speak much after that, and I did not feel inclined to eavesdrop any longer. I went back to my pallet, and lay down, and before Arthur returned, I was asleep.
*
I had said, “We’re never alone together nowadays,” and it was true. Now when at last I had decided to “have it out” with Sonya, there was nowhere I could be sure of privacy. I could not say, “Come down into the hold,” the suggestion carried too many sickening associations, and besides I knew Muriel would be watching us.
I tried to begin the conversation many times, but I was always held back by the fear that we should be discovered in a “scene”, and everyone would know. In any case, I kept reminding myself, taxing Sonya with her infidelity would change nothing, although I knew in fact that something had already been changed; suspicion had been changed to certainty. I have heard it said that hope is only a torment to a man, who without it might adapt himself to necessity. Things were not so consolingly arranged for me. Hope and fear had battled together in my mind, and now that the battle was over, the Occupation had begun, and it was worse than the battle.
In the end it was Sonya who “had it out” with me. “What’s the matter with you nowadays?” she said. “You’re always looking at me in a funny way. It makes me nervous.”
It was astonishingly difficult to tell her what the matter was. I began with Muriel’s report. Sonya listened in silence, and then said, “And you believe her?”
I said, “You said yourself——”
“What did I say?”
“You said, ‘It’s only sex’. You said it as if … as if sex wasn’t important to you. As if it was something you could have with anyone.”
“What is important then?” Sonya said.
I could not answer. Sonya’s face bore a sulky obstinate expression. “Well,” she said, “if you’ve made up your mind, there’s nothing more to be done, is there?”
I said, “Sonya, is it true?”
‘You don’t know, do you?”
“I want to know.”
“You can’t expect me to tell you.”
I wanted to strike her. I wanted to seize and shake her. I wanted to smash and hurt both Sonya and myself, to wipe out the whole thing in a blaze of pain and violence. But I could do none of these things. I could only stare at her, and she stared back at me, while the sun shone down outside, and the raft lay still in the ocean, and it seemed as if we were trapped in a moment that would never end.
“Anyway, I’ll tell you one thing,” Sonya said, “I’ve been saving it up to tell you for a week now. It’s funny really. I’m going to have a baby.”
I said, “Sonya!”
“I thought you’d be pleased.”
“I am. Sonya darling, I am.”
“Are you?” she said. “Well, that won’t last long, will it? After all, you don’t know whose it is.”
CHAPTER NINE
Trial and Error
It was two months since the tempest. We had spent the time in doubt and idleness, with little to eat and less to drink.
As we began to feel the effects of Arthur’s “water discipline”, our physical condition deteriorated alarmingly. We were not pretty people. Under the sunburn, our skins had become swollen, puffy and tender to the touch. Our eyes had receded; it was as if someone had amused himself by pushing holes with his thumb in the swollen flesh of our faces. Our lips were cracked and stiff, and the cheeks and throats of the men were covered with an itching stubble. Our tongues had begun to swell and in swelling were pushed forward so that the tips protruded from our mouths; when we spoke, we slurred and stumbled in our speech like morons. We were saved from scurvy by the vitamin C in our moistened Glub, but the evening slop of raw fish induced in us all a running flux, and added humiliation to weakness. Most of the time, during these last days, we lay about on deck. We had lost our dignity and our self-respect, and so much of our humanity. We were animals indeed, but not the rational animals of Arthur’s vision.
The arrow on the dial of the ammeter fell back and back. Arthur told us that we should have to row. We had done it before, he reminded us, when we had towed the raft to the old man’s ark. Now we were to propel the raft through the water to charge the batteries.
I remember that experience as a sort of after-image. If one closes one’s eyes very tightly against the light, what one sees first of all is just redness; then the after-images begin to form, making pictures and patterns that are always changing, sometimes suddenly and sometimes by degrees, as when a line of telegraph poles turned into centipedes diagonally from the bottom right hand corner. It is a memory like that. First of all, only a redness, and then streaks and white-hot rain and zigzags in the redness, and then pictures, which are for the most part of faces, distorted in close-up. Muriel, her tongue like pink bubble gum, her hair matted and disordered, straining her full weight against an oar that did not move. Banner, rowing and feathering, rowing and feathering meticulously some six inches above the surface of the water. Hunter’s enormous vacancy above a nest of beard. A pair of hands with the skin scraped off the palms. Muriel again, face upwards in the dinghy, her lips drawn back over her gums in a snarl. No picture for Arthur, but only a thin persistent cawing, a single syllable that he meant for “Row!”, but his obstructing tongue would not allow him to make an “R”, and his dry throat turned the rest to croaking.
With the pictures, fears and sensations. How long? How long must I? How long can I? A fear for Sonya and for what this might do to the child, young as it still was in her womb—they jump off tables, don’t they, to stop it? Pain. The pain of not being able to sweat. Surprise that, when Arthur gave us water to sustain us, it seemed to break out at once in drops all over the skin, but the drops dried, and our throats were dry again, and our tongues were weighted stockings, dragging us down to the bottom of the dinghy. Then complete, wonderful, healing exhaustion, the giving in utterly, the knowing that we could do no more, that Arthur had driven us to the furthest limits of our strength, and it was not enough.
I do not remember now whether, after all that pain and effort, we moved the raft at all. Certainly, if we did, the benefit to the batteries was more than cancelled by Arthur’s having to dole out extra water to keep us going, and more water still to entice us out of the dinghy and back on board again. The endeavour had failed, as it was bound to fail, and he would have to think of something else, while we continued to endure.
*
Dying of thirst is something to do with the amount of water in the blood. Ninety pet cent of one’s blood plasma is water, and when this percentage is decreased, one’s blood gets thicker, and the chemistry of the cells is upset so that they can no longer function. After our attempt to charge the batteries of the raft by towing it, we had reached a physical state in which it seemed to me that we should die quite soon, so I went to Arthur to tell him so. That was the one intelligent thing that I did at this time, and I remember it with all the more pleasure, because this wise deed was followed shortly afterwards by some very foolish words.
Arthur was sitting in the cabin, the journal open in front of him as usual. But he seemed to have no heart or strength to write in it, and just sat there, staring into the future. I took the book and the ball-point pen that lay beside it, and wrote on a blank page, “If we do not get water, we shall die.”
Arthur opened his mouth to reply, but the words dried on his tongue. Then he took the book and pen from me, and wrote, “Need to ration.”
I wrote, “Ration not sufficient.”
Arthur wrote, “Must make it last.”
I wrote, “Deterioration gets faster. Medical fact. If Natural Selection in earnest, surely water will be provided.”
Arthur wrote, “Yes.” Then he went
to the cooler, and gave me a drink, and took a drink for himself, and then we took water to the others. Arthur said that we must go carefully, but that we might finish what was in the cooler on that day, and we should distil another lot in the evening.
It was very strange after so long to be able to drink enough. A glass of water, when one has been without it for a long time, is not a taste but a sensation. One does not drink the water; one absorbs it as the dry earth absorbs rain, which seems to soak instantly into every cell and fibre. So first of all we absorbed the water and then, out of luxury, we drank some, and before we could drink too much and prove the old travellers’ tales all over again, we had exhausted the contents of the cooler. Thereafter there was nothing to do but to go to sleep until Arthur roused us to prepare the evening meal, and when we had eaten it, we went to sleep again.
Next morning, Arthur said, “As Mr. Clarke has reminded me, Natural Selection cannot reasonably intend us to perish. We must find some way of raising a wind.”
Hunter said, “Whistle for one. I tried it once in the Pacific.”
“Did it work?”
“No. Could have been my own fault, though. Not a good whistler.”
“Superstition,” Arthur said.
Muriel said, “Arthur doesn’t care for superstition. You know that.”
Arthur looked at me. “You are in some sense responsible, Mr. Clarke,” he said. “It was you who aroused me from—ah, that sweet way I was in to despair. Perhaps, when you did so, you had some sort of plan?”
“I’m sorry, Arthur. I’m afraid I didn’t.”
“Do you care for superstition, Mr. Clarke?”
I said, “Primitive people——”
“Yes, we must be primitive certainly. What do primitive people do in these circumstances? Tell us, Mr. Clarke.”
“They—they go in for magic a lot. They throw coins into the sea, or nail a gold, piece to the mast, or something like that.”
“Perhaps you have a gold piece with you?”
“No.”
“Then we must begin with coins.”
Muriel was found to have a small purse of black silk. It contained nine and sevenpence in cash and two pound notes. Arthur threw the nine and sevenpence into the sea, coin by coin. We watched them turning over and over in the clear water until they disappeared. Then Arthur wadded up the pound notes into pellets, and dropped them also into the sea. One of them was almost immediately eaten by a fish. “The gift has been accepted,” Arthur said.
But there was no wind. We sat on the edge of the deck and whistled, but there was no wind. First we whistled tunes, and then we whistled wind noises, but there was no wind. We blew with our mouths, but there was no wind, and we beat a wet rag against the cold iron of the stove, but there was no wind. In the afternoon, we brought out a tub, and filled it with sea-water, and we slooshed the water about from side to side of the tub to make waves in sympathetic magic, but the waves were not sympathetic enough, and there was no wind.
“Have you any other suggestions, Mr. Clarke?” Arthur asked.
“Not unless you have anyone in mind for Iphigenia.” In the silence that followed, Gertrude looked directly at me, and I could see that she was frightened. I began to blush, and, since the flippancy could not be unsaid, made matters worse by qualifying it. “Wouldn’t be any good anyway,” I said. “You’re not a father, Arthur, and we couldn’t even get by with a virgin, because there isn’t one on board.”
Arthur had not taken the reference. He said, “I do not understand you.”
Banner said, “Iphigenia——” and then he too caught Gertrude’s glance, and stopped.
I said quickly, “What did the Ancient Mariner do?”
“The two cases are not on a level. We have nothing to expiate.” As Arthur stood in thought, I realized that once the process of looking for literary parallels had begun, there was no stopping it. “Jonah, however….” Arthur said, “Although the problem there was not to cause a storm, but to stop one.”
For some time Tony, who usually said nothing during a discussion, had been struggling with a thought. “I don’t know about this magic and stuff,” he said, “I thought—I mean there is something. When I was a kid at school, I burned a spot in me wrist with the sun.”
Sonya said, “Of course. A burning glass.”
“To raise a wind?”
“No, but we could use it to distil water. We can’t use the wind to power the batteries, because there isn’t any wind, but we only want the power for heat, and we can get that from the sun.”
Tony said, “There’s lots of packing cases and stuff downstairs. I thought we could make a fire or something.”
Banner said, “Why use wood at all? Why not a direct beam?”
Gertrude said, “Oh, my dear Tony, what a good idea! You have saved us all. Under Arthur’s direction of course,” and Muriel, glancing quickly at Arthur to make sure that he approved, echoed her, “A good idea, Tony.”
It seemed to me, however, that Arthur was not entirely pleased. Jealous people are sensitive to the jealousies of others, and I detected in Arthur some of the sour envy that I felt within myself. It was really too simple an idea; if we had thought of it sooner, all of us would have been saved so much suffering. It must have been very humiliating for Arthur that a solution should come from somebody whose intelligence he despised; besides, that was not Tony’s function in the new society. For the present, he did no more than to order Hunter to find or make a magnifying glass, and he withdrew into the cabin, asking Gertrude to go with him. “I did not understand what Mr. Clarke meant by Iphigenia, my dear,” he said. “You must explain that to me.”
“Silly cow!” Muriel said, and went to sit outside the cabin, just beneath the window where she could eavesdrop easily.
*
It was not possible in fact to make a burning glass, for we had nothing like the rotating metal disc with which glass is ground. Nor could Hunter find a magnifying glass anywhere on board, so, after experimenting with the bottom of a bottle, we settled for the curved metal shaving mirror in the bathroom. Although the beam we got from it was not strong enough to boil a flask of water, it would certainly start a fire. For fuel there were the crates in the hold, and Glub Cushions, we found, burned slowly like charcoal if we did not use too many at a time and damped them a little with brine first. Should it ever become necessary, we could burn part of the cabin; my imagination played with the idea of using the raft itself, burning it day by day in pieces until only a tiny square was left, just sufficient to hold the fireplace. In any event, we had enough fuel to be able to distil a generous water ration, and to ensure that our evening stew need no longer be eaten raw. Our tongues moved easily in our mouths now, and the distress of our bodies was much abated. You might think that the situation had returned to what it was before, but you would be wrong. There was a change.
At first, as if to compensate for our previous lethargy, we were as active as we could be. We constructed a hearth on the deck of the raft, and set a grate above it. We broke up packing cases, and stacked the pieces in a pile. We brought the cooking implements out on deck, and arranged them in what was now our new kitchen. While Arthur wrote and wrote in the journal, the rest of us cleaned and prepared the fish for supper, and Gertrude went down on her knees afterwards to scrub the deck. We were like children playing at house.
Then that passed, for really there was not enough to do, but the feeling of being in a children’s world persisted. Hunter, our fisherman, sat in his usual place at the edge of the raft, racked by giggles, and said it was because he was thinking of Words. Banner and Gertrude cornered Tony, and whiled away an hour or so by asking him easy riddles and questions on general knowledge. “You’re very clever, Tony,” Gertrude said in admiration after he had answered three in succession correctly, and Tony thinking he was being baited, turned sulky and refused to play any longer.
Then Banner did a malicious thing. On the second morning of this new period, Gertrude rose early; she tho
ught that she might come across another seal. Indeed there was one, she said, at the end of the raft, but it was frightened by the sudden opening of the door, and fled at once into the water. Gertrude decided to follow it. She undressed, and dived into the sea, puffing, and splashing, and blowing the water in little fountains from her mouth in the hope that the seal would return and sport with her, but it would not. Meanwhile Banner came out on deck, saw her in the water, laughed, and took away her clothes. Gertrude did not wish to appear before us naked, but after some time she became tired. Then she discovered that she was not strong enough to pull herself back on deck. She called out, but there was nobody to hear her except Banner, who returned and said, “What if there should be sharks as well as seals?” Then he helped her out of the water, and Gertrude tried to dry herself on her bikini with one hand, and cover herself with the other.
Gertrude complained to Arthur, who reprimanded Banner and ordered him to apologize. For the rest of that day, Gertrude and Banner would not speak to one another, except that Banner announced that if he could catch a seal, he would kill it and eat it. Gertrude said, “You’re not to. You’re not to,” but Banner replied that it would be doing the seal a kindness, because, not being guided as we were guided, the seal was bound to go wrong and suffer. “They never know,” he said. “They never know what will happen, or what people will think, or anything. Death is the only certainty for such creatures. There is great certainty in death,” and Gertrude said, “I’ll death you if you touch my seals,” and there the matter rested.
*
Sonya stacked the plates, and took them away into the galley. “I want to make my position clear,” Arthur said. We sat up straight in our seats, folded our hands in our laps, and gave him our attention. In rummaging through the contents of the hold for fuel, we had come across a crate of candles, and one of these stood in a saucer at the head of the table, its flame a steady yellow tear-drop of light, burning upwards in the still air.
