Ship to Shore

by Peter Tonkin

  After a few moments, however, she set the novel down and pulled out some blank paper and a pencil. ‘My darling,’ she wrote in French, ‘I know that you will never read these words because they must never fall into the captain’s hands and so I must destroy them almost as soon as I have written them, but it will be so lonely here without you that I must write them down or I shall go insane.

  ‘Simply to think of you so far away makes my heart ache. But when I think that you are coming ever closer to me, and that soon I too will be coming towards you, I can feel such a passion building in me that I find it hard to breathe. I have never known anyone like you and only a mission such as this could ever separate us. Oh, my love, do you remember that first night we were together on Avalon and we swam in the sea at high tide? How the whole of that coast of Newfoundland out to the Grand Banks themselves seemed to be alive with those tiny fish that night so that we, swimming naked like seals, were caressed by them in their millions? You were so angry because of the danger. So many fish, you said, would bring whales and sharks, and so they did. But not to us. Not to us, my beloved, because we are beloved of Nature. Gaia is our goddess and she keeps us safe from harm as she did that night when the silver fish cooled our burning flesh with their teeming numbers but lit other hotter fires within. Who would have thought that a life such as mine, of killing and maiming, could have come to such a fruition as this? Did you know that all those tiny fish had come there to give birth and to die? Do you know that we, too, will give birth soon? I found out just after you had returned to Canada and I cannot wait to tell you. How soon will I see you? Let me count the days until we meet at Farewell ...

  ‘I must break off soon because it is growing dark and I cannot risk a light. Tomorrow I will reconnoitre and soon I will set the bomb. Our friends covered things well at Seascale and I was able to bring aboard even more than we managed to set in Belfast. When Clotho goes up, it will destroy Sept Isles and stop this foul traffic. And when I set the charges you have aboard with you, Atropos will close things down in England.

  ‘Our friends in London and New York will send the publicity material within the week and Heritage Mariner will feel the weight of our wrath.

  ‘We cannot allow these beings to pollute our beautiful world. We cannot rest from trying to destroy these people who have already put our magic Avalon at risk with the filth on Napoli.

  ‘But the thought of you so far away hurts me more than I can say. Tonight I will dream of your hands and your lips upon me. It is all that stops me going mad. We will be together in six short nights. Six short nights and no longer. Then the two of us will go back to Avalon until we are no longer two, but three.’

  4 - Day Three

  Friday, 21 May 16:00

  The seventh tee at Brampton golf course, halfway between Cold Fell and Carlisle in Cumbria, was called Cardiac Hill. Neither of the two men currently considering it needed to worry about its reputation. They were both slim men, light but strong, and they were both fit; they carried the weight of their responsibilities well, no matter what the burden of their years.

  Sir William Heritage, Robin Mariner’s father and chairman of Heritage Mariner, was coming up for his middle eighties but he was wiry and strong enough to be pulling his own golf clubs. Sir Harcourt Gibbons hoped that in ten years’ time he would be as hale and hearty as his friend — and as able to slam more than two hundred yards out of his drives with such consistency.

  But the slope of this hole was a challenge to intellect as much as to technique. It was Harcourt’s honour, though he would gladly have traded the privilege to see what club Sir William chose. He squinted up the hill and wondered. At last he pulled a number two wood out of his bag and began to set himself up to drive off. He was acutely aware that this was his friend’s local course and he was very much the stranger here. It seemed to him that distance would be preferable to height at this stage.

  The conversation between the two men had been going on since Harcourt arrived at Cold Fell just before luncheon. He had caught the train up early on Friday morning and had been ensconced snugly in one of Sir William’s guest rooms at Cold Fell by drinks time at noon. But the topic of conversation had been of such importance that it had interrupted the social chit-chat at lunch and undermined the sporting talk over pudding. And this afternoon, between the comments about what wood and what iron, it had dominated the golfing conversation, too.

  ‘Look, Bill,’ said Harcourt as he bent and drove his tee deep into the ground. ‘The law is like the Savoy Hotel. It’s open to anyone.’ He balanced his ball on top of the tee and straightened, looking up the hill in front of him. ‘Anyone who can afford it,’ he added, pleased to have found a use for the famous old saying.

  He took his number two wood and patted the grass behind the tee with its varnished head, glancing up speculatively. At the last two holes he had taken practice swings and then sliced both drives. Perhaps he would do better just to let rip. With no further comment, he swung back and hit the ball. The hole was three hundred and eighty yards. The first three hundred yards went uphill steeply and the last eighty fell away sharply. His drive did not gain the height he had hoped and thumped rather hard into the left of the fairway. At least it didn’t vanish into the rough.

  Sir William took his number three wood and sat his ball on a high tee. ‘It’s not just a question of money,’ he observed as he, like Harcourt, settled the rough grass behind the little plastic pin by patting it with his club head. ‘We have insurance, as you know, and we could under normal circumstances afford a couple of comparable hulls. I am worried, however, that there may be more to this thing than meets the eye.’

  He stopped talking and squared up properly for his shot. The conversation was important, but there was no sense in losing the match because of it. His tee shot lifted far higher than Harcourt’s had, very nearly reaching the crest. He watched the white dot bounce and rest. Neat little five iron down to the green from there, he thought. He would win this hole too if the weather held.

  ‘As we’ve stated in the submissions already before the court, the case against Heritage Mariner is quite simple,’ said Harcourt, not for the first time, as they rocked their clubs up onto the trollies and began to pull them onwards and upwards. ‘The Italian company, CZP, owned the ship. Richard does not dispute that he was on board CZP’s ship, nor that he was notionally in charge of her. He agrees that, just before the ship sank, he was actively engaged in setting explosive charges with the expressed intention of sinking the ship. But he maintains that the ship went down in the final analysis because of the action of the cargo, which effectively ate its way through the sides. His defence is simply that he was prevented from scuttling the ship by the fact that she sank herself. That’s all there is to it. I must say, these are late days to be having second thoughts, old chap. I mean, we have agreed the pleadings before the judge already; there’s only the final liability to settle now. You should have brought up any worries weeks ago, before I took it to the judge in his chambers.’

  They came up to Harcourt’s ball at this point and he squinted up the hill, which looked much steeper from this vantage point. It had hit the ground so hard that it had bounced and was sitting on top of a clump of grass just at the edge of the fairway. Harcourt reckoned he could risk a three wood from here. Certainly it looked as though they had better finish the hole as quickly as possible — it might be their last. Although this was a late weekend in May, the weather was still behaving as though it was an early weekend in March. There were tall black clouds sweeping down over the Borders towards them.

  Bill waited until Harcourt had bashed his ball up over the ridge before he asked, ‘You’re sure about the case? If it’s just a question of buying CZP a new hull, we can probably stretch to it. But after the bomb in Belfast, we have all the spare cash we possess tied up in refitting and reinsuring.’

  ‘All the spare cash,’ echoed Harcourt speculatively.

  ‘We’ve signed away all the family possessions — hou
ses, cars; unlimited liability. We’re counting on you. If it’s just the hull of Napoli then our insurance will cover it. Costs enough, God knows. But if there’s anything further, we could be stretched too far.’

  They were up with Sir William’s ball now and he didn’t even pause before pulling out his number five iron. He was so caught up in what he was saying to his barrister — his silk, as the jargon had it — that he didn’t even calculate his shot. The five iron whispered through the grass with a sound like a headsman’s axe and the ball went flying up over the ridge.

  ‘No,’ said Harcourt firmly. ‘You have nothing to worry about. I have it all worked out and, but for the final aspects to be dealt with in open court, it’s all settled. You can rely on me, old chap.’

  He strode on up to the top of the hill and looked down onto the green. Sir William’s ball was still running, so the barrister had no trouble in seeing that his own ball lay a two-inch putt from the hole. A sense of achievement welled up inside him. The game was turning his way.

  As the thought came, so did the first of the rain.

  Sir William paused, lost in thought, part-way through the action of putting his number five iron back into his golf bag. Was there anything more he wanted to check with Harcourt? The case came to court in less than two weeks and, as he had said, mistakes were likely to come very expensive. But no. There was nothing else he needed to know — beyond the fact that he trusted his barrister with the absolute confidence of long association. And he needed to. One mistake here and Heritage Mariner would go to the wall with a vengeance.

  He settled the club in the golf bag and turned, just as the first great raindrops spattered into his face. At the top of the rise, Harcourt was just putting up his umbrella. Wise man, thought Sir William, and considered following suit. But just at the moment he turned, a column of light seemed to leap between the sky and his friend’s umbrella. As long as he lived, he would never be able to say whether the light went up from the umbrella or came down from the sky. But in the second it took him to settle his club and turn, a massive power of light connected Sir Harcourt Gibbons to the sky. It persisted, crackling like crisp cellophane and smelling like a distant barbecue borne on a fresh sea breeze, then it was gone. Sir William didn’t stand still to watch it but when he went to run forward he found he was falling down.

  When he pulled himself, shakily, to his feet, his old friend Harcourt was lying curled up on the crest of the hill and his umbrella was on fire.

  5 - Day Four

  Saturday, 22 May 06:00

  Ann Cable had never felt so isolated in all her life. Alone in her cabin, unable to sleep, disturbed by the constant background throbbing of the ship’s generators, she would try to lighten her thoughts in the loneliest hours of the dead watch by making ridiculous comparisons. She felt like the first black householder in an all white neighbourhood, she would tell herself. Like the first Chinese to open a restaurant in Paris. Like the first gay footballer out of the closet. Like a lone female reporter on an all male ship which had something to hide.

  She felt more than isolated, she felt threatened. Anything seemed possible. Just the way most of the crew men looked at her made her flesh crawl with its combination of lust and financial speculation: she was good-looking and rich — would it be possible to get into her pants and her purse, her bed and her bank balance? She knew the answer most of them would make: she was a woman, only good for one thing; and it would be a nice change if they made money out of the deal rather than being parted from it, which was what most of them were used to. But the sexual threat — only implied, so far — was less disturbing than the other.

  She did not know all that much about ship handling, in spite of the fact that she had made her name and fortune writing about the loss of the Napoli. She had only ever been aboard one ship for any length of time — Napoli herself — and it was now becoming obvious that the way that the ship had been run, under a Heritage Mariner captain, was very different from the way Atropos was being run. Napoli had been an old rust bucket rapidly rotting away, crewed by a polyglot collection of southern European ruffians, but there had been an air of common purpose and mutual respect aboard. Atropos was brand spanking new, equipped like a space shuttle and crewed by men hand-picked by the owners in Sept Isles, but there were undercurrents of mystery aboard which had set her short hairs to prickling as though the ship were full of ghosts. She was burning to investigate. But in those dark hours of the dead watches, sitting in her bunk in the darkness feeling Atropos buck and shoulder north-westwards through the St Lawrence, it was all too easy to imagine that if she actually discovered anything, then she would end up lost at sea. Just another maritime mystery; just another Mary Celeste. And there was no one she could call on for help. Or no one less than three thousand miles away.

  She was very strongly tempted just to lock herself safely in her cabin and stay there right through the voyage. That would be the sensible thing to do.

  Her day began at six. This was the fourth aboard, though only the second afloat, really. They had sailed more than twenty-four hours behind schedule because of some panic of the captain’s, and because of the grannies demonstrating at the dockside. She knew she would begin to tell the time by bells and changing watches soon, but for now she relied on her watch and was up by six. The cooks and the deck officer on watch were the only other people up at that time, she had discovered; and that fact was important. She loved to exercise but had brought with her only a tight grey body stocking and a high-cut one-piece exercise suit. Her first attempt to run down to the weights room had drawn so many eyes that it had also drawn an acid reprimand from the skeletal Captain Black. If she wished to flaunt herself — he hadn’t quite used the words but his meaning had been clear enough — she should do so when none of his men could be distracted by her. So now she only exercised when she would be alone. And that meant between six and seven in the morning.

  Her cabin was on C deck, one level below the navigation bridge. She shared the deck of four cabins with day rooms and showers en suite with only the captain and the chief engineer, who seemed to hate each other. Neither of them ever appeared before late breakfast at nine. Nevertheless, she found herself behaving as though she were the victim of a voyeur. She had always slept naked; now she wore briefs and a T-shirt. She stripped and dressed with the cabin lights off. She looked each way along the corridor before exiting. Like a child about some mischief, she tiptoed along the corridor, used the stairs rather than risk any noise from the lift, and gasped with fright when the sole of her trainer squealed against the linoleum of the top stair. Three decks down, in the great lateral A deck corridor, she hesitated. There was an internal route to the gym but it would take her past the ship’s galley, past the only other people aboard awake. Under the eyes of the men. It would be better to run round outside, unless it was raining.

  The bulkhead door at the end of the corridor swung open silently and Ann stepped out into the early morning. The icy wind made her catch her breath but the clean cut of it in her lungs was heavenly. It was just getting light, and she found herself looking across a steel-grey vista of sharp waves, all seeming to run the same way as Atropos was heading, as though the ship were grinding down the back of some huge flat file. She stood, legs a little spread, hands on hips, breathing deeply, drinking in the vista. Behind the water rose a rugged grey coastline, dark slate where the water was light steel, almost black at the edges of the snowfields which clung to the hilltops sawing at the white sky. She was on the port side of the ship, looking northwards towards the coast of Labrador, but had she been on the starboard looking south, the view would not have been very different: Atropos was pounding slowly through the Strait of Belle Isle between the mainland of Canada and the island of Newfoundland.

  Abruptly, her steady progress faltered, as though the five-hundred-foot vessel had stumbled. Ann staggered sideways and forward, her movements dictated by the movement of the ship. The deck heaved upwards slightly towards the bow, then settled ba
ck. Ann knew the motions Atropos made when she pitched over waves now and this had been something new. She continued to move towards the rail and looked down into the hissing, foam-streaked water just in time to see a large lump of ice heave by. It looked too small to be a floe. What did they call them? Growlers. Yes, it was a growler. Half a growler, by the look of things, already turning turtle, readjusting to its new state having been chopped in two by Atropos’ ice-breaking bow. It was surprisingly white and its sides, moving through the water, showed shades of luminous blue which settled back to steadfast grey as the ice settled, only to be whirled into the ship’s pale wake to clash against its other half as though trying to heal the breach.

  Still watching the restless ice and trying not to think about Titanic, Ann pounded back along the deck just inside the rail. She considered going round the deck a few times but decided against it after twenty or so steps —the icy air was just too cold. She was a health nut, not a masochist.

  The outer door to the gym extended a great long window overlooking the swimming pool area on the after deck. The pool had facilities to be heated and covered so that it could be used in most weathers, but Captain Black had ordered it to be battened down for the duration of the voyage. He seemed to look upon all provision for the welfare of his men as a waste of time and a dangerous temptation towards idleness and slackness. ‘I run a tight ship!’ The arcane phrase had been the first she had heard him use and it had not taken her long to learn that the crew, officers and men alike, called him ‘Tightship’ behind his back. The fact that they often changed the last letter, replacing the ‘p’ with a ‘t’, made her suspect that this was not a mark of respect or affection. But, in spite of having lived in Italy for many years, she was not an expert on men’s games and macho, so the nickname could have held some grudging appreciation, for all she knew. There was no doubt about First Officer Timmins, however. Everyone definitely despised him.