by John Harris
‘Harry.’ He looked up at her quickly as she used his Christian name for the first time. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘Do it? Do what?’
‘Go in with this man, Duffy. It was a bit barmy for a man with your ability, wasn’t it?’
He shrugged. ‘I dunno. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Grace.’
She thought of his increasing kindness to Teresa, his unexpected gentleness, and the understanding towards herself; how he’d quelled the incipient riot in the saloon; how he’d quietened Dodgin and subdued the hostile Phizacklea and got Grundy gaping in wonder at him. They all seemed to have been singed a little by that personality of his. He had infinite riches in his character which were wasted on the shoddy dealings he indulged in.
She sat on the edge of the bunk staring down at him for a while, an expression of sadness on her face. Then she shook her head and lay back with a soft moan as all the aches and pains made themselves felt.
‘All the same,’ she said slowly, ‘I should have thought with your ability you could have picked your job. You’ve got everything.’
He shook his head. ‘Everything but staying power.’
She was surprised at the humility in his words.
He lay back so that he seemed to cover the entire deck space in the cabin and stretched wearily yet tirelessly, appearing to dismiss the subject from his mind.
‘Look out for the old bugs,’ he said. ‘There are bound to be a few.’
He turned and grinned up at her, then before she could question him any more, he reached up and switched off the light.
Four
Grace woke slowly the following morning. As consciousness flooded back over her, she stared upwards with the feeling that she’d come to life inside a coffin. For a moment, until reality came to her with a violent jerk, she lay tense and rigid, her breath held, suddenly terrified. The terror lasted only for a moment, however, then as her brain reidentified itself with the world, she realized she was still in Captain Phizacklea’s bunk with her head on a pillow that smelled strongly of stale tobacco.
Slowly she turned and looked round the cabin, a shabby place with a cracked washbasin and a spotted mirror, the door, the walls, festooned with dirty clothes. Stuck into the mirror at the opposite side of the cabin from the picture of the dead Captain and his lady, as though they were two worlds he’d tried to keep apart, were three or four postcards bearing the faces of girls; and more girls, nude and seminude in provocative positions, cut from magazines, were pasted on the bulkhead beside the bunk.
She lay for a moment, remembering how the naked feel of the iron side of the bunk had chilled her during the night and she had awakened to hear a dim squeaking somewhere outside the cabin. Remembering the old engineer’s words, she had held her breath in the sort of terror that normal things never produced in her, as she had realized the sound was caused by rats; and she had lain awake for hours conscious of Ash’s dry snoring from the deck beside her and the odour of hides and potatoes that mingled with all the dreary background scents of the Ballaculish which came from the rotten remains in her holds of all the cargoes she’d ever carried.
As the memory of the previous night returned to her, she wished immediately like a child that she were asleep again and safe. Then, remembering Ash, she sat up quickly, her breathing growing more normal as an unbelievable reassurance spread through her limbs at the thought of him.
There was no indication beyond a neatly folded blanket on the deck that he’d ever been in the cabin though, and with a start she realized that the bunk where Teresa had been was empty too. For an agonized moment, she thought she had lost her somewhere, that she had failed in what she had set out to do, then over the buzz of voices on deck and a steady hammering above her head, she heard a shout she recognized as the child’s squeaky voice and the fear subsided again.
Climbing out of the bunk, she washed herself slowly to the accompaniment of the rattling of steam in the ancient pipes, a complete jazz orchestra of complaints as though the entire plumbing system was protesting against her using it. Cooling the scalding water in the bowl with cold from a chipped enamel jug under the bunk, she forced herself to take her time as nervousness and a vague feeling of claustrophobia that was brought on by the stuffy little cabin tried to edge her out into the fresh air.
As she went on deck, she saw there was a hint of fog across the horizon, veiling the water and the flat lands of the riverside half a mile away, but beyond the alders along the bank she could still see the countryside falling away from the bluff on which Santa Rosa was situated, dull and unbroken except for the trees in and around the town. The willows on the Isla des Flores where the Saolito ran into the mainstream were reflected like mourners in the flat satin of the water and the few heron and water fowl that splashed about in the wild tangle of the shallows stood out darkly against the reflected silver.
Somewhere beyond the reeds, she could hear the klaxon hooter of a boat as it probed slowly into the mist, then she saw Teresa on the stern of the ship, silhouetted against the golden smokiness, holding a fishing line someone had obviously loaned her and trying to direct her spittle at the water as she stared downwards at some activity below. The child looked up as she approached, and came bounding towards her.
‘Hurry, Grace,’ she squeaked. ‘Or you’ll miss it. A boat came. Mr Ash’s going ashore. They want somebody. There’s an officer in it.’
Her vitality, her apparent ignorance of their danger seemed to bring Grace back to life, for she seemed to have suffered little harm from the incident the previous night. Indeed, to judge from the hurried garbled message, she was bursting with excitement and interest.
She grabbed Grace’s hand and dragged her along the deck towards the stern, indicating the snaky hoses coiled in the scuppers, the wire strops and the timbers the crew had used.
‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Mr Ash said we were jolly lucky to be alive.’
Thankful for her untouched sanity, Grace picked her way across the debris to where she could see a group of Lascars staring over the rails. By the ship’s side was a small grey launch with a canvas dodger, handled by a corporal with a heavy revolver hanging crookedly at his waist, dragging his uniform out of shape. In the stern, where she could see the words “US Coastguard” carefully painted over with grey paint, stood a thin young man in officer’s uniform.
The crew of the Ballaculish were all hanging over the side of the ship, staring downwards, Dodgin in a grubby white apron and checked linen trousers, and Dainty, the old engineer, grey-faced and smelling of whisky, his mop cap on his head like some travesty of a maidservant.
Then she saw Ash, shouting in Spanish down to the launch. He was shaved to the bone and clean. He had obviously borrowed a white shirt and he looked spruce and wholesome with the superficiality blown out of him by the explosion that had smashed the life from Captain Phizacklea.
As she came up to him, he put his arm round her waist without looking round, as though he included her instinctively in anything he did, and went on shouting to the man in the boat. Finally he turned to her and explained.
‘They want someone to go ashore,’ he said. ‘They say we were fired on by mistake. There was trouble in the town and that bloody clown of a major forgot to warn the battery on the Punta de las Rosas. I expect he’s due for a rocket and he’s trying to put it right. This bloke’s come out to fix it. Not the one with the head like the wedge of cheese and hands like coal grabs. He’s just the cox’n. The other one.’
He indicated the officer in the launch, his breeziness undiminished. He had a hungry excited look about him and she decided he had probably meant it after all the previous night when he had said he wouldn’t have missed the incident for anything.
Then she felt his hands on her waist as he pulled her aside, and a couple of Lascar firemen appeared on deck carrying the silent figure of the mate, lashed to a narrow door. The grey face seemed to be devoid of life and Grace held on to Teresa as sh
e pushed forward to look.
They made the injured man secure and using a small davit by the rail, lowered him, door and all, over the side and down to the launch. Two of the Lascars climbed down after him and arranged the improvised stretcher under the canvas awning, and the blanket-wrapped body of the pilot followed.
‘Get a wriggle on,’ Ash shouted down to them, almost as though he were in charge, not Dainty. ‘We haven’t all day. We want to get him to a doctor before he hands in his chips.’
Grace turned to him, concern in her eyes. Suddenly, she was concerned, interested in him beyond the bounds of needing his help.
‘Are you really going ashore?’ she asked. She had half expected him to come to the conclusion that the sorry crew of the Ballaculish weren’t worth saving.
‘I haven’t thought of an excuse not to yet,’ he said. ‘Still, if I see that bloody major, I’ll tear him such a strip off, he’ll not know whether to shoot himself or join the Guards.’ He seemed to relish the prospect of an argument and his eyes narrowed.
‘Will you be all right?’
‘Sure I’ll be all right. I told you I could sell pigtails to Chinamen. That little bloke down there’s already prepared to lay out the red carpet if necessary to keep us quiet. He’s as uneasy as a maiden lady going behind a bush. It’s a stone bonker really. The one thing they’ll want is to keep it as dark as they can.’
He seemed undisturbed at the likelihood of arrest and she suspected he actually enjoyed the chance of it as a change from routine; that any kind of excitement – even the excitement that had brought them so disastrously to a stop the night before – was worthwhile in the end, even if it meant trouble for him. For the first time, she felt she’d met a man who really thrived on trouble and she began to see him as a leftover swashbuckler from a less civilized age.
‘You’re taking a chance, aren’t you?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘Nothing to flap about. Not more than anybody else.’
Dainty appeared beside them as Ash turned away to the rail, and started handing papers to him. ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘Crew list. I’ve wrote out the names. And the names of them black bastards who nipped off last night. You’d better take the log, too. It’s got all our movements in. I’ve just wrote ’em down. Contact someone in charge and get him to phone the agents. The name’s in the log. Then, for God’s sake, get us a pilot and let’s get out of here.’ He pushed his mop cap back. ‘This is a fine thing to happen at my time of life,’ he said. ‘I don’t know nothing about international incidents.’
It was a cry of despair from a man caught up in something too big for him, from an old man who had hidden too long in the dim bowels of the ship to wish to be forced out into the light, and Ash patted his shoulder comfortingly in what seemed to Grace a ludicrous gesture.
Dodgin was carrying on a conversation with the man in the launch now, alone out of all the crew in his undefeated aggressiveness, pushing Grundy to one side in his efforts to hang over the rail.
‘Coming now, mate,’ he shouted down. ‘Won’t be long. And see he comes back, too, you greasy-looking bastard.’
The officer nodded and smiled, quite uncomprehending.
‘Suppose you don’t come back,’ Grace said.
‘I will.’ Ash grinned, one foot on the rail. ‘Flushed with triumph and garlanded with glory. Leave it to me. I’ll nancy it up till they think they’ve sunk the Queen Mary. Just watch me blind ’em with science.’
Dodgin reached over and patted his shoulder as he began to climb down, clearly confirmed already in his confidence in Ash. ‘Give ’em hell, mate,’ he said. ‘Give ’em one for me.’
By midday, the mist had disappeared from the river and the shadows cast by the trees across the flat banks had shortened as the sun rose to its zenith. Several times they heard guns in the distance and twice they saw aircraft swing overhead – once a flight of Meteors and later a single Lincoln bomber.
Beyond the willows, Grace could see the sparkle of geraniums and hydrangeas and the occasional purple of a jacaranda tree. From the ship’s new position, she could look now almost directly down one of Santa Rosa’s two main streets which, she remembered, intersected at right angles near the Plaza san Martín, but it was empty at the moment except for a broken-down cart and a few dogs.
Even on the ship, there seemed little sign of the previous night’s panic. One of the Lascar seamen was sitting on a bollard forward, arguing with a shipmate who was washing a singlet in a bucket with a bar of yellow soap, and she was amazed at the incredible ability of human beings to accept outrage and still continue with the normality of life.
From Dodgin’s galley came an aroma of stale fat frying which mingled unpleasantly with the stink of hides, and overside in a drifting line that pointed to the shore the floating tin cans glinted among the rubbish which had been flung overboard.
Dodgin and Dainty and Grundy were still hanging over the rails, staring morosely at the town.
‘I bet they’ve shoved him in the calabozo,’ Dainty was saying gloomily. ‘Just the sort of thing they would do, these Wops.’
Teresa tugged at Grace’s sleeve. ‘Will they put him in prison?’ she asked anxiously.
Grace turned her eyes to the frightening emptiness of the water. Somehow, without Ash around, the old ship depressed her unnaturally.
‘I shouldn’t think they could if they tried,’ she said.
‘I hope not. After all, he got us here, didn’t he?’
‘Yes. Yes, he did.’
‘Well, give him a chance,’ Teresa went on as though Ash were a subject dear to her heart, ‘and he’ll get us all the way, won’t he?’
Grace put her arm round the child’s shoulders, beginning to think also that he might.
‘Yes,’ she said fervently, ‘Give him the chance, he probably will.’
Even as she spoke, though, she wondered if she were being too confident, for she knew how easy it would be for him now to disappear again if he wished.
Slowly she began to be afraid that he wouldn’t return, and was pierced like an arrow to the heart by powerful internal terrors of being alone again. She glanced towards the shore, trying to imagine what was happening, and convinced now that he had actually gone, her helplessness fed her fears until she was sick with anger at him for something she didn’t even know he had done.
They all fell into a state of listlessness. Above them, a Lascar carpenter was nailing boards across the scar where the shell had landed, working in desultory snatches, one eye all the time on the river.
‘They’re pretty ’ard to ’andle, them foreign swaddies,’ Dainty was saying, still consumed with pessimism.
‘He’ll do all right,’ Dodgin replied confidently. ‘Better ’n any of us lot, anyway. At least, he speaks the lingo.’
Doubt about their safety was beginning to take root more firmly in Grace’s mind. It was encouraged by the growing fear that Ash, prompted by that strong sense of self-preservation of his, had taken the opportunity they’d offered to look after himself, then a flock of ducks paddling near the bend of the river, sped swiftly across the water, scattering as they went, and burst with a sound like hand-clapping into the air, bunching together as they flew. Beyond them she saw the launch rounding the reeds, the sun sparkling on its wake.
Immediately, they all realized there were half a dozen extra figures in it and they all began to speculate on who they were.
‘They’re soldiers,’ Dainty said gloomily. ‘They’ve got him under guard.’
A kitehawk screamed throatily as it swept down to inspect the rubbish that circled the ship and in the quietness they all looked up quickly at it. Then Dodgin gave a shout.
‘They’re not soldiers,’ he said, his voice lifting. ‘They’ve got them black bastards who nipped off. He’s brought ’em back, be Jesus!’
He began to laugh excitedly and, as the boat drew nearer, they could see the dark features and the blue dungarees of the missing Lascar firemen, and Grace was consciou
s of an inexplicable feeling of pleasure, a curious sense of pride and trust in Ash.
She found herself waving crazily with Teresa and was delighted when she received an answering wave and a thumbs-up sign that warmed her heart.
Five
While they were all laughing and slapping each other on the back, Grace left the deck and went below to the captain’s cabin, dizzy with a sick feeling of relief.
Teresa followed her, staring at her.
‘Are you all right, Gracie?’ she asked.
Grace nodded, not quite trusting herself to speak. There was nothing much that frightened her and nothing much that ever had, and ever since reaching the Ballaculish she had not suffered so much from fear as from uncertainty, from dread of the unknown and the vast responsibility for the child.
‘Yes,’ she said, pulling the child to her, half-smothering her in the warmth of her affection. ‘I’m all right. Trust your old Aunt Grace.’
‘Did Mr Ash fix it so we could go home?’
‘Sure!’ Grace was laughing and strangely elated without knowing why. ‘He fixed it, bless his cotton socks!’
‘He’s nice, isn’t he, Grace?’
Grace nodded. ‘He’s all right,’ she said.
In the course of her life, she had come across a great many men and she hadn’t much but contempt for any of them. She had long since found that basically they were all the same – tough until they couldn’t get what they wanted, then wheedling, childish and petulant to the point of behaving like spoiled children deprived of a treat. There hadn’t been one of them for whom she would have given up her cherished independence, yet her warm nature cried out continually for someone on whom she could lavish her generous love. And to find someone at last whom she could admire for a while left her with a strange shivering feeling of shock that was alien and unexpected.
‘He’s pretty smart,’ Teresa went on enthusiastically. ‘Don’t you think he’s smart, Grace?’