The Strode Venturer

by Hammond Innes

  “What’s the trouble, then?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the heat. He’s so damned efficient.” That was all he would say, except that the way things were going he thought we could leave within the week. It was time I went out.

  I told Ida that evening and had some difficulty in convincing her that an old freighter bound for a volcanic island in the Indian Ocean was no place for a woman. By then she had fallen into the habit of waiting for me at my flat. We’d have a drink there, talk over the day’s progress and then go out for dinner. But sometimes she’d have a meal prepared and we’d spend the evening in the flat. We were so involved in the venture that we were more like business partners than two people in the process of falling in love. We didn’t talk about it. We’d been through it all before, both of us, and I think we were a little suspicious of our feelings for each other, even a little guilty about our need for physical contact.

  That day she had been down to Redhill, to the nursing home. She had been down several times to see the old man. “He was very low,” she said. “I don’t think he can last much longer.” And she added, “Has the transfer of those shares gone through yet? He’s very worried that he’ll die before they’re registered in your name.”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything further.” It was nearly a fortnight since I had received a letter from West, Wright, Turner & Coy. My partner, West had written, has instructed me to make arrangements for the immediate transfer of the 67,215 Strode & Coy. Ordinary £1 shares he had already bequeathed to you in his Will. He gave me to understand when I saw him this morning that he thought you might need them sooner than he had originally anticipated.

  The shares were, in fact, registered in my name two days later. This brought Whimbrill into it as secretary of the company and he called me down to his office. “I knew, of course, that Lawrence Turner had been a persistent buyer during the last year and more. Latterly, as you know, I have been watching the situation very closely and I was becoming increasingly concerned about the future of these shares.” His hand had gone up to the left side of his face. “It’s a big block and faced with the necessity of providing for death duties his executors might well have decided to sell. I am relieved to know that he has taken this step and placed them beyond his executors’ reach.” He lit a cigarette and passed me the packet. “I take it you do not intend to sell?”

  “No.”

  He nodded, sitting hunched in his chair, jotting figures on a slip of paper. “You realize that you are now one of the biggest shareholders in the company?” The point of his silver pencil moved quickly as he added up three separate columns. “It will be tight, very tight—but the public still holds some. And there’s Mrs. de Witt. I think she might support us.” He dropped the pencil and sat back. “Lingrose hasn’t withdrawn his nominations and the meeting is next month. You won’t be back by then.”

  “It’s the equipment,” I said. “It’s taken a little longer than we thought.”

  He nodded. “When do you leave?”

  “The day after to-morrow.”

  “You know Peter signed a proxy in my favour. Would you be willing to do the same?” He was worried about something. But when I asked him what it was he seemed reluctant to put it into words. “It’s just a feeling I have no more. It’s all been too easy and as an accountant I am by nature a pessimist.” He sat silent for a moment, frowning. Finally he said, “Lingrose is a dangerous man to fool around with. Peter used him as a lever to get what he wanted, and when he got it he dropped him flat. And there’s George to consider. George didn’t like it, and neither did Henry. And if this expedition of yours were a success …” He leaned forward and flicked the ash from his cigarette. “They know where they are with Lingrose. But Peter’s different. He’s not interested in money. He’s doing this for quite other reasons. That makes him unpredictable. They don’t understand him or the motives that are driving him.”

  I wondered whether Whimbrill did. “What are you suggesting?”

  He looked away to the far corner of the room, sightless, his whole mind, all his senses concentrated on his thoughts. “I think the two parties will finally come together and reach agreement. Lingrose will probably make the first move. In fact, if my information is correct he has already done so. The nature of his proposition might well be the liquidation of both companies and the formation of an investment company or trust based on Strode House with some of the same directors.”

  “Would you support that?” I asked.

  “No.” He gave me a tired little smile. “I doubt whether I should be given the opportunity. I think I’d be left out in the cold, and so would a lot of others—ships’ officers, superintendents, clerks, men who have given most of their lives to one or other of the two companies.” He pulled open a drawer and took out a proxy form already made out in my name. “I don’t think they’ll try to push anything through at the annual general meeting, but I’m doing what I can to counter it, just in case.”

  I signed the proxy and left him with the uneasy feeling that things were moving to some sort of climax. It was less than three months since I had first set foot in Strode House. Now I owned the third largest block of shares in the parent company. I went out, past the portrait of my father, out into the sunshine and walked up Leadenhall Street, past Lloyds to the pub in the Market where I had seen Reece. It was almost the last day of May and a heat wave. The doors were blocked open. I ordered a beer and stood drinking it in a shaft of sunlight, feeling warm and slightly dazed, thinking of the children—that perhaps after all I’d be able to match the measure of their expectations, thinking, too, of the Maldives and the new world into which I would be flying in two days’ time.

  That evening, as though she had known I wouldn’t want to go out, Ida had cooked some salmon and made a mayonnaise and there was a bottle of Pouilly Fumé to go with it. And afterwards we sat by the open windows watching the lights go on and the sky darken and talking, not about ourselves, but about Strode House and how our lives were being shaped by events beyond our control. The women I had met before had none of them been interested in finance, nor the men either, for City intrigue and the intricacies of financial battles are not spotlighted in headlines the way political struggles are. They are for the most part fought out in secret behind closed doors and so are unfamiliar to the majority of people. But Ida was interested. She had been brought up with it and she understood very well that they were about the same thing—Power. “If Dick Whimbrill is right——” The pucker of a frown showed below the black line of her hair. “I don’t like the idea of your both being away for the annual general meeting.”

  “Whimbrill holds our proxies.”

  “That’s what’s worrying me. I don’t know him very well, but he doesn’t strike me as a very forceful man.”

  “He believes his own future is at stake.”

  But I could see she wasn’t sure of him. “That’s not quite the same thing, is it? And if they made him an offer——” She hesitated. “He’s an accountant, you see. They have a different way of looking at things.”

  “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now,” I said.

  “No.” She nodded reluctantly. “He’s a strange man. He doesn’t seem to have anything to live for outside Strode House. That makes him very vulnerable. But you’re probably right. If they liquidate both companies, then they destroy him, and that’s something that puts fight into the mildest of men.” She was silent for a moment, and then she said, “All this wouldn’t have happened if there’d been anybody at Strode House to succeed Father—a man with real drive. When he died the guts went out of the organization. It had been slipping for some time and it needed somebody with a fresh outlook, new horizons.” Her hand was in mine and the night was warm, the sound of London’s traffic a muffled roar. “I often wonder what would have happened if I had married Hans de Witt,” she murmured. And she went on to talk about the obligations of members of the family in a family business. “I didn’t un
derstand this at the time. I was only a kid.”

  I asked her who Hans de Witt was and she said, “The son of a Dutch shipowner.” She was smiling gently and her fingers tightened on mine. “It’s a long time ago now. He was much older than I was, but Father was interested in a merger. He was looking to the future and he threw Hans at me. But I was having my first love affair and Jennifer grabbed him before I had recovered my senses.” Her voice betrayed an enviousness she didn’t bother to conceal. “Jennifer is a great big woman; she’s quite content to be a Dutch hausfrau.”

  “So the merger never went through.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t Jennifer’s fault. Not then. Hans inherited from his father just after the war when the de Witt cargo line was crippled by Holland’s loss of the Dutch East Indies. He switched to passenger carrying, running emigrants to North America. He’s very successful now and if I’d married him …” She looked at me, smiling. “Well, I didn’t, and that’s that. But I wanted you to know why I feel as I do. As a member of the family I had an obligation and I failed to see it as such. Father was right, of course, Hans has the nerve, the drive, the energy, all the things that Henry and George lack. He’d have made a big company of it—a rival to P. & O. perhaps.” She sighed. “I’ve been paying for my selfishness ever since. And now if Peter fails——”

  She was silent then and when I glanced at her I saw that her eyes were closed. The glow of the lights picked out the bone formation of her face, glimmered on her raven black hair. It was a strong face and her small body tight-packed with energy so that I felt myself in the grip of something stronger than myself. “Never mind,” she said softly. “Don’t let my conscience spoil our last evening.” I knew then that her need was as great as mine. I lit a cigarette and my hand was trembling for there is a luminosity about London at that time of the year, the promise of full summer just ahead, and to-morrow I was seeing the children. The feeling of longing had become an ache deep down in the life-stream of my blood. Her hand slipped from mine and without a word she got to her feet and went into the bedroom, the rustle of her dress a silken sound in the quiet stillness of the room.

  And later as I lay beside her in the dark, relaxed and smoking a cigarette, listening to the sounds of a great city falling silent into slumber, I found myself thinking over the things she had said to me that evening. Never having had money I had not given a thought to its obligations. She had not only made me realize that a company, like a ship, is only as big as the men who run it, but also that the direction of it must have an impulse greater than money. A fresh outlook, new horizons, she had said—it was this I had been groping towards when I had stood staring at the Palace of Westminster on my first day back in London. This was the malaise that had spread through all sections of the country and the thought bolstered my determination to back Peter with everything that was in me. To build something for the future, that was it, and my thoughts turned to the great days of our mercantile expansion, to the East India Company and men like Alexander Guthrie who had opened up new territory with nothing but their wits and determination to sustain them. I was thinking of an island in the Indian Ocean and dreaming dreams and falling gently into sleep.

  IV

  1. THE ISLAND

  “STEER one-two-zero.” Reece’s voice was sharp, almost staccato, and he stared straight ahead at the flat, calm, oily sea that reflected a blinding dazzle of light. White shirt, white shorts, white stockings and shoes, his head bare and the crinkly fair hair bleached almost white by the sun—he looked cool and immaculate, very slim, very good-looking, with a certain air about him, not cocky quite, but ambitious—certainly ambitious. And that puzzled me, for an ambitious man you would have thought would be at pains to cultivate a member of the family who was not only the mainspring of the whole venture but also a man about his own age, who could be expected to be a power in the company when older directors had retired.

  The wheel moved under the lascar helmsman’s hands and the Strode Trader swung slowly on to her new course. It was a twenty-degree turn, but apart from the compass there was nothing to show that the ship’s head had altered, for there was nothing anywhere but the eye-searing blink of flat water, an empty heat-hazed void with sea and sky all one great refraction of light and no horizon.

  “That do you?”

  “Yes.”

  Peter was standing behind the helmsman wearing a sarong and nothing else, his bare chest smooth and brown. The lascar wore khaki shirt and shorts. The time was 1420 hours and the heat in the wheelhouse intense, no air stirring except that made by our passage through the water—a hot, humid current of air coming in through the open doors to the bridge wings. This was the third change of course in twenty-four hours, each course dictated by Peter and given by Reece himself direct to the helmsman. And each time he had given it standing in front of the empty mahogany expanse of the wheelhouse chart table. Chart 748b—the one that covered the northern half of the Indian Ocean—was locked away in Peter’s cabin, as were the ship’s three sextants, the chronometer and the navigation tables. He had commandeered them late at night on the second day out from Bombay. Since then he had twice insisted on steering the ship himself, shut up alone in the wheelhouse with nobody else present. Reece had objected, of course, but had finally agreed after an exchange of wireless messages with head office. Now after six days at sea nobody but Peter knew within a hundred miles where we were.

  “Have you worked out an ETA?” Reece was still staring straight in front of him. His voice was tense.

  “Not yet.”

  “When can I have it?” He turned suddenly. “I’m not sailing my ship blind into an uncharted area. Not for you or anybody else. All this secrecy—it’s bloody stupid, man.” He was on edge and I thought a little scared. It was only when you saw him full face that you noticed the little pouches under his eyes, the suggestion of dissipation, of a flaw in the boyish good looks.

  “I’ll let you have it to-morrow,” Peter said.

  Reece hesitated. He wanted it now. But he wasn’t prepared to make an issue of it. “To-morrow by sun-down then. Otherwise I stop engines. You’re not a qualified navigator and steaming through the night——”

  “Experience is more important than qualifications,” Peter said quietly. “I’ve navigated boats all over the South Pacific, in and out of more islands than you’ve ever set eyes on. And I’ve more at stake than just this ship, so you needn’t be afraid I’ll put her aground.”

  An awkward silence followed, the only sounds the hum of the engines, the surge of the bow wave. Finally Reece said, “To-morrow then,” and he walked past us, back to his cabin.

  “He’s getting scared,” I said. “Sailing blind like this——”

  “He’s not as ignorant of our position as he pretends.”

  He was referring to the fact that the wireless operator had picked up Gan aircraft beacon on his DF. “That was two nights ago,” I said.

  “It gave him a position line.” His voice was irritable. He, too, was on edge, the heat and humidity eating into his last reserves. His face had a closed, tight-set look. It was like the face of a man in a trance, the eyes staring, seeing nothing, only what was in the mind, and the body taut.

  “What’s the point of all this secrecy?” I asked. It seemed to have become an obsession with him and the heat was affecting me, too. “If you’d just let Reece navigate his own ship——”

  “You’ve met them, you’ve talked to them, been in their houses, seen those vedis.” He had turned on me with quite extraordinary violence. “Surely to God you understand? That island belongs to Don Mansoor, to the Adduans. It’s their one hope of survival in the twentieth century that’s now broken in upon them and I’ll do anything, anything at all, to keep its position a secret until they have established a settlement on it and claimed it for their own.”

  He drew me out on to the wing of the bridge where the surge of the water creaming past was louder, the breeze of our passage hot on my face. “One more day,” he said. “That�
��s all, thank God. I’ll get star sights to-morrow night and we’ll close the island at dawn.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell Reece that?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged peevishly. “I suppose because I don’t trust him. He’s George’s man.” He stared at me hard with his eyes narrowed against the sunlight so that he seemed to be considering whether he could trust even me. Then he turned and left, silently on bare feet.

  I leaned on the rail, staring down into the water boiling along the ship’s side. Probably he was right. Probably Reece was George Strode’s man. But I could still see it from his point of view, newly appointed to command and responsible for the safety of his ship. This wasn’t the Strode Venturer and the man himself was a very different proposition from Deacon; he ran a disciplined, efficient ship, with everything neat and ordered and as clean as paint and hard work could make it. And he was very conscious of his new position. To have his navigational instruments confiscated, his courses dictated, even his bridge commandeered, these were blows to his pride, for once we were at sea he had naturally looked upon Peter and myself as little more than supercargoes.

  But the trouble went deeper than that, a question of temperament. They were entirely different in every way. I hadn’t noticed it in Bombay, chiefly because I hardly ever saw them together, Peter having been entirely immersed in the problems of acquiring adequate stores and equipment in the face of the petty restrictions and prevarications of modern India, Reece in seeing to the refitting, storing and fuelling of the ship and personally supervising the loading of the heavy equipment, much of which had to be carried as deck cargo. It was only after we had sailed, when they were cooped up together within the small confines of the ship, that their temperaments had clashed.