by Tim Heald
Supplies and fuel had been taken on board in the Irish Republic and so too had passengers. Elizabeth got talking to a group of new arrivals in the bar while Tudor toyed in a desultory manner with the Irish Times crossword.
Presently she rejoined him.
‘They’re a press group,’ she said. ‘Their leader seems to be a PR person called Jeffrey who could be English, but all the others are Irish and seem to have names beginning with F. The blokes are called Finn, Flan, Fergal, Fingal and even Fimbar and the hackettes have names like Fiannula or Fenella or Felicitas.’
‘That sounds like a nun,’ said Tudor.
‘Doesn’t look like a nun,’ she said. ‘The whole lot are straight out of central casting. Boozing and betting people and they talk funny.’
‘I can guess,’ he said, ‘and what are they here for?’
‘Classic freebie,’ she said. ‘They all, more or less seem to have commissions from Irish papers and magazines. Do you really think there’s such a thing as the Tipperary Tatler? One of the Fiannulas says she’s doing a style piece for them.’
‘Anywhere can have a Tatler,’ said Tudor, caustically. ‘Most places do. It’s a licence to print money. Even in Tipperary they’ll pay money to see if Finn and Flan are sharing a quiet joke over a pint of Guinness in the Fiddler’s Flea. Or whatever. Tatlers are just parish magazines with ball gowns and black ties. Upwardly mobile gossip.’
‘Well,’ said Elizabeth thoughtfully, ‘Fiannula, or one of them, is doing a style piece for the Tipperary Tatler. The other Fiannulas are writing the same sort of drivel for the same sort of non-publications. So are the Finns and the Fimbars. All a complete waste of time and money. They’re only here for the beer.’
‘And the fruit machines,’ said Tudor. ‘Oh, and all the romance that goes with a life at sea. They’ll write bland complimentary pieces and they’ll appear in their publications with bland, complimentary photographs and everyone will be happy.’
‘Is that the way it is?’ she asked.
‘That’s the way it is,’ said Tudor. ‘Way of the world. Nothing really what it seems. All make-believe. Pay enough money and you can make anything happen. Or appear to happen.’
‘You don’t believe that.’
‘I believe that’s how it would be if it weren’t for people like me. Like us. Whistle-blowers. The incorruptible.’
The girl stared moodily into her drink and said nothing.
After a while Tudor sunk the last of his cocktail and said, ‘Come outside. I think this should be a rather spectacular departure. It usually is. I did it once in the QE2. Breathtaking.’
It took a lot to take Elizabeth’s breath away but the Irish leave-taking came close. It was dusk as they sailed down river, past the twinkling lights of Cobh and the fairy-tale silhouette of the cathedral and it was as if the whole of Ireland had turned out to wave them on their way across the Atlantic to what so many Irish people regarded as new Ireland across the water where the Irish could be free from the English yolk and your Kennedys and your Reagans walked tall and inherited the earth.
And the Irish lined the waterfront in their smart French, German and Italian cars and they sounded their horns and they flashed their lights and they cried out in the lowering dark and the passengers on board the Duchess waved back and some of them smiled, and some of them called back and some of them wept a little for it was all quite magical in a Gaelic way and they stayed on deck until the last winking shaft of light from the beacon on the ultimate cliff disappeared into the evening fog and the ship was truly on her own, utterly so, without land or escort, destined for thousands of miles of dangerous and desolate ocean before they came to the land of the free.
‘Time for dinner,’ said Tudor with an Englishman’s tin tongue.
‘You go,’ she said, ‘I’ll catch up.’
He waited a moment, then saw that she really did want to stay and savour the moment. As he walked towards the door that led indoors, he glanced back and saw that she was leaning on the rail gazing down on the white wake gleaming in the dark below. As the ship gathered speed the foaming fan grew more turbulent stretching out in a giant V astern. A handful of gulls still followed them wheeling and mewing before they turned back to the safety of dry land and left the little vessel to the mercy of the ocean. You could almost be forgiven for thinking anthropomorphically of the Duchess as she seemed to lengthen her gait and began to stretch out to the even marathon runner’s stride which would, in a few days, God willing bring her safely to port.
She was pitching and rolling now as the sea buffeted her and the more she moved the noisier she became. Tudor could never work out whether the rattling and whining of a ship at sea was protest or pleasure but he found the noise oddly comforting – the regular thump of the engines, the sigh of the wind through wire and rigging, the plangent rasp of rivets and plates. This, after all, was what the ship had been built for and she had made countless voyages such as this. The knowledge was reassuring though the future was, as always uncertain.
It was an oddity of all journeys, he reflected, glancing up at the sky which had cleared to reveal a full moon and a Milky Way, that they were at the same time similar yet unique. Each time he took the train from Casterbridge to Waterloo he passed through the same countryside, the same towns, the same stations. Often he showed his ticket to the same guard, smiled a silent greeting to the same passengers, bought coffee from the same girl in the buffet. Yet all these people like himself were older every time, a step or two nearer death, a page or so nearer the end.
Crossing the Atlantic was more glamorous than travelling from Wessex to London and yet the voyage contained the same elements of routine and surprise. Once on board they would all fall easily into observing the fixed points that each person created – meals being pre-eminent but lectures and film shows and bridge sessions all playing their part so that in a way life on ship was almost dull, particularly if you were seated at a table with the Welsh Watkyns.
And yet no two voyages were ever quite the same. However many times the Duchess crossed from Britain to America there were always moments of the unexpected to chip away at monotony. Mostly the deviations were trivial, unnoticeable even. Drama was not something the cruise companies encouraged and on the whole they were successful in lulling their customers into a sybaritic somnolence undisturbed by anything untoward.
Tudor spent several moments hesitating on the deck thinking these thoughts, lost in reflections of self-indulgent banality even though they had to do with such fundamental and universal questions as the meaning of life.
He was so abstracted that the sudden opening of the door took him quite by surprise though he realized as he jumped that it was ridiculous to find oneself discomposed by the sudden opening of a door. That was what doors did after all. They opened and shut. Even on board ship. And he was silly, too, to be surprised by the figures who emerged on to the moonlit deck. He would have expected them to have been safely ensconced in their suite, the three waiting hand and foot on the one.
‘Good evening,’ said Prince Abdullah politely, as he led his three wives into the bracing night.
Tudor inclined his head and said ‘Good evening’ back. The Prince spoke the greeting like an old-fashioned Englishman, public-school educated, BBC-modulated. Just the tiniest trace of a foreign inflection. The eyes of his wives looked out at Dr Cornwall, the rest of them concealed in jellabas and yashmaks.
He wondered what they were thinking and continued to do so even as he perused his menu at the dinner table a few moments later and considered the great questions which dominated life on ship: whether to have the paté or the soup; the duck or the beef, whether to drink white or red.
He didn’t even notice that the Watkyns were not with him.
Chapter Six
Tudor was woken by noise in the middle of the night.
For a moment he felt hopelessly, helplessly disoriented as one does when woken suddenly and unexpectedly between alien sheets. It was a klaxon. Deep di
sorientating noise of an indeterminate character, the sort of thing you’d use on torture victims in Guantanamo or the Lubyanka. Noise so penetrating that it had an almost physical character. It hurt.
Seeing the mahogany panelling, the port hole and his towelling bath robe slung across the end of his bed, feeling the regular sway of his room and hearing the throb and mutter of the vessel’s nuts and bolts he quickly remembered where he was. The noise was the blast of the ship’s klaxon, usually sounded only as a test or the prelude to the mandatory boat drill.
Seconds later it ceased. A series of metallic clicks followed and then a female voice spoke.
‘Good morning ladies and gentlemen,’ it said, pleasantly and with a soft Irish lilt which could under other circumstances have seemed quite beguiling. ‘We’re sorry to have disturbed your sleep and in a moment or two we’ll let you resume your slumbers. This is simply to tell you that the ship has now been taken over by the People’s Liberation Army of United Ireland. There will be a further announcement in due course but for the time being we ask everyone to remain calm and to stay in your cabins. As far as we can ascertain there are at present no passengers in public areas of the ship. If there is any passenger away from their cabin we ask them to return there. If anyone is found outside their cabin we cannot be responsible for the consequences. However, if everyone stays in bed and goes back to sleep you may rest assured that you will be perfectly safe. Thank you for your attention.’
There was a click and the Tannoy went dead. Tudor switched on the bedside light and looked at his watch. 4.30. The chances of any passenger being up and about, even an insomniac fruit machine user, were remote. It was the best possible moment for a take-over. He rubbed his eyes and considered his position. Any ordinary sensible passenger would do as asked and stay put. Going back to sleep might be a tall order but it was certainly the sensible course of action.
He had doubts, however, whether he was an ‘ordinary sensible passenger’. As a guest speaker his role was ambiguous. He was not an ordinary passenger, but he was not a member of the crew either. Did that confer obligations? How, he wondered, would Sir Goronwy Watkyn react? And there was the added complication, was there not, that he, like Watkyn, was an expert on crime. If, as it appeared, this was an act of piracy, a maritime hi-jack, then this was as much of a crime as the Mutiny on the Bounty, on which, he remembered with a start, he was due to speak later this morning.
He was about to decide that going back to sleep would be a dereliction of duty when his phone rang.
It was Elizabeth. The Irish People’s Liberation Army might have performed the revolutionary’s text-book first task of commandeering the radio station, but they clearly hadn’t disabled the communications system. Passenger was still able to talk unto passenger.
‘What did you make of that then?’ she asked, obviously excited.
‘Shhh,’ he said nervously and a touch theatrically. ‘You don’t want someone to hear.’
‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘Someone is far too bothered trussing up the captain and officers, making sure the crew don’t stage a counter-attack. They’re not going to bother with cabin-to-cabin communication. They’ve got other things to do. I think it’s my gang though. The so-called Irish travel hacks. I told you there was no such thing as the Tipperary Tatler. That was Fiannula on the loudspeaker system.’
‘You sure?’
‘Pretty sure,’ she said.
‘Are you surprised?’
He could almost hear her thinking down the line.
‘Surprised but not surprised,’ she said.
She was good at ambivalence. Properly expressed it carried academic conviction. Certainty was risky. It was fine if you were right, but mistakes were very bad. Bets, she reckoned were, on the whole, better hedged. On the one hand, on the other hand, might end up as a drawn match but it was better to share the points than earn none.
‘So what should we do?’ asked Tudor.
‘We?’ she asked. ‘What’s this ‘we’, Kemo Sabe? I see no ‘we’. I’m a mere menial. I do as I’m told.’
This was being economic with the truth but at the moment it suited her and it was true that she was, technically, the led and he the leader. He taught, she learned. She sat at his feet, at least as far as the casual observer was concerned. The reality might be different, but she was not going to let on, at least when it didn’t suit her.
‘You’re the boss,’ she said. ‘I’m staying in bed till they sound the all-clear.’
‘OK,’ he said, not feeling remotely OK. ‘I’ll call you after the all-clear.’
He put the phone down.
She was right. It was disconcerting that she was so often right. She was younger than him. And a girl. On both counts she should have been wrong and yet she wasn’t.
He lay back and sighed.
‘Am I man or am I a mouse?’ he asked himself, not sure whether it was a rhetorical question, whether he had the answer, whether he cared, whether he knew, whether, well, anything really...
‘Man or mouse,’ he said out loud. ‘Discuss.’
It was a question that had bothered him almost all his life and was doing so now with increasing frequency. It disturbed him in the dark and silent small hours when one was particularly prone to doubt and loss of confidence. In youth he had been relatively confident of his manhood but as the years passed that confidence evaporated. He had read in one of the colour magazines only a week or so earlier that a man’s testosterone disappeared faster and faster after the age of something like eighteen. Not that testosterone had ever been his sort of thing. If anything he had always cultivated a sort of refined femininity albeit on the uncompromisingly masculine grounds that girls seemed to like that sort of thing. The Morgan motor car was an exception, he supposed, but that had come relatively late in life and was deliberately designed to compensate for the rodent attacks on his virility. Anyway even the Morgan was a subdued symptom of blokeishness. A hardcore Maxim reader would have opted for a Harley-Davidson.
He shook himself. Only a mouse, he told himself, would behave like this. No proper man would conduct such a private conversation at a moment of crisis. It was pusillanimous prevarication. Cometh the hour cometh the man should have been his rallying cry. Not cometh the man cometh the mouse.
He considered his options. Option A was to turn over and go back to sleep. That was the extreme-mouse solution – white mouse tending to albino. The pink-eyed way out. In any case even if he took this cowardly way out it wouldn’t work properly because he was far too tense and excited to go back to sleep. The nautical motion of the old ship might be soporific, but the apparent terrorist hijack was far too bracing for even a drowse or a day-dream.
Option B was to get up, have a shave and a shower, dress and be prepared for the terrorists’ next move. This was more seductive than A if only because it gave him something to do as well as affording him more time to think. He had to admit that it was still pretty mousy behaviour but on the other hand he would present a tougher, more effective proposition if he were scrubbed up. Also it didn’t represent a complete campaign, just part of it. A necessary prelude you might say. Option B might be mouse-like but it could quite easily slip into something altogether more manly. He decided to leave the problem as a straight choice between A and B, leaving consideration of C and possibly further letters of the alphabet until later. He had always admired Fabius Cunctator more than Hannibal. There was a difference between bravery and bravado.
The shower was hot and the shave close. He had, as usual brought his own soap, brown Pears in a box, and he applied shaving soap with an old Trumper’s brush with genuine bristles removing it with a new Gillette blade in a safety razor. He quite liked the idea of an old-fashioned razor which you sharpened by stropping, but he was anxious not to appear too much of a fogey. Indeed for someone who gave the impression of not caring about his appearance he cared very much indeed. He believed that such deceptive nonchalance had to be worked at.
As he washed a
nd shaved himself he considered his next move. Yet again he shrank from the really serious decision by just considering what he should wear. If he were going to indulge in serious counter-terrorist activity he would need to convey gravitas and authority. That meant a collar and tie. The tie should definitely not be Channel Four Newscaster with its mutton-dressed-as-lamb garishness but something plain and sober. Not club or old-school-striped which would be unacceptably Fogeyish. He had a green number with white polka-dots which would just about do. Also a plain creamy yellow shirt with gold monogrammed cuff-links. Dark-grey worsted trousers and a dark blue jacket more in the style of an Ivy League reefer than a British blazer. Blue socks and a pair of dark-grey loafers he had picked up in a closing-down sale in a small shoe-shop behind the Frari church in Venice.
When he had packed himself into this outfit he contemplated the result with a satisfaction verging on the smug. He was weathering well, he told himself, and he looked as if he was at the very least a head of department, which indeed he was. It was an image which, he reckoned, inspired respect if not exactly awe. Even Irish terrorists would think twice before tackling him. He looked the sort of man policemen might still, even in the early twenty-first century, call ‘Sir’.
Wondering whether the bags under his eyes indicated wisdom or fatigue, the crow’s feet healthy scepticism or unhealthy late nights, the flecks of grey at the temple seniority or senility, he found the mouse reasserting itself. There was something wrong with the picture in front of him and he knew that it was a question of conviction. He might have fooled other people into thinking that this was a commanding presence but he didn’t fool himself. Not for a minute. He knew that the Tussaud-like image really was just a waxwork facade. He longed to be able to snuff out candles with the flicker of an eyelid at forty paces, but he knew deep down that he would melt at the strike of a match.
He sat down heavily on the bed. Option B was now complete. It was too late for Option A. It was time therefore to consider C and any alternatives he could bring to mind. C was confrontation. If he adopted it he would leave his cabin, walk to the bridge and command the hijackers to put down their weapons and submit to his citizen’s arrest.