I don’t know how long I was down there. It seemed like hours that I shovelled and sweated in the cavernous inferno of the stoke-hold. The furnace roared and blazed with heat, yet it was a long while before I noticed any change in the pressure gauge. Then slowly the needle began to rise. I was standing, leaning on my shovel, watching the needle, when faint above the furnace roar I heard the slam of metal against metal and turned.
He was standing in the rectangle of the stoke-hold doors. He didn’t move for a moment and then he advanced towards me, reeling drunkenly to the movement of the ship. But it wasn’t the rolling that made him stagger. It was exhaustion. I watched him as he came towards me with a sort of fascination. The furnace door was open and in the glow I saw his face sweating and haggard, the eyes sunk into shadowed sockets.
He stopped as he saw me staring at him. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. There was a nervous pitch to his voice, and his eyes, turned now to catch the furnace glow, had a wild look in them. ‘What are you staring at?’
‘You,’ I said. ‘Where have you been?’
He didn’t answer.
‘You haven’t been to sleep at all.’ I caught hold of his arm. ‘Where have you been?’ I shouted at him.
He shook me off. ‘Mind your own damn’ business!’ He was staring at me wildly. Then he reached for the shovel. ‘Give me that.’ He snatched it out of my hand and began to feed coal in through the open furnace door. But he was so exhausted he could hardly balance himself to the roll of the ship. His movements became slower and slower. ‘Don’t stand there watching me,’ he shouted. ‘Go and get some sleep.’
‘It’s you who need sleep,’ I told him.
‘I said we’d take it in two-hour shifts.’ His voice was flat, his tone final. Coal spilled suddenly out of the chute, piling over his feet to a heavy roll. He stared at it with a sort of crazy fascination. ‘Get out of here,’ he said. And then, shouting: ‘Get out! Do you hear?’ He was leaning on the shovel, still staring down at the coal spilling out of the chute. His body seemed to sag and he brushed his arm across his sweaty face. ‘Go and get some sleep, for God’s sake. Leave me here.’ The last almost a whisper. And then he added, as though it were a connected thought: ‘It’s blowing full gale now.’
I hesitated, but he looked half-crazed in that weird light and I picked up my jersey and started for the door. I checked once, in the doorway. He was still watching me, the furnace-glow shining full on his haggard face and casting the enormous shadow of his body on the coal chute behind him.
Clambering up through the gloom of the engine-room I heard the scrape of the shovel and had one last glimpse of him through the open door; he was working at the coal, shovelling it into the furnace as though it were some sort of enemy to be attacked and destroyed with the last reserves of his energy.
The sounds of the gale changed as I climbed up through the ship; instead of the pounding of the waves against the hull, solid and resonant, there was the high-pitched note of the wind and the hissing, tearing sound of the sea. Cold, rushing air hit me in a blast as I stepped out into the corridor and made my way for’ard to my borrowed cabin. I had a wash and then lay back on the bunk, exhausted.
But though I was tired and closed my eyes, I couldn’t sleep. There was something queer about the man—about the ship, too; those two fires and the half-flooded hold and the way they had abandoned her.
I must have dozed off, for, when I opened my eyes again, I was suddenly tense, staring at the dim-lit unfamiliarity of the cabin, wondering where I was. And then I was thinking of the atmosphere in that other cabin and, in the odd way one’s mind clings to a detail, I remembered the two raincoats hanging on the door, the two raincoats that must belong to two different men. I sat up, feeling stale and sweaty and dirty. It was then just after two. I swung my feet off the bunk and sat there staring dazedly at the desk.
Rice! That was the name of the man. Less than twenty-four hours ago he had been on board, here in his cabin, perhaps seated at that desk. And here was I, dressed in his clothes, occupying his cabin—and the ship still afloat.
I pulled myself up and went over to the desk, drawn by a sort of fellow-feeling for the poor devil, wondering whether he was still tossing about on the sea in one of the lifeboats. Or had he got safe ashore? Maybe he was drowned. Idly I opened the desk top. There were books on navigation; he’d been an orderly man with a sense of property for he had written his name on the fly-leaf of each—John Rice, in the same small, crabbed hand that has made most of the entries in the bridge log book. There were paperbacks, too, mostly detective fiction, exercise books full of trigonometrical calculations, a slide rule, some loose sheets of graph paper.
It was under these that I found the brand-new leather writing case, the gift note still inside—To John. Write me often, darling. Love—Maggie. Wife or sweetheart? I didn’t know, but staring up at me was the last letter he had written her. My darling Maggie it began, and my eyes were caught and held by the opening of the second paragraph: Now that the worst is over, I don’t mind telling you, darling, this has been a trip and no mistake. Nothing has gone right.
The skipper had died and they had buried him in the Med. And out in the Atlantic they had run into heavy weather. On March 16 they were hove-to—a real buster—the pumps unable to hold their own, Numbers One and Two holds flooded, and a fire in the radio shack whilst they were trying to shore up the boiler-room bulkhead, with the crew near panic because that bastard Higgins, had told them that explosives formed part of the cargo, whatever the manifest said. A Mr Dellimare, whom he referred to as the owner, had been lost overboard that same night.
Patch he described as having joined the ship at Aden as first officer in place of old Adams who was sick. And he added this: Thank God he did or I don’t think I’d be writing this to you. A good seaman, whatever they say about his having run the BELLE ISLE on the rocks a few years back. And then this final paragraph: Now Higgins is first officer and honestly, Maggie, I don’t know. I’ve told you how he’s been riding me ever since we left Yokohama. But it isn’t only that. He’s too thick with some of the crew—the worst of them. And then there’s the ship. Sometimes I think the old girl knows she’s bound for the knacker’s yard. There’s some ships when it comes to breaking up . . .
The letter ended abruptly like that. What had happened?
Was it the shout of Fire? There were questions racing through my mind, questions that only Patch could answer. I thrust the letter into my pocket and hurried down to the stoke-hold.
I had got as far as the engine-room before I stopped to think about the man I was going to question. He’d been alone on the ship. They’d all abandoned her, except him. And Taggart was dead—the owner, too. A cold shiver ran through me, and on the lower catwalk I stopped and listened, straining my ears—hearing all the sounds of the ship struggling with the seas, all magnified by the resonance of that gloomy cavern, but unable to hear the sound I was listening for, the sound of a shovel scraping coal from the iron floors.
I went down slowly then, a step at a time, listening—listening for the scrape of that shovel. But I couldn’t hear it and when I finally reached the door to the stoke-hold, there was the shovel lying on the coal.
I shouted to him, but all I got was the echo of my own voice, sounding thin against the pounding of the seas. And when I flung open the furnace door, I wondered whether he existed at all outside of my imagination. The fire was a heap of white-hot ash. It looked as though it hadn’t been stoked since I had left it.
In a frenzy, I seized the shovel and piled on coal, trying to smother my fears in physical exertion, in satisfaction at the sound of the coal spilling out of the chute, at the roar of the furnace.
But you can’t just blot out fear like that. It was there inside me. I suddenly dropped the shovel, slammed the furnace door shut and went rushing up through the ship. I had to find him. I had to convince myself that he existed.
You must remember I was very tired.
He wa
sn’t on the bridge. But there were pencil marks on the chart, a new position. And the sight of the seas steadied me. They were real enough anyway. God! they were real! I clung to the ledge below the glass panels of the wheelhouse and stared, fascinated, as a wave built up to port, broke and burst against the ship’s side, flinging up a great column of smoking water that crashed down on the foredeck, blotting everything out. The sea rolled green over the bows. And when the outline of the bulwarks showed again and she struggled up with thousands of tons of water spilling off her, I saw that the for’ard hatch was a gaping rectangle in the deck.
There was no litter of matchwood. The deck was swept clear of all trace of the hatch covers. They had been gone some time. I watched the water spilling out of the hold as the ship rolled. But as fast as it spilled, the angry seas filled it up again. The bows were practically under water. The ship felt heavy and sluggish under my feet. She didn’t feel as though she could last much longer.
I glanced round the bridge, rooted to the spot by the strange emptiness of it and the sudden certainty that the ship was going to go down. The spokes of the wheel were flung out in a forlorn circle. The brass of the binnacle gleamed. The telegraph pointers still stood at Full Ahead. The emptiness of it all . . . I turned and went down to the captain’s cabin. He was there, lying back in the arm-chair, his body relaxed, his eyes closed. A half-empty bottle of rum stood on the desk at his elbow. The glass was on the floor, spilling a brown wet stain across the carpet. Sleep had smoothed out the lines of his face. Like that he seemed younger, less tough; but he still looked haggard and his right hand twitched nervously where it lay against the dark leather arm of the chair. The two blue raincoats still hung incongruously side-by-side on the back of the door. The girl still smiled at me sunnily from her silver frame.
A big sea broke against the ship’s side, darkening the portholes with upflung water. His eyelids flicked back. ‘What is it?’ He seemed instantly wide awake, though his face was still puffed with sleep, flushed with the liquor he’d drunk.
‘The for’ard hatch covers have gone,’ I said. I felt a strange sense of relief. He was real and it was his responsibility, not mine. I wasn’t alone after all.
‘I know that.’ He sat up, pushing his hand across his face and up through his black hair. ‘What do you expect me to do about it—go out and rig new ones?’ His voice was a little slurred. ‘We did that once.’ He pulled himself up out of the chair and went over to the porthole and stood there, looking at the sea. His back was towards me, his shoulders slightly hunched, hands thrust into his pockets. ‘It was like this all the way up through the Bay—heavy seas and the ship making water all the time.’ The daylight filtering through the porthole shone cold and hard on his exhausted features. ‘And then that storm! God! What a night!’ He stared out through the porthole.
‘You’d better get some more sleep,’ I said.
‘Sleep?’ His hand went to his eyes, rubbing them, and then pushing up through his hair again. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ His forehead wrinkled in a frown and he smiled so that his face had a surprised look. ‘You know, I can’t remember when I last slept.’ And then he added: ‘There was something . . .’ He was frowning. ‘God! I can’t remember. Something I was going to look up.’ He stared down at the chart and books that lay on the floor beside the arm-chair. The chart was Number 2100, the large-scale chart of the Minkies. And then he was looking at me again and in an odd voice he said, ‘Who exactly are you?’ He was a little drunk.
‘I told you that earlier,’ I replied. ‘My name is—’
‘To hell with your name,’ he shouted impatiently. ‘What were you doing out there in that yacht? What made you board the ship?’ And then before I had time to say anything, he added, ‘Are you something to do with the Company?’
‘What company?’
‘The Dellimare Trading and Shipping Company—the people who own the Mary Deare.’ He hesitated. ‘Were you out there, waiting to see if—’ But then he shook his head. ‘No, it couldn’t have been that. We weren’t steaming to schedule.’
‘I’d never heard of the Mary Deare until last night,’ I told him. And I explained how we’d almost been run down. ‘What happened?’ I asked him. ‘How was it that the crew abandoned her with the engines still running and you on board? Was it the fire?’
He stared at me, swaying a little on his feet. And then he said, ‘She was never meant to make the Channel.’ He said it with a sort of smile, and when I asked him what he meant, he shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the porthole, staring out at the sea. ‘I thought we were in the clear when I’d got her round Ushant,’ he murmured. ‘God damn it! I thought I’d taken all the knocks a man could in the course of a single voyage. And then that fire.’ He turned and faced me again then. He seemed suddenly to want to talk. ‘It was the fire that beat me. It happened about nine-thirty last night. Rice rushed in here to say that Number Three hold was ablaze and the crew were panicking. I got the hoses run out and part of Number Four hatch cleared so that we could play water on the bulkhead. And then I went down the inspection ladder into Number Four to check. That’s how they got me.’ He pointed to the bloodied gash on his jaw.
‘You mean somebody hit you—one of the crew?’ I asked in astonishment.
He nodded, smiling. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. ‘They battened the inspection hatch down on top of me when I was unconscious and then they drove the crew in panic to the boats.’
‘And left you there?’
‘Yes. The only thing that saved me was that they forgot we’d cleared part of the hatch cover. By piling bales of cotton up—’
‘But that’s mutiny—murder. Are you suggesting Higgins . . .’
He lurched towards me then, sudden violence in his face. ‘Higgins! How did you know it was Higgins?’
I started to explain about the letter Rice had written, but he interrupted me. ‘What else did he say?’ he demanded. ‘Anything about Dellimare?’
‘The owner? No. Only that he’d been lost overboard.’ And I added, ‘The captain died, too, I gather.’
‘Yes, damn his eyes!’ He turned away from me and his foot struck the overturned glass. He picked it up and poured himself a drink, his hands shaking slightly. ‘You having one?’ He didn’t wait for me to reply, but pulled open a drawer of the desk and produced a glass, filling it almost to the brim. ‘I buried him at sea on the first Tuesday in March,’ he said, handing the drink to me. ‘And glad I was to see the last of him.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I was glad at the time, anyway.’
‘What did he die of?’ I asked.
‘Die of?’ He looked up at me quickly from under his dark brows, suddenly suspicious again. ‘Who the hell cares what he died of?’ he said with sudden truculence. ‘He died and left me to face the whole . . .’ He made a vague gesture with the hand that held his glass. And then he seemed suddenly to notice me again, for he said abruptly: ‘What the hell were you doing out there in that yacht of yours last night?’
I started to tell him how we’d bought Sea Witch in Morlaix and were sailing her back to England for conversion into a diving tender, but he didn’t seem to be listening. His mind was away on some thought of his own and all at once he said: ‘And I thought it was decent of the old bastard to get out and make room for a younger man.’ He was laughing again as though at some joke. ‘Well, it’s all the same now. That bulkhead will go soon.’ And he looked at me and added, ‘Do you know how old this ship is? Over forty years old! She’s been torpedoed three times, wrecked twice. She’s been rotting in Far Eastern ports for twenty years. Christ! She might have been waiting for me.’ And he grinned, not pleasantly, but with his lips drawn back from his teeth.
A sea crashed against the ship’s side and the shudder of the impact seemed to bring him back to the present. ‘Do you know the Minkies?’ He lunged forward and came up with a book which he tossed across to me. ‘Page three hundred and eight, if you’re interested in reading the details of your own graveyard.’
It was the Channel Pilot, Part II.
I found the page and read:
PLATEAU DES MINQUIERS.—Buoyage.—Caution.—Plateau des Minquiers consists of an extensive group of above-water and sunken rocks and reefs, together with numerous banks of shingle, gravel and sand . . . The highest rock, Maîtresse Ile, 31 feet high, on which stand several houses, is situated near the middle of the plateau . . . There were details that showed the whole extent of the reefs to be about 17½ miles long by 8 miles deep, and paragraph after paragraph dealt with major rock outcrops and buoyage.
‘I should warn you that the so-called houses on Maîtresse Ile are nothing but deserted stone shacks.’ He had spread the chart out on the desk and was bending over it, his head in his hands.
‘What about tide?’ I asked.
‘Tide?’ He suddenly seemed excited. ‘Yes, that was it. Something to do with the tide. I was going to look it up.’ He turned and searched the floor again, swaying slightly, balanced automatically to the roll of the ship. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter much.’ He downed the rest of his drink and poured himself another. ‘Help yourself.’ He pushed the bottle towards me.
I shook my head. The liquor had done nothing to the chill emptiness inside me—a momentary trickle of warmth, that was all. I was cold with weariness and the knowledge of how it would end. And yet there had to be something we could do. If the man were fresh; if he’d had food and sleep . . . ‘When did you feed last?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, I had some bully. Sometime this morning it must have been.’ And then with sudden concern that took me by surprise, he said, ‘Why, are you hungry?’
It seemed absurd to admit to hunger when the ship might go down at any moment, but the mere thought of food was enough. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am.’ Anyway, it might get him away from the bottle, put something inside him besides liquor.
‘All right. Let’s go and feed.’ He took me down to the pantry, holding his glass delicately and balancing himself to the sluggish roll. We found a tin of ham—bread, butter, pickles. ‘Coffee?’ He lit a primus stove he’d found and put a kettle on. We ate raven¬ously by the light of a single, guttering candle; not talking, just stuffing food into our empty bellies. The noise of the storm was remote down there in the pantry, overlaid by the roar of the primus.
The Wreck of the Mary Deare Page 5