by James Barlow
The permutations of her falseness and his humiliation were endless. They would fill many hours of the day and night. Drink helped, of course, a little. More drink then.
‘Christ, it’s hot,’ he said, and even this had its pictorial corollary: would the sweat be running between her breasts? Would her clothes stick to her buttocks and waist so that the man – Peter, his name was, I must remember that – had to peel them off like a wet swimming costume?
How many times, in how many places? (Beds, sports cars, on the beach, hurriedly, the first time, on a chair?)
‘What’s the time?’
They told him. ‘Eleven o’clock.’
‘My God, we sail at noon!’
He shook hands, they were good fellows, had saved him a little of this dreadful day –
Tomazos boarded the Areopagus and the world was different. The eyes and the nostrils noticed. He viewed the entire world now as an enemy; at the minimum it might snigger at him. (How many times? Her thin cool wide sexy mouth burning against this bastard’s moustache, his naked shoulder, his chest. And the long procession of words – did they start with ‘No’ or ‘I have a husband,’ and what had been the pattern of oral fraud and persuasion from then to the moment when she dropped her pants and the pendulum had gone over to him: ‘Hurry up, the kids’ll be out of school soon . . . Him? Oh, hell, we all make mistakes. A fat little Greek. No, darling, not rich. Don’t give it a thought. Push harder, Peter, be rough with me.’)
The passengers lined the rails, it was that late, hot and limp: Adelaide’s century heat had exhausted them, too. And the smells – they were old and should have been familiar, but he had not previously noticed: particular oils, foods, old wood, paint and steel. The ship. His. At least he had that.
On the bridge Mollon noticed.
‘Christ, Nikolaos, you’ve finally discovered Australian beer!’
‘What of it?’
‘You’re drunk, mate, that’s what!’
‘Who cares?’
‘Not me, mate. Maybe the captain.’
‘What’s our condition?’
‘We’re on schedule. Sail in forty minutes.’
‘Good,’ said Tomazos with ferocity. ‘The sooner we get out of this hateful town –’
‘What’s up? What’s the matter with Adelaide?’
‘Like everything Australian, she’s ugly and vulgar –’
‘Oh, not that bad?’
‘And stupid. Stupid, ugly and a mess.’
‘Jesus, Nikolaos, you’re making a noise! Don’t knock poor bloody Adelaide. It was the beer that did it.’
‘To hell with this ridiculous country and its dowdy coarse people . . . ’
‘Now wait a minute. Y’want a punch-up or something? Is it me you’re bothered by?’
‘Anything Australian.’
Mollon said, ‘Well, you’ve got nearly six hundred on board.’
‘Vulgar fools drowned in beer and bingo.’
‘Hey, listen, mate, I don’t liked that –’ began Mollon angrily.
Captain Vafiadis came on the bridge. They didn’t know if he’d overheard this dialogue. A motorboat’s engine thumped in the water and voices cheered on the quayside, although it was a very small crowd this time. There was now distinct hostility emanating from Mollon where previously there had been absolute comradeship.
The captain asked, ‘Did you get a chance to see your wife?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Tomazos said through his teeth. ‘I saw her.’
And he could sense through the alcohol their shock and understanding. They knew, more or less, what he’d encountered.
Half an hour later they were manoeuvring in the Torrens River, and Captain Vafiadis instructed, ‘Officer of the Watch, take her round.’
‘Very good, sir,’ Tomazos acknowledged. ‘Helmsman, starboard twenty-five.’
This was to take the Areopagus in a half circle around to starboard.
‘Not to starboard!’ the captain called loudly. ‘The other way, to port.’
Tomazos, very shaken indeed by the captain countermanding his order, nevertheless obeyed the master. ‘Helmsman, midships . . . port twenty.’
As they came around, Tomazos saw why he’d been wrong. On that side of the river a tanker was still anchored. The Areopagus would have cleared her by thirty feet, but the awful fact was that he was so upset this day that he hadn’t known of the tankers presence.
The third officer, Makris, was on the bridge, too, and was startled and didn’t know where to look. Such a reprimand and error had not been experienced before by Tomazos.
Captain Vafiadis said coldly, ‘One would think you weren’t sober, Mr. Tomazos,’ and walked off the bridge.
Tomazos, who never had strong feelings against the people with whom he worked, hated Captain Vafiadis that moment. The captain knew damn well the dejection which had caused the inattention; there had been no need to rub it in.
‘What the hell,’ he said aloud in discomfort. ‘Port or starboard, what’s the difference?’
But it stung, for Makris would spread the news as excited gossip. Worse than that, the helmsman was Yannopoulos, a slight man in his middle forties, with a walnut-coloured face, a very good sailor, calm, never ruffled, a man utterly reliable and very pleasant to work with.
It was her fault, Elaine’s. Something that had been valuable and worthwhile now had its content of embarrassment and dislike. Not that Yannopoulos would gossip, but he might lose confidence fractionally. Makris being young and bored, would prattle, and from others a garbled version would get around the ship. It might even become standard commentary at specific times, perhaps when orders were resented: ‘The first officer? Oh, he was all right until the time he caught a man with his wife. He’s been unpredictable since then, so watch it . . . ’
He hid from them in his cabin a few yards aft of the bridge. It was a small neat cabin about fifteen feet by twelve, but likely now to become a prison. There were a bunk and wardrobe, a transistor radio bought in Japan, a dressing table and washbasin. There was a door to the cabin, but during the day it was normally wide open and the entrance merely curtained off. Now Tomazos shut the door. He left the whiskey bottle alone because he was on duty again in a few hours. The sun had heated up the cabin and the air was stifling. Tomazos lay in his bunk waiting for the hours to pass.
A thunderstorm cracked overhead and as the ship came out of the river and into the Great Australian Bight again the sea whipped up and the Areopagus pitched and shuddered.
He went on duty and it was satisfying that the sea was the colour of slate and moving in small mountains. There was no one on the bridge except Yannopoulos, who greeted him politely. There never was much dialogue between them – it was unnecessary, they were so attuned – but now Tomazos was self-conscious. And tired. He who never wearied had been exhausted by this day, tired forever, he felt.
‘I’m putting her on the gyro-pilot,’ he told the helmsman, who was spinning the wheel which operated the rudder by telemotor system.
Tomazos put the control lever to ‘Off’ switched on the main switch and with the steering wheel brought the rudder amidships. He then opened the bypass valve of the telemotor hydraulic system, leaving Yannopoulos with nothing to do. He put the control lever to ‘Hand,’ so that the Areopagus was now under the control of the gyro-pilot wheel by hand. He steadied her on the course he wanted, which was 272, and put the control lever to ‘Gyro.’ The Areopagus would now cover the bulk of the 1,348 miles to Fremantle on her own, providing Tomazos made minor alterations to the ‘Weather Adjustment’ and ‘Rudder Adjustment’ – two lost motion device controls turned anticlockwise over a scale from 0-6 which allowed for the condition of the sea. It was a beam sea, and rough, and Tomazos made a rudder adjustment bearing this in mind, as well as the loa
ding and trim of the ship. He allowed a certain amount of ‘initial’ rudder to provide a degree of ‘meeting’ rudder when the ship returned to her course. After a while he studied the course recorder chart which was in the chart room to see what kind of a pattern was being made by the two ink-fed pens which were travelling horizontally across a vertically moving chart paper.
Captain Vafiadis came on the bridge. Tomazos felt uneasy, and as if he knew it and wanted to assert himself – something he hadn’t perhaps been able to do in seven years – the captain said a little brusquely for Tomazos’ liking: ‘Show me your latest fix and do stop fiddling with that silly gadget as if it could do our work for us.’
This was absurd, as the company was not likely to buy ‘silly’ equipment, and in fact the gyro-pilot was an incredibly accurate and complicated assembly which was capable of doing the ‘work’ a fraction better than the officers did without it.
The captain nevertheless complained, ‘We’ve lost a hell of a lot of time picking up those automobiles,’ as if calling at Adelaide had been Tomazos’ idea.
‘Shall I ask for a few more knots, sir?’
‘Do you think the chief engineer would give them to you?’
It was, Tomazos realized in relief, his own position the captain was worried about. He was going to be late all along the line – Freemantle, Bali, Singapore, Hong Kong. He had been pressed to the limit long before Adelaide. The company would complain, and, worse, so would the passengers, and this would undermine the master’s position of infallibility, his reputation for arriving with the specific tide and at the very hour forecast recklessly in the company’s brochures . . . It was known around the Areopagus that the captain and the chief engineer disliked each other. Captain Vafiadis would hate to ask a favour, particularly when he was aware that Mr. Bitsios would have to turn it down.
When Tomazos came off watch at the end of his four hours Kristina was standing at the window of the radio office.
She called out, ‘Hello, Nikolaos,’ because otherwise, it was obvious, he wouldn’t have noticed her or indeed anyone. And she had been there for twenty minutes conversing with some difficulty to the radio officer who she never saw normally more than once a month, and then only in passing. He was a Turkish man of about fifty, very capable, formal and polite, and Kristina talked to him so that she might legitimately be standing about when Tomazos’ duty ended.
‘What are you doing, Kristina?’
‘I am cabling my mother.’
He said, ‘I didn’t know you had a mother.’
She chided gently, ‘We all have mothers and mine has a birthday tomorrow.’
Tomazos thought about it and remarked, ‘It’s strange, how we know someone and yet never identify them as a daughter – you know what I mean?’
‘Perfectly. You see me as a part of the ship, a girl in the Purser’s Office . . . and to see me as something else would be somehow wrong.’
‘Yes. Something like that, although we are much more than a functioning part of the Areopagus, Kristina.’
She stood there in silence, dressed very neatly in the company’s uniform of dark green skirt and pale green blouse, in a prolonged moment of embarrassment. He said nothing because, this day, he was bereft of light heartedness.
At last Kristina said shakily, ‘We all know – well, I do – that something is wrong. And I’m so sorry.’
‘It is nothing.’
‘You are such a nice person.’
‘It happens to sailors – and their wives.’
‘I’m sorry that such a thing –’
‘It can’t be helped. Tough on my children,’ he acknowledged.
‘You will get a letter,’ she forecast, ‘when we reach Bali or Singapore. And the quarrel will be over.’
‘It was worse than a quarrel, Kristina.’
‘But it can be repaired, Nikolaos.’
‘No,’ he told her. ‘It can never be repaired. I could not live with her again.’
‘Ah, how awful,’ she sighed. ‘But this is what you say today, Nikolaos. Time may alter your hurt.’
‘That is kind of you to believe so,’ he said.
It was impossible for her to say anything further. ‘Well, goodnight, Nikolaos. Remember you have friends.’
‘Goodnight, Kristina.’
Tomazos went to his cabin. It was still humid and uncomfortable. He listened to a news bulletin. There were still wars and riots, people with greater troubles than his. He was aware that there would be no privacy for a distressed first officer, friends or not. His every word, gesture, foible and mannerism would now be noted, discussed and analyzed, together with his habits, on the decks, in the wardrooms and bars. At meals his conversation or silence would be overheard or noted by stewards and repeated, perhaps with embellishments. If he was ‘taut’ it would be regarded as temper, and if he was not it might be considered that he had gone to pieces, taken to the bottle.
He did not include Kristina in this train of thought although her sympathy proved that the gossip had reached the Purser’s Office, which meant everywhere . . .
He was exhausted, but the oppressive heat and the kaleidoscope of his thoughts wouldn’t let him sleep. Was Elaine awake, too? Was she alone tonight? Had this man, Peter, a wife? Probably, now that Tomazos thought about it, for he was over thirty. So other persons would suffer also. And Elaine? Was she scared now? No. Elaine was unusual for a woman, never frightened. But the thought that her marriage was over must inevitably corrode her peace of mind. There was unpleasantness to go through, at the very least tedious conversations with a lawyer. The disgrace would hurt her mother, who was a snob . . .
But what hurt him was what he had seen, the naked sweating bodies which had coupled, the signal of indifference in the eyes which had preceded even the alarm of being caught. Go away and let us get on with it. It was in such violent contrast to everything which had gone before.
It was no use.
He had to have a drink.
The next eight hours were his and if he wanted to drink.
The next whiskey bottle was under his bunk, unopened.
Tomazos drank deeply in his wounded desolation, and then put the bottle back out of sight so that when the standby came to call him at four in the morning he would not see it.
Chapter Nine
Seventy feet below Tomazos, Dimitrios Retalis was now a much happier young man.
He had a friend.
Keith Rajaratnam had come aboard at Melbourne to replace the sailor injured at Sydney by the exploding gas cylinder.
It was the policy of the Greco-Australian Line to have a few English-speaking crew members for the benefit of Australian, New Zealand, British and South African passengers. Girls in the Purser’s Office, barmen, an officer or two on the bridge. But below decks the sixty crew of the chief engineer were all Greek and only two officers spoke some English.
Rajaratnam was from Singapore and had learned his engineering in that port, the fifth largest in the world. He was of Indian race, but spoke only English. Dimitrios had learned some English – quite a lot, he now realized – and by a happy coincidence was of the same technical qualification as Rajaratnam. He was therefore chosen to show the new young man the bowels of the Areopagus, to instruct him on the whereabouts and correct readings of the fire-room air-pressure gauge, the oil pressures, the feed system telegraphs, the lubricating points along the port propeller shaft the gauges and control valves to the main steam line, the superheater, the peepholes to the burners, the lubricating tanks and strainers, and whole dozens of valves, drains and vents.
And Dimitrios found that Rajaratnam absorbed this information rapidly and permanently. He might have been born in the port engine room of the Areopagus.
He was a small, neat, rather nice-looking young man, and, incredibly, always seem
ed clean and never hot. He had a quick sense of humour. Best of all, he accepted Dimitrios without reservations, failing in that identification which would have been instantaneous in any European, Greek-speaking or otherwise.
He played checkers with Dimitrios and taught him chess. He would talk for hours, and yet be able to say, without causing offense, ‘I would like to read this book now. Do you mind?’ or ‘I am going to write a letter to my friend, so I will not be present with you for half an hour.’
‘When we get to Singapore,’ he told Dimitrios, ‘I will show you many places. Better than Change Alley, although we can go there and have a good barter with the traders if you wish. Do you like Madras curry or Malay satay? Chinese roast duck is very good, too, the Cantonese especially . . . My father has a shop in Serangoon Road . . . Have you seen the orchids in the Botanical Gardens?’ he asked, as if it was quite natural that a merchant seaman should wish to see these flowers; and Dimitrios liked him for that.