I didn’t reply to that, but simply handed him the package. I think he knew it was out of the question, for he didn’t ask me again. A moment later the rear door opened and I heard him get out. “I—I’d like to thank you,” he stammered. “Whatever happens—I won’t let you down.”
“Good luck!” I said.
“Thanks.” And then he was walking across the dock, not hesitantly, but with a firm, purposeful tread. I watched him mount the gangway, saw him pause and speak to one of the crew, an Arab; and then he disappeared from sight through a door in the bridge deck.
I lit a cigarette and sat there, wondering what would happen now. I didn’t think he’d much of a chance, but you never know; he was a resourceful kid.
I finished my cigarette and lit another. I was thinking about the constable on the gate. I ought to have realized that that would be one of the first things they’d do following his escape. And the man had recognized me. I tried to analyse my motives in doing such a crazy thing, but I couldn’t sort them out. The cold crept into the car as I waited, and still nothing happened, except that the snow thickened and the dock turned dazzling white. A tug hooted out in the river, a lost, owl sound in the winter night. It was twenty minutes past nine.
Ten minutes later a whistle sounded from somewhere high up on the Emerald Isle and two men came quickly out of a hut at the end of the dock. They manhandled the gangway ashore and then stood by the warps. Another whistle and the for’ard warp went slack, fell with a splash into the dock. Black smoke belched from the funnel, and as the stern warp was let go, a gap opened up between the ship’s side and the quay. I switched the engine on then, turned the heater up, and sat there smoking as the Emerald Isle locked out into the River Taff. And when her lights had finally disappeared behind the whitened shoulders of the loading-sheds, I drove back to the solitude of my flat, hoping to God I’d done the right thing.
The story of what happened to him after that I got partly from Captain Griffiths on his return and partly from a letter David wrote me. When he left me on the dock there and went on board the Emerald Isle there was no clear-cut plan in his mind. He knew the layout, of course. She was the only ship trading regularly out of Cardiff to Arabian ports, and she had exercised a fatal fascination for him since he was old enough to wander in the docks. It was the Somali steward and not a deck hand who met him at the top of the gangway, and on the spur of the moment, almost without thinking, he inquired whether the passenger accommodation was fully booked. The steward told him no: there were six cabins and only three were occupied. Feeling suddenly more confident, he asked to see the Captain.
Captain Griffiths was in his cabin on the port side of the bridge-deck housing, and when David was shown in he was seated at his desk checking the Mate’s trim figures. He took the packet, glanced at it, and then looked up at David. “You work for Mr. Grant, do you?”
“I—I run errands for him.”
“Office boy, eh? Well, you’re only just in time. We sail in quarter of an hour.” Griffiths peered up at him from under his bushy brows. “What’s the matter with your face, boy? Been in a fight?”
“No. No, sir. I—I had a fall.”
“Must have been a bad one. You’re as white as a sheet.” He bent down, pulled open a drawer of his desk, and came up with a bottle of whisky. “I’ll give you a drink for your pains.” He gave that high-pitched cackling laugh, filled the glasses half full, and handed one of them to David. “Well, young fellow, you can wish me luck, for it’s a Welsh landowner I am now.” And he slapped the packet of documents with unconcealed pride. “There’s times, you know,” he confided as he swallowed his drink, “when I feel like the Wandering Jew himself, doomed to ply from one silt-laden port to another, right through to Eternity. This,” and his hand touched the packet again, “this may help me to preserve my sanity when the temperature’s over the hundred and the humidity’s so thick your lungs feel as though they’re stuffed full of wet cotton wool and will never breathe clean air again; when conditions are like that, then I’ll take these documents out and read them through just to convince myself that I really do have a little place on the Gower Peninsula where rain washes the air clean of dust and heat and the damned, Godforsaken, everlasting flies.”
“That’s the Persian Gulf you’ll be referring to, isn’t it? Then maybe you’ll know where Colonel Whitaker lives now?” He hadn’t intended to ask that question, but the unaccustomed liquor had overlaid his nervousness.
Griffiths glanced up at him quickly. “Funny thing,” he murmured. “Grant asked me that same question only this afternoon. Is Colonel Whitaker one of the firm’s clients?”
“I—I don’t know, sir.”
“Then what made you ask about him?”
David hesitated. But if he were to succeed in stowing away on board, there was no harm in telling Captain Griffiths the truth right now. “He’s my father.”
“Your father!” The blue eyes stared. “Good God! Didn’t know the Bedouin was married.”
“My natural father, sir.”
Griffiths’s eyes suddenly crinkled at the corners. “Natural father, you say? Well, by God, that’s a good one.” And he lay back in his swivel chair, pointed his beard at the steel deck above, and cackled with laughter. And then he stopped suddenly. “I’m sorry, boy. You’re sensitive about it, I can see. Have you ever met your father?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, if you had, you’d know why I laughed. Bedouin sons—and daughters. There’s gossip enough about him, but never a whisper of a son in Wales, you see. I’ll tell him, next time he’s aboard—I’ll say to him casually …” But David was spared the rest, for the bridge communicator buzzed and a voice said: “Tug coming alongside now, sir.”
“Very good, Mr. Evans.” Griffiths got to his feet. “I’m needed on the bridge.” He paused in front of David, staring up at his face. “Yes. I can see the likeness now. Any message you want me to give him?” And when David shook his head dumbly, he patted him on the arm. “Well, I’ll tell him I saw you when next he comes aboard. And now you’d better get off the ship quick or you’ll find yourself in Arabia with a deal of explaining to do.” And he went off, cackling with laughter, to the bridge above.
David found himself standing alone outside the Captain’s cabin. An alleyway ran athwartships. Numbered mahogany doors led off it on either side. He listened, every nerve taut. He could hear voices on the bridge and down below in the saloon, but the deck on which he stood seemed utterly deserted. Treading softly, he walked the length of the alleyway to the starb’d side, as far away from the Captain’s cabin as possible. The first door he tried was locked, the second opened to a glimpse of heavily labelled baggage and the startled face of a man lying prone on his bunk with a book. A tug blared so close alongside that he jumped. Cabin Number Four was empty, and he slipped inside and locked the door. And after that he stood for a long time, quite still and breathing heavily, listening to the sounds of the ship, waiting tense for the sudden outcry that would inevitably follow the discovery that he had not gone ashore.
That period of waiting, ten minutes at the most, seemed the longest he had ever known. And then a whistle sounded. It was so like the shrill of a police whistle that he reached for the handle of the door, instinctively seeking escape in movement. But then the engine-room telegraph rang from the bridge overhead and the ship suddenly came to life, a gentle throbbing against the soles of his shoes. He knelt on the unmade bunk then and cautiously pulled back the curtain that covered the porthole. He could see the deck rail and beyond it a flat expanse of water with the snow driving across it. And then the water was swirling to the bite of the screws and he knew the ship was moving.
He took off his hat and coat then and lay down on the bunk under a ship’s blanket, listening with his ears attuned to every sound. A gong sounded for the evening meal and there was movement in the next cabin, the gush of a tap, the bang of a suitcase. The shrill of the whistle on the bridge was answered a moment later by the
tug’s farewell blast on her siren. The beat of the engines increased, and later, after they had slowed to drop the pilot, the ship began to roll.
He slept during the night, rolled from side to side of the narrow bunk. But when daylight came, he lay awake, tense and hungry. Footsteps sounded in the alleyway, cabin doors slammed, somewhere a loose porthole cover rattled back and forth. The hours of daylight seemed endless, but nobody came, nobody even tried the handle of the cabin door. It was as though he didn’t exist, and, perversely, he felt deserted, lost and forgotten in this strange world he’d been thrust into by events. He had no watch, so that he’d no idea of the time. The sky was grey with a low wrack of cloud, no sun. The violence of the movement was exhausting, and towards nightfall he was sick, retching emptily into the washbasin. Nobody seemed to hear the sound of his misery, nobody seemed to care. The seas, thudding against the bows of the ship, made her tremble, so that everything rattled, and each time she buried her bows the noise of the impact was followed by a long, shuddering movement that seemed to run through his tired body as though he were himself being exposed to the onslaught of the gale.
Night followed the day at last and he slept; and then it was day again. Darkness and light succeeding each other. He lost count of the days, and when the sun came out and the sea subsided, he knew he was too weak to hold out alone in that cabin any longer. The moment had come to face the future.
Just above his head, within easy reach of his left hand, was a bell-push. He lay half a day, staring at the yellow bone button embedded in its wooden orifice, before he could summon the courage to press it, and when the steward came he told the startled Somali to take him to the Captain.
Griffiths was seated at his desk so that to David’s bemused mind it seemed like that first time he’d met him, except that now the cabin was full of sunlight and they were off the coast of Portugal. The Somali was explaining excitedly and Griffiths’s small blue eyes were staring up at him. The Captain silenced the man with a movement of his hand. “All right, Ishmail. You can leave us now.” And as the steward turned to go, his eyes rolling in his head, Griffiths added: “And see you don’t talk about this. The passengers are not to know that a stowaway has been hiding in their accommodation.” And when the door closed and they were alone, he turned to David. “Now, young man, perhaps you’d explain why the devil you stowed away on my ship?”
David hesitated. It was difficult to know where to begin, though he’d had four days of solitude to think about it. He was scared, too. The little man in the worn blue jacket with the gold braid on the sleeves was more frightening to him than either of the judges who had sentenced him, for his future was in the Captain’s hands. “Well, come on, man, come on.” The beard waggled impatiently, the blue eyes bored into him.
I would like to think that he remembered my advice then, but more probably he was too weak and confused to invent a satisfactory story. At any rate, he told it straight, from the receipt of his mother’s hysterical letter and his escape from Borstal, right through to the tragedy of his return to the house in Everdale Road. And Griffiths listened without comment, except that halfway through he took pity on David’s weakness, for he was leaning on the edge of the desk to support himself, and told him to pull up a chair and sit down. And when finally he was asked to account for his possession of the documents that had been his excuse for boarding the ship, he stuck to the explanation we’d agreed on.
But Griffiths was much too sharp for him. “So you took the packet from Mr. Grant’s office and decided to deliver it yourself?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You say you found the door of Mr. Grant’s office open. That means he’d only gone out for a moment. When he came back and found the packet gone, the natural thing would be for him to come down to the ship and give me some explanation. You’re lying, you see.”
There was nothing he could do then but tell Captain Griffiths the truth, and the blue eyes, staring into his, began to crease at the corners. By the time he had finished, Griffiths was leaning back in the swivel chair and roaring with laughter, his mouth so wide open that David could see the movement of his uvula in the red hollow of his gullet. “Well, I’ll be damned!” Griffiths said, wiping his eyes. “And Grant an accessory …” And then he started in on a cross-examination that seemed to go on and on.
Finally he got up and stood for a long time staring out of the porthole at the sunlight dancing on the waves made by the ship’s passage through the water, whilst David sat there, numbed and hopeless. “Well, I believe you,” Griffiths said, still staring out at the sea. “You could never have made all that up.” There was a long silence. “You got Grant to help you—and how you did that I don’t know, considering he’d never met your father. He was risking his reputation, everything. You’ve no passport, of course? That means you can’t land in the normal way. And you’ve never had word from your father, which means he doesn’t care to acknowledge your existence—right?”
And when David didn’t say anything, Griffiths swung round from the porthole, his beard thrust aggressively forward. “And you stow away on my ship, expecting me to get you into Arabia. How the devil do you think I’m going to do that, eh?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Perhaps Grant suggested something?” But David shook his head unhappily and Griffiths snapped: “A lawyer—he should have had more sense.” And he stumped across the cabin and stood peering down at David’s face. “Is your father going to acknowledge you now, do you think? How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“And do you think Colonel Whitaker’s going to be pleased to have a bastard he sired nineteen, twenty years ago, suddenly turn up with no passport, nothing—and a jailbird at that?”
David got to his feet then. “I’m sorry, Captain Griffiths,” he said stiffly. “I didn’t realize …” The words didn’t come easily, and his mouth felt dry and caked. “I’ve always dreamed of this, you see—of getting out to Arabia. I suppose it’s in my—bastard blood.” He said it with bitterness, for he was convinced now that the world was against him, as it always had been—as it always would be. “I’ll work my passage,” he added wearily, “and when we get to Aden you can hand me over to the authorities.”
Griffiths nodded. “That’s the first sensible suggestion you’ve made. And it’s exactly what I ought to do.” He turned away and stood for a moment lost in thought. “Your father did me a good turn once. I owe him something for that, but the question is would I be doing him a good turn …” He gave a quick shrug and subsided into his chair, chuckling to himself. “It has its humorous side, you know.” And David watched, fascinated and with a sudden feeling of intense excitement, as Griffiths’s hand reached out to the bridge communicator. “Mr. Evans. Come down to my cabin for a moment, will you?” And then, looking at David: “Well, now, for the sake of Mr. Grant, whom I wouldn’t have suspected of such lawlessness, and for the sake of your father, who’s going to get the shock of his life, I’m going to sign you on as a deck hand. But understand this,” he added, “any trouble at Aden and I hand you over to the authorities.”
David was too relieved, too dazed to speak. The Mate came in and Griffiths said: “Stowaway for you, Mr. Evans. Have the galley give him some food and then put him to work. I’m signing him on. And see the passengers, at any rate, don’t know how he came aboard. His name is—Whitaker.” David caught the glint of humour in the blue eyes.
“Thank you, sir,” he mumbled, but as he turned away all he could think about was that name, spoken aloud for the first time. Whitaker. Somehow it seemed to fit, as though it had always belonged to him; it was a symbol, too, a declaration that the past was gone, the future ahead.
All down the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal, the life of the ship, the sun’s increasing warmth, the sight of places all dreamed about and now suddenly come to life absorbed him completely, each day bringing the promise of Arabia twenty-four steaming hours nearer. But when they entered the Red Sea, with the w
ater flat like a mirror and the desert hills of the Hejaz shimmering to port, he knew they were getting close to Aden. And at Aden the police might be waiting for him.
It was night when the anchor was let go off Steamer Point, and as he stood on the foredeck directing a stream of water on to the hawsehole, he could see the lights of Crater and the black shape of the volcanic hills behind towering against the stars. His first Arabian port. It touched his nostrils with a breath of sun-hot oil waste. But instead of excitement, all he felt was fear.
Customs and Immigration came aboard. He stood by the rail, in the shadow of one of the boats, and watched them climb the side from a launch. His work was done and he’d nothing to think about how but the possibility of arrest. A subdued murmur came to him from the town, strange Arab cries drifting across the water. Another launch glided to the ship’s side. The agent this time. And later two of the passengers were climbing down into it, followed by their baggage. The officials were leaving, too, and he watched the launches curve away from the ship, two ghostly arrow-tips puttering into the night. He breathed gently again, savouring the warm, strange-scented air … and then the steward called his name. “Captain want you in cabin.”
Slowly he went for’ard to the bridge-deck housing. Captain Griffiths was seated in the leather armchair, his face a little flushed, his eyes bright, a tumbler of whisky at his elbow. “Well, young fellow, it appears that you’re in the clear. Nobody is in the least bit interested in you here.” And he added: “Doubtless you have Mr. Grant to thank for that. I’m sorry I can’t send him a message; the man must be half out of his mind, considering the chance he took.”
“I’ll write to him as soon as I can,” David murmured.
The Captain nodded. “Time enough for that when you’re safely ashore. But it’s only fair to tell you that if I fail to contact your father, then you’ll complete the voyage and be paid off at Cardiff.” And having delivered this warning, he went on: “I’ll be going ashore in the morning and I’ll cable Colonel Whitaker care of GODCO—that’s the Gulfoman Oilfields Development Company. It may reach him, it may not. Depends where your father is, you see; he’s not an easy man to contact. Meantime, I am instructing Mr. Evans to give you work that will keep you out of sight of the passengers. We have two oil men with us on the voyage up the coast, also an official from the PRPG’s office—that’s the Political Resident Persian Gulf. See to it that you keep out of their way. If you do get ashore, then I don’t want anybody saying afterwards that they saw you on board my ship.” And with that David found himself dismissed.
The Doomed Oasis Page 5