‘Would you like some tea?’ I asked.
She nodded. She had her handkerchief out and her face was turned away from me. I hesitated, feeling there ought to be something I could do. But there was nothing and I went in search of the steward. To give her time to recover I waited whilst he made the tea and brought it back to her myself. She was composed now and though her face still looked white and pinched, she had got back some of the vitality that there had been in that photograph. She began asking me questions and to keep her mind off her father’s death I started to tell her what had happened after I boarded the Mary Deare.
And then Patch came in. He didn’t see her at first. ‘I’ve got to leave,’ he said. ‘A question of identification. They’ve picked up twelve bodies.’ His voice was hard and urgent, his face strained. ‘Rice is dead. The only one I could rely on—’
‘This is Miss Taggart,’ I said.
He stared at her. For a second he didn’t know her, didn’t connect her name; his mind was concentrated entirely on his own affairs. And then the hardness slowly left his face and he came forward, hesitantly, almost nervously. ‘Of course. Your face . . .’ He paused as though at a loss for words. ‘It—it was there on his desk. I never removed it.’ And then, still looking at her, as though fascinated, he added almost to himself: ‘You were with me through many bad moments.’
‘I understand my father is dead?’
The forthright way in which she put it seemed to shock him, for his eyes widened slightly as though at a blow. ‘Yes.’
‘Mr Sands said you thought it was a heart attack?’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s right—a heart attack.’ He said it automatically, not thinking about the words, all his mind concentrated in his eyes, drinking her in as though she were some apparition that had suddenly come to life.
There was an awkward pause. ‘What happened? Please tell me what happened?’ She was standing facing him now and there was a tightness in her voice that betrayed her nervousness. I suddenly felt that she was afraid of him. A sort of tension stretched between them. ‘I want to know what happened,’ she repeated and her voice sounded almost brittle in the silence.
‘Nothing happened,’ he answered slowly. ‘He died. That’s all.’ His voice was flat, without feeling.
‘But how? When? Surely you can give me some details?’
He pushed his hand up through his hair. ‘Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry. It was March 2nd. We were in the Med then.’ He hesitated as though searching in his mind for the words he wanted. ‘He didn’t come up to the bridge that morning. And then the steward called me. He was lying in his bunk.’ Again a pause and then he added, ‘We buried him that afternoon, at sea.’
‘He died in his sleep then?’
‘Yes. That’s right. He died in his sleep.’
There was a long silence. She wanted to believe him, wanted to desperately. But she didn’t. Her eyes were very big and her hands were pressed tightly together. ‘Did you know him well?’ she asked. ‘Had you sailed with him before?’
‘No.’
‘Had he been ill at all—during the voyage, or before you joined the ship at Aden?’
Again the slight hesitation. ‘No. He hadn’t been ill.’ He seemed to pull himself together then. ‘I gather the owners didn’t inform you of his death. I’m sorry about that. I notified them by radio immediately, but I received no reply. They should have notified you.’ He said it without any hope that they would have done so.
‘What did he look like—before his death? Tell me about him please. You see, I hadn’t seen him—’ The pleading sound of her voice trailed away. And then suddenly in a firmer voice she said, ‘Can you describe him to me?’
He frowned slightly. ‘Yes, if you want me to.’ His tone was reluctant. ‘I—don’t quite know what you want me to tell you.’
‘Just what he looked like. That’s all.’
‘I see. Well, I’ll try. He was small, very small—there was almost nothing of him at all. His face was red—sun-burned. He was bald, you know, but when he had his cap on and was up on the bridge he looked much younger than—’
‘Bald?’ Her voice sounded shocked.
‘Oh, he still had some white hair.’ Patch sounded awkward. ‘You must understand, Miss Taggart, he wasn’t a young man and he’d been a long time in the tropics.’
‘He had fair hair,’ she said almost desperately. ‘A lot of fair hair.’ She was clinging to a five-year-old picture of him. ‘You’re making him out to be an old man.’
‘You asked me to describe him,’ Patch said defensively.
‘I can’t believe it.’ There was a break in her voice. And then she was looking at him again, her chin up, her face white. ‘There’s something more, isn’t there—something you haven’t told me?’
‘No, I assure you,’ Patch murmured unhappily.
‘Yes, there is, I know there is.’ Her voice had suddenly risen on a note of hysteria. ‘Why didn’t he write to me from Aden? He always wrote me . . . every port . . . and then dying like that and the ship going down . . . He’d never lost a ship in his life.’
Patch was staring at her, his face suddenly hard and angry. Then abruptly he turned to me. ‘I’ve got to go now.’ He didn’t look at the girl again as he turned on his heels and walked quickly out.
She looked round at the sound of the door closing, staring at the blankness of it with wide, tear-filled eyes. And then suddenly she slumped down into her chair and buried her head in her arms, her whole body racked by a paroxysm of sobs. I waited, wondering what I could do to help her. Gradually her shoulders ceased to shake. ‘Five years is a long time,’ I said gently. ‘He could only tell you what he knew.’
‘It wasn’t that,’ she said wildly. ‘All the time he was here I felt—’ She stopped there. She had her handkerchief out and she began dabbing at her face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘It was silly of me. I—I was just a schoolgirl when I last saw my father. My impression of him is probably a bit romantic.’
I put my hand on her shoulder. ‘Just remember him as you last saw him,’ I said.
She nodded dumbly.
‘Shall I pour you some more tea?’
‘No. No thanks.’ She stood up. ‘I must go now.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked. She seemed so lost.
‘No. Nothing.’ She gave me a smile that was a mere conventional movement of her lips. She was more than dazed; she was raw and hurt inside. ‘I must go—somewhere, by myself.’ It was said fugitively and in a rush, her hand held out to me automatically. ‘Goodbye. Thank you.’ Our hands touched, and she was gone. For a moment her footsteps sounded on the bare wood of the deck outside, and then I was alone with the sounds of the ship and the dock. Through the porthole I saw the bare, grey walls of St Malo glistening wet in a fleeting gleam of sunlight—the old walls of the city and above them the new stone and roofing of buildings faithfully copied to replace the shattered wreckage that the Germans had left. She was walking quickly, not seeing the passengers or the French or the sombre, fortress-like beauty of the ancient city; a small, neat figure whose mind clung to a girl’s memories of a dead father.
I turned away and lit a cigarette, slumping wearily into a chair. The crane, the gangway, the passengers in their raincoats and the French dock men in their blue smocks and trousers; it all seemed so ordinary—the Minkies and the Mary Deare were a vague dream.
And then Captain Fraser came in. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what did happen? Do you know?’ The curiosity in his blue eyes was unveiled now. ‘The crew say that he ordered them to abandon ship.’ He waited and when I didn’t say anything, he added, ‘Not just one of them; it’s what they all say.’
I remembered then what Patch had said: They’ll cling together . . . because they’ve got to cover themselves somehow. Who was right—Patch or the crew? My mind went back to that moment when we had grounded, when he had relinquished the wheel from the grip of his hands in the midst of that waste of sea and rock.
I was conscious of Fraser again and was suddenly and for the first time fully aware of the ordeal that Patch now faced. I pulled myself stiffly up out of the chair. ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. And then, because I sensed in the man a sort of hostility towards Patch, I added quickly, ‘But I’m quite certain he never ordered the crew to take to the boats.’ It was an instinctive rather than a reasoned statement. I told him I was going ashore then to find a hotel, but he wouldn’t hear of it and insisted on my accepting the hospitality of his ship, ringing for the steward and putting a cabin at my disposal.
I saw Patch once more before I took the plane for Guernsey. It was at Paimpol, twenty or thirty miles to the west of St Malo, in a little office down by the bassin. There were fishing vessels there, packed two and three-deep along the walls—tubby wooden bottoms, all bitumen-black, nudging each other like charladies, with mast-tops nodding, gay with paint—and the water of the bassin was poppled with little hissing waves, for it was blowing half a gale again. As the police car that had brought me from St Malo drew up I saw Patch framed in the fly-blown office window; just his face, disembodied and white as a ghost, looking out like a prisoner on to the world of the sea.
‘This way plees, monsieur.’
There was an outer office that served as a waiting-room with benches round the wall and a dozen men were seated there, dumb, apathetic and listless—flotsam washed in by the sea. I knew instinctively that they were all that remained of the Mary Deare’s crew. Their borrowed clothes breathed shipwreck and they huddled close together, like a bunch of frightened, bewildered sheep; some that were clearly English, others that might be any race under the sun. One man, and one man alone, stood out from the motley bunch. He was a great hunk of a brute with a bull’s neck and a bull’s head, all hard bone and folds of flesh. He stood with his legs spread wide, solid as a piece of sculpture on the pedestal of his feet, his huge meaty hands thrust inside his trousers, which were fastened with a broad leather belt that was stained white with a crust of salt and had a big square brass buckle that had turned almost green. He held his hands there as though trying to prevent the great roll of fat, like a rubber tyre, that was his belly escaping entirely from the belt. His clothes were borrowed—a blue shirt that was too small for him and blue trousers that were too short. His thighs and legs tapered away like a bull terrier’s hind quarters so that they looked on the verge of buckling under the weight of that great barrel of a body.
He started forward as though to bar my way. Tiny eyes, hard as flint, stared at me unwinking over heavy pouches of flesh. I half checked, thinking he was going to speak to me, but he didn’t; then the gendarme opened the door to the inner office and I went in.
Patch turned from the window as I entered. I couldn’t see his expression. His head and shoulders were outlined against the window’s square of daylight and all I could see was the people in the road outside and the fishing boats moving restlessly in the bassin beyond. There were filing cabinets ranged against the walls under faded charts of the harbour, a big, old-fashioned safe in one corner, and, seated at an untidy desk facing the light, was a ferrety little man with twinkling eyes and thinning hair. ‘Monsieur Sands?’ He held out a thin, pale hand. He didn’t rise to greet me and I was conscious of the crutch propped against the wooden arm of his chair. ‘You will excuse me please for the journey you make, but it is necessary.’ He waved me to a seat. ‘Alors, monsieur.’ He was staring at the sheet of foolscap in front of him that was covered with neat, copper-plate writing. ‘You go on board the Mary Deare from your yacht. C’est ça?’
‘Oui, monsieur.’ I nodded.
‘And the name of your yacht, monsieur?’
‘Sea Witch.’
He began to write slowly and with meticulous care, frowning slightly and biting softly at his underlip as the steel nib scratched across the surface of the paper. ‘And your name—your full name?’
‘John Henry Sands.’ I spelt it for him.
‘And your address?’
I gave him the name and address of my bank.
‘Eh bien. Now, you boarded the Mary Deare how long after the crew had abandoned the ship?’
‘Ten or eleven hours after.’
‘And Monsieur le Capitaine?’ He glanced at Patch. ‘He was still on the ship, eh?’
I nodded.
The official leaned forward. ‘Alors, monsieur. It is this that I have to ask you. In your opinion, did Monsieur le Capitaine order the crew to abandon ship or did he not?’
I looked across at Patch, but he was still just a silhouette framed in the window. ‘I can’t say, monsieur,’ I replied. ‘I wasn’t there.’
‘Of course. I understand that. But in your opinion. I want your opinion, monsieur. You must know what had happened. He must have talked about it with you. You were on that ship through many desperate hours. It must have occurred to you both that you might die. Did he not say anything that would enable you to form some opinion as to what really happened?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We didn’t talk very much. There wasn’t time.’ And then, because it must seem extraordinary to him that we hadn’t had time to talk in all the hours we had been on board together, I explained exactly what we had had to do.
He kept on nodding his small head whilst I was talking, a little impatiently as though he weren’t listening. And as soon as I had finished, he said, ‘And now, monsieur, your opinion. That is what I want.’
By then I had had time to make up my mind. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I am quite convinced that Captain Patch never ordered his crew to abandon ship.’ And I went on to explain that it was impossible to believe that he had done so since he himself had remained on board and, single-handed, had put out the fire in the after hold. All the time I was talking the steel pen scratched across the surface of the paper, and when I had finished the official read it through carefully and then turned the sheet towards me. ‘You read French, monsieur?’ I nodded. ‘Then please to read what is written there and sign the deposition.’ He handed me the pen.
‘You understand,’ I said, when I had read it through and signed it, ‘that I wasn’t there. I do not know what happened.’
‘Of course.’ He was looking across at Patch. ‘You wish to add anything to the statement you have made?’ he asked him. And when Patch merely shook his head, he leaned forward, ‘You understand, Monsieur le Capitaine, that it is a very serious charge that you make against your crew—your officers also. Monsieur ’Iggins has sworn that you gave the order to him, and the man at the wheel—Yules—has confirmed that he heard you give the order.’ Patch made no comment. ‘I think perhaps it will be best if we have Monsieur ’Iggins and the other man in here so that I can—’
‘No!’ Patch’s voice trembled with sudden violence.
‘But, monsieur.’ The official’s voice was mild. ‘I must understand what—’
‘By Christ! I tell you, no!’ Patch had come forward to the desk in two strides, was leaning down over it. ‘I won’t have my statement queried in front of those two.’
‘But there must be some reason—’
‘No, I tell you!’ Patch’s fist crashed down on the desk. ‘You have my statement and that’s that. In due course there will be an Enquiry. Until then neither you nor anybody else is going to cross-examine me in front of the crew.’
‘But, Monsieur le Capitaine, do you understand what it is you accuse them of?’
‘Of course, I do.’
‘Then I must ask you—’
‘No. Do you hear me? No!’ His fist slammed the desk again. And then he turned abruptly to me. ‘For God’s sake, let’s go and have a drink. I’ve been in this wretched little office . . .’ He caught hold of my arm. ‘Come on. I need a drink.’
I glanced at the official. He merely shrugged his shoulders, spreading his hands out palm upwards in a little gesture of despair. Patch pulled open the door and strode through the outer office, not glancing to left
or right, walking straight through the men gathered there as though they didn’t exist. But when I started to follow him, the big man blocked my path. ‘Well, wot did you tell ’em?’ he demanded in a throaty voice that was like steam wheezing up from the great pot of his belly. ‘I suppose you told ’em that he never ordered us to abandon ship. Is that wot you said?’
I tried to push past him, but one of his great paws shot out and gripped me by the arm. ‘Come on. Let’s have it. Is that wot you told ’em?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He let go of me then. ‘God Almighty!’ he growled. ‘Wot the hell do you know about it, eh? You were there I s’pose when we took to the boats?’ He was grinning, truculent, and the stubble mat of his face, thrust close to mine, was still grey with salt and dirt. For a man who had been shipwrecked he looked oddly pleased with himself. He oozed self-confidence like a barrel oozes lard and his small, blood-shot eyes glittered moistly, like a pair of oysters, as he said again, ‘You were there, eh?’ And he guffawed at his own heavy humour.
‘No,’ I told him. ‘Of course I wasn’t there. But I don’t—’
‘Well, we was there.’ His voice was raised and his small eyes darted to the half-open door behind me. ‘We was there an’ we know dam’ well wot orders were given.’ He was saying it for the benefit of the French official in the inner office. ‘It was the right order, too, with the ship half full of explosives and a fire on board. That’s wot we felt at the time—me and Rice and the old Chief . . . everybody.’
‘If it was the right order,’ I said, ‘how was it possible for Captain Patch to put the fire out on his own?’
‘Ah. You’d better ask him that.’ And he turned and looked at Patch.
The Wreck of the Mary Deare Page 9