Endangered Species (39 page)

‘The ways of God are passing our understanding . . .' In the alleyway the words had a hollow, insubstantial ring, like a primitive, meaningless incantation, yet something in the manner of their utterance struck Stevenson, whose mind revolved round certain preoccupations.

‘You really believe that, don't you?'

‘D'you think I'd do a thankless job like this if I didn't?' replied the priest, a twinkle in his blue eyes. ‘I'm not aware of having made a single conversion in over twenty years of this work. Nowadays I don't even minister to nominal Christians, like yourself. Most of my pastoral care is with Asiatic seamen, Filipinos and the like, but . . .' The man shrugged as if mere words could not encompass the spiritual enormity of his situation. Then he caught Stevenson's eyes. ‘Anyway, what is reality, eh?'

‘A bit like Voltaire's definition of history, I guess,' said Stevenson, ‘a fable upon which we are all agreed, more or less.'

‘Yes, and our indifference to its unpleasantness is but a conspiracy of concurrence. So, my friend, we go on.'

‘What will happen to them, Padre?'

‘The boat people? Oh, they'll join the thousands already held in the camps around the colony. This is Asia, after all.'

‘Not a very happy ending to our joint ordeal, is it?'

‘The only ending of this temporal life any of us can look forward to is the common one of death.'

‘Yes, but . . .'

‘Are you still under the illusory influence of things like justice and the freedom to seek happiness? Surely you've been at sea long enough to know the nonsense of that?'

‘I suppose I have.' Stevenson grinned ruefully. ‘It's not a comfortable feeling though, is it? Why were we equipped to dream of it?'

‘Ah, there you hit the eternal mysteries bang on the head. But don't let an old cynic like me influence you. The world needs romantics like you. Come to communion in the mission chapel and hear what comfortable words our saviour Christ said . . .'

‘ “Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you”.'

‘You are not such a nominal Christian after all.'

‘I'll come to communion, Padre, and afterwards I would like a word with you. I'm sure the fable of reality can be manipulated a touch.'

The peculiarity of the day pursued Mackinnon to its very end. Allowed to leave the ship to make a deposition concerning his need of refuge and to note protest in case of claims of damage to cargo during Typhoon David while the authorities debated the fate of the boat people, he boarded a
wallah-wallah
. The little launch swung round and crossed under the stern of the
Matthew Flinders
. Mackinnon stood looking at his last command. Men who serve aboard ship only infrequently see them from the outside and to Mackinnon the sight brought satisfaction. The topsides were rust-streaked, and fresh corrosion showed on her white upperworks, evidence of her ordeal in the typhoon. Above him Stevenson was lowering the ‘illegal' red ensign.

‘Sunset,' he called down by way of explanation and Mackinnon nodded, raising a hand in a half-wave that was also a kind of instinctive, valedictory salute. As the
wallah-wallah
drew away, the ship's side seemed to blaze
like molten metal, high-lit by the near-horizontal rays of the sun as it set behind banks of inky cumulus hanging above the distant hills of China proper. The light flared, too, on the jagged and rusty wreck of a huge ship lying on the bottom of the harbour, a burnt-out hulk which was one more symbol in this eventful day.

The great wreck had once been one of the wonders of the maritime world, the Royal Mail Ship
Queen Elizabeth
, pride of the Cunard-White Star Line, whose first task had been the swift transportation of Canadian and American soldiers across the North Atlantic Ocean before she settled to her true, post-war business of carrying passengers between Britain and the United States.

Now she lay discarded, a gravestone of a merchant fleet of which she had once been cast, quite spuriously, as the flagship. It hardly seemed to matter now; she was nothing more than a consumed relic, a metaphor for all the thousands of ships that had once been part of something greater than the sum of its separate parts.

The great transatlantic liner's corroding superstructure rose from the grubby waters of the harbour like a gigantic tombstone. Mackinnon turned away profoundly moved. Then, unable to restrain himself, he looked back. Not a gravestone: she was the burnt, awry totem of a disinherited tribe.

Darkness crept over the water. The sun had set and the gentle breeze was suddenly chilly.

Shelagh was waiting for him in her hotel room. Their meeting was undemonstrative. They hugged each other and kissed, as though only a day or so had separated them.

She seemed older, he thought, the smart formality of new clothes setting off her still comely figure, but emphasising the lines of her face.

‘You look tired,' she said, and he knew she was thinking the same thing.

‘It's been a long day.'

‘I expected you earlier. I saw the ship come in.' The lilt of her voice was ageless, the voice of the young Irish farm girl he had first met as a shipwrecked apprentice forty-odd years earlier.

‘We had some problems,' he said shortly. ‘Picked up a load of boat people which the locals didn't want and I had to note protest and then go to the police mortuary.'

‘Mortuary?'

‘One of the crew.' He did not enlarge. It was better not to try and tell her everything all at once. Besides, he wanted to tell her
all
about it, most especially how she had inspired him to turn surgeon, and he knew this was not the moment. He was emotionally drained from informing York's widow of her husband's death and the frustration of being unable to contact Taylor's widow.

‘I've some gin and some tonic.'

‘Bless you.'

‘Did you read the book about the Uffizi?'

Mackinnon laughed and shook his head. ‘Somehow I never quite got round to it.'

‘Mr Dent rang me this afternoon.' She tinkled ice into two glasses. ‘He said something about the company being unable to pay my hotel bill after tomorrow. You've fallen out, haven't you?'

‘Not before time. The presence of the boat people embarrassed him. He had sold the ship to the Chinese in Shanghai. I'm supposed to take her up there but,' he shrugged, ‘I've told him it's not on. Rawlings can do that.'

‘I'm pleased, darling,' she said, handing him the drink and sitting down opposite him. ‘Dent mentioned the boat people . . .'

At the prompting Mackinnon began to tell her. He spoke of their arrival at Singapore and his sense of foreboding, of the approach of the typhoon and Taylor's mistake; of the rescue and its awful sequel, the operation; of the long
struggle through the worst weather he had ever experienced, the deaths of Ernie York, of Taylor, the Vietnamese woman and then Macgregor.

Finally he explained his feelings at the end, as the
Matthew Flinders
arrived at Hong Kong.

‘James Dent and this young naval chap came on the bridge as though they owned the whole bloody world. It was quite odd, you know. I had this overwhelming sense of solidarity with those unfortunate refugees; suddenly I had nothing in common with the two representatives of my own nation. It struck me that nationality meant nothing in the circumstances. What
does
it mean, beyond acknowledging the fact that one is born on the same chunk of earth as others? Like institutionalised religion I felt it was a superimposed doctrine, an idea become fact and a fact become chains. In the war, running cargoes to Russia and across the Atlantic, we were taught to feel part of something greater, part of the
Allied
war effort. This morning I thought I was part of something greater even than that. After all, I am a seaman; whatever else we may be, we're an international confraternity, sharing the common perils of the sea, beyond the boundaries of men like Dent. Moreover, with my career ending, I had become something else, something the very end actually conferred upon me: I am a free spirit. I could do what I liked, do what I thought was right. What was Dent but a trafficker? So, for lots of reasons,' he ended on a note of abrupt self-deprecation, ‘I defied the bugger, and brought the ship into Hong Kong. Not that she had the fuel to go much further.'

‘I never liked James Dent.'

‘It's strange, you know, but you've seen the wreck of the old
Queen Elizabeth
?' She nodded. ‘I'm a bloody old fool, but I thought it looked symbolic, lying there. Made me think of my feelings about nationality and whether I might not be a traitor, or something. Then I realised my repudiation of nationality was as rational as the shipowners'. Don't you think that's odd?'

‘Not as odd as what happened to me on the flight out.'

‘What? I don't understand.'

‘You remember how she died . . . how we never knew . . .'

Shelagh never mentioned their child by name. It was her way of coping, of coming to terms with the indifference of death. ‘I sat next to a woman, an Army wife coming back out to rejoin her husband. You know the way people chat on long flights. She'd just lost her son, a four-year-old. It sounded just like
her
 . . . the symptoms, the lethargy, the weakness . . .' She fell silent.

‘Go on,' Mackinnon prompted, his voice low, thinking how attractive she looked to him. The single bedside light threw her face into sharp focus, revealing the beauty of it.

‘It's rare, but it's got a name, an auto-immune disease, dermatomyositis.'

The name meant nothing to him beyond the realisation that it pleased Shelagh to have discovered the cause of their child's death.

‘In a sense,' she went on, her explanation ruthless in its long-deferred pursuit of the truth, ‘the body starts to consume itself.'

‘It's odd,' he said quietly, ‘how life goes round in circles.'

Neither Stevenson nor Rawlings expected Mackinnon to return aboard before the morning. This irritated Rawlings, partly because of the confusion and irregularity inherent in their arrival, and partly because, with Taylor dead, he had perforce to split the night duty with the Second Mate. By contrast, Stevenson could not have cared less.

He had had no sleep before climbing to the bridge, for to him, in his capacity as liaison officer, had fallen the sad duty of seeing ashore the bodies of Chief Engineer York, Third Officer Taylor, Able Seaman Macgregor and the Vietnamese woman.

The padre had made the necessary arrangements and
Stevenson had seen the bodies into police custody. Tomorrow, almost as his last act as Master, Mackinnon would have to register the deaths. He had already formally identified the bodies.

The inactivity of a midnight-to-six anchor watch brought home the fact that it was all over, and with a finality outside the normal emphasised by the presence on the bridge of the smartly uniformed Chinese policeman. Whatever happened to the ship, her true voyaging finished here, tonight, along with that of Mackinnon and himself and the rest of them. In a prescient moment Stevenson knew Rawlings would find, as time passed, his three – or four-day tenure of command a mild mockery. Stevenson wished him well, indifferent to the Chief Officer's inner self, knowing he was adequately provided for.

A figure loomed at the head of the starboard ladder and Stevenson turned at the intrusion. ‘Can't you sleep?'

‘No.' Sparks settled himself beside Stevenson, elbows on the dew-damp teak rail, and they stared in companionable silence over the waters of Hong Kong harbour.

The night was overcast, the glow of the colony's millions of lights were reflected in an orange glow from the cloud base. Crowded at the waterfront level, lessening in density higher up the Peak, they sparkled or flashed in the myriad colours of the advertising logos. The Chinese and Roman characters spelled the familiar names of companies known the world over, the American conglomerate, the Japanese
daibatsu
, the German corporations; airlines, electronics companies, beer and soft drinks manufacturers silently screamed the message of their commercial insistence like precocious children demanding attention. Both men felt the incongruous contrast of their situation compared with the peril through which they had so recently passed; yet neither could express the dichotomy, for in its brazen embrace they felt the comfort of normality.

On and off the lights flashed, the brilliance of the neon
colours thrown back by the black, soulless waters of the harbour.

Opposite, from the lower levels of Kowloon, answering broadsides flickered from the environs of Nathan Road, fading into the dark hills of the New Territories beyond which brooded China.

Criss-crossing the harbour, ferries and
wallah-wallahs
made their ceaseless way while clusters of brilliance marked the merchant ships. Here and there the matrix of shore light was obscured by the batwing sail of an ancient junk ghosting silently through the crowded waters, its oil lamps ineffective in the prevailing glare.

‘Bit of an anticlimax, isn't it?' Stevenson said at last, as though the phrase was the final precipitation of his thoughts.

‘Yes; but the end of a voyage always was.' Reasonably, Sparks temporised, the eternal optimist, though the use of the past tense was evidence of the importance of the moment in their shared lives.

‘You're not going on to Shanghai?'

‘I've got no choice,' Sparks replied. ‘Unless Dent kicks us all ashore. I can't afford to jeopardise my pay off. Not now, not after all these years. What about you?'

‘I've been doing some thinking. I don't know for sure yet.'

‘Other fish to fry, eh?' Sparks looked at the younger man, half-envying him his foot-loose youth.

‘I don't know that either, yet.'

‘Well good luck. I suppose we must chalk it up to experience.'