by Peter Tonkin
The twins nodded, their eyes shining. It was clearly all they could do to sit still. Robin’s heart gave an unexpected twist. It seemed that she would be the one who was most affected by this parting.
There came a gentle tapping on the window and Robin turned to find a woman who looked for all the world like Nurse Janet — blonde curls, sparkling eyes, youthful dimples. Half expecting this to be one of the junior teachers, Robin hit the automatic wind for the window.
‘Hello,’ said the stranger brightly as the glass wheezed downwards. ‘My name is Hilary Harper. I’m the headmistress here. These must be Mary and William. And you must be Captain Mariner.’
Coffee was a lovely, restful experience, not least because they took it in the headmistress’s private garden, overlooked by overblown roses. That is, the grown-ups took their coffee there. Through the gate at the end of the garden it was possible to see the junior playground with its swings, roundabout and sandpit. Hilary’s daughters — Robin could never think of the headmistress as Mrs Harper; it was as though they became fast friends at once — took the twins through and all that could be heard of them after that was distant happy shrieking.
‘William and Mary will fit right in, I’m sure,’ said Hilary quietly. ‘We foster a strong family atmosphere here and are used to taking children like yours. We also have a representative sample of foreign children and so we have a very strict equal opportunities policy, for gender and race as well as social standing. It is quite important. We have two princesses and a prince. They aren’t treated any differently from the rest. Now, while Anne and Joan have the twins in hand, I’m sure you will want to have a look around and go through the formalities.’
Eric Harper came in while Robin was explaining precisely who the school should contact in the event of an emergency. He was a short, square man, who fizzed with ill-controlled energy. He taught physical education and a range of humanities subjects. When Robin expressed her wish to take the twins on a picnic lunch, he suggested the Harpers accompany them and that he show Robin the very best place locally to have a picnic.
So it was that they all spent a lazy afternoon consuming a range of delicacies from Robin’s hamper, and yet more from Hilary and Eric’s as well, while the four children played happily on the rolling hillsides below Harrow Hill, full to the gills with cold chicken and cold sausages, hard-boiled eggs, fragrant tomatoes, cake, chocolate biscuits and Pepsi-Cola. Later they all walked down to the wildfowl trust area and watched the birds and then the girls took the twins round Arundel Castle.
‘This has been one of the loveliest afternoons I can remember,’ Robin said to Hilary as they began to pack up. ‘As soon as Richard can get away, we’ll both come up. I know he’s dying to see Amberley as well.’
‘He’s welcome at any time,’ said Hilary easily. ‘That’s another policy. Easy access for parents. As long as it doesn’t interfere with the curriculum too much.’
Robin could hardly bring herself to think of her rough-and-tumble twins as the subjects of a curriculum. Once again, the massiveness of the change in her life that this day represented twisted her heart and made her catch her breath. She looked up and saw Hilary’s wise eyes on her. The headmistress looked at her watch. ‘Time for a nice cup of tea, I think,’ she said bracingly. ‘Then we’ll show you your room and let you prepare for dinner. I hope it won’t be too much of a trial, but we have a fairly formal dinner here, as I told you on the phone. Adults only. I’ll hand William and Mary over to their housemistress, together with my two, as soon as we get back. They’ll have high tea and then curl up for a video, I expect. We have the complete Disney, more or less. We’ll have snifters at six thirty, eat at seven and see if they can get through the night without you.’
The guest room was lovely. Robin looked wistfully out of the window over the gardens towards the swimming pool while she stripped off her picnic outfit. It was as well Hilary had warned her about the formal dinner before she set out. She had brought one of her more formal party frocks with her. She laid it on the bed and padded through for a quick shower. As she did so, she noticed a little television in the comer, and, as it was just gone five thirty, she switched it on. The newsreader was just announcing the headlines as Robin stepped into the shower, so she did not hear him say, ‘Reports are coming in about an accident to the Macau ferry … ’
Five minutes later, Robin padded through, mindlessly towelling her golden curls, and stopped, surprised to see the picture of a BBC news reporter standing outside the Shim Tak Centre on Connaught Road, Central. It was difficult to hear what he was saying because the wind kept whipping over the top of his microphone and drowning out his words. Frowning slightly, she walked forward, dropping her hands so the towel came away from her ears.
‘ … just after noon local time. There has been no report of precisely what went wrong. It simply did not arrive at Macau. There has been one flight along the path the jetcat would have followed but there was nothing to be seen, not even any wreckage. The weather has closed in now and so it will be impossible to do more today. The Number Six storm signal is up in Xianggang; the Number Eight warning is up in Macau. There is a full typhoon blowing across the area where the jetcat seems to have gone down. Hopes are fading very rapidly that there will be any survivors.’
The anchorman came back on screen. ‘And we will be keeping you up to date with that story as more news comes in. In the meantime, anyone who thinks a friend or relative might have been on the jetcat which sailed at noon local time between Hong Kong and Macau today should call the following number at the Chinese Legation in London … ’
Robin started to scrub at her hair again. It did not occur to her that she should call the number on the screen. As far as she was aware, nobody she knew was aboard the noon jetcat. She shrugged. Perhaps she would ask Richard about the incident when he called her at Ashenden tomorrow night.
Thinking of Richard, she smiled indulgently. He had been so set against the twins coming to boarding school, even though he had enjoyed his days at Fettes College, alma mater of his uncles on his Scottish mother’s side. Still, although he was the one who wanted the twins at home, it was never him who ended up looking after them. It wasn’t his fault. His heart was in the right place, he tried to be supportive, house-trained, a twenty-first-century man. But there was always something that seemed to call him away. And really, she was in no position to cast aspersions. William and Mary seemed to have spent almost as much of their childhood with their grandparents as with their parents. It was only during the last two years, cocooned in Xianggang, that she had really felt she had got to know the pair of them. And now here she was, foisting them off on the Harpers, pretending it was all for their own good. She was suddenly consumed with guilt.
As she sipped a small glass of some really excellent single malt in the Harpers’ study at six thirty, the matronly house-mistress reported that the twins had enjoyed their tea and had happily tucked down in front of the TV with the Harper girls. After dinner, Robin would have the opportunity for a quick kiss goodnight and then they would be off to the ‘Freshers’ Dorm’ where Anne and Joan had already secreted the makings of quite a fair midnight feast.
Dinner was excellent. The kitchen staff, normally faced with the requirements of feeding the better part of one hundred students, traditionally tried to outdo themselves for the two staff dinners over the weekend before the school year began. Robin found herself pampered with salmon and wild mushrooms en papillote; loin of pork stuffed with apricots and almonds, with new potatoes roasted with garlic, and sugar snap peas; chocolate and black cherry gateau — not quite a Black Forest, something even more delicious. Feeling full and fat, she simply watched as the trenchermen among them demolished half a Stilton, but she did accept a little port and carried it through to the library where coffee awaited.
As they all arrived in the oak-panelled room, the sound of a distant telephone revealed that the tall door on the right opened through into the head’s study. Eric disappeared to see
who it was while the rest of them collapsed into overstuffed armchairs and considered a little small talk. They had been very indulgent with their dazzling guest so far and had avoided shop talk altogether. ‘If you want the lowdown on your darlings’ classmates, you should come back in here on Monday night,’ chuckled Hilary. ‘We’ll all be dishing the dirt on the little monsters then, won’t we?’
The chorus of cheerful assent from her colleagues drowned out the whisper of the door opening. Eric Harper cleared his throat. ‘Captain Mariner, it’s for you,’ he said, in one of those quiet voices teachers use to reach the furthest comer of the class. ‘It’s your father and he sounds worried. I’m afraid something’s up.’
7
Robin sat dry-eyed in Hilary Harper’s private sitting room. She held the headmistress’s telephone to her ear and flicked at the comer of her BT chargecard as she waited for connection. At the far end of the line it was 3 a.m. but she didn’t think Gerry and Dottie would mind.
Indeed, when Gerry came on the line, his voice was alert. He had obviously not been asleep, in spite of the hour. ‘Gerry Stephenson. What can I do for you?’
‘It’s Robin.’
‘I’ve been expecting your call. No news more than I told Sir William, I’m afraid. Just that Richard’s name was on the passenger list. Surprise to me, I must say. But that’s all at this stage. Except that the weather has worsened here. It was a bad one in Macau. Number Eight storm warning went up at four. It went up here at eight last night. They won’t be resuming the search either from here or from Macau until dawn, and only then if the wind moderates. It was gusting at one hundred knots last night. It’s a miracle the phone lines are still up.’
There seemed nothing left to say, so, in a kind of daze, Robin closed the conversation with the usual courtesies, stilted and redundant though they sounded under the circumstances, and hung up.
‘Would you like to talk?’ asked Hilary with practical solicitude.
Robin found that she would. She had to get this straight in her head but the shock was simply too great. ‘Why in heaven’s name did he have to go off to Macau?’ she said. ‘Macau for heaven’s sake!’
‘Is Macau far away?’
‘No. Jetfoil in an hour. Less. It’s just across the estuary of the Pearl River. Like going from Southend to Margate. Nothing. He would never use the jetfoil, though. The seats were too small for him. Bloody man!’
‘That’s why he was on a jetcat? Is that right? Jetcat?’
‘That’s right. God! What am I going to do?’
‘Well, you don’t need to worry about William and Mary. They’ll be fine here. I would advise you not to let them know about this until things are clearer.’
Robin was tom. Almost literally. It was as though she could feel herself tearing inside. She took a deep, shuddering breath. Jesus, this was so unfair! He had put her through all this before. How dare he put her through it again! And Hilary was right. What on earth was she going to tell the twins? The cosy little room suddenly became stultifyingly hot. ‘Can I walk outside?’ she asked.
‘Of course. I’ll come with you, if I may.’
The rose garden was lovely under the light of a three-quarter moon. There was no wind and the hot air concentrated and contained the scent of the massive blooms, mingling it with the perfume of the night-flowering jasmine which swept up the trellis on the west-facing wall, and the lavender which clustered at its foot. One or two late bees bumbled drowsily from blossom to blossom and bats from the school’s old bell tower skimmed overhead.
‘This happened two years ago. May, nineteen ninety-seven,’ said Robin.
‘Captain Mariner was aboard a ship that went missing?’
‘No. I got a phone call in the middle of the night telling me he’d just been arrested for mass murder. God! Is he never at rest? Can’t he just sit still for once? What is going on here? I hate that place, you know. Hate it!’
Hilary found this outburst a little hard to follow. She remembered something of the case Robin was referring to, however; it had made all the papers and news bulletins over here as well as in Hong Kong. It had been the big story of the last days before handover. And, she remembered very clearly, Captain Mariner had been totally exonerated.
‘Even so, you’ll have to go back out at once, won’t you?’ she said.
‘Yes. But I need to do some more thinking. Last time, I went via Heritage House and just picked up all the intelligence I could on the way. This time I don’t know. This time it’s different.’
‘How so?’
‘Last time I had a target in view. A clear objective. Something to do. This is different.’
‘Perhaps not. Perhaps by the time you get out there, there will be something to do.’ Hilary stopped there. At the very least from the sound of things, she thought grimly, there would be a memorial service to be arranged and the Hong Kong branch of Heritage Mariner to be closed down. But she let none of these thoughts into her tone and voiced none of them either. Robin would have to face them for herself and in her own time. In the meantime, she would have to settle on some kind of action. All Hilary’s training as a teacher and a personnel manager had taught her that any high-stress situation had to be resolved in such a way that those most closely involved in it were left with a series of options and targets, something to do other than brood. And in any case, adept at characterising people on short acquaintance as she was, she knew that Robin Mariner was the sort of person who would always resolve things through decisive action.
No sooner had Hilary completed this train of thought than the accuracy of her summation was proved. Robin turned back and re-entered the little sitting room. By the time Hilary had caught up with her, she was standing over the phone again, punching in 144 and another series of numbers less familiar to the teacher.
‘Crewfinders?’ said a distant voice from the handset.
‘Audrey, this is Robin Mariner. Have you heard the news?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I get out?’
‘Not tonight. I don’t know when they’ll re-open the airports, but I can’t get you a flight to Hong Kong, Macau or even Guangzhou at the moment. Everything is closed. I can get you into Singapore, Brunei, Manila and Tokyo. You could sit there until it clears and then hop over. Or you can wait until the morning and I can try for you then.’
‘In the morning. I think we’ll have to discuss this at board level in any case. The implications are … ’ Robin let the sentence hang, clearly trying to consider the implications for herself.
‘Robin … ’
‘I know. Thanks. I’ll talk to you in the morning.’ Robin put the phone down.
‘Can I get you anything?’ asked Hilary.
‘I would kill for a cup of tea.’
‘Coming right up.’
By the time Hilary came back with a pot of strong, fragrant tea, Robin was on the phone again. The teacher blanched at the thought of the Mariner phone bill. Robin was now talking to someone called Charles Lee and it didn’t take much intuition to discover that this was a senior executive of the Heritage Mariner board. Don’t any of these people ever sleep? wondered Helen wearily. But then she thought, on a night like tonight, nobody working for Heritage Mariner would get much sleep.
‘We’ll call a senior board for ten, then,’ Robin was saying. ‘I know Helen DuFour is in town again, and Sir William is with her to see this new exhibition at the Royal Academy. So it should be easy enough for the four of us to thrash things through … Yes. I’ll let them know … Ten sharp in the boardroom at Heritage House … Of course I’ll let you know the second there’s anything new … That’s right. The control room and the Crewfinders secretariat will be the first to hear in any case. Right. See you at ten.’
‘The control room?’ asked Hilary as she poured the tea. Robin looked at her as though she was a stranger for a second, then her mind clicked back into gear. ‘Yes. The shipping company still runs a fair-sized tanker fleet and two toxic waste-disposal vessels. The co
ntrol room monitors them twenty-four hours a day, and keeps bang up to date with anything else that’s happening in the shipping world as well. And Crewfinders does a parallel job on the personnel level. They share facilities at the top of Heritage House. It’s apparently a bit like the ops room at the top of the SIS building on the South Bank, with a bit of news service work thrown in — all flashing lights, digital displays, illuminated maps. Constant stream of reports coming in. Satellite stations from all over the world … Do you have satellite here?’
‘Modern languages does, of course. Pre-set to the French, Italian, German and Russian channels. We don’t have any of the news channels, though, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘Then I’ll just have to rely on what’s left of the World Service.’
So it was that when the twins were woken up by two excited ten-year-olds laden with the makings of an epic midnight feast, their mother, at the far end of the corridor but really a world away, was glued to her powerful little transistor radio, listening to the news at 23.00 hours GMT. And when they had collapsed, replete and vastly contented, back into unshakable slumber, she was listening to the midnight bulletin, one hour adrift of British Summer Time in England, all too well aware that it was just after 8 a.m. in Xianggang, and wondering whether to call Gerry for something more up-to-date even than the World Service could supply.
In the end, uncharacteristically, she did nothing, overwhelmed, suddenly, with an incapacitating excess of sorrow, foreboding and the agony of loss. She was still sobbing quietly when, exhausted, she fell asleep.
Robin was lucky to make it back to Ashenden without having an accident early the next morning. Her preoccupation was dangerously absolute and her sense of unreality weirdly disorientating. She had been woken by the twins from a deep sleep filled with sunnily happy dreams. The children had been full of their midnight adventure and buoyantly excited about the future. Neither of them noticed her slowly darkening mood and they took her swift departure in good part, with almost blasé self-possession. She was the one who was most affected. Her eyes prickled dangerously as she bid them a final farewell; they were far more interested in the promise of breakfast.