Scend of the Sea Page 2

  'What about weather satellites?' she asked. I had begun to find my tongue; it was strange, and a little exciting, to be talking weather outside the sterilities of synoptic readings. 'There was a radio talk about them the other day. It seems they are able to photograph the build-up of storm-cloud formations over any part of the ocean.' She flicked a quick glance at me, wondering whether her question might kill the conversation. 'All you have to do, it would appear, is to sit tight in your office safely on land and wait for a satellite photo to come in-without going to sea at all.'

  I smiled a little at her seriousness. 'You're trying to talk me out of my ship! No, weather satellites are valuable, but they're not the whole answer. From them you can see vast stretches of ocean and its weather. If I had some of the photos here I'd show you how you can actually watch the great battalions of cloud taking up storm formation as a front approaches South Africa from the south-west, from Antarctica. The storm may extend for a thousand miles. But we weathermen need a great deal more than a photograph. We want upper air temperatures, wind speeds, barometric pressures-a whole lot of technical things we lump together under the term synoptic reading. If we have these readings we can also work out, far more accurately than from a satellite photo, when and how a big storm system will strike the Cape.'

  'It seems an awful lot of effort to go to in order to tell people whether or not to go for a picnic or a swim.'

  'Fortunately, those people are at the bottom of our priority list,' I replied. 'Ships in coastal waters and aircraft are our main concern — farmers next. For them, however, I suppose we could have got by without the Walvis Bay. It's oil rigs which make this ship important. Without them, she wouldn't be here tonight.'

  'Oil rigs?'

  'The weather ship's main function is to supply accurate information for the big floating rigs drilling for oil on the continental shelf off the southern Cape coast. Our forecasts are of prime importance to them-there's a great deal of money involved in missing just one day's drilling, or having expensive equipment smashed because the oil-men didn't know what sort of seas to expect. When this little Walvis Bay starts to cavort in a southwesterly swell 600 or 700 miles out on the high seas, it's a fairly good bet that three or four days later the huge drilling platforms on the coast will likewise cavort. In fact, it was oil, which really clinched the whole weather ship project. Without finance from the backers of the oil rigs, none of the other bodies concerned could have afforded a ship like this with her special expensive equipment. When you arrived, I was dismantling some of it to make sure it wouldn't get damaged on the passage to Durban. It's a great responsibility, all this special apparatus, and it's a major part of my job to see it doesn't get smashed at sea. I sail Walvis Bay on a very light rein in the Southern Ocean, with one eye all the time on my equipment.' 'And this is your whole life?'

  'I'm used to it,' I answered. Then it slipped out. Why should I have told her? I didn't need a confessional, but those steady, provocative eyes were on me.

  'Single-handed yacht racing is a loner's game,' I said a little self-consciously. 'I graduated in that school. Whalers first. To the Antarctic-but that was more a bit of schoolboy fun than serious sea-going.'

  She asked no questions. She simply waited, in that quiet, serious way of hers.

  So I added. 'I raced Touleier in the Cape en Buenos Aires race. It was a sort of curtain-raiser to the big Rio race this year.'

  'And won — I know.’ she answered. 'The whole world heard about Touleier's exploits — they even learned to pronounce her name.' She ran it round her tongue, as if it gave her pleasure to do so. 'Tow-layer.' She ran her finger round the dial of the wind gauge repeater, as if vicariously sampling those great gales which had swept me across the empty ocean between the two great continents of the south. 'You call it a curtain-raiser, the papers called it sorting the men from the boys.'

  I remembered a field of ice as I neared the winning post, the gale blowing the spicules of ice so that they scored the face of the compass.

  'If you can stand forty-four days alone in a yacht at sea, it's easy to take twenty-one days each month in a ship like Walvis Bay, which is thirty times her size, surrounded by men, in touch with the land every three hours by radio, discussing all the time things like pressures, wave heights, wind direction and force, plotting. .'

  'Mr Hoskins didn't tell me it was the skipper of Touleier I was bringing a chart to tonight.'

  'He was my backroom boy for the race. That was the first time he fathered my needs for a special outfit; Walvis Bay is also special. You get used to this sort of life. It has its compensations. Who do you know gets one week's holiday every four? That's what happens to my crew. Three weeks at sea, one in port. It's also got its rather imponderable academic rewards. No one has ever yet sat in continuous watch over the weather in the Southern Ocean where I'm stationed. Already some extremely interesting new developments have come to light which we could not have known without on-the-spot observations.'

  She did not reply, but took three steps across the cabin, as if pacing it for size. From the inward-angled bookshelf — designed to prevent my books falling out in a seaway-she picked out a blue-covered one.

  ‘I suppose a hermit finds compensations in his cell,’ she murmured, as if to herself. 'Compensations!' She turned to me and quoted the title. ‘ "The Antarctic Pilot, comprising the coasts of Antarctica and all the islands south of the usual route of vessels."' She did not look up from the print, but put it back among half a dozen others of the same ilk, reciting their titles volume by volume.

  The irritation which I had felt earlier from the pressures of getting the weather ship to sea returned, and I was on the point of asking her whether she expected me to spend my leisure hours at sea listening to mushy radio programmes or gazing at pin-ups. But her action stopped my comment. The bookshelf had been only a ploy, a kind of vestibule, as it were, to her true purpose.

  She went quickly to the big framed photograph of a ship on the bulkhead, turned, and faced me.

  My eyes, she told me afterwards, went blank like iceblink in the sky when the great bergs haze a blue Southern Ocean sky with their dead reflection.

  She waited, but this time I did not respond. She stared at me and I at her. I should have let her go then.

  She had taken another inexorable step.

  She had stepped under the photograph of the Waratah.

  She frowned and dropped her eyes from their long penetrating assessment of mine.

  'I have been very, very presumptuous,' she said softly. The slight shake of the head was more a plea in extenuation than in defence. She rapped the glass face of the wind gauge with a finger. This time it was not to share, but to probe, its secret. 'One cannot see an altar and not be awed, even if the altar of someone's life is. .' It was half a question, half an assertion '. . the wind?'

  I remained silent. She turned and stared at the photograph of the Waratah. I heard the clump and thump of the crew on the deck above, and somewhere a gull screamed in rage. The points of her hair in her neck, short like a boy's, curled where they touched the polo collar of her jersey.

  She ran her left fingers round the heavy frame of the photograph, speaking more softly still, addressing it almost, not me.

  'Can it really mean so much-simply this photograph of an old high-funnelled liner with a signature in each corner?'

  I seemed to hear myself reply; I kept my voice level. 'You can't read the name-photographers weren't that good in 1909. If you could, you'd see that it was — Waratah.'

  Only on rare other occasions in my knowledge of her did she give that quick jerky sigh, half intake of breath, half a smothered exclamation. Still she did not turn from the ship.

  'Waratah’

  The sound of the name spoken by someone else was unreal to me; I had lived with it, buried, for so long; now it seemed to stir in its grave-clothes at her startled exclamation.

  'I suppose more has been written about her fate and more speculations let fly than about any
other ship which ever sailed the Seven Seas,' I ventured.

  She replied hesitatingly, but her concentration was on my reaction, not on her own words. 'There was some appalling tragedy connected with her-I don't know the details-'

  She told me later that I spoke mechanically: the words seemed to have been learned by heart.

  "The Waratah was one of the finest ships of her day-before the First World War. She was big for those days, too — 10,000 tons. She was brand new, on her second voyage only. She sailed from Durban bound for Cape Town one winter's night in 1909 with 211 people on board. Next day, nearly a couple of hundred miles to the south, off the coast of Pondoland, she was spoken to by another steamer. Waratah exchanged signals; there was no hint of trouble. Then, a few hours later near East London, she disappeared. Vanished. She was never seen or heard of again, and no wreckage or bodies were ever found, not so much as a matchbox. Just like that. In broad daylight. In sight of the coast. Ships behind and ahead of her. It remains one of the greatest mysteries of the sea.'

  I wanted to hide my tenseness from those clear eyes. So I gestured. 'Read the signatures on the photograph.' She read, ' "J. E. Ilbery, Master."' 'Go on.'

  ' "Douglas Fairlie, First Officer." ‘

  Someone tapped on the cabin door, but we ignored it.

  'There's no need to go on, is there?' she said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I repeat, I was very presumptuous,' she went on. 'I had no idea I was treading into a place of such grief.'

  She looked startled at my unnatural laugh.

  'Douglas Fairlie was my grandfather. I never even saw him, nor did my father, for that matter. Douglas Fairlie was lost in the Waratah over sixty years ago.'

  The line of her lips was puzzled. 'But you — it's sixty years — is it grief, still?'

  I said brusquely, 'Look at the other photograph.'

  'It's an airliner — South African Airways.'

  The cabin seemed hot, and I slipped off my oilskin. I did not join her at the photographs.

  I'm sorry, I forgot the signature's on the back. I'll tell you what it says: "Ian, what do you think of my flying Gemsbok’ Love from Dad." Do you follow?'

  She said slowly, 'The South African Airways airliner Gemsbok crashed while coming into land at East London. All on board were killed.'

  'The pilot was Captain Bruce Fairlie,' I added. 'No bodies or wreckage were ever found.'

  She looked from one photograph to the other and said very deliberately, Those are Waratah words.'

  'The Waratah vanished near East London without trace,' I said. 'The Gemsbok vanished without trace near East London.

  Bruce Fairlie commanded the Gemsbok. Douglas Fairlie was first officer of the Waratah. ,

  The papers were full of it — the Gemsbok was the worst air crash until then in South Africa.'

  'It's four years ago now.'

  'Wasn't there something about the pilot dying at the controls. .? I'm sorry, I mean your father. .'

  I heard myself talking in that flat, official jargon again. To hide — what?

  The court of inquiry found that the possibility of my father having died of a heart attack at the controls as the Viscount came in to land could not be ruled out. .'

  She gave a slightly perceptible, impatient toss of her short hair and frowned. She had lost me for the moment; it warmed me to be wanted back.

  So I said, 'What I am trying to say is that my father and my grandfather died at roughly the same place, at an interval of over sixty years, one in a fine ship and the other in a fine plane.'

  She added, 'And from neither were any bodies or wreckage ever found. Yet the son-the grandson-is at sea, on as hazardous a job as is possible in these days of push-button safety.'

  'I told you, it suits me.'

  'Did he — your father, the pilot-approve of your single-handed ocean racing?'

  'Touleier came after the Gemsbok crash. The sea comes first with the Fairlies. In my father that love mutated into flying. He acknowledged that it was so. My brother too.'

  'Your brother, too?'

  ‘I have a younger brother who is a South African Air Force pilot — Buccaneer sea-jets. They say that if you can handle a yacht, it gives you a feeling to handle a plane. Perhaps there's really not much between us either way.'

  I thought then she was breaking off at a tangent, tactfully trying to end the overcharged conversation. 'You've told me about the Waratah and the Gemsbok, but can I ask you a question about yourself?'

  'There's nothing much beyond what you already know.’

  'Why do you live with a wind gauge repeater in your cabin?'

  From anyone else it would have been prying impertinence. She was too deep for that.

  'It's part of my job-an important part-to know the direction of the wind.’ 'Day and night? Where you sleep? Where you relax?’ I replied, 'You see, the big fronts which come up from Antarctica and affect the weather round the Cape and the oil rigs I told you about are from the south-west. .'

  Suddenly I wanted to sail, to be at sea. Later, she was to tell me that my voice changed and the ice-blink blankness was back in my eyes. But she had the key she wanted — southwest!

  She waited only a little, not pressing a reply, and said she must go when I paused on the word. Her voice was restrained; she did not look again at the two photographs.

  I moved from the doorway and in doing so brushed off my oilskin from the chart where I had shed it. Her chart lay still unopened on the wind gauge repeater. She stared at the one the oilskin had laid bare.

  'You have my chart already! ‘

  It was impossible to explain to her, then.

  'Yes, I have one chart of the Pondoland coast. But I wanted another.’

  She frowned a little as she bent to read the superscription on mine. I noticed that her lips moved more towards their right-hand corner than the left. ' "East London to Bashee River, S.A. surveying ship Africana, 1934/35." It's marked full of lines and arrows which I don't understand.'

  I was tired. I nearly said, I don't understand them either, but instead I covered up. "There are too many lines and markings on this chart of mine. I wanted a clean one for Walvis Bay's trip. That's why I asked Mr Hoskins for a new one.'

  'I think he might be a little hurt if he knew you'd had one all along,' she said.

  'He's never been in my cabin.'

  'So he hasn't seen the Waratah?’

  ‘I think we should let it go at that, don't you?'

  She went.

  I did not leave the cabin. I did not know her name.

  CHAPTER TWO

  'Green Point light bears zero-six-three.' 'Distance?'

  'One and a quarter miles, sir.'

  'Ground haze or fog?'

  'Not tonight, sir. Clear as a whistle.'

  'Steady as she goes, then.'

  'Aye, aye, sir. Steady as she goes.'

  Young Smit, who held the imprecise status of second officer of the weather ship, was enjoying the formality. He, like me, was a yachtsman and knew the approaches to Table Bay like the back of his hand. This was a new course to him, for usually on taking Walvis Bay to her Southern Ocean station, I headed westwards into the open sea; now, Durban-bound, the weather ship would first have to make her way round the thirty-mile projection which is the Cape Peninsula and then follow an easterly course past the notorious Cape Agulhas, and then parallel to the country's southern shore. I was keeping a bright watch for fog on this winter's night, as it has an evil trick of hanging over a very limited area of low-lying ground which are Green and Mouille Points and ambushing any unwary shipmaster who sees the bright lights of the port all around him and heads for them. The fine ships whose bones lie on the reefs are proof of the folly of taking that final short-cut into the great port.

  The peaks of the Twelve Apostles were misty to port, and I decided to keep closer inshore than the Shell Mammoth, ahead of me in the night, could do with her deep draught. I went over to the port side of the bridge and took a loo
k at the receding land.

  Chart-bringer!

  Had I thought of that quiet but disquieting presence which still lingered below my Waratah photograph as someone to be sought out again, I should have chafed now at the thought of my long absence from Cape Town during my deep probe southwards beyond Bouvet and past those two seamounts which are more real on a chart than in the actuality of the wild sea-desert of the Southern Ocean and, departing, I would have wondered where she was among the blaze of lights abeam which was Sea Point. I might have even picked out a block of flats as her possible home and told her of it when next I met her. I might have rejected Sea Point and let my mind hover, helicopter-like, over the sprawling welter of suburban lights glistening in the rain under the great mountain and speculated again where she did live. With parents? From whom had she derived that strange withdrawn look, that quiet fervour at the back of those deep eyes, which had touched — me or the Waratah, Or both? I side-stepped that uncomfortable thought. I might have asked too, had the mood of pleasant fantasy been upon me as I watched the lighted land and the darker clefts and kloofs of the mountain slide away, whether she ever watched the ships come and go? Being a weekend, was she partying among the lights, forgetful of her encounter with an odd skipper who was making his way to sea in the darkness, maybe some unaccountable darkness of his own mind?

  I might have had these thoughts, but I did not: it was not of herself, but of me, that she made me think that night. She held up a mirror to me, and it was at my own image, not hers, that I looked as the shoreline became progressively less illuminated until only an occasional light shone out to sea, or a car's headlights searchlighted the magnificent Marine Drive which swings again and again as it follows the shoreline the length of the Peninsula. I was twenty-eight. She was perhaps twenty-five. Command of the Walvis Bay was my first real job. I had been born in Cape Town, educated there, and had graduated from Cape Town University. Before university, as I had told her briefly, I had spent a season in a whaler in Antarctica as a youthful adventure. I think the influence of the head of the university's Oceanographic Department had something to do with my appointment to the command of the weather ship, plus my ocean-racing experience. I had raced Touleier (‘the one who leads the oxen') to South America-and won. That night off the Peninsula I had not yet heard the soft inflexion of her Welsh name, so unusual to South African ears. Tafline! Had I known it, and known something of the ancestry which had shaped that finely-moulded face, it might have given her more substance; there was nothing of her in my cabin but a presence and an oil-skinned chart. There was no lingering perfume, even. She had called the cabin a cell, her curiosity compounded with compassion; I handed over the bridge for a moment to Smit and went below and tried to look at the cabin with her own eyes and project the image of myself which had clearly intrigued her, but I found it uncomfortable, and I went back to the darkness and the disappearing land.