Читать книгу Acts of Mutiny - Derek Beaven - Страница 20

At last there came a time when the Armorica turned her back to the wind, and Robert could anticipate the Med. Now, on the way in, the acute flexing of seascape seemed so mundane as to be beyond comment. Everyone had grown used to the bad weather. They had all worked out ways of shortening sail, as it were. It had become routine to cross even the smallest interior spaces as if at one minute you were scaling Everest, and the next leaping off.

The wind eased. On the unabated swell they were running eastwards now, level with Gibraltar. The creaking and groaning sounds lessened slightly, and the following motion was different: longer, less aggressive. He had begun to find exhilarating the sudden compression of the ship’s lifts, and the remarkable weight loss next, by which he could cross the assembly area in only four or five strides. As the children did. Indeed, he felt like a boy again, and looked gingerly around to check that no one had seen the excitement on his face, and, once, when the space was momentarily empty one morning, the wheeling of his arms.

A link with Penny had forged. Imperceptibly, out of nothing, amid all these fantastical comings and goings it had taken shape. He knew it. She must know it. They had flashed signals in each other’s eyes. Surely they had. She kept appearing in his thoughts, would not be displaced. He imagined the entwining of her legs. She was a mermaid.

‘We’ll be docking at Gibraltar only to refuel, I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen.’ The Chief Officer made the announcement. ‘And that’ll be tonight. As you’ll all be aware, the conditions have been somewhat exceptional, we don’t mind saying so, even us toughened old salts.’ He laughed. ‘We don’t often find ourselves in forty – or fifty-foot seas on this run. More like Cape Horn, to be honest.’ He grinned again at the few people gathered round the board marking the mileage of the ship’s daily run.

So at least they were admitting it, Robert thought. Once he grasped that they had weathered a storm which the crew also had struggled to cope with, then the large number of breakages, the several days of slips and spills and sliding became indexes of their courage, rather than of their own mere landlubberliness. He recalled his conversation with the steward of the Verandah bar. And felt better about it. In all probability the Armorica would not turn over now, for all the extra demands that had been made on her tanks. They would make it.

The Chief Officer continued. ‘To be perfectly frank I don’t recommend Gib in both the middle of winter and the middle of the night.’ The small group, which included Penny, responded with a polite chuckle, while the deck moved under them as usual. ‘We’ve lost several days, you see, and shall have to make up for lost time. As to disembarking procedure …’

But Robert’s attention became diverted because Penny spoke separately in an undertone to her neighbour. ‘Not so long ago I’d have given almost anything to set foot on dry land, but if it’s just during the small hours, I don’t see the point either. Do you? It would just be nothing at all.’

‘We shan’t be going,’ the neighbour replied, a woman called Mrs Burns who had once, with her husband, shared Robert’s table for dinner. Since the storm, she had been absent. He suspected she had been able to eat nothing at all.

‘It would be like, I don’t know, Eastbourne in the blackout springs to mind,’ Penny said. ‘I think I’ll concentrate on a good night’s sleep. Picking up the pieces almost. I just hope my violin’s safe; hasn’t broken loose, or been crushed by some huge thing that has. I wish there was some way I could look.’

‘Oh? Do you play?’

‘Less than I’d like to, what with my young family. It was possibly going to be a career, but I’ve had to give up all that. Probably wouldn’t have come off. Still …’

Robert made himself turn away. He went off through the double doors to get a Scotch, and resolved to resume his schedule of work, swell or no swell, Joe or no Joe. And anyway, Joe was up now, and going about his business.

In the main lounge there was a large decorative mural showing what had been explained as an Armorican scene. A party of lords and ladies in medieval costume looked at the sea from the rocky coast of Brittany. A sailing cog ploughed the distance. The painted waves, with their tender, painted crests, looked all too easy. It was a naive offering.

Allowing himself to be swept towards the other end, he braced himself against a pillar, and then sat down on the piano stool. He opened the keyboard, rested his fingers idly on the keys, but did not press them down. From a nearby table, three older ladies, heavy with pearls and in severe grey perms almost identically decayed, dared him to play. Duly annoyed, he moved off again.

She was a mermaid, of course, and he would probably make a fool of himself, as he had done some years before. The signs were the same. It was the close, tempting fit of mutual attraction within a cluster of people all getting to know one another. And surely, surely there was some indefinable link between them, in the air. But it went together with the absolute impossibility of their clashing circumstances. The more he discovered about her, the more he was drawn to think of her. The more he learned about her world, the less it offered any firm ground where they could meet.

Yet here they were, in the same bewitched boat. Why should it be that when there were plenty of ordinary, nice, pretty women about the towns and cities of England, he must eschew them? He supposed there must be some cause; but did not wish to discover in detail what grubby quirk it might turn out to be. Probably to do with a nasty-minded God, and better left untouched. He would study. He must just take care not to ruin everything, the whole future. Four weeks or so of the high seas, then Adelaide and up to Woomera, a corner of untillable soil named after the aboriginal word for a spear-thrower, because the military used it to launch guided missiles into the very centre. To see how well they worked; how well the tactical armaments of the deterrent might deter. There he would attend the tracking station, looking up at the stars with radio equipment, tracking … who knew what exactly? And on this basis he would build a new life for himself, a better life than the grubby, rainy, pompous, clapped-out little island of his birth could offer.

Scotch in hand, he stood outdoors from the bar on the promenade deck with his back to its cold steel wall, looking out as he had grown so accustomed to. The interminable ridges stretched off into the north, grown oily, now, under a darkening afternoon sky. Penny Kendrick swam in them, holding her beautiful violin in front of her breasts and slinking her hips to the deep like a wild sonata. Sharks swam with her, nuzzling her side, rasping her lovely belly with their sandpaper skin. ‘Damn!’ he said aloud. ‘Damn!’