But they had cheated the sea of one hundred and forty-six lives. Would he really have rather lost them and preserved Taylor and Ernie York? God alone knew the true secrets of a man’s heart, for they were often obscure to the bearer, but he was relieved the engine had restarted, relieved to the point of a muck sweat!
And now Stevenson stood before him with the burden of his detailed report.
‘I’m sorry, sir, we couldn’t get him out.’
‘I understand,’ Mackinnon said, though his eyes asked the unspoken question.
An awful sensation of uncertainy swept Stevenson, then he remembered the enigmatic expression on Taylor’s face. ‘He was quite dead, sir.’
‘Safety of the ship, mister,’ Mackinnon rasped harshly, giving absolution and extreme unction before turning back to his window. ‘We’ll be passing through the vortex soon,’ he went on, his back to the Second Mate. ‘You’d better go and warn the refugees then let the crowd know. Don’t forget the engine-room, or the greasers aft. I want a personal appearance, Mr Stevenson d’you understand?’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
Did the Second Mate understand? Mackinnon wondered. He had not needed to see Rawlings hanging back, coiling the lifelines, to know the Mate had already risen as far as he could to the occasion. Taylor had done bloody well, better than Mackinnon would have thought, and been sacrificed. Now there was only Stevenson. . . .
No, that was not true: there was Freddie Thorpe and George Reed, and Able Seaman Pritchard and Braddock and the stalwart Bosun, and Chippy, and Reed’s Chinese greasers who they called by numbers at boat drill.
He could feel the soft, warm bundle, see the wrinkled face that looked like no one else, yet was indubitably Shelagh with a touch of his own mother.
The drinking had started the day he had received the news of the child’s death. They had been in port; perhaps if they had been at sea it would have been different. He had asked Eastern Steam to relieve him, even telegraphed an offer to pay his own fare home to be with Shelagh; but the company had refused and he had been devastated. The binge had lasted four days before he came to himself and had exhausted the patience of others. They had covered for him, of course, out of pity and sympathy and friendship. A bloke could go on a bender if the cause was great enough and they were mostly absentee fathers, sentimentalists who understood the solace of the bottle.
But it happened again at the next port, and then the next, until they knew the worst was looming and the Master, a tolerant man, carpeted Mackinnon and warned him about alcoholism and dismissal, telling him he was the best Chief Officer in the line and now his reputation hung by a thread.
It straightened him for a bit, but then, with letters from home that revived his bitterness, he relapsed ashore. They found him in a gutter, half-naked, his face bruised and cut, his wallet missing. He could not remember what had happened. The Master locked him in his cabin and stood his watch. He thought he had lost his job, but the Master proved a true friend and gave him a final chance. Mackinnon pulled back from the abyss. Despite the company’s heartlessness, he had subsequently proved unswervingly loyal.
Long afterwards he had asked his commander why he had been so forgiving. ‘Because if we had been in an office or a factory,’ the Master had said, ‘you’d have gone sick. Here you can never leave the job.’
Even now the memory made him shudder.
Stevenson went directly to the smoke-room. His shoulder hurt badly, for he had further strained it in the fight with the cement mixers. He was absurdly glad to be going to find Tam, glad of the excuse Mackinnon had given him, ‘to find the interpreter and get her to tell them they would be all right soon, that although it was going to be very uncomfortable for a few more hours, the ship was very, very strong. Be confident and reassuring.’ Mackinnon had concluded.
She was not in the smoke-room. The old woman said something, her gold teeth flashing in the electric light, and pointed. He went aft and found her in the alleyway, talking to two Vietnamese men. As he approached they caught sight of him and the three fell silent. It was obvious he was intruding.
‘You okay?’ he asked her, feeling far from confident and reassuring, remembering the loose ammunition clip.
She tossed her lank hair back. ‘Sure.’
‘I come from the Captain,’ he began portentously, looking from one to the other, not liking the blank, uncommunicative expression in Tam’s face or the outright hostility of the two men. One had his hand in the pocket of his slacks and the angular outline of a bulky object made Stevenson’s mouth run dry. ‘We will have very bad time for about four or five hours’ – he held up his fingers – ‘but soon typhoon pass and everything will be okay.’ He smiled, a thin, insincere grimace. ‘Then we go Hong Kong.’
‘Hong Kong?’ one of the men asked, then fired a question at Tam. She asked: ‘We go to Hong Kong?’
‘Of course,’ Stevenson said, then the second man snapped something and spat on the deck. As Stevenson stood uncomprehending the three of them pushed past him and left him staring after them.
‘You were on the fucking bridge when we broached,’ Pritchard, who had been relieved on the wheel, accused Macgregor, his finger stabbing at the Scotsman. Braddock stood beside him and the other men in the mess-room, halfway through an extempore breakfast of cornflakes and tea, grew silent.
‘Aye, and we’ve got to stand your bloody trick for you,’ one of them added.
‘You’re no bleedin’ seaman, Rob Roy. You’re shit!’
Macgregor smirked. ‘You smell like what you’re treated like,’ he said obscurely, ‘an it wasna my fault we broached. That daft bastard Mackinnon—’
‘What would you know about it?’ Pritchard said contemptuously. ‘You couldn’t piss in a swimming pool.’ He exchanged glances with Braddock. Macgregor had hazarded the ship and with it all their lives.
‘I’m going to see how that nipper is,’ Braddock said.
‘I’m coming wid yer.’
But Macgregor refused to rise to the insults. He had bigger things on his mind.
‘What d’you mean “conspiratorial”?’
‘I don’t know, sir, it was just a feeling. Up to now the girl was quite friendly.’ He paused, then went on, ‘But in the presence of those two men, she seemed suddenly the opposite.’
‘And one of them had a gun?’
Stevenson shrugged. ‘Again, it’s only a hunch, sir, but I’m pretty sure. I can’t ignore it. We know it’s a possibility.’
‘We do indeed.’ Mackinnon’s voice trailed off, then he thought of something. ‘You say they asked about us going to Hong Kong?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder why they asked that. You’d already told ’em we were bound there, hadn’t you?’
‘Yes, I think so, sir.’
A nasty suspicion was forming in Mackinnon’s mind. He nodded. ‘Right then, mister, search ’em, search every one of them and disarm them.’
‘Me, sir? Or Mr Rawlings?’
‘I haven’t seen the Mate, Mr Stevenson, so I want you to do it. Get the Bosun and Carpenter to help you, otherwise keep it as low key as you can. Get the girl to interpret. I don’t want any misunderstandings.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
‘By the way, Mr Stevenson.’ Mackinnon beckoned him into the chart-room and lowered his voice. ‘For your ears only, but we’ve received orders to proceed to Shanghai.’
‘Shanghai? But that means. . . .’
‘Exactly.’
‘Jesus!’
‘Go on, get on with it and if you see the Mate, tell him I’d like a word.’
He almost tripped over Tam. She was with Braddock and Pritchard, cradling the baby in her arms. The wrinkled face peered from a swathing of blanket. Her two boyfriends seemed to have disappeared. The contrast with the last time he had seen her not ten minutes earlier was marked. The quartet were sitting on the steps of the main stairway, like a small social group waiting for a photographer. A thin film of water still trickled
about their feet. They were laughing together, though Stevenson noted a shadow pass over Tam’s face as she saw who it was stepping down past them.
‘Can I speak with you a moment please,’ he said. ‘I have a message from the Captain for your people.’
‘I already tell them about everything all right.’
‘No, this is more important.’
Tam stood unsteadily as the ship rolled. ‘I’ll take the baby,’ Braddock volunteered.
‘No, it okay. Baby sleep.’
Stevenson put his hand out to steady her, forgetting it was his injured arm. The pain of her sudden weight made him wince, but she drew sharply away from him.
‘Ask Chippy and the Bose to come here, please,’ he said to Braddock.
‘Okay.’ The two seamen shuffled reluctantly away and Stevenson turned to the girl. She looked very uneasy, as if frightened to be alone with him.
‘Listen Tam, you must interpret for me. I am going to take you into the saloon and speak to the men. I think – the Captain thinks – someone . . . one of you people, has a gun; perhaps more than one. D’you understand?’
Her pale face had drained of colour and he saw her long throat undulate as she swallowed.
‘D’you understand?’ he repeated.
For a moment she stood, eyes downcast, then she looked up at him. ‘Alex, you tell me ship go Hong Kong, yes?’
He nodded, fearing what was coming. ‘Yes, I told you.’
‘Is true?’ she asked directly, setting aside any recognition of the subtleties of tense as a preliminary to explanation. Slowly he shook his head. ‘No. Ship now go Shanghai.’
She jerked as though he had struck her. Her large eyes widened as she backed away, and then she turned and was running aft bouncing off the bulkhead as the Matthew Flinders rolled, and the alleyway was full of the baby’s wailing.
‘Shit!’ muttered Stevenson vehemently.
‘Did you make her an offer, Sec?’ Macgregor grinned from the far end of the alleyway, but vanished when the Bosun and Carpenter appeared. Stevenson was caught up in the necessity of instructing the petty officers.
They started with the saloon. The Bosun and Carpenter closed off each of the two doors and stood impassively while Stevenson strode forward and motioned for all the men to stand. Anger lent a grim purposefulness to his task. After turning over their pathetically few bundles he frisked each man in turn, as he had seen done on the movies. Their limbs were thin as sticks under their cotton trousers, their ribbed chests bare of holsters, their armpits sticky with nothing more sinister than sweat. Once he drew back sharply from a young man woken from sleep, his erection rigid. The ensuing laughter defused what might, in its aftermath, have been unpleasant. He found no guns and, smiling as courteously as he was able, he thanked them. Only as he left did he realise neither of the men he had seen earlier with Tam had been among those searched. Then, as the three white men were leaving, the two missing Vietnamese burst into the saloon.
‘What for you do this?’ one of them demanded in passable pidgin. Struck in the back by the imploding door handle the Bosun had the man spun round and spread-eagled against the bulkhead in a trice. Frisking him he straightened and shook his head. The other man, his hands voluntarily lifted above his head, was equally devoid of arms.
Stevenson went up to the first. ‘You savvy English, eh? Okay, we check. Make everything okay.’ Then he led the trio from the saloon and left a babel of voices noisily debating the intrusion.
‘Do we get to do that with the women?’ queried Chippy facetiously.
Stevenson sighed. ‘I suppose we’d better.’
But it was a half-hearted affair, despite the explanation rendered by Tam to ease the embarrassment of both parties. As he left the smoke-room, Stevenson caught the girl’s eyes and held his hands up in an eloquent and hopeless shrug. But as an appeal it was a useless gesture; Tam merely looked away.
Stevenson escaped to the wilderness of the upper deck.
Immediately he noticed the change. Emerging on deck it was lighter, the mastheads no longer seemed to scrape the heavy overcast. He caught sight of a glimpse of the sun, a pale disc, but visible again as the fractus edged away. Against it a shape, ragged, batlike, then another, and another, a hideous nightmare of exhausted birds flopping like filthy rags tossed out of the sky; the grey and white of sea birds, and the brilliant greens, iridescent blue and scarlets of land birds. Unnerved, Stevenson stood for a moment, aware too that the wind had dropped and the ship’s motion had become irregular.
Climbing towards the boat-deck, only half-comprehending what had happened and sensing again that elemental shift in the relationship of air and water, he realised the spray had fallen back, that a vague and misty horizon was visible. The surface of the sea no longer wore the scourged, abraded appearance it had done; instead its battered waves seemed to gather themselves, not wind-driven and tumbling crests, but highly charged repositories of kinetic energy released from the thrall of the taifun.
On the bridge ladder he paused and turned, scanning the surface of the ocean. This was the very eye of the storm, and as if to confirm his diagnosis the sun finally broke through. Looking upwards he could see the sky, a mighty dome of cobalt blue edged by a great mass of towering cloud, a huge curtain of cumulonimbus on a gigantic scale.
All about the ship the sea was suddenly blue and white and the comparative silence was unnerving after the hours of wind-rushing noise.
‘Is this the vortex, sir?’ he asked Mackinnon as he slid back the wheelhouse door and met the Captain’s drawn face.
‘Only the edge, laddie, only the edge. The worst is yet to come.’
Stevenson looked at the helmsman. He was steering a course again, and though the Matthew Flinders rolled and wallowed and threw her bow in the air and continued to shoot curtains of spray and ship the occasional sea, her motion, bad enough in normal circumstances, was nothing to what it had been earlier. It was clear to Stevenson that Mackinnon had his ship under command again and was making north and east as fast as possible to cut his way out of the typhoon as it moved west-north-west.
‘Did you find anything?’ Mackinnon asked.
‘Nothing, sir.’
‘You checked everyone?’
‘Yes.’ Stevenson paused, remembering. ‘Oh, except the woman you operated on.’
Mackinnon shook his head. ‘I’ve just had word from Freddie. He’s been with her all night.’ The Chief Steward had also let him know the woman had had another dose of morphine sulphate. ‘What about the baby?’
‘The baby, sir?’ Comprehension dawned in Stevenson’s eyes. Without a word, he turned and ran below, banging from bulkhead to bulkhead, bruising his shoulder again, his heart in his mouth. Of course! The baby . . .’
He was convinced he had been deceived, convinced Tam had been holding the gun in the child’s blanket even as she had talked to him. Why else had she looked so guilty? Why else had she refused Braddock the bundle? And why else had she reacted the way she had when he told her they were bound for Shanghai, not Hong Kong.
Now he would have to confess to Mackinnon the refugees knew of the re-routing, knew it from himself, to whom Mackinnon had imparted the news in confidence.
It became imperative that he discover the gun.
She was in the smoke-room, sitting where he had seen her earlier, back straight against the bulkhead, staring in front of her. What was she seeing? Her village under the nipa palms, the dusty road on its low dyke, the rice paddies spread out on either side and the range of blue mountains in the distance? Or a noisy, teeming street in Saigon; a street of endless comings and goings, of jostling and haggling.
To his relief the swaddled baby was still in her arms, though it whimpered quietly.
‘Tam.’
She looked up at him, but no warmth kindled in her eyes. She merely gazed at him as he squatted down next to her. The old woman in the corner sucked in her cheeks and muttered to herself.
‘Tam,’ he repeated, his
hands going out for the baby, ‘you hide gun, eh?’
She thrust the baby at him and it stirred, crying as Stevenson took it. The blanket concealed nothing more than a damp patch. Sheepishly he handed the baby back to her and stood up.
‘You tell me lie,’ she snapped.
‘No . . .’
‘You tell me ship go Hong Kong.’ Her voice was sharp with accusation, betrayal.
‘Yes.’ He nodded vigorously. ‘Ship go Hong Kong, then – he held up his hand to stop her protest – ‘then we have radio message, just now, savvy? I didn’t know when I spoke to you before. We have a change of our orders,’ he went on, seeing her expression alter and abandoning the attempt to tell her in pidgin. ‘I came and told you when I knew.’ He switched to the offensive, dropping down on his haunches beside her and lowering his voice. ‘Tam, those two men. They had the gun, yes? They told you to hide it, didn’t they?’
For a moment she stared at him impassively and his heart sank. ‘I not want to go Shanghai,’ she said. ‘Everybody all finish.’ She was silent, her eyes imploring him to understand what would happen to them. ‘Okay Hong Kong bad; maybe prison camp but not – not finish.’ She whispered the last word. Stevenson thought of Taylor’s dead face.
‘Those men,’ he began, but Tam interrupted.
‘Not good men, Alex, no, but they maybe fight for us.’ She paused, then added, ‘Maybe you fight for us too, maybe you not let me and’ – she indicated the whimpering bundle – ‘baby go back to Communists in Shanghai.’
Stevenson could not bear the look in her eyes. What could he do? Whatever happened his loyalties lay with Mackinnon.
‘The gun,’ he persisted, ‘where is the gun?’
She lowered her eyes, aware she had lost. ‘Ask Phan Van Nui.’
Deeply troubled, Stevenson climbed once more to the bridge. The ship was moving with an increasingly erratic motion. He was too late, too involved, to carry out his encouraging mission to the engine-room.
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