The White Voyage

by John Christopher

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Truly. Give me the rod. If anyone sees you, it is my rod and you are holding it for me.’

  ‘Then you pay the fine.’

  Olsen smiled. ‘No one can fine a captain who casts a line from his own ship. What bait do you have? Liver? From our kitchens. Let us see what we shall catch with it.’

  There was a small floating dock opposite the Kreya, holding a battered fishing smack. Olsen cast a line well out in that direction. It struck the oily water, covered with floating refuse, and sank out of sight. A few moments later the float began to jerk as the line was taken down below.

  ‘Ho, there!’ Olsen said. ‘We have it.’

  He began to wind in. A long, threshing shape came into view at the end of the line.

  ‘We have you, Mr Eel,’ Olsen said.

  But as the eel broke water a convulsive jerk freed it from the hook. It sank back into the depths and the line came up uselessly.

  ‘You have bad luck, Captain,’ Josef said.

  ‘Next time we get him,’ Olsen said.

  He re-baited the hook and cast again. Josef looked after the rod with disappointment and longing.

  Stefan came out from the lounge and stood near them.

  He said: ‘She has stopped rolling. At least I will eat something tonight.’

  ‘And tomorrow morning,’ Olsen said, ‘you give it to the fishes. It is of small value.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Stefan said. ‘After two days, generally I am less sick.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Olsen told him, ‘you will be sick. The weather forecast is for storms. The Kreya will roll like a porpoise, all the way from here to Amsterdam.’

  ‘That is a joke?’ Stefan suggested uneasily.

  ‘Ask Mr Mouritzen if you do not believe me.’ Mouritzen was approaching them from the direction of the forecastle. ‘Is it not so, Niels?’

  ‘He has taken your rod, has he?’ Mouritzen asked Josef. ‘Yes, the forecast is bad, but forecasts are not always accurate. On the outward trip we were promised good weather, and we had storms all the way to Dublin.’

  ‘My appetite has gone,’ Stefan said, ‘before I could regain it.’

  Mouritzen grinned and went on. He called back over his shoulder:

  ‘Give him back his rod, Captain. You will catch nothing.’

  ‘I will catch something,’ Olsen said. ‘If I must stand here until we sail, I will have something.’

  ‘Shall I hold the rod for a time?’ Josef asked.

  ‘I will give it back to you with a fish on the end,’ Olsen said. ‘That is a promise, and where I promise, I perform.’

  Josef gazed disconsolately at the sluggish dirty water. Mrs Simanyi and Nadya came out to join them.

  ‘Now we have docked,’ Nadya said, ‘can Katerina be exercised?’

  Olsen shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They begin to unload the horses very soon. She must wait until that has been done. It will not take long. One hour here, two hours in Dublin, three in Amsterdam. The Hollanders are frightened of horses.’

  ‘And the fish are frightened of you?’ Nadya said.

  ‘Frightened or not, I will lure them.’

  The three Simanyis remained watching him. Thorsen came out with them, and Mr and Mrs Jones were on the small promenade deck, looking down. There was no bite. For ten or fifteen minutes, Olsen waited without success, from time to time reeling in and re-casting. Then as the French dock labourers came aboard and the mobile crane moved along and picked up the horse-box, the watchers turned their attention to the other side.

  Olsen called Thorsen to him. He gave him instructions in Danish and Thorsen, grinning, went off to the forecastle. A few minutes later, Olsen called out to Josef:

  ‘Here you are! I said I would give back the rod when there was a fish on the line. Come now, and take it.’

  The onlookers turned back. Josef came across and took the rod. The float was three-quarters submerged. He began to reel in. Olsen stood beside him, watching with interest.

  ‘There it is,’ he cried, as a flat shape was drawn up to the surface. ‘There is your fish, Simanyi!’

  Simanyi was the first to see it. ‘Ah, you scoundrel!’ he said, but he continued to reel in. Nadya began to laugh, and the others joined in. The fish which Josef unhooked from the end of his line was headless and gutted, and still brick-hard from its sojourn in the ship’s cold-store.

  ‘Where I promise, I perform,’ Olsen said. He grinned. ‘Good fishing, Simanyi.’

  * * *

  As they went back to their cabin, Jones said: ‘He’s a cool one, that Olsen.’

  Sheila said: ‘Yes.’

  She went to the dressing-table and began making up. Her movements were jerky and nervous. He noticed it, and went to stand behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders.

  ‘Half the voyage behind us,’ he said. ‘Time is going on.’

  ‘Very slowly. Do we have to stay on board all afternoon and evening? Can’t we go ashore?’

  ‘There’s nothing to stop you going.’

  ‘Not without you.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be any pleasure in it. I know really that nothing could go wrong, but I’d be jumpy all the same.’

  ‘You’re not likely to bump into anyone who knows you in Dieppe, in November, surely?’

  ‘No.’ He nodded in the direction of the typewriter case. ‘It’s that.’

  ‘It’s locked,’ she said, ‘and you can surely lock the cabin too if you’re going ashore. There would be nothing odd about that.’

  ‘Thorsen would have to come in here to see to the beds. He might decide to borrow the typewriter. When he found it locked he might be struck by the fact that the lock isn’t an ordinary typewriter lock. I had to put a new lock on because a child could have picked the other. But it makes it unusual.’

  ‘Would it matter, as long as he couldn’t open it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He put his hands up to his face and rubbed his eyes with the finger tips. ‘He might find a way of opening it. I suppose he could even break it open and tell some story of having dropped the case when he was cleaning the cabin. There are a dozen things that could happen. I just don’t want to give anyone the chance of a couple of hours here undisturbed. You understand that?’

  She asked: ‘Is this the way it’s going to be?’

  ‘Only for a few more days – a week at the outside. Things will be different after that.’

  ‘Will they?’

  He kicked the typewriter case with the side of his foot.

  ‘We can have the little ceremony of getting rid of it, if you like. Take it out on the lake and watch it drown. My love, we knew this part wasn’t going to be easy.’

  Sheila stared at the case. ‘It’s like an interloper, sitting with us all the time, watching and listening. I didn’t know one could hate an inanimate object so much.’

  ‘Be fair,’ he said. ‘We depend on it. All our future is in there.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s what makes me afraid.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s all? You’re not beginning to have regrets?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I had no alternative,’ he said, ‘but you did. You’re so much younger, and you haven’t been beaten by life.’

  She got up and kissed him.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she said. ‘Darling, what are you talking about? How could I have let you go by yourself?’ She strained herself against him. ‘It was my idea as much as yours. I think I talked you into it. Everything you say is right. Too much depends on the next few days. We can’t take chances. After that …’ She kissed him again, sighing. ‘I can’t really believe it – I suppose that’s the trouble.’

  He stroked her head for a few moments, without talking. Then he said:

  ‘We mustn’t let ourselves get too much under strain, though. Perhaps you were right in the first place. Thorsen wouldn’t have the nerve to open the case, even if he did notice
the lock. Let’s go ashore, have a few drinks and a decent meal somewhere – forget the whole thing for a few hours. Well?’

  ‘No.’ She left him and bent down beside the typewriter case. She put her arms round it, touching it with fascination and loathing. ‘No, we’ll stay.’

  Mouritzen saw Mary and Annabel on deck and hurried after them. He caught up with them just as they reached the gang-plank.

  ‘Going ashore?’ he asked.

  Mary gave him a small formal smile. ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I come with you?’

  ‘No, thank you. You will have things of your own to do.’

  He looked down towards Annabel.

  ‘What do you say, Annabel? Shall I come with you? I know a place where we can play games, and a place where we can buy lemonade. Would you like that?’

  ‘I like Coca-Cola,’ Annabel said.

  ‘That, too! Well, may I come?’

  ‘Yes,’ Annabel said. ‘What kind of games?’

  Mouritzen assisted them down the gang-plank. ‘You will see.’

  ‘I feel sure that your time could be better occupied,’ said Mary. ‘But thank you.’

  He fell into step beside them. ‘No thanks. There is not much that one can find to do, in a strange port in a foreign country, when one is alone.’

  They came to the end of the sheds and crossed the railway lines towards the road leading into the town.

  ‘It’s not a complaint I would have expected to hear,’ Mary said. ‘I thought sailors were more resourceful.’

  ‘Sailors can be as lonely as other men. Perhaps they are more lonely.’

  She made no answer to that. They walked on into the town, and he found a café, after rejecting one that had no Coca-Cola. He consulted gravely with Annabel on these matters; and she replied with matching gravity and courtesy. The two of them got on well together. When they were finally sitting at a table together, Mary felt that they had the look of a family party, and the thought pleased and disturbed her. There was nothing to regret, she told herself, and nothing now to pine for. In two days she would be meeting Jan Volkmar, and he – dark and solid in the photograph he had sent her, with a heavy chin and worried, serious eyes – would give them both all the security they could want.

  She drank her tea, smiling, thinking that at last Annabel would have a home like other children, a chance to be more child-like. Watching her, Mouritzen said:

  ‘What makes you smile?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘If I knew,’ he said, ‘I would strive to repeat it. I like to see you smile.’

  With sudden conscious cruelty, she said: ‘I suppose I was smiling out of happiness – that the journey will be over so soon.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mouritzen said. He picked up his glass of beer. ‘You are right.’

  He took them into a pin-table arcade, and played a game of mechanical football with Annabel, manipulating the rows of metal players with enthusiasm. After allowing himself to be beaten he insisted on another game, with Annabel and he on one side and Mary on the other. The two of them scored an overwhelming victory.

  Afterwards they walked down to the beach, and Mouritzen showed Annabel how to build the pebbles into cairns and fortifications. They were still engaged in this as it began to grow dark. Mary looked at her watch.

  ‘We must be going back now, Niels,’ she said.

  ‘First we find something to eat.’ He prodded Annabel in the ribs. ‘Shall we not?’

  ‘I think we’d better go back to the ship,’ Mary said. ‘There’s absolutely no need for you to come. We can find our way quite easily. It will be Annabel’s bed time soon.’

  ‘Just as soon,’ Mouritzen argued, ‘wherever she eats her dinner. Come, I know a good place, where they will have ice-cream as well. Will we like that?’

  Annabel’s reply was an emphatic one. Mary smiled at Mouritzen over her head.

  ‘All right. Thank you – we’d love to.’

  * * *

  Thorsen was waiting for Nadya when she had finished exercising Katerina. He barred her way to the cabins.

  ‘Shall we go into Dieppe together?’ he suggested.

  She looked at him with a faint smile. ‘No. Thank you.’

  The last two words were so drawled as to sound insulting.

  Thorsen said: ‘Niels has taken the Cleary woman and the child. They went twenty minutes ago.’

  Nadya stopped smiling. ‘I saw them.’

  ‘You don’t want to go by yourself,’ Thorsen said.

  ‘There are others.’

  ‘Not with your brother, either.’

  ‘Bernard is taking me.’

  Thorsen made a gesture of contempt. ‘He is no good to you.’

  ‘What do you mean – no good to me?’

  ‘You’re a girl of passion,’ Thorsen said. ‘So Niels told me.’

  She said in a low, even voice: ‘You’re a liar.’

  ‘That night in his cabin – was it just after two o’clock that you came out or just before?’

  ‘Niels told you that?’

  ‘Who else?’

  Nadya laughed, her strong, white teeth gleaming. ‘You liar! You were spying on us. I heard the door of your cabin snick, and saw the light under the door. You think Bernard is not man enough for me? What would you say you are, little Jorgen? I would call you a schoolboy.’

  He said warningly: ‘Don’t make me angry.’

  She reached forward and rumpled his hair; she was still wearing pullover and jeans and her clothes carried the animal smell of the bear.

  ‘Should I fear little Jorgen?’ she asked. Her fingers suddenly tightened in his hair, and she pulled his head back savagely. Tears came into Thorsen’s eyes. ‘Go back to school,’ Nadya said. ‘Or to Mama, and ask her to wipe your pretty little eyes.’

  She went inside. Thorsen looked round, making sure that no one had seen the incident. Then, after quickly combing his hair, he called to the boy, Ib, to tell him he was going, and hurried off the ship.

  He went to a back street, not far from the railway station. The houses were tall and mean and smelled of garbage. Thorsen rang a bell on the ground floor and stepped back into the street. A window opened and a woman looked out, silently. She nodded her head, and he went back into the house.

  There was a double bed in the room to which she admitted him, covered with a tattered silk counterpane, of faded gold patterned with faded roses. The only other furniture consisted of a cheap wash-stand and a chest of drawers, and two upright chairs. On the chest of drawers stood a large marble clock, flanked by prancing horses. It had been her mother’s, she had told him on a previous visit, and it would fetch nothing anyway.

  She was a woman in her forties, who even in her youth could not have claimed anything resembling good looks. Her body was tired and slack, her face fell in sad wrinkles from the dyed blonde hair, and her eyes were dulled and unhappy. She wore a red, woollen wrap; where it was torn at the elbow one could see part of a stained blue nightdress.

  She asked Thorsen for two thousand francs, and when he gave her the money she put the notes carefully under the clock. Then, opening the wrap, she went to the bed and sat down wearily.

  Thorsen began to curse her, at first gently, feeling his way among the obscenities like a man reluctantly paying out money. He spoke in Danish, and she looked at him, blankly, neither understanding nor caring. He warmed to it by degrees, his voice thickening and growing louder, the obscenities coming more plentifully and with less and less meaning. After a time, he broke into foreign languages – German, English, snatches of French. Although she understood these, she gave no sign of caring or of resenting them. Thorsen grew more violent and less coherent. He shrieked at her, standing close by where she sat. But she showed only indifference, and although he raised his fists as if to strike her, he did not touch her.

  At last his voice cracked and broke on the torrent of filth. He stood for a moment staring at her, his eyes wild, his face distorted with rage. The
n, suddenly changing, he dropped to his knees beside the bed and put his head down on her knees. He wept, and she soothed him, talking to him in French, monotonously on and on.

  * * *

  Although some of the other men tried to persuade him to go ashore with them, Carling stayed on the Kreya. He went down into the forward hold to make sure that everything had been left in order by the French dockers, and stayed down there, resting his arms on one of the wooden stalls from which the horses had been taken, smelling the horses and the hay.

  For him it was a childhood smell. He had been born on a farm in Fyn, the eldest of four sons of a small farmer. But it had been the seas that fascinated him, not the land, and when he was fifteen he had left, going first to Odense and then to Copenhagen. There had been no regrets. Even when, on account of Tove, he had thought of leaving the sea, he had not thought that he might have been mistaken in giving up farming. Tove would never have been a farmer’s wife.

  But what would she have been – what had she been? The question, rising all unexpectedly through the quiet melancholy of his mind, pierced him again, and with a new twisting sharpness.

  ‘Tove!’ he cried aloud. ‘What was it? What should you have told me?’

  The horses that were left champed at the straw. In his agony, Carling fled back again to childhood, bridging the years with that smell, those untroubled easy sounds. But his mind played traitor to him: he was in the big kitchen, a boy of five or six, unregarded, listening to the sound of the pot bubbling on the fire, and the slow, quiet talk of his elders.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the barn – the little barn.’

  ‘And how, then?’

  ‘With his belt.’

  ‘And with what reason?’

  ‘It’s not known. Her, maybe.’

  ‘In Hell – for her?’

  ‘No man knows another’s mind.’

  ‘But in Hell,’ his mother said. Her voice had in it wonder and dread. ‘We know that.’

  Carling spoke aloud again, to the present, to the world where torment was ever at hand and hope a thin fugitive.

  ‘No!’ he cried. ‘That’s not true.’