The Song and the Sea

by Isobel Chace

  “And her legs aren’t as good as yours either,” Nick put in maliciously.

  Charlotte cast him an angry glance, but he only smiled, looking completely unrepentant.

  “Where’s Dad?” she asked hastily, to change the subject.

  “He comes,” Monique said indifferently. “He is looking for one of Nick’s cameras.”

  At last they were all ready. Seamus and Nick in their flippers, laden down with the weight of the cylinders and with their masks in their hands.

  “I give you half an hour and you’ll be down with us,” Seamus said, settling himself on to a seat in the boat.

  “Never!” Charlotte shuddered. “You’ll have to face it, Dad, I just haven’t got your enthusiasm for fish!”

  She was a little sorry when she saw that her equipment had come with them too. It lay in a huddle in the bottom of the boat and she tried to ignore it, to pretend that it wasn’t there. It wasn’t necessary for her to go down. She never had liked creepy-crawlies and she was sure that the sea was filled with nasty slimy things that walked about on at least eight legs.

  “You may as well use the mask anyway,” Nick said gently. “Take a duck dive or two and you’ll be able to see us below you.” He wet it for her and saw that she put it on properly. It meant that she had to breathe through her mouth, for it covered her nose as well as her eyes.

  “I’ll do that,” she agreed.

  One by one they slipped over the side of the boat and disappeared, Nick first, carrying the camera before him, Seamus after him, equipped with a bag and a harpoon gun.

  Charlotte took a deep breath and dived in after them. The water was deliciously warm after the first cold contact with her skin. She swam with ease round the boat and waved to Monique. Then she came back to the place where the men had disappeared and put her head under the water to see where they had got to. She had never tried a mask under water before and she was surprised to discover what a difference it made to her vision. She had always been half-blind under water before, but now she could see several yards all round her.

  She saw her father waving and thrashed her feet in reply. There was no sign of Nick. She came up to the surface for air and gulped the fresh oxygen into her lungs. She was badly out of practice, she thought; she used to be able to hold her breath for longer than that.

  After a few minutes she hauled herself back into the little tender and attached the flippers to her feet. She looked curiously at the compressed air equipment, the three cylinders neatly built into a harness, the tubes coming forward into a mouthpiece that fitted under the lips with little nodules for the teeth to hold. A clever little valve cut off the supply when the user breathed out, dispelling the used air into the sea. Lastly, there was a belt with little weights of lead attached.

  “Why not try it?” a voice said beneath her. “I’ll see nothing happens to you.”

  She shook her head.

  “I said no, Dad.”

  “Nothing can happen to you.”

  She smiled.

  “I guess I’m just a coward,” she-said. “I can’t bring myself to do it.”

  Seamus hooked his arms over the edge of the boat and grinned at her.

  “Frightened of the charm of the sea too?” he asked slyly. “Some time you’ll have to get out of the froth and get down to the beer.”

  Charlotte’s eyes met his.

  “Is that what Mother refused to do?” she asked. Seamus stopped smiling.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll tell you some time, Charlotte. Only I’d like you to get to know me first. Do you mind.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

  She was sorry when he dived down again. It was lonely on the surface by herself. She could see another ship away on the horizon and wondered why it was there. Perhaps it was a fishing vessel.

  It was fully an hour before Nick came up. He carried a whole bag of plants and stones for Monique, holding the camera easily in one hand, allowing the water to hold it up.

  His face was grim and his eyes angry.

  “You’re coming down with me,” he said abruptly. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  He reached a hand over the gunwale of the boat and hauled her over the side, silently fastening her into her harness.

  “I’m sorry to rush you,” he said bleakly, “but once you’ve seen this, you’ll see what I’m up against.”

  He pushed her mouthpiece in against her teeth and gave her a second or two to test it. The compressed air was surprisingly sweet to the taste and she took a deep breath, shocked by his treatment of her.

  They went down together, her hand firmly held in his, through a shoal of beautiful little golden fish that brushed against her legs. She was angrier than she had ever been and so she hadn’t time to be afraid. This was one high-handed action that Nick was going to pay for. She looked across at him, her eyes furious behind her mask. He pointed some distance ahead of them and she saw an enormous shape on the surface which made her go cold with fear. She didn’t like the silence either, broken only by the slight whistle every time she drew breath and the bubbling sound of the used air escaping into the sea. Bubbles that grew slowly bigger as they went upwards, flattening into oval shapes as they reached the surface.

  But still Nick drew her downwards and then, at last, she saw why. The shape was the fishing boat she had seen in the distance, and it was dragging for fish. Most of them scattered before the net that ballooned out into the water, too wise to get themselves caught. But it was to something else that Nick was pointing—a trail of devastation followed the net wherever it went. Nick showed her the torn-off seaweed and the shattered homes of countless fish. For the first time she understood his indignation. Was man determined to make enormous deserts under the sea as well as on the land? Dustbowls, or rather bowls of stirred-up mud, where nothing would live?

  She saw the set, stern look on Nick’s face. He, at least, wasn’t a destroyer. He was one of the building kind. The kind who edged the deserts with grass and trees and tried to reclaim them for mankind. Perhaps, who knew, his vision of farming the sea was not so mad. After all, at one time man had only hunted on land. It had been a long time before he had learned the value of domesticated animals for his own use. Now he hunted the sea, wiping out whole species with a careless hand, but when he was hungry enough, perhaps then he would listen to men like Nick and begin to learn what he was about, replenishing the sea as he fished it.

  She tried to attract his attention, to show him a fish that had caught her eye, but he was off, after the nets, filming as he went. He went too fast for her, so she sat on the bottom and looked about her, astonished at the fairyland that slowly appeared before her eyes as the sea cleared—or was it that she had moved out of that opaque patch? A whole new world to delight her, filled with color and the sweetest little fish she had ever seen. If this was the beer her father had been talking about, she loved it!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The shadows on the highly-polished wood beside her bunk were like the clouds in an English sky, forming pictures to the imaginative eye. Charlotte lay and played with them in her mind; corals and seaweeds blowing in the current, and one that looked just like seaweeds blowing in the current, and one that looked just like Nick with his camera stretched out before him. Nick with his straight, brown back and his utter concentration on the thing he was doing at that particular moment.

  It had all been rather a dream. If she shut her eyes she could still feel the cool embrace of the sea and see those odd opaque patches that seemed to gather for no particular reason. And the astonishing, breathless color, when her father had shone his flashlamp into the nooks and crannies behind the rocks, hoping to surprise something of interest.

  Later, when they had come up to the surface, Monique had rubbed her hair dry for her.

  “You will ruin it if you have too much seawater,” she had said gravely. “There must be some way to keep it dry.”

  Charlotte had run an impatient hand through it.r />
  “I’ll cut it short,” she said.

  Monique had been horrified.

  “But, you could not! It is already like a boy’s!” she had demurred. “Your father likes a woman to have long hair that has never seen the scissors.”

  Charlotte had chuckled.

  “He’ll grow used to it.”

  Of course Monique’s hair was long and so Nick probably preferred it that way too. It was the kind of thing that Monique would know about him. She probably knew all sorts of those little intimate preferences that go to make up a man. Not that it mattered to Charlotte what Nick thought. It was enough to know whether he took sugar in his tea and that he ate meat with his pickles rather than pickles with his meat—those things were important, because she was expected to cook every fourth meal on board for the four of them and it was only civil to find out their individual preferences. Sometimes her conscience smote her, for she knew that Seamus didn’t like pickles at all, but he could always eat tomato sauce as she did, or chutney. Cold meat, she told herself, meant spending far less time in the galley, and if Nick preferred it that way, that was all to the good.

  Charlotte drew the sheet up to her chin and gave a little sigh of satisfaction. Considering the way that they had teased her for going down after all, she felt she had treated the whole episode with dignity. Only Nick knew that she had had no choice in the matter, and she had forgiven him for that, for it had been worth it to find that whole new world. She would never again be afraid of diving despite the hazards that she was too sensible to know had not diminished because she had not felt even the slightest discomfort the first time.

  The bell rang out on deck. Last Dog Watch was beginning. Charlotte giggled. Sometimes she had to agree with Monique that sailor’s terms for many things on a boat were quite ridiculous. Still, whatever one called it, it meant supper, and she was outrageously hungry.

  Both the men had insisted that she should take a rest after tea. She had gone to her cabin reluctantly, but now she was glad, for she felt fresh and thoroughly rested, and the crew had asked her to sing to them in the moonlight after supper and she wanted to sing her very best. This time there would be no mistakes—no altering the music to suit herself. This time there would be nothing for Nick to criticize.

  It was Seamus’s turn to cook, a duty that he took seriously. He was fond of the Swiss packaged soups, mixing two or three kinds together in enormous quantities so that soup lingered in various saucepans in the galley pretty well permanently. Tonight it was leek soup, followed by enormous slabs of the bread that Monique so incredibly could turn out in the galley oven, covered with French cream cheese and slices of onion.

  Nick was trying to get the B.B.C. on the wireless, which meant that the set had to warm up for about ten minutes before anything but whistles and shrieks were received. Monique was happily classifying the stones and corals that Nick had brought up to her. The whole added up to chaos.

  “Anything new?” Charlotte asked, as she tried to clear a corner of the table in order to set it.

  Monique shook her head.

  “Rien. Have a look at this. It is called Fire Coral—Millepora. Be careful of it, it can sting your skin.”

  Charlotte looked at it long and hard. She had no desire to run into anything that would hurt her under water. She supposed she was a coward in her way, but up to now jellyfish had been a quite sufficient reason to put her off bathing.

  ‘Monique—” she began hesitantly.

  The French girl looked up, her eyes a little mocking.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you come down with us?”

  There was a sudden silence in the saloon. Charlotte bit her lower lip.

  “Shouldn’t I have asked?” she said.

  Monique smiled, her eyes resting on Nick’s intent form.

  “It is as Nick told you,” she said at last. “My legs are not as good as yours. Besides, I had an accident and Seamus had to rescue me. There were sharks everywhere. I would rather not think about it. It is enough to have you all down there.” Nick looked over his shoulder.

  “Seamus wouldn’t let her go down again, but I wasn’t going to have him putting you off too. If I’d had my way Monique would have gone down again the very next day.”

  Charlotte wondered that her father had overruled him in the matter. If Nick had insisted she was sure that Monique would have done anything to oblige him, but it was obvious that none of them really wanted to discuss the incident so she let the subject drop.

  Seamus brought the soup in then and there was a mad rush as Monique tried to tidy up her things and Charlotte tried to finish setting the table at one and the same time.

  Afterwards Liam took complete charge of the proceedings. The sails were stowed away as they rode out at anchor and the engine was still. All that could be seen was the black mast and the silver beams of the moon. Up above, the stars twinkled mysteriously at them.

  “Are you coming to listen, Nick?” Charlotte asked, when the Irishman came to collect her. She had been telling herself that nothing would induce her to ask him, but the words came out all the same.

  He turned and grinned at her.

  “I can hear from here,” he said. She didn’t say any more. She accepted Liam’s arm and allowed him to bear her off in state.

  But it wasn’t the same! She had wanted Nick to be part of her audience, to sit on the deck in the moonlight with the sailors and to fall under the spell of the music. Or was it her spell that she wanted him to fall under? She banished the unwelcome thought with indignation. She didn’t want Nick. It was just that his charm made her feel good, as it did every other female in his vicinity, and he had shaken her confidence over her singing. Shaken it more than he knew.

  The crew, however, were more than satisfied with her efforts. They clapped and whistled with abandon, stamping their feet on the decks.

  “Perhaps something soft and restrained,” Monique suggested at last, laughing as Seamus whispered something in her ear.

  “Sing an Irish song,” Liam begged her.

  But Charlotte shook her head. Instead she sang the old Maori songs of New Zealand, some of them in English, but most of them in the Maori she had learned with such difficulty from an old woman who had lived in a pa, a Maori village, not far from where she and her mother had lived. And then, last of all, she sang an Ave Maria for Liam, the liquid notes floating out across the water and echoing round the bay.

  There was complete silence when she finished, and they sat on in the darkness, half asleep, drunk with music and moonlight.

  Liam was the first to move, pushing his men down below so that they would be fresh and ready to sail in the morning. One and all they came and thanked Charlotte, teasing her in their good-humored way.

  “I must go too,” Monique said at last. “It is my breakfast tomorrow.”

  Seamus said nothing, but he accompanied her down below, leaving Charlotte alone on the deck. She pulled her wrap closer around her shoulders and gazed out at the Mediterranean all about her. She wondered what it would be like, down with the fish, at this hour. Whether they gave up their busy manoeuvres? Did fishes, in fact, sleep? Hadn’t her father told her that few of them could even blink, having no eyelids?

  She heard footsteps coming towards her across the deck and looked over her shoulder. It was Nick. He stopped as soon as he saw her and went in the opposite direction. She was hurt, bitterly hurt, but she went on standing there, leaning on the rails. After a few seconds she could hear him singing under his breath. It was a sea-shanty, but then she had never heard Nick ever sing anything else. In spite of herself she found she was holding her breath trying to catch the words.

  “O, Shenandoah! I love your, daughter,

  Away, you rolling river,

  I’ll take her ’cross you rolling water,

  And away, we’re bound away,

  ’Cross the wide Missouri.”

  For a wild moment she wished that it had been Seamus’s daughter that
he had wanted to carry away, but that was ridiculous! Resolutely she told herself that it was the effect of the moonlight and the strange day she had spent, and took herself off to bed.

  Sleep was elusive that night. It was a long time before she heard Nick come down from the deck and shut the door of his cabin with a firm click. She wondered whether Monique was lying awake too, and whether she also had heard him. Poor Monique! It must be terrible to be in love with such a man. She thought of the havoc he had wrought in her, cabin that morning looking for film, and smiled. Perhaps he would lend her one of his still cameras. She would like to take a snap or two of the friendly, inquisitive fish that had come along to take a look at her, to send them back to her friends in New Zealand. New Zealanders were a little apt to think that they knew everything about fish, edible fish, but she had never seen anything like that quaint little fellow with the red spots on his back.

  She felt as though she had only just dozed off when she heard someone knocking on her door.

  “Come in!” she called out sleepily.

  “Is that yourself, Miss Hastings?”

  Liam! What could he possibly want at this hour? Charlotte drew her dressing-gown around her shoulders and opened the door a few inches.

  “What is it?” she asked in a whisper.

  “It’s Michael. The boy’s been saying he had a headache all day. I thought maybe you’d come and take a look at him.”

  “Hadn’t you better get Mr. D’Abernon?” Charlotte suggested. “I don’t know much about these things.”

  Liam looked doubtful.

  “I’d be glad if you’d come,” he said at last. “The boy’s been saying he’d like to see you, and you with the voice of an angel!”

  Reluctantly, Charlotte followed him down the corridor to where the men’s bunks were slung. She thought Michael was the fair youth with the nice smile, but she wasn’t even very sure of that.

  Liam went and brought the first aid box and opened it on the foot of the bunk. The youth smiled up at Charlotte.