Tafline blushed and was confused. 'It-it was a form of expression. I didn't know Captain Fairlie very well at that stage. I…'
'You were in the area recently where the panel was found, were you not, Captain Fairlie?'
The faces round me turned blank at Joubert's tone of interrogation. It seemed, too, that the friendly surge of professional interest by the civilian experts had dimmed.
'Yes, but. .’
'But what?'
I gestured towards the documents on the desk. 'I explained it all to the C-in-C. I tried to at the Buccaneer inquiry. I have long believed that the clue to Waratah's disappearance was the answer to safety for oil rigs in that area.'
'Quite so, quite so. Yet the telegram says, "keep away from the Waratah"'
He let the silence fall, and then went on, 'I said before, I am a policeman, Captain Fairlie, and in order to get to the bottom of things, we look below what lies on the surface. There are a number of very strange undercurrents in all this. The juffrou's telegram is one of them.'
'It was just a simple message with no hidden or sinister meanings …' I began.
'What do you say, juftrou’
'It was an everyday thought wishing him well.'
Joubert smiled sarcastically. ' "Keep away from the Waratah" — a very ordinary thing for a young lady in love to say!'
'You're reading all sorts of things into this, colonel!' I protested.
There is nothing ordinary about a testament being scratched on a sheet of aluminium,' retorted Joubert. ‘It is less ordinary still for someone whom everyone believes was killed in an airliner crash to bequeath his son a non-existent ship. In all my experience, I have never heard of anything like it.'
I said, 'You've forgotten the watch, Colonel Joubert.'
'No, Captain Fairlie, I have not.'
The police major chuckled in the background like a jackal at a lion's kill.
'That watch is just the sort of extra fancy touch that rouses a policeman's deepest instincts of distrust. It makes the job look too right, too watertight. If it weren't for that watch, I might have had doubts. But look at it-it's one of those self-winding calendar types and the hand has been set at October 23, 1967. Not you notice, at the date of the crash, July, 1967, but a couple of months later. Very clever, very clever indeed!'
I checked my anger. 'You want proof-we can easily have the watch analysed. Or I can tell you myself-there was an inscription from the Air Force Association on the back. It was given to him when he became chief civilian pilot. The wording said something about his war-time raids.'
'I don't for a moment doubt it is your father's watch, Captain Fairlie, just as I don't doubt that it is a panel from the Gemsbok. What worries me is how all this surfaced at once, and why. And where that telegram about the Waratah fits into it.'
‘I’ve tried to explain. I've said over and over..
Joubert waved his hand in dismissal. ‘I want to think this thing over-a lot. You'll be hearing from me again.' He laughed in his overbearing way. 'If you really want people to be on your side, you produce the wreck of the Waratah, Until then, you still have a great deal of explaining to do to a lot of people, Captain Fairlie!'
I went cold at the thought. 'What do we say to the press?'
Joubert shrugged and laughed again. 'You say, Captain Fairlie! It's your story. You set the ball rolling.'
I turned to Tafline. She was unhappy, withdrawn. Again I wondered, what was all this Waratah suspicion and subtle accusation doing to her feelings?
Joubert added, 'That pretty face of yours will provide the press with the romantic interest on the story they love so, juffrou.''
An hour later, stunned by a barrage of reporters' questionings and blinded by a score of bursting flashbulbs, we stood by the great splash of colour which is the flower market. She had not spoken since we emerged into the street, but she asked the Malay woman for kalkoentjies ('little turkeys') — those tiny exquisite wild gladioli, daubed with colours as if they had just been painted and scented, which came from hidden places of the Western Cape. Because it was winter, they were difficult to obtain in the market, but the woman came back smiling with some of the earliest which had been gathered from some sheltered kloof. I pinned the bunch to her lapel without speaking, and she looked down into the brown-and-yellow splashed centre.
'They are like a woman in love.' she murmured. 'Beautiful by day, and her heart perfumed at night.'
Why did my father have to find the Waratah? I asked myself resentfully, looking at her lovely face. Why did they have to come between us, those puzzling, bitter, unanswerable questions?
She said, The Waratah is like the albatross hung round the Ancient Mariner's neck — for both of us. It has driven you into a corner, Ian. You are discredited, in danger of losing everything — your career, reputation, esteem.. '
The cold fear tugged at my heart as I waited for her next words.
'We can never realize our love properly while we carry this burden.'
The numb silence fell between us. I did not want it, but she was right and I knew that she was right.
I was afraid, though, when I saw Greatheart reach for the sword.
She said, 'We must go and look for the Waratah, you and I.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Touleier planed swiftly down the following sea, rose, and shook herself with an exulting motion as she raced out of the trough under full power of her great racing blue nylon spinnaker. A dollop of cold sea came aboard as she lifted and sloshed past me as I went forward to trim the jib a little so that all the spent wind of the spinnaker would spill into it, just as the mainsail was giving its overflow to the spinnaker itself.
'Watch it!' I warned Jubela at the helm.
Touleier was making a good eleven knots with a bone ' between her teeth’, and I was driving her hard. Her sails were as taut and eager as I to get to the Bashee. Touleier liked it that way-she was a thoroughbred and could take what I handed out and, even in the rising sea and fresh south-westerly wind on the port quarter, she did not roll much because of her lean, streamlined hull. She was steady, tense, alive, and seemed to be exhilarating in being taken from her winter confinement as much as I did driving her. Between Touleier and myself there was that imponderable rapport which comes sometimes between a man and his ship perhaps that is why I won the South American race in her — and I understood her every mood. It was this, perhaps, which made me a little particular about Jubela steering her, although he was handling the superb flier magnificently, grinning now and again as she picked up an extra knot or two in a downward plane, or giving a slight correction to the helm as he watched the taut, towering pyramid of canvas above him.
Tafline watched us from the cockpit as we handled the yacht. Like us, she wore oilskins, but no hood, and the wind blew her short hair forward over her forehead. Something of the pure joy of the yacht's speed touched her, too, and relaxed the urgency of our forward flight; she spoke only a little now and then to ask me some technicality of sailing.
Touleier drove for the Bashee.
I had emerged from my unhappy engagement with the colonel and the reporters to the easement of that moment with her by the flower-sellers stunned, bewildered, raw, confused, certainly with no idea of repeating my search for the Waratah. The fact that the liner lay somewhere accessible, not hundreds of feet deep out of reach in some forsaken patch of sea, beat like a drum in my brain, but equally imperative was the unconcealed hostility of the authorities and their conviction that they had to do with an irresponsible nut. Whether I would ever be allowed to command the Walvis Bay again and resume the weather watch was open to the gravest doubt. At any moment I expected to be summoned to Pretoria to account for using the weather ship as a springboard for what the Weather Bureau undoubtedly now regarded as a private investigation of the Waratah mystery and nothing else.
Because my whole being was a ripple of hurt nerves, I had responded badly to her suggestion that we should go and search for the vanished liner.
How could we hope to succeed, I asked her roughly, where squadrons of specially equipped aircraft, helicopters and warships had failed? It was barely a fortnight since Major Bates and his men had been over it. Bates had button-holed me on leaving the Conference, and asked my permission to read in the transcript, in the interest of his Maritime Group, my statements about off-shore currents and winds. 'Only providing you don't also use it as evidence against me,' I had said firmly.
I had used Bates's own words to justify my own reluctance.
The air-search revealed nothing. Bates himself has said so, I argued with her. 'I myself sailed the Waratah's exact course, and I saw nothing, I assure you.'
She had paused, in that guarded way of hers, her face buried in her nosegay.
True,' she replied quietly. There was no island for Bates and his fliers to see, no mysterious underwater cavern, no hulk. But you saw what there was. You saw that ancient ship, sailing against the wind.'
I had felt uncomfortable and on the defensive. I regretted having told even her.
'It might have been anything — some sort of optical illusion caused by the waves and the light. One can't start a search on anything as nebulous as that.'
'Phillips of the Clan Macintyre saw it too,' she replied.
'I am not denying it,' I hedged. 'All I am saying is that it is certainly not substantial enough to approach the authorities. If I came along now, after all that has happened, with a story that I had seen the Flying Dutchman, I think they'd clap me in a lunatic asylum straight away. When it came to the point, I couldn't even bring myself to tell the C-in-C. In order to convince them that they should renew the air-sea search, they need some completely down-to-earth, substantial, and tangible facts.'
She smiled. 'I said, we must go and look, you and I. I didn't mention the authorities.'
'What do you mean?'
'Touleier.'
'Touleier, I expostulated. 'But she's laid up for the winter. You can't just go off in a yacht which doesn't belong to you anyway, but to a syndicate. Besides, it's winter, the worst time of the year.. ’
The idea came to me during the Conference when I turned and looked at you,' she went on. 'Touleier's ready for the round-the-coast race in the spring, you told me so yourself. You also said they wanted you to skipper her, although you probably couldn't, if you're on the weather watch. She's got a new suit of sails and that untried self-steering device. Nothing would please the sponsors more than that the winner of the South American race should take Touleier on a quick shake-down cruise round the coast while his own ship is being repaired.'
I gasped, then I laughed. It might still lie within my grasp to justify everything I had done and said about the Waratah.
'It's so simple and so fantastic I’ I exclaimed, a little unsteadily. 'Jubela-I could get him to crew with us. It's a big strain handling a fast boat like Touleier by oneself, and Jubela knows his stuff. We can expect some rough weather..'
'We want rough weather, we want another big gale,' she said firmly. 'It's the way we'll find the Waratah secret.'
This time I'll take a camera along — a very good camera,' I remarked. 'If we see anything like my old sailing ship, I can at least bring back a picture for the doubting Thomases.'
The thought of the wild sea and frenetic wind sobered my enthusiasm for a moment. 'We can count on at least half a dozen winter gales in those parts. However, the one I hit in Walvis Bay and the sort of gale which hit the Waratah was no ordinary winter gale. But we do know that the storm that hit Waratah was followed shortly afterwards by two other exceptional gales. We may be lucky-or unlucky. It's also very different being out in a blow in a small boat like Touleier and a ship even of Walvis Bay's size. The going will be rough.'
She had touched my hand. 'There's probably not a sailor in the whole Southern Hemisphere safer than you in a gale. The Fairlies must have been bora in gales.'
I felt like adding, died, too.
Touleier's sponsors had been delighted when I put forward Tafline's suggestion. They, at least, did not seem to share the general misgivings about me. Jubela appeared as glad as the sponsors when I found him drinking mournfully in a shebeen at 10 o'clock in the morning.
The sea is clean,' he had said. 'And I am like a bushpig in a wallow here.'
Now he was in his element; gone was the silence and depression which had marked his final days at the wheel of Walvis Bay. I had told him the Waratah story and Tafline had been with me. ‘It is right that one should know the grave of one's ancestors' was all Jubela had replied, 'and this ancestor must have been a great sailor.'
The mood of the three of us was tight, purposeful, that day when we approached the headland of St Francis, our last southern gateway to the Bashee, still some 200 miles to the north-east, the final point in rounding the 'ankle' of the coast. Touleier herself seemed to share that mood: taut, yet controlled; eager, yet aware of the dangers ahead.
I took my binoculars and climbed into the rigging. Astern, the horizon had the peculiar blur of purple-blue characteristic of a south-westerly blow, although I felt sure it would not work up into a buster of the calibre which had nearly sunk the Walvis Bay. I had to rely on my own instincts. It would have been fatal for me to have got in touch with the Weather Bureau, and I had no intention of letting Colonel Joubert in on our mission. I had concealed the yacht's departure by slipping out of Cape Town at night, in a growing northwesterly wind. Now, well to the east, rounding that 'ankle' of the South African coastline, I was keeping well clear of the land in order to avoid being caught by some of the violent squalls which sometimes sweep down from the high land. Touleier's thrusting spinnaker would snap the light-metal racing mast like a carrot if it were caught aback. There it was!
I called to Tafline. 'Cape St Francis!'
She swung up nimbly alongside me and looked through the binoculars, and then let them hang round her neck on the strap. She put her face against mine, warm by contrast with the cold south-westerly wind and its threat of rain. The dedicated purpose of the voyage was lightened by my joy at being away to sea with her, and having a splendid yacht underfoot. I think she guessed what I was thinking, for she turned and looked into my eyes, and allowed the roll of the mast to sway her hard against my side.
Touleier raced on.
Unwilling to break the silence, yet reminded of our mission by the sight of that distant landmark, she said at length, 'You read the sea like a book, Ian. It is what lies ahead now, isn't it? It would be pure magic, you and me and Touleier, if it weren't for the Waratah.'
I side-stepped it now. I gestured towards some other passing ships. 'We're using the standard northward route close to the coast to avoid the Agulhas Current. That tanker out there is picking up the benefit of its southbound flow. That's the way it has always been. Northbound, you keep close to the land, especially in this sort of wind, which sets up a counter-current shorewards.'
Without warning, she buried her face in my neck. 'Oh my darling, my darling!' she sobbed. ‘I know all these winds, storms, currents, and the rest are part of the pattern which has been woven into our lives because of. . of. .' I felt the warm tears against my skin. 'But it's you I want, free of all these terrifying shackles. .' She choked gently, and I tried to comfort her, and I tasted the salt of her tears on her lips. She took my face in her hands and searched it with her finger-tips as if to memorize every line; she kissed me as if her heart would burst until even that lively deck and press of sail became oblivion as we raced towards the Bashee.
There were a hundred things to do to the yacht as Touleier sped northwards. After Cape St Francis, Tafline had insisted, as part of the general state of alertness and preparedness, on being taught the rudiments of helmsmanship, although my heart was in my mouth once when Touleier was caught napping by a sharp squall with her at the wheel; the yacht went far over before I could get to Tafline's side, but Jubela saved the situation by letting fly a halliard.
I kept Touleier well clear of the big harbour of
Port Elizabeth, but beyond we went close to two groups of tiny islands, called St Croix and Bird, which lie in the big bay of Algoa. In these waters the first sailor ever to round the Cape nearly five centuries ago turned back because his crew mutinied: Bartholomew Diaz planted a marble cross, and it is wrongly commemorated by the name Cape Padrone at the north-eastern fringe of the bay. Only in this century, shortly before the Second World War, was the true location of Diaz's cross found slightly to the north.
Now we were approaching the spot. I was trying to use the weak inshore counter-current about three miles out to help Touleier along and edge past a race of the Agulhas Current which spills over near Cape Padrone. There was muddy water under the yacht, a sure sign that the south-wester was strong enough to generate at least a slight counter to the big main stream further out.
Jubela was off watch and Tafline sat scanning the sea and the shoreline with my glasses: watching, hoping, tireless.
'An island!'
I threw a quick bight of halliard round a cleat and slithered to her side.
No island had ever been recorded hereabouts.
'There!' she pointed, giving me the glasses. 'It's dark against the white.'
The bucking deck and my unsteady hands made focusing difficult.
Then I saw the tiny cross at the summit. I laughed. I had not realized how keyed up. I really was. My nerves were as stretched as Touleier's rigging.
'Diaz made the same mistake four centuries ago,' I told her, disappointed. 'The cross is a replica of Diaz' original, which tumbled down and was found in fragments among the rocks below.'
'But — it looks like an island!' she maintained.
"That's why it deceived the experts for so long,' I went on. 'Its actual name is False Islet. Diaz logged that he had planted his cross on an island, and for hundreds of years men searched for an island, just as we are doing. Until an acute historian-detective hit on the secret of False Islet.'
Scend of the Sea Page 15