‘And who the divil are you?’ the man challenged, the click of the gun lock sounding clear in the evening air.
‘Seamen,’ Mackinnon gasped, ‘British seamen . . . we’ve been torpedoed.’
He remembered clearly standing there while the big Irishman came up to him and, finger on the trigger of the shotgun, cautiously scrutinised him. The man walked round him before asking, ‘How many of you?’
Mackinnon told him and led him back to the beach while the man sent his daughter to inform the police.
‘Where are we?’ Mackinnon asked as he stumbled down on to the sand where his shipmates had huddled and the lifeboat looked like a beached whale in the darkness.
‘County Antrim,’ the man said gruffly and they returned to the house until the police arrived. The girl came back with the police, peering at the survivors with shy curiosity, a girl of his own age with large dark eyes and hair that looked brown until the lamplight caught it and it flared into a rich, dark gold.
Mackinnon heard the man called her ‘Shelagh’. He did not then know that she was destined to become his wife.
Ah, well, Mackinnon concluded chuckling to himself, Shelagh deserved a reward for her constancy; if, he thought looking down at his pot-belly floating like an island between his chin and his toes, she considered the reward worth having . . .
A splash woke the Captain from his self-contemplation.
‘Afternoon, sir,’ said a head bobbing up beside him. It was Taylor.
‘Afternoon, Three-O,’ replied Mackinnon and began a slow dismissive crawl to and fro, irritated because his solitude had been broken.
The thunderheaded cumulonimbus clouds Captain Mackinnon had observed over the distant mountains of Sumatra produced an electric storm during the first watch, the eight to twelve in the evening. For hours the flickering of vast electrical discharges illuminated the huge nimbi from within, deluging the forests of northern Sumatra with torrential rain. It was an awe-inspiring sight which reached its crescendo around midnight as the Second Officer once again relieved the Third.
‘The odd thing about it is the lack of noise. It must be over a hundred miles away,’ drawled Taylor.
Stevenson agreed. ‘All the same, it’s pretty impressive.’
‘I wonder,’ Taylor went on musingly, ‘what the Spanish and Portuguese thought of it when they first came out here. I imagine they’d have regarded it as an omen.’
‘I expect they consulted their priests and clutched their crucifixes.’
‘Do I detect a touch of ancestral Scots Calvinism? Tut, tut, prejudice and all that – not allowed today.’ Taylor stared south again as the lightning flashed on the two figures, throwing sudden, momentary shadows and lighting the disembodied face of Stevenson fighting his annoyance over so thrown-away a remark. ‘Still,’ Taylor went on archly, ‘it was an improvement on examining the entrails of goats.’
Irritated and unthinking, still half-doped from his brief, two-hour sleep, Stevenson said, ‘The Portuguese didn’t do that. It was the Greeks and Romans . . .’
But he need not have bothered. The next lightning flash illuminated Taylor’s face in such stark relief that the contempt of his expression seemed to hang between the two of them long after darkness had returned. A pent-up fury burst from Stevenson.
‘You really can be an arrogant sod, Charles,’ he snapped.
Taylor turned and Stevenson knew from his voice that he was smiling. ‘I know, Alex. And it does annoy you, doesn’t it?’
Then he was gone, his tall, thin figure dropping down the bridge ladder so that Stevenson had the very distinct, though quite ludicrous, impression that Taylor had dropped down to some hellishly subterranean level, and not the boat-deck of the motor vessel Matthew Flinders.
Charles Taylor stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel round himself. Padding back to his cabin he opened a can of beer. Between vigorous rubs of his limbs he knocked the beer back. When he and the can were dry he picked up a book and threw himself on his bunk.
He was tired and the print danced before his eyes; he was unable to read a word. He snapped the bunk light off and lay staring upwards into the darkness, but he found it impossible to compose himself for sleep. He was angry with himself for annoying Stevenson, angry at his self-revelations of the night before and vaguely hurt by Captain Mackinnon’s obvious unfriendliness of the afternoon. It seemed, in keeping with his strained marriage, he, Charles Taylor, was incapable of maintaining a single human relationship.
He felt the big Burmeister and Wain diesel engine thumping relentlessly far down below. It missed a beat as the governor cut in. Every turn of the screw took them thirteen feet away from home.
Home . . . what the hell did that mean, anyway?
With the inevitability of a clock hand ticking away the moments to the hour of execution, Taylor’s mind crept inexorably round to thoughts of Caroline. It was incredibly true that as his mind’s eye fastened itself upon her image his heartbeat increased, so that his reaction was as real as if she had walked into the room and was, even then, sliding out of her silk robe, her white body a pale flame in the gloom.
He turned over restlessly, but she did not leave. He rolled over on to his back again and she bestrode him like a succubus, her wide smile tormenting him until, as always, he forgave her and succumbed to the blandishments of her remembered flesh.
CHAPTER THREE
Singapore
‘Hujan! Hujan!’
Stevenson looked up from the cargo plan. The air was suddenly much cooler now, and clouds had overrun the brazen dome of the sky. The first heavy raindrops fell as the Chinese stevedore came running up.
‘Rain come, Second Mate. We put hatches on now.’
‘Sure.’ Stevenson nodded assent, folded the cargo plan and, stuffing it hurriedly into the breast pocket of his khaki shirt, began walking swiftly aft to the seamen’s accommodation. Already the labourers were emerging from the hatches, chattering happily at the respite from their work, grinning at the hurrying officer.
‘Rain coming,’ one remarked, proudly demonstrating his knowledge of English. ‘Plenty rain.’
The alleyway was dark after the glare of sunlight and he blinked as he stopped in the doorway of the crew’s mess-room.
‘ ’Ullo, Sec. What can we do for youse then, la?’ The unmistakably Liverpudlian accent of Able Seaman Pritchard greeted him from a haze of cigarette smoke. From within this uncomfortable fug came the familiar pop and hiss of opening beer cans.
‘Rain’s coming,’ he said. ‘Get the hatches closed.’ Pritchard rose, but his watch-mate, Able Seaman Macgregor, continued to swig the freshly opened can. ‘Don’t be all bloody day,’ Stevenson added, staring at the reluctant sailor whose eyes shifted from the Second Mate to Pritchard as the latter flicked him on the shoulder.
‘Come on, la. Get your arse into gear.’
Macgregor slammed his beer can down hard on to the Formica-topped table so that a fleck of froth flew from its opening.
Stevenson strode out on deck again, irritated by the silly incident. The glare of the sun had gone and the sky was darkly overcast. The billowing cumulus that had drifted up from the Rhio Islands of Indonesia twenty miles to the south were no longer picturesque adornments on the horizon but vaporous sacks sagging overhead from which dark curtains already swept the tank farm on Pulo Bukum.
The raindrops, huge, heavy and icy after the heat, struck Stevenson and made dark patches the size of old pennies on the Matthew Flinders’s deck. He clambered on to the nearest hatch-coaming, seized the end of the hatch-wire and pulled it. A snag in a steel strand bit painfully into his palm and he swore, tugged the greasy wire free and unscrewed the shackle pin, all the while hauling the heavy wire across the gaping pit of Number Five hatch.
‘Hold on there, Sec.’
Pritchard, his hands encased in leather gloves, took the shackle and made it fast to the lug on the Macgregor hatch cover. Looking up at the cargo winch, Stevenson watched with mounting annoyan
ce as Able Seaman Macgregor, with an air of proprietorial leisure, put the thing into gear, disengaged the derrick cargo runners and set the wire tight.
‘Okay, Rob Roy,’ Pritchard called, jumping clear. With a grinding banging which reverberated from bulkhead to bulkhead and from the ship to the godown walls on the wharf, the huge steel slabs were jerked by their tie chains one after the other from their neat vertical stowage under the overhanging deck of the contactor house and slammed horizontally over the opening of Number Five hatch. Even as Macgregor lazily swung himself from the forward winch control to the after one, Stevenson and Pritchard had run round to repeat the operation at Number Six hatch.
‘In de good ole days,’ grunted Pritchard as the two men attached the wire to the cover sections of Number Six hatch, ‘the bloody ’prenticle boys would’ve given us a hand.’
‘Yes,’ said Stevenson, ‘and I’d have stood and bawled at you from under my solar topee.’
Pritchard grinned at the Second Mate as he waved at Macgregor and both men backed off. So much for the lifestyle of bourgeois privilege enjoyed by officers of the latter-day Merchant Navy, thought Stevenson, with a twinge of resentment. The numbing clatter and bashing that followed silenced his repartee.
‘Come on, Rob Roy,’ Pritchard yelled at Macgregor, ‘there’s more work forrard,’ adding, as he followed Stevenson along the starboard outboard alleyway where the labourers were settling down on coconut mats amid cigarette smoke and a universal hawking, ‘I know de bloody things have the same name as him, but you’d think he invented dem. If youse hurry, Sec, you can drive the winches and let that little sod earn ’is keep.’
Stevenson was pleased that Pritchard disliked Macgregor. Perhaps the Liverpudlian was just ingratiating himself, Stevenson thought as he heaved himself up the steel ladder on to the top of the contactor house between Number Four and Five hatches, but he considered himself a fair judge of character. Pritchard was a grafter and Macgregor a waster. The resentful glare that Macgregor threw him when he eventually caught up with the Second Mate and Pritchard confirmed his judgement.
‘Where de fuck ’ave youse been?’ Pritchard greeted him as the rain began to pour with a seething hiss that drummed on the steel deck. A foot above the well-deck a heavy mist seemed to hang as the raindrops bounced back before finally falling and forming a shallow lake that gurgled its way into the scuppers and poured over the side.
By the time they closed the last hatch they were all three soaked to the skin. Stevenson climbed down from the forecastle winch controls and they stood for a moment under the overhang, catching their breath before running aft to the shelter of the accommodation.
‘Thanks Pritch, Macgregor . . .’
The Glaswegian looked up slyly. ‘That should be worth a wee beer, eh, Sec?’
Stevenson stared at the man, the effrontery of the suggestion silencing him for a moment. Pritchard snorted, contemptuous of his watch-mate, and began to walk aft, as though braving the rain was preferable to being a party to Macgregor’s ploy.
‘Ah’m bluidy soaked, mon,’ Magregor whined, looking down at himself, his voice wheedlingly pathetic, as though he alone had taken the full force of the rain.
‘You cheeky bastard . . .’ Stevenson knew the instant he spoke he had been trapped. Macgregor’s mood changed instantly to a posture of truculence; his eyes blazed with hatred. He was the affronted one now and Stevenson bit his indiscreet lip with annoyance.
‘You canna talk tae me like that, mon. Ah’ll take the matter up wi’ the Union. Nae struck-up prick of an officer’s going tae call me a bastard.’
Stevenson turned angrily away, strongly tempted to hit Macgregor and stop his silly blather but determined not to put himself further in the wrong. He made to follow the disappearing figure of Pritchard.
‘Hey, you stuck-up English snob, ah’m talking tae you . . .’ There was no mistaking the provocative aggression in Macgregor’s voice and Stevenson swung round, holding his clenched fists by his side with an effort at self-control.
Macgregor stood with his jaw thrust belligerently forwards. Stevenson could have sworn he wanted the Second Mate to hit him, to fulfil some ancient, imagined or inherited grievance.
‘Listen, Macgregor, you know very well I didn’t use the word seriously, so button your lip! As to my being English, just remember I’m as Scots as yourself!’
Stevenson saw the fox cunning of quick-witted malice appear as a gleam in Macgregor’s eyes.
‘Bullshit,’ he said contemptuously, ‘and just you remember that ma name’s Mister Macgregor tae you.’
Stevenson choked off a reply and began to walk furiously aft. It came to him, in a bitter moment of recollection, that somewhere, long ago, he had read or heard his profession traduced, the British mercantile marine described with contempt as the pickings of the prisons officered by the sweepings of the public schools. It was, like most generalisations, inaccurate in the particular, but possessed the tackiness of wit to stick, to lodge among those disposed to that most English vice, snobbery. The reflection grated on his nerves, reminding him he had abandoned Cathy for this life, this life that gave him Macgregor for a colleague.
‘Shit!’ swore Stevenson.
The rain, falling from the overloaded clouds in a solid mass, chilled him and he dripped water on the labourers now dozing on their mats along the outer alleyways. They shouted their protest. Gone were the days of the white tuan; now even an involuntary dripping of rainwater brought down the complaints of coolies upon him.
He was in the shower when he heard the knock on his cabin door.
‘It’s only me,’ sang out Taylor’s voice. ‘I’ve a beer for you.’
Stevenson rubbed his hair vigorously, wrapped the towel round his waist and stepped out into the cabin. Taylor was lounging on the daybed; he handed Stevenson a beer.
‘Thanks, Chas.’ He threw his head back and sucked greedily at the can.
‘What’s up?’ asked Taylor, seeing the preoccupied look on Stevenson’s open face.
‘I’m bloody furious and this is just what I need. Thanks.’
‘What’s happened?’ Taylor persisted.
‘Oh, nothing much. That bloody man Macgregor gave me some lip . . .’ Stevenson outlined the incident. ‘My own fault, really. I shouldn’t have called him a bastard.’ He finished with an unhappy shrug.
‘Oh, forget it, Alex. We’re all guilty when it comes to bad language. It doesn’t signify except when a troublemaker like Macgregor wants to make something of it. Here, have another beer and drown your sorrows.’
With a sense of diminishing unease Stevenson slowly dismissed the incident from his mind. Beyond the jalousies the rain lashed down and a peal of thunder rumbled across Keppel Harbour. Stevenson looked at his watch.
‘There won’t be any more cargo work this shift,’ he remarked, accepting the second can of beer from Taylor.
‘That’s what I came to see you about. The Mate says he’ll stand this evening’s harbour watch so you and I can take a run ashore together. How about it?’
‘That’s unusual for old Randy Rawlings, isn’t it?’ asked Stevenson, pulling on a clean white uniform shirt and musing on the Mate’s philanthropy. Second and Third Officers were customarily on watch and watch in harbour with no time to socialise beyond the brief few moments when they handed over the deck.
‘I suspect he has ulterior motives. I heard him asking Woo for a Chinese special chow tonight; I expect he’s invited someone aboard. Hasn’t he got relatives here?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Stevenson recalled casually. ‘I think you’re right.’
‘Anyway, I thought it would be a good opportunity for you and I to enjoy a modest little piss-up and, er—’ Taylor rolled his eyes with exaggerated significance at the picture of Cathy on Stevenson’s desk. Stevenson turned from drawing on his shorts and for a moment both men stared at the photographed face that smiled back at them.
‘She’s very attractive, Alex. She seems to me more like the kin
d you marry than the kind you screw.’ He sighed. ‘But I suppose you were screwing her just the same.’ Taylor caught Stevenson’s eye. The latter was oddly discomfited by the remark and swung round to gaze in the mirror and comb his hair assiduously.
‘Sorry, old man,’ said Taylor. ‘Didn’t mean to tread on any toes.’
Stevenson heard the supercilious pomposity enter Taylor’s voice with the outmoded words. He was assailed from both flanks. First Macgregor’s sly attack on the imagined privilege of his being Alexander Stevenson, Second Mate of the ageing motor vessel Matthew Flinders; now, from somewhere above him in the social pecking order, came the mild contempt of the blond aristocrat. He felt bowed under the martyrdom of being middle class and in a flash had lost his temper.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Chas, don’t be so bloody condescending!’ He rounded on Taylor and whipped him verbally, transferring the anger he felt for Macgregor to the lolling figure of the Third Mate on the daybed. ‘From what you told me the other night, you’re no great Lothario yourself . . .’
And for the second time that afternoon he regretted what he had said the instant the words had left his mouth.
Taylor looked like a man physically struck.
‘Oh, fuck it! Chas, I’m sorry, I really am . . .’ Stevenson was abruptly aware of the difference in their ages. Taylor was suddenly a silent, crushed boy and Stevenson realised that his superciliousness was a facade, bred in him, or cultivated, it did not really matter.
‘I am sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it. Macgregor got under my skin.’
Very slowly Taylor uncoiled himself and stood up, facing the contrite and apologetic Stevenson.
‘Forget it, Alex. I’m going down to dinner.’ He made to push past Stevenson as the notes of the steward’s gong sounded.
It was the Radio Officer who saved the situation. His appearance in the cabin doorway was without the time-honoured formality of a knock and the obvious excitement on his face was sufficiently unusual to distract them both.
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