Bear Island

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘You levelling with me, Dr Marlowe?’

  ‘Of course. Or do you think I’m the invisible Borgia who’s flitting around, a little pinch here, a little pinch there?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I don’t think you’re levelling with me, either.’ His voice was sombre. ‘Maybe some day you are going to wish you were.’

  Some day I was going to wish I had, for then I wouldn’t have had to leave Smithy behind in Bear Island.

  * * *

  Back in the saloon, I picked up the booklet Goin had given me, went to the corner settee, found myself a steamer blanket, decided I didn’t require it yet and wedged myself into the corner, my feet comfortably on a swivel chair belonging to the nearest table. I picked up, without much interest, the cardboard file and was debating whether to open it when the lee door opened and Mary Stuart came in. There was snow on the tangled corn-coloured hair and she was wearing a heavy tweed coat.

  ‘So this is where you are.’ She banged the door shut and looked at me almost accusingly.

  ‘This,’ I acknowledged, ‘is where I am.’

  ‘You weren’t in your cabin. And your light’s gone. Do you know that?’

  ‘I know that. I’d some writing to do. That’s why I came here. Is there something wrong?’

  She lurched across the saloon and sat heavily on the settee opposite me. ‘Nothing more than has been wrong.’ She and Smithy should meet up, they’d get on famously. ‘Do you mind if I stay here?’

  I could have said that it didn’t matter whether I minded or not, that the saloon was as much hers as mine, but as she seemed to be a touchy sort of creature I just smiled and said: ‘I would take it as an insult if you left.’ She smiled back at me, just an acknowledging flicker, and settled as best she could in her seat, drawing the tweed coat around her and bracing herself against the violent movements of the Morning Rose. She closed her eyes and with the long dark lashes lying along pale wet cheeks her high cheek-bones were more pronounced than ever, her Slavonic ancestry unmistakable.

  It was no great hardship to look upon Mary Stuart but I still felt an increasing irritation as I watched her. It wasn’t so much her fey imaginings and need for company that made me uneasy, it was the obvious discomfort she was experiencing in trying to keep her seated balance while I was wedged so very comfortably in my own place: there is nothing more uncomfortable than being comfortable oneself and watching another in acute discomfort, not unless, of course, one has a feeling of very powerful antagonism towards the other party, in which case a very comfortable feeling can be induced: but I had no such antagonism towards the girl opposite. To compound my feeling of guilt she began to shiver involuntarily.

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘You’d be more comfortable in my seat. And there’s a rug here you can have.’

  She opened her eyes. ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘There are plenty more rugs,’ I said in something like exasperation. Nothing brings out the worst in me more quickly than sweetly-smiling suffering. I picked up the rug, did my customary two-step across the heaving deck and draped the rug over her. She looked at me gravely and said nothing.

  Back in my corner I picked up the booklet again but instead of reading it got to wondering about my cabin and those who might visit it during my absence. Mary Stuart had visited it, but then she’d told me she had and the fact that she was here now confirmed the reason for her visit. At least, it seemed to confirm it. She was scared, she said, she was lonely and so she naturally wanted company. Why my company? Why not that of, say, Charles Conrad who was a whole lot younger, nicer, and better-looking than I was? Or even his other two fellow actors, Gunther Jungbeck and Jon Heyter, both very personable characters indeed? Maybe she wanted to be with me for all the wrong reasons. Maybe she was watching me, maybe she was virtually guarding me, maybe she was giving someone the opportunity to visit my cabin while— I was suddenly very acutely aware that there were things in my cabin that I’d rather not be seen by others.

  I put the book down and headed for the lee door. She opened her eyes and lifted her head.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just—are you coming back?’

  ‘I’m sorry, too. I’m not rude,’ I lied, ‘just tired. Below. Back in a minute.’

  She nodded, her eyes following me until I closed the door behind me. Once outside I remained still for twenty seconds or so, ignoring the vagrant flurries of snow that even here, on the lee side, seemed bent on getting down my collar and up the trouser cuffs, then walked quickly for’ard. I peered through the plate glass window and she was sitting as I’d left her, only now she had her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands, shaking her head slowly from side to side. Ten years ago I’d have been back in that saloon pretty rapidly, arms round her and telling her that all her troubles were over. That was ten years ago. Now I just looked at her, wondered if she had been expecting me to take a peek at her, then made my way for’ard and down to the passenger accommodation.

  It was after midnight but not yet closing hours in the lounge bar, for Lonnie Gilbert, with a heroically foolhardy disregard for what would surely be Otto’s fearful wrath when the crime was discovered, had both glass doors swung open and latched in position, while he himself was ensconced in some state behind the bar itself, a bottle of malt whisky in one hand, a soda-siphon in the other. He beamed paternally at me as I passed through and as it seemed late in the day to point out to Lonnie that the better-class malts stood in no need of the anaemic assistance of soda I just nodded and went below.

  If anybody had been in my cabin and gone through my belongings, he’d done it in a very circumspect way. As far as I could recall everything was as I had left it and nothing had been disturbed, but then, a practised searcher rarely left any trace of his passing. Both my cases had elasticized linen pockets in the lids and in each pocket in each lid, holding the lids as nearly horizontal as possible, I placed a small coin just at the entrance to the pocket. Then I locked the cases. In spite of the trawler’s wildly erratic behaviour those coins would remain where they were, held in place by the pressure of the clothes inside but as soon as the lid was opened, the pressure released, and the lid then lifted even part way towards the vertical, the coins would slide down to the feet of the pockets. I then locked my medical bag—it was considerably larger and heavier than the average medical bag but then it held a considerably greater amount of equipment—and put it out in the passage. I closed the door behind me, carefully wedging a spent book match between the front of the door and the sill: that door would have to open only a crack and the match would drop clear.

  Lonnie, unsurprisingly, was still at his station in the lounge when I reached there.

  ‘Aha!’ He regarded his empty glass with an air of surprise, then reached out with an unerring hand. ‘The kindly healer with his bag of tricks. Hotfoot to the succour of suffering mankind? A new and dreadful epidemic, is it? Your old Uncle Lonnie is proud of you, boy, proud of you. This Hippocratic spirit—’ He broke off, only to resume almost at once. ‘Now that we have touched, inadvertently chanced upon, as one might say, this topic—spirit, the blushful Hippocrene—I wonder if by any chance you would care to join me in a thimbleful of the elixir I have here—’

  ‘Thank you, Lonnie, no. Why don’t you get to bed? If you keep it up like this, you won’t be able to get up tomorrow.’

  ‘And that, my dear boy, is the whole point of the exercise. I don’t want to get up tomorrow. The day after tomorrow? Well, yes, if I must, I’ll face the day after tomorrow. I don’t want to, mind you, for tomorrows, I’ve found, are always distressingly similar to todays. The only good thing you can say about a today is that at any given moment such and such a portion of it is already irrevocably past—’ he paused to admire his speech control— ‘irrevocably past, as I say, and, with the passing of every moment, so much less of it to come. But all of tomorrow is still to come. Think of it. All of it— the livelong day.’ He lifted his rechar
ged glass. ‘Others drink to forget the past. But some of us— very, very few and it would not be right of me to say that we’re gifted with a prescience and understanding and intelligence far beyond the normal ken, so I’ll just say we’re different—some of us, I say, drink to forget the future. How, you will ask, can one forget the future? Well, for one thing, it takes practice. And, of course, a little assistance.’ He drank half his malt in one gulp and intoned: ‘“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable—”’

  ‘Lonnie,’ I said, ‘I don’t think you’re the least little bit like Macbeth.’

  ‘And there you have it in a nutshell. I’m not. A tragic figure, a sad man, fated and laden with doom. Now, me, I’m not like that at all. We Gilberts have the indomitable spirit, the unconquerable soul. Your Shakespeares are all very well, but Walter de la Mare is my boy.’ He lifted his glass and squinted myopically at it against the light. ‘“Look your last on all things lovely every hour.”’

  ‘I don’t think he quite meant it in that way, Lonnie. Anyway, doctor’s orders and do me a favour—get to hell out of here. Otto will have you drawn and quartered if he finds you here.’

  ‘Otto? Do you know something?’ Lonnie leaned forward confidentially. ‘Otto’s really a very kindly man. I like Otto. He’s always been good to me, Otto has. Most people are good, my dear chap, don’t you know that? Most people are kind. Lots of them very kind. But none so kind as Otto. Why, I remember—’

  He broke off as I went round the back of the bar, replaced the bottles, locked the doors, placed the keys in his dressing-gown pocket and took his arm.

  ‘I’m not trying to deprive you of the necessities of life,’ I explained. ‘Neither am I being heavy-handed and moralistic. But I have a sensitive nature and I don’t want to be around when you find out that your assessment of Otto is a hundred per cent wrong.’ Lonnie came without a single murmur of protest. Clearly, he had his emergency supplies cached in his cabin. On our stumbling descent of the companionway he said: ‘You think I’m headed for the next world with my gas pedal flat on the floor, don’t you?’

  ‘As long as you don’t hit anybody it’s none of my business how you drive, Lonnie.’

  He stumbled into his cabin, sat heavily on his bed, then moved with remarkable swiftness to one side: I could only conclude that he’d inadvertently sat on a bottle of scotch. He looked at me, pondering, then said: ‘Tell me, my boy, do you think they have bars in heaven?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have no information on that one, Lonnie.’

  ‘Quite, quite. It makes a gratifying change to find a doctor who is not the source of all wisdom. You may leave me now, my good fellow.’

  I looked at Neal Divine, now quietly asleep, and at Lonnie, impatiently and for obvious reasons awaiting my departure, and left them both.

  Mary Stuart was sitting where I’d left her, arms straight out on either side and fingers splayed to counteract the now noticeably heavier pitching of the Morning Rose: the rolling effect, on the other hand, was considerably less, so I assumed that the wind was still veering in a northerly direction. She looked at me with the normally big brown eyes now preternaturally huge in a dreadfully tired face, then looked away again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I found myself apologizing. ‘I’ve been discussing classics and theology with our production manager.’ I made for my corner seat and sat down gratefully. ‘Do you know him at all?’

  ‘Everybody knows Lonnie.’ She tried to smile. ‘We worked together in the last picture I made.’ Again she essayed a smile. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘No.’ I’d heard about it though, enough to make me walk five miles out of my way to avoid it.

  ‘It was awful. I was awful. I can’t imagine why they gave me another chance.’

  ‘You’re a very beautiful girl,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to be able to act. Performance detracts from appearance. Anyway, you may be an excellent actress. I wouldn’t know. About Lonnie?’

  ‘Yes. He was there. So were Mr Gerran and Mr Heissman.’ I said nothing so she went on: ‘This is the third picture we’ve all made together. The third since Mr Heissman—well, since he—’

  ‘I know. Mr Heissman was away for quite a bit.’

  ‘Lonnie’s such a nice man. He’s so helpful and kind and I think he’s a very wise man. But he’s a funny man. You know that Lonnie likes to take a drink. One day, after twelve hours on the set and all of us dead tired, when we got back to the hotel I asked for a double gin and he became very angry with me. Why should he be like that?’

  ‘Because he’s a funny man. So you like him?’

  ‘How could I not like him? He likes everybody so everybody just likes him back. Even Mr Gerran likes him—they’re very close. But then, they’ve known each other for years and years.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. Has Lonnie a family? Is he married?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think he was. Maybe he’s divorced. Why do you ask so many questions about him?’

  ‘Because I’m a typically knowing, prying sawbones and I like to know as much as possible about people who are or may be my patients. For instance, I know enough about Lonnie now never to give him a brandy if he were in need of a restorative for it wouldn’t have the slightest effect.’

  She smiled and closed her eyes. Conversation over. I took another steamer rug from under my seat, wrapped it around me—the temperature in the saloon was noticeably dropping—and picked up the folder that Goin had given me. I turned to Page 1, which, apart from being titled ‘Bear Island’, started off without any preamble.

  ‘It is widely maintained,’ it read, ‘that Olympus Productions is approaching the making of this, its latest production, in conditions so restrictive as to amount to an aura of almost total secrecy. Allegations to this effect have subsequently made their appearance in popular and trade presses and in light of the absence of production office denials in the contrary those uncorroborated assertions have achieved a considerable degree of substance and credence which one might regard, in the circumstances, as being a psychological inevitability.’ I read through this rubbish again, a travesty of the Queen’s English fit only for the columns of the more learned Sunday papers, and then I got it: they were making a hush-hush picture and didn’t care who knew. And very good publicity it was for the film, too, I thought, but, no, I was doing the boys an injustice. Or so the boys said. The article continued:

  ‘Other cinematic productions’—I assumed he meant films—‘have been approached and, on occasion, even executed under conditions of similar secrecy but those other and, one is afraid spurious sub rosa ventures have had for their calculated aim nothing less, regrettably, than the extraction of the maximum free publicity. This, we insist, and with some pride, is not the objective of Olympus Productions.’ Good old Olympus, this I had to see, a cinema company who didn’t want free publicity: next thing we’d have the Bank of England turning its nose up at the sound of the word ‘money’. ‘Our frankly cabbalistic approach to this production, which has given rise to so much intrigued and largely ill-informed speculation, has, in fact, been imposed upon us by considerations of the highest importance: the handling of this, a story which in the wrong hands might well generate potentially and dangerously explosive international repercussions, calls for the utmost in delicacy and finesse, essential qualities for the creation of what we confidently expect will be hailed as a cinematic masterpiece, but qualities which even we feel—nay, are certain—would not be able to overcome the immense damage done by—and we are certain of this—the world-wide furore that would immediately and automatically follow the premature leaking of the story we intend to film.

  ‘We are confident, however, that when—there is no “if”—this production is made in our own way, in our own time, and under the very strictest security conditions—this is why we have gone to the quite extraordinary lengths of obtaining notarized oaths of secrecy from every member of the cast and crew of the film project under discu
ssion, including the managing director and his codirectors— we will have upon our hands, when this production is presented to a public, which will have been geared by that time to the highest degree of expectancy, a tour de force of so unparalleled an order that the justification for—’

  Mary Stuart sneezed and I blessed her, twice, once for her health and once for the heaven-sent interruption of the reading of this modestly phrased manifesto. I glanced at her again just as she sneezed again. She was sitting in a curiously huddled fashion, hands clasped tightly together, her face white and pinched. I laid down the Olympus manifesto, unwrapped my rug, crossed the saloon in a zigzag totter which resulted from the now very pronounced pitching of the Morning Rose, sat beside her and took her hands in mine. They were icily cold.

  ‘You’re freezing,’ I said somewhat unnecessarily.

  ‘I’m all right. I’m just a bit tired.’

  ‘Why don’t you go below to your cabin? It’s at least twenty degrees warmer down there and you’ll never sleep up here if you have to keep bracing yourself all the time from falling off your seat.’

  ‘No. I don’t sleep down there either. I’ve hardly slept since—’ She broke off. ‘And I don’t feel nearly so—so queasy up here. Please.’

  I don’t give up easily. I said: ‘Then at least take my corner seat, you’ll be much more comfortable there.’

  She took her hands away. ‘Please. Just leave me.’

  I gave up. I left her. I took three wavering steps in the direction of my seat, halted in irritation, turned back to her and hauled her none too gently to her feet. She looked at me, not speaking, in tired surprise, and continued to say nothing, and to offer no resistance, as I led her across to my corner, brought out another two steamer rugs, cocooned her in those, lifted her feet on to the settee and sat beside her. She looked up at me for a few seconds, her gaze transferring itself from my right eye to my left and back again, then she turned her face to me, closed her eyes and slid one of her icy hands under my jacket. During all this performance she didn’t speak once or permit any expression to appear on her face and I would have been deeply moved by this touching trust in me were it not for the reflection that if it were her purpose or instructions to keep as close an eye as possible on me she could hardly, even in her most optimistic moments, have hoped to arrive at a situation where she could keep an eye within half an inch of my shirt-front. I couldn’t even take a deep breath without her knowing all about it. On the other hand, if she were as innocent as the driven snow that had now completely obscured the plate glass not six inches from my head, then it was less than likely that any ill-disposed citizen or citizens would contemplate taking action of a violent and permanent nature against me as long as I had Mary Stuart practically sitting on my lap. It was, I thought, a pretty even trade. I looked down at the half-hidden lovely face and reflected that I was possibly having a shade the better of the deal.