The Novels of Beryl Bainbridge Volume 1

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Oriana wasn’t feeling too well. She’d had to lie down before the meal was finished, and on my going upstairs to see how she was she turned her head away when I bent to kiss her cheek; she said I had grease on my chin. I suspect she was upset I had shown such a hearty appetite for food when we were so soon to be parted.

  Cherry kicked sand over those bleached bones and when everything was covered tramped up and down to smooth the surface. I half expected him to fashion a make-shift cross from driftwood to stick on the mound. He’s very young. He’d taken off his glasses to clean them on his shirt and though his face was burnt by the sun his anxious eyes were ringed with white moons. ‘Spectacles are an awful nuisance,’ he complained, peering short-sightedly about him. ‘The slightest exertion and they mist over. Either that or the sweat makes them slide down one’s nose.’

  ‘You may find them something of a handicap in the cold,’ I warned him. ‘They’re bound to freeze over.’

  ‘I expect I shall manage,’ he said. ‘Poor sight is something I’ve learnt to live with.’

  I turned my face away from the sea. There was a stiff breeze blowing and I swear I could smell, mixed with the faintest trace of cooling, mushed apple, the aroma of pork crackling basted in hot honey.

  ‘Uncle Bill,’ asked Cherry suddenly, still kicking at the sand in that boyish way. ‘Is it true that adversity brings out the best in men?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied promptly. ‘Good men, that is’, and looked him straight in the eye, knowing he was thinking of the journey ahead and whether he was up to it, and wanting to tell him, without using words, that in my book he was.

  ‘Men from our background,’ I explained, ‘are at an advantage. They’ve been schooled to accept things, not to argue the toss once the umpire has made a decision. Abiding by the rules is a great help, you know … it does away with introspection, leaves one free to get on with the game.’

  ‘I was never very much good at sport,’ Cherry said, ‘on account of my eyesight … apart from rowing, that is, though even there I failed to get a blue. I’m afraid I was a disappointment to my father’, and he smiled at me apologetically, as if I was someone else he’d let down.

  I shirked taking him up on this, having been told about his father by Con, who maintains that the reason Cherry didn’t do well at Oxford was because his old man treated him like a skivvy during the vacations.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ I said, ‘what hell Royds went through in 1901 trying to pit his will against Scott’s. He simply couldn’t accept authority, any more than could Shackleton.’

  I didn’t think it fit to say more. I’d remembered the morning Shackleton accidentally burned a hole in the tent floor while cooking, and the broadside Con gave him. It had happened many times before, this spilling of oil and the subsequent blaze. We’d all done it, including Con. It’s hard to behave like a Boy Scout boiling a billycan on the village green when the cold has paralysed one’s mind and swollen one’s fingers to the size of bananas. Taff Evans hadn’t got a wigging. On the contrary, Con had told him not to worry and that he was sure we were all grateful for the warmth, however unexpected – but then Con has always had an exaggerated regard for the lower classes.

  Some two days after Shackleton had set alight to the ground sheet he and I were employed in packing sledges. I daresay we were making a fair amount of noise, he laughing and me protesting at an indelicate story he’d just spun concerning a Grenadier Guard and an amorous batman. In those days, having been married for less than two months, I was far more prudish than I am now and I seem to remember I was trying to stuff his head into one of the sleeping bags. Just then Con came out of his tent and shouted, ‘Come here, you bloody fools’, only he used a stronger word.

  Going up to him I said, ‘I trust you weren’t speaking to me, Con?’ and he said, ‘No, I wasn’t, Bill.’

  ‘In that case,’ Shackeleton challenged, ‘you meant me’, at which Con stared him out. ‘Right,’ said Shackleton, standing his ground like a bantam cock, ‘perhaps you should bear this in mind. You’re the worst – fool of the lot, with – bells on.’

  It wasn’t until some years later I realised Con was upset at me for being so pally with Shackleton. He’d taken it on board that I was his man. That and the fact that earlier, while trying to get the dogs into the traces, he’d been bitten by one of the bitches.

  With Con it’s all or nothing, which is in part why I admire him. It sounds blasphemous, but one only has the energy to die for one man at a time.

  ‘Is it nothing more than a game?’ asked Cherry, wistfully, staring at me owl-eyed. Re-tying the laces of my boot, I stood up and busied myself with the fastenings of my backpack. I didn’t consider it advisable to continue the discussion; one can never be sure where such conversations may lead.

  We followed the shore line until we came to East Bay, where the sheer wall of Noah’s Ark mountain, rust red in the sunlight, dropped into the angry surf. There wasn’t a beach as such, merely a tumbled floor of shattered rocks over which lay solidified streams of black lava. I’m constrained to think, from the quantity of debris and the tempestuous shapes which mimic the surge of waves, that the mountain was once an active volcano.

  We proceeded on our way until we came to the magnificent tunnel known as the Archway which connects South West Bay with East Bay. The water gushing through this natural aperture is black as pitch, save where the frenzied spray spurts upwards and dissolves on the rose-red crags of the outer walls. I wanted to get out my sketching pad there and then, but there was simply nowhere to sit.

  Cherry amused himself by trying to harpoon a seasnake in one of the pools. It was about five feet in length, of a grey colour striped with yellow, and once speared it twisted and bucked so violently that Cherry almost lost it. Much to his surprise it succeeded in biting him on the elbow, at which he swore loudly. Though I don’t, as a rule, approve of bad language, it’s rather a good sign in Cherry.

  After examining the wound to make sure it wasn’t deep, I told him to walk further out and bathe his arm in salt water. He hadn’t been gone more than a few minutes when he let out a shout and I saw he was struggling with something caught between the rocks. He returned carrying a biscuit tin which he shook excitedly under my nose.

  ‘There’s something in it, Uncle Bill,’ he said. ‘Something heavy’, and prising off the corroded lid he shook out another smaller tin with the likeness of Queen Victoria, much disfigured by sea water, stamped on the lid.

  He spent the greater part of the walk back to West Bay trying to open the second box, without success. It was quite comical to watch him labouring away at the lid with his knife. I had earlier told him of the legend of buried treasure on the Island, gold and silver plate plundered from Peruvian churches, and I think he fully expected his little tin to contain some ancient map with a cross marking the spot.

  When we reached our original landing place we were aghast to find a southerly swell rolling in and huge breakers bursting with a noise of thunder upon the beach. The natural pier was half torn away and we had a devil of a job getting a rope to the pram and swimming out with it to the whaler. Until it was my turn to cast off I sat on a crag munching a biscuit. Afterwards Birdie said my coolness had been an inspiration, and I hadn’t the heart to disillusion him; the fact is, I’d got cramp.

  All our specimens had to be left behind – Lillie’s plants, my eggs, Oates’s birds, Birdie’s butterflies and spiders, as well as our guns, watches and notebooks. Oates was dreadfully put out at having to abandon the huge frigate, or man-of-war bird, he had slaughtered below the Ninepin, its wings measuring at least seventeen feet across at full spread. Worse, Seaman Murphy was considered too weak to fight the heaving seas. Atkinson elected to stay with him. Having dug out the rum and helped gather a pile of dead wood, we left them our outer clothing and plunged into the mountainous waves.

  None of us slept well that night. The noise of the surf pounding on the beach was enough to waken the dead. The Terra Nova pitched l
ike a cork; even Oates, a man with a cast-iron stomach, could be seen clinging to the rails in the small hours. We could see the glow from Atkinson’s fire and the sparks showering in the darkness.

  Cherry had at last managed to open his tin, to find nothing more thrilling than a folded page torn from The Times newspaper of 1853 with a curious article to do with Gladstone encircled in faded ink. Coming home from the opera the great man had been accosted by a loose woman who had burst into tears and insisted on telling him of the several misfortunes which had led her to such a life. In the middle of this pathetic dialogue a man had stepped from the shadows and, addressing Gladstone by name, threatened to expose him in the Morning Herald unless he was given a sum of money, there and then, or a position as a clerk in Somerset House. The fact that the man’s name was Wilson tickled everyone in the ward-room; I daresay the joke will run for weeks.

  Still, it’s interesting to wonder how such a salacious item from the past found its way to a deserted island. The Wilson in question was given twelve months hard labour. Teddy Evans has got it into his head that after his release the fellow signed on board some ship bound for the Cape, and either the vessel sank with all hands or Wilson died at sea and the captain slid him and his belongings overboard.

  Oates, being more complex than Teddy, was intrigued by Gladstone rather than Wilson. He argued there was no smoke without fire, and what was a man in Gladstone’s position doing walking home? ‘I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt as regards innocent involvement,’ he said. ‘But I won’t excuse his stupidity.’

  The next morning the sky was stormy and if anything the sea wilder than on the previous night. We could see the surf breaking over rocks at least sixty foot in height. The wind was blowing in strong gusts right offshore, pushing the crests of the incoming waves into great veils of spray, bright with rainbows as the sun blazed through the clouds.

  It was decided that Rennick, Bowers, Teddy Evans, Oates and myself should take the pram and the whaler in to rescue the castaways. With hindsight it was perhaps unwise of Teddy to insist on going with us. As commander of the ship it would have been unfortunate if he had come to any harm. In my capacity as chief of the scientific staff I too should have stayed behind; the truth is neither of us wanted to miss the fun.

  The first idea had been to fire a rocket line to the edge of the cliff for Atkinson and the seaman to get a hold of. We realised at the second attempt that it was hopeless; the wind was too strong and the angle of the cliff all wrong. Birdie and Rennick got in the pram and somehow managed to get out a line to the shore for the gear to be taken off. It was our job to warn them of any big waves coming up behind. Time and again we bellowed ‘Look out!’, at which Birdie and Rennick rowed like the devil to pull away. I lost count of how often the line tore free. Everyone knows how the ocean swell moves in a regular rhythm, how at intervals two or three greater waves than usual come up one after the other, to be followed by a comparative calm during which, with skill, a boat can be swept ashore. Trouble was, we didn’t want to be beached, for in such seas we’d never have got off again.

  At last, during one of the brief lulls, Atkinson waded close enough to throw some of the gear into the pram, and some quarter of an hour after this triumph Rennick managed to drag the sick seaman aboard, Birdie leaping out into the surf to change places with him and steady the stern. The next moment the pram flew out in the backwash and Birdie disappeared under a torrent of water to emerge thirty long seconds later, twelve feet up on the rocks. I could see him scrambling for dear life away from the suck of a second huge wave that roared after him. The odd thing was, while his old brown tennis pumps were torn from his feet and never seen again, his treasured green hat remained firmly anchored to his head.

  Evans and myself hauled the pram alongside the whaler and tumbled Rennick and Seaman Murphy over the gunnel. Then, despite my protests, Evans and Oates jumped into the pram and made again for the shore. By running down between waves Birdie got the guns, cameras and specimen cases aboard, at which we all cheered. Alas, we were premature, for the next instant a gigantic curl of water hurled the pram forward, Oates and Evans diving headlong into the boiling surf a split second before the following wave washed her high onto the rocks.

  A pram is a marvellously buoyant little boat, yet such manoeuvres were immensely risky, and Rennick and I yelled ourselves hoarse ordering the men to abandon everything and return. To no avail; if I could have got my hands on Birdie I might have throttled him, so great was my anger. There were moments when the clap of the waves sounded like the beating of monstrous wings, and I feared that the silver bird of death had all along been searching for Birdie, not me, and would soon find him in the heaving depths.

  For those involved in their battle with the sea, alternately submerged and clawing their way to the surface, time – as they afterwards recounted – passed with the swiftness of a disconnected dream. We who watched, expecting any moment that one or other would be drowned, remained in the grip of a nightmare which lasted six insufferable hours.

  In the end the gear was lashed to buoys, thrown into the sea and somehow dragged into the whaler. The day’s collection of ants, cockroaches and locusts, Birdie’s fifteen different species of spider, and the blue sea crabs in which Atkinson later discovered a hitherto unknown nematode, were all but ruined by salt water. As for the eggs Cherry and I had so carefully gathered, we pitched the resulting fishy-smelling mess into the waves. My watch was lost, along with a leather wallet in which I kept a snapshot of my father. I daresay the latter will find its way back to the beach, where, God knows how many years hence, some other visitors may find it and view it with as much puzzlement as Cherry’s page of The Times.

  Surprisingly, apart from a quantity of gashed ankles and bruised ribs, no one was any the worse for wear. True, Atkinson and Seaman Murphy had spent a ghastly night kept awake by the sinister slithering of the land crabs and the melancholy cries of the numerous terns – a sound Murphy likened to the plucking of banjo strings – but one could tell from the sparkle in their eyes that such memories had been quite washed away in the exhilaration of their rescue.

  Indeed everyone concerned behaved as if they’d just returned from a particularly lively party, and could have been mistaken, from their unnaturally loud voices and swaggering gait, for men in the grip of alcoholic stimulation. Oates, wild-eyed and in the middle of telling me how he had felt as weightless as a balloon – ‘My dear Bill, you have no idea how I floated, yes floated, up the side of that damned cliff’ – suddenly fell fast asleep across the wardroom table, a position he remained in for the next twelve hours.

  Atkinson, Lillie and I stayed up all night in our separate workrooms, attempting to salvage what we could of the waterlogged specimens. I was uncomfortably aware that the scientific results of the Discovery expedition of 1901 had come under heavy criticism from the President of the Physical Society, who had gone so far as to suggest that Con should undergo a scientific court martial. Fortunately, it was the meteorological observations that had come most under fire – some error had occurred in the confusing of true and magnetic compass bearings – but I didn’t want to take any chances and was determined to save as many of the birds as possible.

  At sunrise, Birdie sought me out in my laboratory. He’d slept in his hat and it had buckled into the most extraordinary shape above his left ear. He also had a bruise across the bridge of his nose and looked altogether the pirate.

  ‘Did I tell you about my Captain on the Worcester,’ he said, looking down at the skeleton of the magnificent man-o’-war bird brought down by Oates. ‘He taught me all I know about the skinning and preserving of birds … not that it amounts to much.’

  ‘You have mentioned him,’ I said.

  ‘He was a great man. He once said, not to me, but to a cadet who had got himself into debt, “Never be particular about money, unless it’s not your own.” I’ve never forgotten that.’

  ‘I don’t wonder,’ I said. I was still angry with him fo
r taking such risks the previous day I had been going to tell him that only hours before we landed on South Trinidad, Campbell had told me he wanted him for the Eastern party set to explore Edward VII Land. He’d asked if I’d put in a good word with Con when we reached the Cape. I’d said I wouldn’t, as I had every intention of recommending him for the shore party. After his recent reckless behaviour I didn’t feel Birdie deserved to be acquainted with such proof of his capabilities, let alone his popularity.

  He sensed I was fed up with him. ‘Uncle Bill,’ he said, looking as close to contrite as that ridiculous hat would allow, ‘I expect we gave you a lot of worry yesterday. I do assure you we were never in any danger.’

  ‘I’m going to have to revise my classification of the petrels,’ I said. ‘I had thought the black-breasted ones to be a different species from the white, but Cherry and I found them nesting together.’

  ‘I never thought otherwise,’ he replied. ‘Black, white, yellow, we all have the same needs, though I’ve never considered the black-breasted kind to be the equal of the white,’ and at that I couldn’t help laughing, and so forgave him.

  Later that day, we set sail in green seas, the southern rollers lifting us like a shuttlecock. I was still skinning in the laboratory when Birdie brought in my cocoa at ten o’clock. ‘Do you know what, Uncle Bill?’ he said. ‘Don’t let on to the other chaps, but I’ve just remembered it’s my birthday.’

  At that moment the ship wallowed sickeningly and shuddered; the monotonous chonk-chonk of the screw missed a beat. I slid sideways from the sink, my cocoa slopping onto the linoleum.