She was still game. 'No chance of the Waratah being ashore there?'
'Not a chance,' I answered. 'Since the cross was found, thousands of people have visited the place. You can walk from the mainland across a sand causeway to it.' I added, to let her down lightly and not dampen her keenness, 'It's so easy to be deceived on this coast. In a few hours we'll come to a spot called Ship Rock. Another near it is called The Wreck. If you want to imagine things, the natural topography gives one full scope.'
Towards sunset the wind eased and backed to the south. We took in Touleier's spinnaker for the night, leaving her moving well under the American-cut mainsail and jib. We could not be off the Bashee until the following evening at the earliest, if the wind held. In the crowded shipping lane I decided to rig a spotlight high in the rigging to illuminate the sails so that we would not be run down by some unwatch-ful steamer. Touleier held close to the coast and at intervals the lighted resorts stood out clearer almost than the navigational lights. A thin veil of spume from the breakers hung over the cliffs. It was scarcely necessary for me to listen to the radio met. reports to know that the main front had bypassed the Cape — the change of wind direction southwards was a certain pointer that we had nothing to expect, or to fear, from this particular south-wester.
As we sat alone in the cockpit-she was half-turned away from me, gazing towards the land — she suddenly said:
'Did you really see the Flying Dutchman, Ian?'
She had never spoken of it again since that day when first the news of the Gemsbok panel reached us. My stomach knotted at her words. Gone was the quiet pleasure of sailing.
‘I told you, I saw a ship, an ancient ship, sailing against the wind.'
There was a long pause. She watched the distant coastline. 'You didn't link her in your mind with the Flying Dutchman!' 'No.’
She got up quickly, turned to me and dropped on her knees. She scanned my face, deeply, tenderly.
'My darling — are you quite sure of what you saw?'
In that moment, I would have traded away a dozen Waratahs for her.
I leaned forward and touched a wisp of short hair above her ear. She would not let my fingers go.
'When I was thrown against the rear of the bridge by the big wave,' I explained, 'I wasn't stunned. My sole concern at that moment was to prevent Walvis Bay from broaching to. Nothing was further from my thoughts than the Flying Dutchman-or the Waratah. My only thought was to save my ship. I grabbed the wheel. Then I saw. It was a ship, and she was close, between Walvis Bay and the land. She was darkened. It was all too quick to distinguish any details. I mean, I couldn't distinguish gunports, deckhouses, porthole lights or anything like that.'
'No human figures? A man with … with.. ’
'A bloodied sword? — No.'
'It was more an outline, then?’
'She seemed almost on top of us. I saw a high prow and a towering, square stern, and I noticed particularly the way she was heading — south-west. That meant she was sailing right into the eye of the wind.'
'The sails, what did the sails look like?'
I paused and considered. 'Now you come to ask, I don't remember seeing any sails. I should, being a sailor. But what struck me most forcibly was the way she was going. Both her stern and bow were quite distinct, both were high and well defined. There was no mistaking them. It was for all the world like one of those pictures you've seen of an old-fashioned caravel.'
'And you and Phillips-are the only two who claim to have seen this ancient ship? You are sure there is no other record of her? ‘
'Certain,' I replied. 'You might even discredit my sighting by saying that I had been subconsciously influenced by all my delving into the Waratah disaster. But Phillips himself-no! When Phillips sighted what he himself called the Flying Dutchman, he had no idea even that the Waratah was missing.
He had brought the Clan Macintyre successfully through a great storm. Half his ordeal was already behind him. No, what Phillips saw, he saw in daylight, not at night.'
She looked at me sharply, and then helped me slack off the mainsail under the dropping wind, waiting, in her quiet way, for me to continue.
'Let's discount my sighting for the moment. Phillips knew all about sailing ships. He stated categorically that the mizzen of the caravel he saw was raked back, and the foremast forward.'
'Your sighting is so recent, and yet Phillips' is much more explicit,' she said quietly.
'I can't say I saw the masts or the sails,' I went on. 'But I saw the hull clearly. The high bow and stern were exactly as Phillips describes them. And she was definitely sailing against the wind. It scared Phillips. He drank cocoa. I felt more like a shot of rum.'
'Were you frightened. Ian, like he was?’
'I knew only fear,' I replied sombrely. ‘I have tried since, over and again, to try and rationalize it. I still go cold when I have a nightmare and see right ahead of me that dark, old-fashioned hull and Walvis Bay about to crash into it. There were seconds only between us and certain death, that I know.'
She turned away and spoke so softly that I had to crane to hear what she said.
‘I saw nothing, yet I felt it all, hundreds of miles away, that night. It's impossible to describe the feeling. It was the same that first day I came aboard and saw your photographs.'
We left it at that. But had I 'felt' the Waratah then, I would have put the yacht about and nothing would ever have induced me to go in search of her again. As it was, the wind and the sea were quieting; it was a joy to have her close against me in the cold chill as the night wore on. There were no ghosts at sea that night. She was warm, she was alive, she was mine.
The lid of the Waratah’s coffin lifted next night, and the ghosts escaped.
At dawn Touleier was south of the Bashee.
We had sailed all day northwards, never out of sight of the great forests and high cliffs which come down almost to the water's edge. Far out at sea, even, we could hear the breakers. It is an iron shore. One scarcely ever finds a seashell which has not been smashed by the force of the waves. We both grew more tense as Touleier approached the Bashee, and she was very silent. We contented ourselves with minor tasks about the yacht and left unsaid many things. We did not talk about the Waratah.
The coastline is cut by innumerable rivers, and each one seems to have an exquisite lagoon at its mouth. In the first dim light I could see solid columns of mist marching down each river to the sea, shaped and squared by the cliffs on either side.
One- two- three flashes.
Bashee Mouth light.
Tafline screamed from below.
For a moment I sat rigid. Her voice seemed to hang against the dark backdrop of the cliffs, the shadowy forests and the river mouth white with breakers.
I raced to the cabin.
She was sitting up on the bunk, wide-eyed, shaking. 'The storm, Ian! That wind …!'
I held her, trembling. In the dim light coming through the porthole I could see that consciousness had not come fully into her eyes.
'My darling, the wind is gone. It's a quiet, still dawn. There's no storm.'
‘I heard. .' she shook her head as if to clear it. 'But he stood here, and his oilskins were wet.1 She buried her face against me. 'Thank God, it's you, my darling. It was only a dream.'
I soothed her. But the strange, deep eyes were full of shadows.
‘I can see him now, standing by the bunk,' she said, smiling a little wryly. 'I could hear the wind, and his oilskins were dripping'
'Who was standing?' I asked gently, cold at the recollection of Sawyer
'It was just an ordinary person,' she said hesitatingly. 'No not him. There was nothing like that Just a man.' She looked at me searchingly. 'His face was like yours, a little. I could hear the gale. His oilskins were streaming wet, it's all so vivid. Why, what is the matter?'
It was I who was trembling. She had on almost nothing except a thin slip of a thing; I could see her breasts and her body now where she had pushed aside
the bedclothes in her agitation.
Where before I had seen the mystic the sea-ancestry, the knight with unadorned armour against the panoply of the Waratah in the lists. Now I saw the woman.
She sat and held my gaze. She extended her arm to touch me. Not taking her eyes from me, she slipped off the wispy thing. She brought my hands to her breasts in the tender lycanthropy of love. We searched for each other's eyes, lips, hair. Then her lips went cold. Her body lost its fervour to be one with mine.
She drew back. She wept — a quiet, passionless sobbing, a grief as deep, it seemed, as the passion of the moment before.
'We could love, we could forget,' she said softly, 'but we can't forget, and it would come and take our love away from us. It would only be pretending. You are committed and I am committed. We are not free to commit our love until we find the Waratah. I said before, and my body and my heart say it now, until we are free of this burden, we will not be able to realize our love properly.'
All I could say, was: 'We're at the place now. South of the Bashee.'
She ran her hands over her breasts and down her thighs; she clasped them round her knees and hid her face. She gave a last broken, half-sob.
I moved to comfort her, but she shook her head without looking up. 'I'll dress and come up to you in the cockpit.'
As I went to the door, she said in a smothered voice, 'When we have the Waratah, I am yours.'
She was tense, alert, when she came on deck as if being at the Bashee would in itself solve everything. She had come across at once to me at the wheel. She did not kiss me, or stand close, but faced me from the other side of the helm, her hands warm on mine by contrast with the stainless steel circle of the wheel.
‘I know now you will never love me less,' was all she said.
But as we ghosted through the placid water towards the land, I felt her tenseness and disappointment growing at the sight of the empty sea. With daylight, we could make out the deep cleft the Bashee makes between the forested hills, the signal station on a grassy cliff with more forest for a backdrop, and a group of thatched holiday rondavels nearby.
Then the bubble of pent-up feeling burst.
'It's so ordinary!' she exclaimed. 'There's just nothing here, Ian!'
I took in the sails and Touleier lay in the easy swell, perhaps a mile offshore.
'It's the normality of it like this which breaks down the picture of whatever I saw in Walvis Bay's path that night,' I replied. I was tired, drained of feeling. Like that moment at the flower-sellers, I hated the Waratah. But, again, I knew she was right.
'Yet,' she went on, and I still recall her vehemence-'where we are now, maybe right under our keel, a great liner went down and an airliner too. I feel I want to tear the sea apart and look.'
Tear apart! I remember her words now: the answer was all too improbable, too simple, when one came to think of it. I wonder if we would have accepted it, had we known then, without having to live it out?
She jumped on the rail and gazed astern, as if to probe that gentle sea for the undefined spot where Alistair had died.
'I didn't expect anything like this!' She was puzzled, angry. ‘I took it for granted there would be a sinister sea, a sinister setting, somehow. My reason tells me your brother died somewhere right here. You nearly did, too, but I see nothing. We have the most concrete proof that your father sent you a message from "south of the Bashee", but where, where?'
She gestured helplessly. One of the big supertankers ploughed south; a coaster was coming up fast behind us, closer inshore.
'The sea has a lying face,' I retorted. 'I know. I know how savage and remorseless it can be, this stretch of apparently guileless water, and it does cover up the Waratah’s secret; we have narrowed it down to here.’
She looked at me and said: 'Maybe I was wrong to make you come. Maybe I am wrong about the Waratah. If I am wrong about her, then I am wrong about last night.'
I gave the wheel to Jubela and sat beside her, looking south-west.
'No,' I replied. ‘I am the only person who has seen the other side of the coin and lived to tell it.' 'That's what I believe.'
'Everything else, all speculation for sixty years, every sea and air search ends here, south of the Bashee.'
It is not enough simply to be here, Ian. There must be something more.'
'The murderers of my brother, my father and my grandfather, were never brought to trial.'
'What do you mean, Ian?'
‘The sea, and the wind.’
She gestured at the gentle sea, turning a deep blue-green in the new light. 'It seems impossible to credit.'
'Except for the Skeleton Coast, there are more wrecks to the square mile along this coast than anywhere else in the world,' I replied.
Tafline shivered, and she was silent a long time, staring at the empty sea. Then she said. 'If this thing — whatever it is-occurs only at long intervals, what is the use of our coming so soon after it hit at Walvis Bay! I was crazy to suggest we come in a small boat like Touleier. We're simply risking our. necks to no purpose, if the same wind and sea conditions recur.'
My thoughts were only half on my reply. The Waratah now held to ransom the slim, lovely creature beside me; my throat constricted at the recollection of her a few hours earlier. Find the Waratah and find my love! For her sake, for my sake, there must be no mistake!
I answered, far from convinced: 'It's just the other way round. The bigger the ship, the less chance it has, because it has a much longer length exposed to a wave. A sixty-foot wave would threaten a long ship whereas a small thing like Touleier would simply rise to it.'
She did not seem quite reassured and did not reply. Then she turned and I found my pulses racing at those deep eyes.
'Darling, perhaps you have already solved the Waratah problem and don't know it? Isn't it simply a question of the Waratah being overwhelmed by one of those monster waves, despite all the experts said about her stability?'
Her tone made me yearn to play traitor and agree. Reluctantly, however, I said, The answer to that is, no bodies or wreckage were ever found, and the place was alive with ships within a couple of days. When a big vessel goes down, wreckage would spew out of her hatches; the engine-room boilers would explode.'
She broke in hopefully, and I loved her for it. 'Isn't it all too cut and dried, just as the experts were about the Waratah and her stability?'
I smiled back. 'Maybe as an expert I'm in danger of not seeing the wood for the trees. I can only take the picture so far, and no farther. All I know is that a danger area lay right across the track of the Waratah, and she went straight into it. Then there came into play some unknown, lethal, death-dealing factor which can swallow up a 10,000-ton liner as easily as it does a modern airliner or a supersonic fighter-jet.'
'Do we simply wait around here, then, hoping for this unknown factor to manifest itself?'
My heart sank when I looked at her, but I forced myself to say it. 'No. We have to run the gauntlet. That means the south-west. We must get up to Port St John's. Then, if a gale comes, we must sail the Waratah's course from there-south-west. It's the only way I see if we want to find out.'
She came close to me, the first time since the night. ‘I don't think I am afraid of dying; I am only afraid of losing you.'
We sailed to Port St John's from a sea as empty as the hour after the Waratah had vanished.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It came, pungent and fateful as a distant bell-buoy tolling over a killer reef.
All day we had inched Touleier up the Waratah coast while the wind stayed light in the north-east. Tafline and I checked, discussed, spotted landmarks like the impressive rock which is called The-Hole-in-the-Wall. It was perfect fair-weather yachting and some of the tension seemed to ebb from us as we absorbed the soporific magic and she ghosted along. We had breathtaking glimpses of black, iron-bound cliffs topped by great forests, for which the territory is famous; we could pick out, by their lofty whiteness like ships' spars, the str
aight trunks of the unzimbeet trees among their darker companions; fragile lagoons came and went at sunset with the chimerical loveliness of an old Chinese print on silk; tree euphorbias hung out stark candelabra of branches against great cliffs and begged to be photographed; here and there the lush strelitzias would overarch a river mouth with sensuous, tropical beauty, a frame for secret mangrove swamps behind, trodden not by human foot but by the claws of giant crabs as big as soup plates.
The twice-daily shipping forecasts brought a taut expectancy. One is broadcast after lunch, and the other after 11 at night. There was no hint of a gale.
There was a nerve-tingle at dawn when I brought Touleier into position off Port St John's where the Waratah and Clan Macintyre had exchanged their last signals. We had decided on this just as, lower down the coast off East London, we had cruised over the exact spot where the liner Guelph had received her garbled ‘t-a-h' lamp signal from a ship which was never subsequently identified.
Tafline had asked me to call her when Touleier was under the Cape Hermes light. I went to her cabin. She was lying, eyes wide open, waiting for me.
I felt a small nerve kick in her lips as she kissed me and she indicated the heavy sweater and slacks she had been wearing when she left me after the late-night forecast. The apology, the dedication, the promise, were all in her embrace. She held me for so long that it was I who had to remind her that the wheel was unattended.
We went on deck.
She shivered as the flash came from the Cape Hermes lighthouse. It stands, as it did when the Waratah passed by, unnaturally bright against the dark cliff on the southern bank of the lovely river mouth. Except for a few thatched cottages, the coastline looked the same as it did on that fateful morning when the two liners parted. She shivered again at the sight of the strange rectangular columns of mist marching down the St John's River to the sea, shaping themselves to the cliffs on either side. The great Gates-massive, forest-covered twin peaks flanking the river on either side-were shrouded in the early light. Once the mist swirled aside and showed the ruins of an old piled jetty and rusting boiler of some abandoned coaster, relics of the days when the port was still used by shipping.
Scend of the Sea Page 16