by Joan Aiken
“You’d better wait,” muttered Singer Jones, “or Cap’ll feed you to the tiburones.” And he shunted his jaw sideways with a meaning leer.
The boat’s crew seemed haloed with gold to Miss Roe as they pulled towards her. Actually they were as unsavoury a load as might have been found anywhere in the South Pacific, and their captain was a fit leader for them.
Valentino MacTavish mooched about the ocean with his unshaven crew and his shocking old ship full of unmentionable cargoes, carrying on a dozen illegal trades, engaging in acts of minor piracy when it seemed safe, wanted by the police of every large port but always slipping away just before the net descended.
“Man!” said Valentino MacTavish, eyeing Miss Roe with the incredulity of a cat that sees a whole Dover sole laid on its dish. And he helped her over the gunwale.
She noticed first that the Aurora seemed full of dirty washing and sardine tins; second, that the captain, though very attentive in a queer way, was not much like Alec Guinness, her ideal of seamanly beauty; third, that the crew, huddled together in the waist, seemed jeeringly in awe of their captain; fourth, that the two totalitarian mice in her collar were becoming restive, possibly because their sharp nostrils detected the odour of proletarian comrades somewhere near at hand.
“I should like to wash my hands, please,” she said, and was taken with suspicious promptitude to Valentino’s cabin.
The mess and clutter depressed her. She found herself regretting the tidy island and friendly mice, feeling homesick.
She shook Afi and Anep out of her collar, and they rushed greedily about the floor, questing and roving among the discarded underwear and heady unfamiliar smells, presently making off down holes in the panelling to preach equality and the rights of mice. From time to time they darted joyously back to report on their successes with the ship’s rodent population.
“Do be careful!” Miss Roe exclaimed anxiously. “The captain said he was coming back soon to show me round.”
“We won’t let him see us.”
They waved their tails in reassurance.
As it happened, they were both sitting on her shoulders, Anep telling her how he had set up committees to form trade unions, Afi reporting a lecture he had delivered to the boiler-room mice on the need for collective ownership of the means of production—when the door opened and Captain MacTavish came in. There was just time to fly under her collar once more.
Valentino carried a bottle of palm wine under his arm. He had already drunk half of it. Now he took another swig, put down the bottle, and advanced on Miss Roe in a purposeful manner.
His mind was fuddled with drink, a suspicion that his crew were laughing at him, and the need for asserting his authority. A core of anger, mainly at himself, burnt in him; his eyes were bloodshot, shamed, and lustful. In many ways he was a piteous object.
To his astonishment, when he laid hold of the petrified Miss Roe, his amatory intentions were interrupted by a series of savage, needlesharp stabs in his left wrist and right forearm.
He shrieked, clawing at his arms, and shrieked again as, like animated scalpels, the two mice dived for his most vulnerable points.
The crew heard shrieks coming from the cabin, but this was a commonplace. True, the voice sounded like the captain’s rather than the girl’s, but Valentino was an eccentric, and it would have been the height of indelicacy to intrude—and, anyway, more than their lives were worth.
They settled down on the after-hatch, throwing numbered sardine tins for the chance of being next with the girl.
A couple of hours later someone gave a shout, and the crew, focusing their eyes as best they could, saw a raft drifting in the Aurora’s direction.
“Hey, fellas, there’s someone on it.”
“It’s the crazy Swede. You know? Olaf Myrdal.”
“Think we oughta tell Cap?”
“Better not.”
“Ah, shucks, we can disturb him by now, surely?”
Ant went down and peered through the cabin keyhole. The yell he let out brought the rest of the crew running, and in panicked incredulity they broke open the door.
Miss Roe was lying on the floor, deeply unconscious. At some distance from her lay a skeleton, white and shining.
It was not until Singer touched the bones and discovered them to be warm that real terror set in.
“Where in heck’s it come from?” bellowed Ant, frightened and sweating, looking for reassurance to the others.
“Where’s Cap?”
“But look—look,” stuttered Dice Morgan. “Look at that finger!”
They looked. On a metacarpal bone shone a band of tarnished gold with a familiar amethyst. The captain had been something of a dandy.
“Good sakes!” breathed Ant. “It’s him! It is Cap!” Fear soon finds relief in vengeance.
“The girl’s done it! Drop her over the side! Feed her to the sharks. She’s a witch, she’s a Jonah.”
Several of the crew were averse to touching Miss Roe at all, but Singer was not so particular, and he dragged her unconscious body on deck.
“Why not put her on the raft?” suggested Dice brilliantly. “We don’t want her haunting us. We drop her overboard, the sharks eat her, we get her duppy climbing up the side every night and pulling us in by the ankles. Put her on the raft, let her haunt the loony Swede.”
There was a chorus of agreement.
They hailed the raft, which was now floating past their stern.
“Hi there, you Swede! Will you take a bit of cargo for us?”
The Swede came to the door of his little cabin and surveyed them coldly.
“I wish for nothing that has been on your ship,” he said. But already two men had grappled the raft alongside, and two more wrapped Miss Roe’s body in a tarpaulin and rolled it over the gunwale. More by luck than judgment it fell on the balsawood deck of the raft.
“Adios, amigos!” shouted the crew of Aurora, leaning over the stern-rail and waving. “Have a happy honeymoon! Mind she don’t turn you to a skellington, Swedey! Disconnecta dem dry bones!”
They drew away.The Swede reluctantly removed the wrappings from the bundle they had tossed him. When he saw Miss Roe, his expression of disapproval deepened. He scooped up a dipper of seawater and dashed it in her face.
Presently she came to, looked round her, and shuddered.
“Did they hurt you ?” he said.
Her eyes slowly took him in—his bigness, his slow, gentle movements, his look of rather severe intelligence.
“Who are you? You don’t look like those men.” She pulled herself to a sitting position. “Am I still on the ship?”
“You are not on the ship, no. They threw you off. Have they injured you?”
Her eyes dilated. “He was going to—that captain! But the mice—it was horrible!” Suddenly she stiffened. “The mice! Afi and Anep—where are they?”
Afi ran from her collar and rubbed affectionately against her chin. She stroked him in relief. The Swede’s expression softened as he observed this exchange. But then Miss Roe burst into tears.
“Do not cry, young lady. I do not know what you were doing on that ship, and I may say frankly that I did not wish for a passenger, especially a female one, but I think you are better off here than there. Wait, and I will make some seaweed tea. My name is Olaf Myrdal,” he added with a certain dignity. “You may have heard of me.”
“It’s my mouse,” sobbed poor Miss Roe, unheeding. “The other mouse, Anep! He’s been left on that ship. Oh please, please go back and fetch him.”
“Impossible, my dear child,” he said gently. “That ship has a far greater command of speed than my raft, and, as you can see, it is nearly five miles ahead of us.”
Since Miss Roe continued to weep unrestrainedly, he said after a while, with a slightly admonishing air, “I think you had better tell me all about it.”
Miss Roe calmed down as she told her story. She couldn’t help liking and trusting this tall, quiet man with his long sweeping go
lden beard and his benign expression.
The expression changed to one of qualified surprise as her story proceeded.
“So!” he said. “An island of intelligent mice. I should indeed like to call there. And you can communicate with them?”
“Yes,” said Miss Roe, wiping her eyes, “we used to have ever such nice talks in the evenings. You’d be surprised what a lot goes through their little heads.”
“This mouse you have here is one of them?”
Afi was prospecting busily about the raft, sniffing, tasting, and scrutinising.
“Can you request your small friend to come here?”
Miss Roe called Afi, who ran confidingly up her leg and from the eminence of her wrist looked in a searching manner at Myrdal.
“Does this man come from your country?” he asked Miss Roe. She shook her head. “Excellent,” the mouse remarked, “then perhaps he can tell me things you do not know. Ask if in his land they have nationalised the means of production?”
Miss Roe translated this as best she could. Myrdal’s eyebrows shot up.
“Doesn’t he know?” said Afi, disappointed. “Well, ask him if he is familiar with these concepts: the transition of quantity into quality, the negation of the negation, the interpenetration of opposites?”
“Merciful heavens!” exclaimed the Swede. “To think that I, who have come to sea in order to escape once and for all from mankind’s violence and the conflicts of warring ideologies, should have run up against a Marxist mouse.”
Miss Roe, accustomed to the philosophical talk of her mouse friends, was still unhappy.
“What about poor Anep,” she mourned, “alone on that ship, among those dreadful men?”
“He will be in no danger. If, as you tell me, he has already organised the ship’s mice into trade unions, it is for the men that you should fear. Already they are doomed. Already, maybe, they have suffered the fate of their captain. And when the ship reaches port, what then? I believe that you have loosed on mankind, unwittingly, a greater destructive force than the hydrogen bomb. The age of men is ended; that of mice is about to begin.”
“Oh dear,” said Miss Roe. “Do you think we might have some of that seaweed tea you talked about?” It always took her a little while to assimilate an idea.
“When do we reach port?” she asked later, sipping the hot green fluid.
“Never.”
“Never? But—”
“Did I not tell you that I came to sea to escape from violence? More than ever now it will be necessary to stay away from the world of men. I have ample resources on the raft—the works of Strindberg, Ibsen, Thomas Hardy, Voltaire, and Shakespeare.”
Miss Roe seemed doubtful of these benefits. Then she brightened. “Couldn’t we go back to my island?”
“My dear girl, there is nothing I should like better, in due course. But for the moment it would be out of the question. Afi is now a potential menace to the island’s peace, since he has had experience of the efficacy of violence. Also—though this is merely a personal consideration—our own lives might be in danger if he were able to tell the other mice about the experiment with Captain MacTavish. They might wish to repeat it—especially as you promised not to reveal their existence and have done so.”
“Yes—I see.” But Miss Roe could hardly believe it of her dear mice.
“Mice do not live long,” pronounced Olaf. “We can afford to drift for a year or two, until Afi dies of old age, before we return.”
“Poor Afi ! He will be rather bored. He was hoping to get to Australia.”
“I shall learn his language and teach him Swedish; we shall have philosophical discussions. I shall read him Strindberg, also.”
“I suppose you haven’t any wool or knitting needles, have you?” said Miss Roe wistfully, feeling a little left out by this programme. He shook his head.
“Another thing,” he said. “We must be married. For a young girl and a man, even a philosopher like me, to drift about the ocean on a raft without matrimony is not at all seemly.”
Married! Miss Roe stared in surprise that approached consternation at this godlike being who spoke the word so matter-of-factly. Never, never, in her wildest dreams . . .
“But how could we?” she said. “There’s no church, no clergyman?”
“Marriage before witnesses is quite correct at sea. Your friend down there is rational—he will do admirably as a witness.”
Miss Roe’s eyes began to shine. This put a different complexion on things. If she were married to this Mr Myrdal, he would not seem quite so alarming; and she could endure the solemnity of drifting about the Pacific reading Strindberg aloud to a mouse if she was graced with the status of a married woman.
“But mind,” he said, “no children!”
“No children?” She was dreadfully cast down. “But if all the world is going to be overrun with mice, surely it’s our duty—?”
“My belief is that the human race is due to expire. It shall not be our part to prolong its death-throes.”
“Oh dear,” said Miss Roe again.
The simple marriage ceremony was performed. Afterwards Olaf and Afi, who had taken a great fancy to one another, settled down to a discussion of the philosophy of Kant.
Miss Roe, now Mrs Myrdal, stretched out in the rays of the setting sun, chin propped on elbows, and watched them. He was nice, her new husband, she decided: a bit silly with all his fanciful ideas perhaps, a bit grand and dignified, but ever so kind! And all men had to be learnt and managed. It was a shame about the children, though; she had already planned to ask if she couldn’t snip off a bit of that long, golden beard. It would knit up lovely into tiny bootees.
Oh well—she stretched, and rolled over into the last of the sunshine—there would be plenty of time to persuade him to change his mind.
Harp Music
It wasn’t till long afterwards that Father told me about his journey home with the harp. At the time it had gone too deep.
It all began one morning when I was cleaning the windows of the bus we lived in. There were a lot of windows, and they took a lot of cleaning, but when you’d done justice to them and the sun came out the effect was fine.
Father was asleep after night-shift, in the big double folding bed, and Coffee the cat was stretched out at full stretch on top of him. They were both very large, and they had found that was more satisfactory than trying to partition the bed between them.
I’d finished the main windows and was in the cab, which we’d converted to other uses by taking out the driving seat. I was just giving the windscreen a final polish when I heard bumping and realised with astonishment that Father was getting up of his own accord—getting up without my beseeching and begging and bullying him to do so, without even a cup of tea. There was a clink as he put the teapot on the stove to boil up, and I went in to see what was going on.
“It’s not time for you to wake yet,” I said. “Only half past eleven.”
“I’m going out to buy a harp,” Father said, pulling his belt through the slots that he always cut in the tops of his trousers.
He was amazingly cheerful. Normally he hated the whole process of washing and dressing; he’d get through it as fast as possible in a glum silence. But this morning he burst into song, a song about virgin sturgeon of which the less quoted the better. When I came back from emptying my bucket, I was thunderstruck to see that Father had on his old A.R.P. warden’s coat and was gulping a hasty pint of boiling, rust-coloured tea before leaving.
“Don’t you want any breakfast?” I said.
“No,” he said. He didn’t eat much breakfast at the best of times, and never before he’d been up and smoking for an hour.
He went outside and took the tarpaulin off his bicycle. “See you at midnight.”
“Won’t you be back before?” I said.
“I told you, I’m going to buy a harp.” He started off across the field. Midway, a thought struck him. He turned and summoned me with wavings of his arms. I tr
otted across.
“Oh, by the way,” he said, “there’s a girl coming to leave some things.”
“A girl?”
“Yes,” he said impatiently. “A girl from the office.” Father was a rewrite man at a news agency. “She’s divorcing her husband. They can’t agree about which of their belongings are his and which are hers, so she wants to leave a couple of her treasures with me for safekeeping in case he tries to grab them and hide them away. I said she could.”
“What are the things?”
“Heaven knows. A clock, maybe, or a typewriter.”
“We haven’t much space,” I said, looking doubtfully back at the bus. It was only a single-decker.
“It won’t be for more than a month or two. Till the divorce is through,” Father said optimistically. He got on his bike again.
“What’s her name?” I called.
“Can’t remember. Beryl something. What are those bread things you put in soup?” he called back.
“Croutons?”
“That’s it. Well—be seeing you.” This time he really was off.
I went back to the bus feeling rather forlorn, resenting this Mrs Crouton, and folded up the bed with a heave and a clang. Then I had to unfold it again because Coffee the cat was still inside.
At about half past two I heard a tap on the window and sticking my head out I saw a pretty but distracted-looking redhead. She was rather shabbily dressed, but the tiny man beside her might just that minute have stepped out of a polythene bag. Beyond the field gate stood an enormous car. A queer thread of sound which I couldn’t identify seemed to be coming from the front of the bus. I went outside and the noise identified itself; a baby in a pram was parked by the bonnet.
“Are you Mrs Crouton?” I said. A horrible feeling of uneasiness was beginning to grow in me.
“Crouton?” she said, seeming surprised. “No, I’m Beryl Sippett. Are you Sean Ross?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, good. Your father said I could leave my baby here.”