Kitabı oku: «Bear Island»

CHAPTER ONE

To even the least sensitive and perceptive beholder the Morning Rose, at this stage of her long and highly chequered career, must have seemed ill-named, for if ever a vessel could fairly have been said to be approaching, if not actually arrived at, the sunset of her days it was this one. Officially designated an Arctic Steam Trawler, the Morning Rose, 560 gross tons, 173 feet in length, 30 in beam and with a draught, unladen but fully provisioned with fuel and water, of 14.3 feet, had, in fact, been launched from the Jarrow slipways as far back as 1926, the year of the General Strike.

The Morning Rose, then, was far gone beyond the superannuation watershed, she was slow, creaking, unstable and coming apart at the seams. So were Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes. The Morning Rose consumed a great deal of fuel in relation to the foot-pounds of energy produced. So did Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes, malt whisky for Captain Imrie, Jamaican rum for Mr Stokes. And that was what they were doing now, stoking up on their respective fuels with the steadfast dedication of those who haven’t attained septuagenarian status through sheer happenstance.

As far as I could see, none of the sparse number of diners at the two long fore-and-aft tables was stoking up very much on anything. There was a reason for this, of course, the same reason that accounted for the poor attendance at dinner that night. It was not because of the food which, while it wouldn’t cause any sleepless nights in the kitchens of the Savoy, was adequate enough, nor was it because of any aesthetic objections our cargo of creative artists might have entertained towards the dining saloon’s decor, which was, by any standards, quite superb: it was a symphony in teak furniture and wine-coloured carpets and curtains, not, admittedly, what one would look to find on the average trawler, but then, the average trawler, when its fishing days are over—as the Morning Rose’s were deemed to be in 1956—doesn’t have the good fortune to be re-engined and converted to a luxury yacht by, of all people, a shipping millionaire whose enthusiasm for the sea was matched only by his massive ignorance of all things nautical.

The trouble tonight lay elsewhere, not within the ship but without. Three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, where we at the present moment had the debatable fortune to be, the weather conditions can be as beautifully peaceful as any on earth, with mirror-smooth, milky-white seas stretching from horizon to horizon under a canopy of either washed-out blue or stars that are less stars than little chips of frozen fire in a black, black sky. But those days are rare and, usually, to be found only in that brief period that passes for summer in those high latitudes. And whatever summer there had been was long gone. We were deep into late October now, the period of the classical equinoctial gales, and there was a real classical equinoctial beauty blowing up right then. Moxen and Scott, the two stewards, had prudently drawn the dining saloon curtains so that we couldn’t see quite how classical it was.

We didn’t have to see it. We could hear it and we could feel it. We could hear the wild threnody of the gale in the rigging, a high-pitched, ululating, atonic sound, as lonely, lost and eerie as a witch’s lament. We could hear, at monotonously regular intervals, the flat explosive clap of sound as the bluff bows of the trawler crashed into the troughs of the steep-sided waves marching steadily eastwards under the goad of that bitter wind born on the immensity of the Greenland icecap, all of seven hundred miles away. We could hear the constantly altering variation in the depth of the engine note as the propeller surged upwards, almost clearing water level, then plunged deep down into the sea again.

And we could feel the storm, a fact that most of those present clearly found a great deal more distressing than just listening to it. One moment, depending upon which side of the fore-and-aft tables we were sitting, we would be leaning sharply to our left or right as the bows lurched and staggered up the side of a wave: the next, we would be leaning as sharply in the other direction as the stern, in turn, rode high on the crest of the same wave. To compound the steadily increasing level of misery and discomfort the serried ranks of waves beyond the damask drapes were slowly but ominously beginning to break down into confused seas which violently accentuated the Morning Rose’s typical fishing-boat propensity for rolling continuously in anything short of mill-pond conditions. The two different motions, lateral and transverse, were now combining to produce an extremely unpleasant corkscrewing effect indeed.

Because I’d spent most of the past eight years at sea, I wasn’t experiencing any distressing symptoms myself, but I didn’t have to be a doctor—which my paper qualifications declared me to be—to diagnose the symptoms of mal de mer. The wan smile, the gaze studiously averted from anything that resembled food, the air of rapt communication with the inner self, all the signs were there in plenty. A very mirth-provoking subject, sea-sickness, until one suffers from it oneself: then it ceases to be funny any more. I’d dispensed enough sea-sickness pills to turn them all buttercup-yellow, but these are about as effective against an Arctic gale as aspirin is against cholera.

I looked round and wondered who would be the first to go. Antonio, I thought, that tall, willowy, exquisite, rather precious but oddly likeable Roman with the shock of ludicrously blond and curling hair. It is a fact that when a person reaches that nadir of nausea which is the inevitable prelude to violent sickness the complexion does assume a hue which can only be described as greenish: in Antonio’s case it was more a tinge of apple-green chartreuse, an odd coloration that I’d never seen before, but I put it down to his naturally sallow complexion. Anyway, no question but that it was the genuine symptom of the genuine illness: another particularly wild lurch and Antonio was on his feet and out of the saloon at a dead run—or as near a dead run as his land-lubber legs could achieve on that swaying deck—without either farewell or apology.

Such is the power of suggestion that within a very few seconds and on the very next lurch three other passengers, two men and a girl, hurriedly rose and left. And such is the power of suggestion compounded that within two minutes more there were, apart from Captain Imrie, Mr Stokes and myself, only two others left: Mr Gerran and Mr Heissman.

Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes, seated at the heads of their respective and now virtually deserted tables, observed the hurried departure of the last of the sufferers, looked at each other in mild astonishment, shook their heads and got on with the business of replenishing their fuel reserves. Captain Imrie, a large and splendidly patriarchal figure with piercing blue eyes that weren’t much good for seeing with, had a mane of thick white hair that was brushed straight back to his shoulders, and, totally obscuring the dinner tie he affected for dinner wear, an even more impressively flowing beard that would have been the envy of many a biblical prophet: as always, he wore a gold-buttoned, double-breasted jacket with the thick white ring of a commodore of the Royal Navy, to which he wasn’t entitled, and, partly concealed by the grandeur of his beard, four rows of medal ribbons, to which he was. Now, still shaking his head, he lifted his bottle of malt scotch from its container—not until that evening had I understood the purpose of that two-foot-high wrought-iron contraption bolted to the saloon deck by the side of his chair—filled his glass almost to the top and added the negligible amount of water required to make it brimming full. It was at this precise moment that the Morning Rose reared unusually high on the crest of a wave, hovered for what appeared to be an unconscionably long time, then fell both forwards and sideways to plunge with a resounding, shuddering crash into the shoulder of the next sea. Captain Imrie didn’t spill a drop: for any indication he gave to the contrary he might have been in the tap-room of the Mainbrace in Hull, which was where I’d first met him. He quaffed half the contents of his glass in one gulp and reached for his pipe. Captain Imrie had long mastered the art of dining gracefully at sea.

Mr Gerran, clearly, hadn’t. He gazed down at his lamb chops, brussels sprouts, potatoes, and glass of hock which weren’t where they ought to have been—they were on his napkin and his napkin was on his lap—with a vexed frown on his face. This was, in its small way, a crisis, and Otto Gerran could hardly be said to be at his ineffectual best when faced with crisis of any kind. But for young Moxen, the steward, this was routine: his own napkin at the ready and bearing a small plastic bucket he’d apparently conjured from nowhere, he set about effecting running repairs while Gerran gazed downwards with an expression of perplexed distaste.

Seated, Otto Gerran, apart from his curiously narrow, pointed cranium that widened out to broad, fleshy jowls, looked as if he might have been cast in one of the standard moulds which produce the vast majority of human shapes and forms: it was not until he stood up, a feat he performed with great difficulty and as infrequently as possible, that one appreciated how preposterous this misconception was. Gerran stood five feet two inches in his elevator shoes, weighed two hundred and forty-five pounds and, were it not for his extremely ill-fitting clothes—one would assume that the tailor just gave up—was the nearest thing to a perfect human sphere I’d ever clapped eyes on. He had no neck, long slender sensitive hands and the smallest feet I’ve ever seen for a man of his size. The salvage operation over, Gerran looked up and at Imrie. His complexion was puce in colour, with the purple much more in evidence than the brown. This did not mean that he was angry, for Gerran never showed anger and was widely believed to be incapable of it: puce was as standard for him as the peaches and cream of the mythical English rose. His coronary was at least fifteen years overdue.

‘Really, Captain Imrie, this is preposterous.’ For a man of his vast bulk, Gerran had a surprisingly high-pitched voice: surprisingly, that is, if you weren’t a medical practitioner. ‘Must we keep heading into this dreadful storm?’

‘Storm?’ Captain Imrie lowered his glass and looked at Gerran in genuine disbelief. ‘Did you say “storm”? A little blow like this?’ He looked across to the table where I was sitting with Mr Stokes. ‘Force Seven, you would say, Mr Stokes? A touch of Eight, perhaps?’

Mr Stokes helped himself to some more rum, leaned back and deliberated. He was as bereft of cranial and facial hair as Captain Imrie was over-endowed with it. With his gleaming pate, tightly- drawn brown face seamed and wrinkled into a thousand fissures, and a long, thin, scrawny neck, he looked as aged and as ageless as a Galapagos turtle. He also moved at about the same speed. Both he and Captain Imrie had gone to sea together—in mine-sweepers, as incredibly far back as World War I—and had remained together until they had officially retired ten years previously. Nobody, the legend went, had ever heard them refer to each other except as Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes. Some said that, in private, they used the terms Skipper and Chief (Mr Stokes was the Chief Engineer) but this was discounted as an unsubstantiated and unworthy rumour which did justice to neither man.

Moments passed, then Mr Stokes, having arrived at a measured opinion, delivered himself of it. ‘Seven,’ he said.

‘Seven.’ Captain Imrie accepted the judgement as unhesitatingly as if an oracle had spoken and poured himself another drink: I thanked whatever gods there be for the infinitely reassuring presence of Smithy, the mate, on the bridge. ‘You see, Mr Gerran? Nothing.’ As Gerran was at that moment clinging frantically to a table that was inclined at an angle of 30 degrees, he made no reply. ‘A storm? Dearie me, dearie me. Why, I remember the very first time that Mr Stokes and I took the Morning Rose up to the Bear Island fishing grounds, the very first trawler ever to fish those waters and come back with full holds, 1928, I think it was—’

‘1929,’ Mr Stokes said.

‘1929.’ Captain Imrie fixed his bright blue eyes on Gerran and Johann Heissman, a small, lean, pale man with a permanently apprehensive expression: Heissman’s hands were never still. ‘Now, that was a storm! We were with a trawler out of Aberdeen, I forget its name—’

‘The Silver Harvest,’ Mr Stokes said.

‘The Silver Harvest. Engine failure in a Force Ten. Two hours she was broadside to the seas, two hours before we could get a line aboard. Her skipper— her skipper—’

‘MacAndrew. John MacAndrew.’

‘Thank you, Mr Stokes. Broke his neck. Towed his boat—and him with his broken neck in splints— for thirty hours in a Force Ten, four of them in a Force Eleven. Man, you should have seen yon seas. I tell you, they were mountains, just mountains. The bows thirty feet up and down, up and down, rolling over on our beam ends, hour after hour, every man except Mr Stokes and myself coughing his insides up—’ He broke off as Heissman rose hurriedly to his feet and ran from the saloon. ‘Is your friend upset, Mr Gerran?’

‘Couldn’t we heave to or whatever it is you do?’ Gerran pleaded. ‘Or run for shelter?’

‘Shelter? Shelter from what? Why, I remember—’

‘Mr Gerran and his company haven’t spent their lives at sea, Captain,’ I said.

‘True, true. Heave to? Heaving to won’t stop the waves. And the nearest shelter is Jan Mayen— and that’s three hundred miles to the west—into the weather.’

‘We could run before the weather. Surely that would help?’

‘Aye, we could do that. She’d steady up then, no doubt about it. If that’s what you want, Mr Gerran. You know what the contract says—captain to obey all orders other than those that will endanger the vessel.’

‘Good, good. Right away, then.’

‘You appreciate, of course, Mr Gerran, that this blow might last another day or so?’

With amelioration of the present sufferings practically at hand Gerran permitted himself a slight smile. ‘We cannot control the caprices of Mother Nature, Captain.’

‘And that we’ll have to turn almost ninety east?’

‘In your safe hands, Captain.’

‘I don’t think you are quite understanding. It will cost us two, perhaps three days. And if we run east, the weather north of North Cape is usually worse than it is here. Might have to put into Hammerfest for shelter. Might lose a week, maybe more. I don’t know how many hundred pounds a day it costs you to hire the ship and crew and pay your own camera crew and all those actors and actresses—I hear tell that some of those people you call stars can earn a fortune in just no time at all—’ Captain Imrie broke off and pushed back his chair. ‘What am I talking about? Money will mean nothing to a man like you. You will excuse me while I call the bridge.’

‘Wait.’ Gerran looked stricken. His parsimony was legendary throughout the film world and Captain Imrie had touched, not inadvertently, I thought, upon his tenderest nerve. ‘A week! Lose a whole week?’

‘If we’re lucky.’ Captain Imrie pulled his chair back up to the table and reached for the malt.

‘But I’ve already lost three days. The Orkney cliffs, the sea, the Morning Rose—not a foot of background yet.’ Gerran’s hands were out of sight but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been wringing them.

‘And your director and camera crew on their backs for the past four days,’ Captain Imrie said sympathetically. It was impossible to say whether a smile lay behind the obfuscatory luxuriance of moustache and beard. ‘The caprices of nature, Mr Gerran.’

‘Three days,’ Gerran said again. ‘Maybe another week. A thirty-three day location budget, Kirkwall to Kirkwall.’ Otto Gerran looked ill, clearly both the state of his stomach and his film finances were making very heavy demands upon him. ‘How far to Bear Island, Captain Imrie?’

‘Three hundred miles, give or take the usual. Twenty-eight hours, if we can keep up our best speed.’

‘You can keep it up?’

‘I wasn’t thinking about the Morning Rose. It can stand anything. It’s your people, Mr Gerran. Nothing against them, of course, but I’m thinking they’d be more at home with those pedal boats in the paddling ponds.’

‘Yes, of course, of course.’ You could see that this aspect of the business had just occurred to him. ‘Dr Marlowe, you must have treated a great deal of sea-sickness during your years in the Navy.’ He paused, but as I didn’t deny it, he went on: ‘How long do people take to recover from sickness of this kind?’

‘Depends how sick they are.’ I’d never given the matter any thought, but it seemed a logical enough answer. ‘How long they’ve been ill and how badly. Ninety rough minutes on a cross-Channel trip and you’re as right as rain in ten minutes. Four days in an Atlantic gale and you’ll be as long again before you’re back on even keel.’

‘But people don’t actually die of sea-sickness, do they?’

‘I’ve never known of a case.’ For all his usual indecisiveness and more than occasional bumbling ineptitude which tended to make people laugh at him—discreetly and behind his back, of course—Otto, I realized for the first time and with some vague feeling of surprise, was capable of determination that might verge on the ruthless. Something to do with money, I suppose. ‘Not by itself, that is. But with a person already suffering from a heart condition, severe asthma, bronchitis, ulcerated stomach—well, yes, it could see him off.’

He was silent for a few moments, probably carrying out a rapid mental survey of the physical condition of cast and crew, then he said: ‘I must admit that I’m a bit worried about our people. I wonder if you’d mind having a look over them, just a quick check? Health’s a damn sight more important than any profit—hah! profit, in these days!—that we might make from the wretched film. As a doctor I’m sure you whole-heartedly agree.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Right away.’ Otto had to have something that had made him the household name that he had become in the past twenty years and one had to admire this massive and wholly inadmirable hypocrisy that was clearly part of it. He had me all ways. I had said that sea-sickness alone did not kill so that if I were to state categorically that some member or members of his cast or crew were in no condition to withstand any further punishment from the sea he would insist on proof of the existence of some disease which, in conjunction with sea-sickness, might be potentially lethal, a proof that, in the first place, would have been very difficult for me to adduce in light of the limited examination facilities available to me aboard ship and, in the second place, would have been impossible anyhow, for every single member of cast and crew had been subjected to a rigorous insurance medical before leaving Britain: if I gave a clean bill of health to all, then Otto would press on with all speed for Bear Island, regardless of the sufferings of ‘our people’ about whom he professed to be so worried, thereby effecting a considerable saving in time and money: and, in the remote event of any of them inconsiderately dying upon our hands, why, then, as the man who had given the green light, I was the one in the dock.

I drained my glass of inferior brandy that Otto had laid on in such meagre quantities and rose. ‘You’ll be here?’

‘Yes. Most co-operative of you, Doctor, most.’

‘We never close,’ I said.

I was beginning to like Smithy though I hardly knew him or anything about him: I was never to get to know him, not well. That I should ever get to know him in my professional capacity was unthinkable: six feet two in his carpet slippers and certainly nothing short of two hundred pounds, Smithy was as unlikely a candidate for a doctor’s surgery as had ever come my way.

‘In the first-aid cabinet there.’ Smithy nodded towards a cupboard in a corner of the dimly-lit wheel-house. ‘Captain Imrie’s own private elixir. For emergency use only.’

I extracted one of half a dozen bottles held in place by felt-lined spring clamps and examined it under the chart-table lamp. My regard for Smithy went up another notch. In latitude 70° something north and aboard a superannuated trawler, however converted, one does not look to find Otard-Dupuy VSOP.

‘What constitutes an emergency?’ I asked.

‘Thirst.’

I poured some of the Otard-Dupuy into a small glass and offered it to Smithy, who shook his head and watched me as I sampled the brandy, then lowered the glass with suitable reverence.

‘To waste this on a thirst,’ I said, ‘is a crime against nature. Captain Imrie isn’t going to be too happy when he comes up here and finds me knocking back his special reserve.’

‘Captain Imrie is a man who lives by fixed rules. The most fixed of the lot is that he never appears on the bridge between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. Oakley—he’s the bo’sun—and I take turns during the night. Believe me, that way it’s safer for everyone all round. What brings you to the bridge, Doctor—apart from this sure instinct for locating VSOP?’

‘Duty. I’m checking on the weather prior to checking on the health of Mr Gerran’s paid slaves. He fears they may start dying off like flies if we continue on this course in these conditions.’ The conditions, I’d noted, appeared to be deteriorating, for the behaviour of the Morning Rose, especially its degree of roll, was now distinctly more uncomfortable than it had been: perhaps it was just a function of the height of the bridge but I didn’t think so.

‘Mr Gerran should have left you at home and brought along his palm-reader or fortune-teller.’ A very contained man, educated and clearly intelligent, Smithy always seemed to be slightly amused. ‘As for the weather, the 6 p.m. forecast was as it usually is for these parts, vague and not very encouraging. They haven’t,’ he added superfluously, ‘a great number of weather stations in those parts.’

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s not going to improve.’ He dismissed the weather and smiled. ‘I’m not a great man for the small-talk, but with the Otard-Dupuy who needs it? Take the weight off your feet for an hour, then go tell Mr Gerran that all his paid slaves, as you call them, are holding a square dance on the poop.’

‘I suspect Mr Gerran of having a suspicious checking mind. However, if I may—?’

‘My guest.’

I helped myself again and replaced the bottle in the cabinet. Smithy, as he’d warned, wasn’t very talkative, but the silence was companionable enough. Presently he said: ‘Navy, aren’t you, Doc?’

‘Past tense.’

‘And now this?’

‘A shameful come-down. Don’t you find it so?’

‘Touché.’ I could dimly see the white teeth as he smiled in the half-dark. ‘Medical malpractice, flogging penicillin to the wogs or just drunk in charge of a surgery?’

‘Nothing so glamorous. “Insubordination” is the word they used.’

‘Snap. Me too.’ A pause. ‘This Mr Gerran of yours. Is he all right?’

‘So the insurance doctors say.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘You can’t expect me to speak ill of my employer.’ Again there was that dimly-seen glimpse of white teeth.

‘Well, that’s one way of answering my question. But, well, look, the bloke must be loony—or is that an offensive term?’

‘Only to psychiatrists. I don’t speak to them. Loony’s fine by me. But I’d remind you that Mr Gerran has a very distinguished record.’

‘As a loony?’

‘That, too. But also as a film-maker, a producer.’

‘What kind of producer would take a film unit up to Bear Island with winter coming on?’

‘Mr Gerran wants realism.’

‘Mr Gerran wants his head examined. Has he any idea what it’s like up there at this time of year?’

‘He’s also a man with a dream.’

‘No place for dreamers in the Barents Sea. How the Americans ever managed to put a man on the moon—’

‘Our friend Otto isn’t an American. He’s a central European. If you want the makers of dreams or the peddlers of dreams, there’s the place to find them—among the headwaters of the Danube.’

‘And the biggest rogues and confidence men in Europe?’

‘You can’t have everything.’

‘He’s a long way from the Danube.’

‘Otto had to leave in a great hurry at a time when a large number of people had to leave in a great hurry. Year before the war, that was. Found his way to America—where else?—then to Hollywood—again, where else? Say what you like about Otto—and I’m afraid a lot of people do just that—you have to admire his recuperative powers. He’d left a thriving film business behind him in Vienna and arrived in California with what he stood up in.’

‘That’s not so little.’

‘It was then. I’ve seen pictures. No greyhound, but still about a hundred pounds short of what he is today. Anyway, inside just a few years— chiefly, I’m told, by switching at the psychologically correct moment from anti-Nazism to antiCommunism— Otto prospered mightily in the American film industry on the strength of a handful of nauseatingly super-patriotic pictures, which had the critics in despair and the audiences in raptures. In the mid-fifties, sensing that the cinematic sun was setting over Hollywood—you can’t see it but he carries his own built-in radar system with him—Otto’s devotion to his adopted country evaporated along with his bank balance and he transferred himself to London, where he made a number of avant-garde films that had the critics in rapture, the audiences in despair and Otto in the red.’

‘You seem to know your Otto,’ Smithy said.

‘Anybody who has read the first five pages of the prospectus for his last film would know his Otto. I’ll let you have a copy. Never mentions the film, just Otto. Misses out words like “nauseating” and “despair” of course and you have to read between the lines a bit. But it’s all there.’

‘I’d like a copy.’ Smithy thought some, then said: ‘If he’s in the red where’s the money coming from? To make this film, I mean.’

‘Your sheltered life. A producer is always at his most affluent when the bailiffs are camped outside the studio gates—rented studio, of course. Who, when the banks are foreclosing on him and the insurance companies drafting their ultimatums, is throwing the party of the year at the Savoy? Our friend the big-time producer. It’s kind of like the law of nature. You’d better stick to ships, Mr Smith,’ I added kindly.

‘Smithy,’ he said absently. ‘So who’s bankrolling your friend?’

‘My employer. I’ve no idea. Very secretive about money matters is Otto.’

‘But someone is. Backing him, I mean.’

‘Must be.’ I put down my glass and stood up. ‘Thanks for the hospitality.’

‘Even after he’s produced a string of losers? Seems barmy to me. Fishy, at least.’

‘The film world, Smithy, is full of barmy and fishy people.’ I didn’t, in fact, know whether it was or not but if this shipload was in any way representative of the cinema industry it seemed a pretty fair extrapolation.

‘Or perhaps he’s just got hold of the story to end all stories.’

‘The screenplay. There, now, you may have a point—but it’s one you would have to raise with Mr Gerran personally. Apart from Heissman, who wrote it, Gerran is the only one who’s seen it.’

It hadn’t been a factor of the height of the bridge. As I stepped out on to the starboard ladder on the lee side—there were no internal communications between bridge and deck level on those elderly steam trawlers—I was left in no doubt that the weather had indeed deteriorated and deteriorated sharply, a fact that should have probably been readily apparent to anyone whose concern for the prevailing meteorological conditions hadn’t been confronted with the unfair challenge of Otard-Dupuy. Even on this, what should have been the sheltered side of the ship, the power of the wind, bitter cold, was such that I had to cling with both hands to the handrails: and with the Morning Rose now rolling, erratically and violently, through almost fifty degrees of arc—which was wicked enough but I’d once been on a cruiser that had gone through a hundred degrees of arc and still survived—I could have used another pair of arms.