Dead calm

by Charles Williams

  “About four months. We were on our honeymoon.”

  She nodded. “I can only give you the opinion of another woman who was, in effect, on her honeymoon. Both alternatives are impossible, of course, as long as you continue to weigh them. But inevitably there’ll be a point when she has to stop thinking, and it’ll become a simple matter of instinct versus conditioning. Instinct is a lot older.”

  “She may not even remember the gun. Or know how to assemble it if she does—or get the chance, for that matter.”

  “But she would know better than to try to threaten him with it? You know, the magic wand of television and B pictures?”

  “Yes,” he said. “She’d know better than to point it unless she was prepared to shoot it.” He closed the discussion abruptly and stood up to look down the hatch. There was perceptibly more water in the after cabin than there had been thirty minutes ago. He motioned for Bellew to relinquish the pump.

  “I’ll take over for a couple of hours. We can’t all work all the time, and I want to get some idea how fast it’s rising against pumping alone. So the two of you’d better turn in on the settees in there and see if you can get some sleep. You’re going to need it.”

  “Right,” Bellew agreed. He started down the steps into the doghouse. Then he turned and asked, “How did he sucker you?”

  Ingram explained briefly how Warriner had rowed out and come aboard, and the story he’d told. “It kept bothering me, especially his not wanting to come back aboard here or even wanting me to. But I had no real reason to doubt him, so I couldn’t very well force him to, and I didn’t like the idea of leaving my wife on there alone with him until I knew more about him. Then he turned in, and I decided to have a look anyway. But apparently he wasn’t asleep. You didn’t even know he’d left?”

  “No,” Bellew said. “When we heard you walking around, we thought it was still him. We didn’t know he’d sighted a rescue boat when he slugged me and locked us in there. A laugh a minute, that Hughie-boy. Like to run into him again some day.”

  The contempt in Mrs. Warriner’s voice was like a whiplash. “Are you sure that’s why he hit you?”

  “Why else, baby?” Bellew turned and went on below.

  Ingram shrugged and began pumping. Mrs. Warriner remained where she was, turning slightly so she faced him. “I’m not sleepy,” she said. “Do you mind if I talk?”

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  She took a drag on her cigarette and stared moodily at the smoke. “I can understand your not wanting to talk about your wife under these circumstances—and least of all to me. But I’m trying to form a picture of her. Not to belabor the obvious any more than we have to, she’s the key to this, naturally; we know what’s going to happen on here, so if there is to be any other outcome it would have to hinge on what happens on there within the next few hours. You said she was thirty-five, which implies—or should imply—a certain amount of maturity. Is she pretty?”

  “Yes,” Ingram said. “She’s very pretty.”

  Her smile was fleeting and faintly tinged with sadness. “It was a silly question to ask a bridegroom. Is she blond or brunette?”

  “Blond,” he said, still pumping. “Or in that jurisdiction. Her hair’s somewhere between golden blond and light brown-tawny, I think you’d call it—and the eyes are sea-green. High cheekbones, very smooth complexion, beautiful tan. Generally speaking, it’s the type of face and coloration that go with high spirit and a very low flashpoint in the temper department, but she grew up faster than the temper did, and somewhere along the line they gave her a sense of humor. Maybe she needed it, to marry me.”

  “Don’t add too much modesty to your other virtues,” she said. “It’ll sound phony. Does she have any children?”

  “No. She had a boy, but he died. Polio.”

  “I’m sorry. That was the first marriage?”

  “The second. The first marriage was one of those kid things, during the war. That is, the Second World War—”

  “Thank you, Mr. Ingram. But I know which one you mean. Go on.”

  “She wasn’t quite seventeen, and he was a navigator in the Eighth Air Force. After the war he went back to school on the GI Bill, pre-med student. She worked, and they lived in a Quonset hut—you remember the routine. They were both too young for it, I guess; anyway, he was failing all his subjects and they began to fight and it didn’t last. She went back to Texas, and they were divorced. The second marriage was another thing. No divorce; he was killed in an airplane crash.”

  “How old would the boy be if he’d lived?”

  “Around twelve, I think.”

  “Does she attract children?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen her around any.”

  “How about the lost, the insecure, the dependent, the scared?”

  He saw the shadow of pain in her eyes again and knew what she meant. “She has a great deal of tenderness and sympathy,” he said. “I don’t know how apparent it’ll be after she’s just been slugged—”

  “He’ll know, don’t worry. It’s like radar. And he brings it out if it’s been latent for years. With that, plus a reasonable amount of intelligence, I think she can handle him, provided she doesn’t panic.”

  “Why does he think you tried to kill him?”

  “He thinks Bellew and I are lovers. And that we planned to do away with him and Estelle.” She made no attempt to look away. The brown eyes were completely without expression now, however, and he could only guess at the torment behind them. “Unfortunately, there is some justification for his thinking so. And it’s my fault. I blamed the whole thing on Bellew awhile ago, but that was in anger. I’m probably as much responsible for his crackup as Bellew is, in a different way.”

  Ingram was beginning to like her and found that difficult to believe. Maybe she was too accustomed to taking the rap for everything; Warriner had struck him as an alibi artist who’d load it on anybody in sight. “Well, look, your husband’s a grown man, or supposed to be—”

  “The type of woman he attracts, or is attracted to, never gave him a chance to be one. And it’s too late now.”

  “What happened?” Ingram asked.

  For a moment he thought she hadn’t heard. Then she said, “That’s a good question, and I wish I could answer it. Specifically, what happened was a very tragic accident. The accident itself is difficult enough to explain, but to understand why it smashed him you’d have to go back a long way. When was the first time, Mr. Ingram, that you realized it was possible for this environment of ours to be unfriendly, and that it was also possible to find yourself utterly alone in it? I mean, with nobody to take your head in her lap and tell you everything was going to be all right, that the critics were wrong, that the bank must have forgotten to credit your last deposit, that the pathologist must have made a mistake, or the teacher that gave you a D was just being spiteful?”

  “I don’t know,” Ingram replied. “Probably a long time ago.”

  “Precisely. While you were still quite young, and under relatively harmless circumstances, and over the years you built up—well, not an immunity, nobody’s immunized—but call it a progressively higher threshold of susceptibility. It happened to Hughie for the first time at the age of twenty-eight, alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean without even a lifebelt, and he was there because he’d been betrayed by the one person he’d been conditioned all his life to trust and depend on— his mother, in one of her successive manifestations.”

  “Aren’t you riding yourself pretty hard?” Ingram asked.

  “No. I don’t think so.” She gazed out across the metallic glare of the sea to where the sun had already begun its descent into the west. “If you know the conditions when you accept the appointment, you also accept the responsibility. I let him down.”

  8

  She was silent for a moment. How did you explain Hughie to a man who’d seen only the wreckage after he’d been shattered by the Pacific Ocean, by Bellew’s contemptuou
s bullying, and by her own misguided attempts to help him? How make him see the wit, the charm, the sensitivity, the genuine talent behind the beach-boy good looks?

  Strangely enough, when she’d first met Hughie, a little over a year ago, he’d been living on a yacht. It was on the island of Rhodes, snuggled up under the Turkish coast on almost the opposite side of the world from where she was now, and the yacht, a glittering and obviously expensive yawl registered under the Panamanian flag, appeared to be more or less permanently moored in that harbor astride whose entrance the Colossus had towered two thousand years before. Hughie was living aboard it alone, and he was painting.

  Oh, it wasn’t his yacht, it belonged to a friend who was only letting him live on it, he’d disclaimed with a refreshing and boyish honesty that couldn’t help appealing to a woman who’d known her share of phonies on two continents. It wasn’t until somewhat later—too late, in fact—that she learned his frankness had been a little less than complete, that the friend was female, a wealthy American divorcee living in Rome, and that Hughie’s relationship to her was one for which “protégé” was as good a euphemism as any. By that time she was—as she would have put it if she’d still been in any condition to view the thing with her old self-honesty and clarity of thought—hooked herself.

  She saw him as a talented but too-beautiful boy who was being ruined by a continuously self-renewing matriarchy of lionizing sponsors, benefactresses, patronesses-of-art-at-the-source, surrogate mothers, and rapaciously protective beldames who started out wanting to adopt him and wound up by sandbagging him with the flushed and hectic urgencies of some autumnal reflowering and dragging him off to bed. And by the time she should have begun to suspect the weakness in his character she had made the further discovery that he wasn’t a boy at all, that he was twenty-seven instead of the twenty she had thought, and she was hopelessly in love with him.

  She was forty years old then and widowed nearly two years, no longer a victim of the grief and numbness of loss but only of its emptiness, the feeling that she must have been left over for something if she could only discover what it was. She’d come to Europe again. Since she belonged to a set to which the jet flight across the Pole was only a commute hop, she had friends in London, Paris, Antibes, Florence, and God knew where else, but she had avoided them, going on instead to Istanbul and then back to Athens and Corfu and a footloose and unscheduled wandering through the Dodecanese, searching for she knew not what. She’d arrived in Rhodes around the middle of July for a four-day stay. She’d met Hughie, and the four days had become a week, and then two, and finally a month.

  “He’s a painter,” she went on. “A good one. And, given a chance, he might have become a great one. It wasn’t his fault that women could never leave him alone—”

  “If I’m not mistaken,” Ingram broke in, “nothing is ever Hughie’s fault.”

  She nodded somberly. “To some extent, that’s true—if oversimplified. But there are reasons for it.”

  “I’m not knocking it. Probably a very comforting philosophy, as long as you can keep from having to sign for the mess sometime when there’s nobody around to hand it to.”

  “It’s the way he was raised,” she said. “He’s never had a chance. Even his childhood was against him. He’s seen his father only once, and very briefly, in the past seventeen years. Though he’s never said so directly, I gather he either hated him or was afraid of him, and probably at least some of it must have been his mother’s fault. Certainly the picture that comes through from the few things he has said is one of such utter crudity and brutality it seems a little too one-sided to be quite true.

  “His father was—or is, rather—the editor and publisher of a small daily newspaper in Mississippi, an ex-football player at one of the Southern universities, and from all accounts a man whose only passions apparently were drinking, random and indiscriminate affairs with very sordid women, white supremacy, and shooting quail. That plus bullying Hughie because the boy showed more interest in sketching animals than in killing them. It could be that all of this is literally true, in spite of its familiarity, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility of a certain amount of editing by the doting mother and embittered ex-wife. At any rate, when Hughie was eleven his parents separated and were later divorced. His mother, who had a little money of her own, took him to Switzerland. He went to a private school in Lausanne but lived with her all the time in the villa she rented there so they wouldn’t be separated. She never remarried. You can see the pattern, of course, the possessiveness, the overprotection, the you’d-never-leave-Mumsy-would-you-after-all-she’s-done-for-you rubbish. After the school in Switzerland he attended the Sorbonne for two years and then began studying art, also in Paris, and also still living with his mother. She died five or six years ago. There was a little money left, but not enough to keep him going until he could get some kind of recognition as a painter. However—” She smiled with a tinge of bitterness, and went on. “Europe is crawling with middle-aged women eager to help the struggling young artist, especially if he’s charming and decorative and well mannered and has no social liabilities like cutting off his ears or wasting too much time painting.”

  She broke off then with an impatient gesture, as though annoyed at herself. “I’m sorry. You asked me about the accident. As I said, it’s difficult to explain how it could have happened. Fortunately you know the interior layout here, which will help. Hughie and I occupied the after cabin, and Mr. and Mrs. Bellew the forward one—”

  Ingram interrupted. “But first, who is Bellew, anyway? Somehow, I don’t place him in this. Is he a friend, or a neighbor of yours in Santa Barbara?”

  “I’m not from Santa Barbara,” she replied. “San Francisco. We just bought the boat in Santa Barbara and sailed from there in the beginning.” She shook another cigarette out of the pack and held the latter up toward Ingram at the pump.

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  “You don’t smoke?”

  “Only cigars.” He wished he had one, but among the other things he was wishing for at the moment it didn’t have a very high priority. “But about Bellew?”

  “He’s a writer.” Then, catching Ingram’s look of surprise, she smiled faintly. “No, he doesn’t remind you a great deal of Proust or Henry James. He’s a specialized type of writer; he does articles for outdoor magazines. Hunting and fishing.”

  “Wait.” Ingram frowned. “Bellew? Russell Bellew? I think I’ve seen some of his stories. Marlin fishing, and hunting sheep in Mexico. With some beautiful photography, as I recall.”

  “His wife did the photography. She was an artist with a camera.”

  Ingram stopped pumping for a moment and walked past her to the open hatch to look down into the cabin. In spite of his continuous pumping, the water was still rising. His face was somber as he walked back to the pump.

  She lit the cigarette and carefully blew out the match. “Still gaining?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. She was a cool one, he thought; and so, for that matter, was Bellew. That was something, anyway; at least he didn’t have a couple of screamers on his hands. Of course there was no telling how they’d take it later on. But then, he added grimly, there was no telling how he’d do, either; it was something you couldn’t forecast.

  “But we can still hold it by bailing too, can’t we?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “We can now.”

  “But not for long?”

  “Just how long, I don’t know. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not going to get any better, but it is going to get progressively worse, with this rolling. And in a bad squall, as I told you, she could come apart like a bale of shingles. But forgetting the squall, which we can’t do anything about anyway, she might last for a week yet…” His voice trailed off.

  She glanced up questioningly. “There’s something else?”

  There was no reason to try to hide it from her, he thought. “Only this—even if we do keep her afloat for another week, after
tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest, it’s not going to do any good anyway. There’s not a chance in a million we’ll be sighted by a ship, not where we are. And even if one happened to pick us up on radar, there’s nothing to indicate we’re in distress.

  “So, as you said, the only thing that could change it is if Rae is still on there and is able to cope with your husband. She might even be able to talk him into coming back. If she does, we’ll probably be all right. The second possibility is that she may be able to get control of the boat some way. He’ll have to sleep sometime, or …” He stopped, floundering.

  She nodded, her face devoid of expression. “Or she may kill him. Go on.”

  If she could manage it, he could too. “Right,” he said just as calmly. “But even if she does get control of the boat, it’s nowhere near as simple as it sounds. She may never find us again. They’re over the horizon now, and unless she knows the course he was steering when he left here, she can’t come back because she won’t know which way back is. Also, at the speed they were going, somewhere around midnight tonight and about a hundred miles from here they’re going to run out of gas, and she can’t make it back unless she gets some wind. In these conditions, it could take days. Also, at that distance, the accumulated errors of trying to make good a course while she’s fighting fluky breezes and calms become so great that after a while she won’t know within twenty miles where she is herself.

  “She can’t call for help, to get a search organized, even if there was anybody out here to look. We’ve got a radiotelephone, but it won’t reach land from here, and you can’t call a ship with it because they stand their radio watches on five hundred kilocycles and not the phone bands.

  “So if she ever finds us again it’ll be within the next twelve hours or so, because if they get any farther away there’s practically no chance. Have you got any distress flares aboard?”