Endangered Species (6 page)

Stevenson choked off a reply and began to walk furiously aft. It came to him, in a bitter moment of recollection, that somewhere, long ago, he had read or heard his profession traduced, the British mercantile marine described with contempt as the pickings of the prisons officered by the sweepings of the public schools. It was, like most generalisations, inaccurate in the particular, but possessed the tackiness of wit to stick, to lodge among those disposed to that most English vice, snobbery. The reflection grated on his nerves, reminding him he had abandoned Cathy for this life, this life that gave him Macgregor for a colleague.

‘Shit!' swore Stevenson.

The rain, falling from the overloaded clouds in a solid mass, chilled him and he dripped water on the labourers now dozing on their mats along the outer alleyways. They shouted their protest. Gone were the days of the white
tuan
; now even an involuntary dripping of rainwater brought down the complaints of coolies upon him.

He was in the shower when he heard the knock on his cabin door.

‘It's only me,' sang out Taylor's voice. ‘I've a beer for you.'

Stevenson rubbed his hair vigorously, wrapped the towel round his waist and stepped out into the cabin. Taylor was lounging on the daybed; he handed Stevenson a beer.

‘Thanks, Chas.' He threw his head back and sucked greedily at the can.

‘What's up?' asked Taylor, seeing the preoccupied look on
Stevenson's open face.

‘I'm bloody furious and this is just what I need. Thanks.'

‘What's happened?' Taylor persisted.

‘Oh, nothing much. That bloody man Macgregor gave me some lip . . .' Stevenson outlined the incident. ‘My own fault, really. I shouldn't have called him a bastard.' He finished with an unhappy shrug.

‘Oh, forget it, Alex. We're all guilty when it comes to bad language. It doesn't signify except when a troublemaker like Macgregor wants to make something of it. Here, have another beer and drown your sorrows.'

With a sense of diminishing unease Stevenson slowly dismissed the incident from his mind. Beyond the jalousies the rain lashed down and a peal of thunder rumbled across Keppel Harbour. Stevenson looked at his watch.

‘There won't be any more cargo work this shift,' he remarked, accepting the second can of beer from Taylor.

‘That's what I came to see you about. The Mate says he'll stand this evening's harbour watch so you and I can take a run ashore together. How about it?'

‘That's unusual for old Randy Rawlings, isn't it?' asked Stevenson, pulling on a clean white uniform shirt and musing on the Mate's philanthropy. Second and Third Officers were customarily on watch and watch in harbour with no time to socialise beyond the brief few moments when they handed over the deck.

‘I suspect he has ulterior motives. I heard him asking Woo for a Chinese special chow tonight; I expect he's invited someone aboard. Hasn't he got relatives here?'

‘Oh, yes,' Stevenson recalled casually. ‘I think you're right.'

‘Anyway, I thought it would be a good opportunity for you and I to enjoy a modest little piss-up and, er—' Taylor rolled his eyes with exaggerated significance at the picture of Cathy on Stevenson's desk. Stevenson turned from drawing on his shorts and for a moment both men stared at the photographed
face that smiled back at them.

‘She's very attractive, Alex. She seems to me more like the kind you marry than the kind you screw.' He sighed. ‘But I suppose you were screwing her just the same.' Taylor caught Stevenson's eye. The latter was oddly discomfited by the remark and swung round to gaze in the mirror and comb his hair assiduously.

‘Sorry, old man,' said Taylor. ‘Didn't mean to tread on any toes.'

Stevenson heard the supercilious pomposity enter Taylor's voice with the outmoded words. He was assailed from both flanks. First Macgregor's sly attack on the imagined privilege of his being Alexander Stevenson, Second Mate of the ageing motor vessel
Matthew Flinders
; now, from somewhere above him in the social pecking order, came the mild contempt of the blond aristocrat. He felt bowed under the martyrdom of being middle class and in a flash had lost his temper.

‘Oh, for Christ's sake, Chas, don't be so bloody condescending!' He rounded on Taylor and whipped him verbally, transferring the anger he felt for Macgregor to the lolling figure of the Third Mate on the daybed. ‘From what you told me the other night, you're no great Lothario yourself . . .'

And for the second time that afternoon he regretted what he had said the instant the words had left his mouth.

Taylor looked like a man physically struck.

‘Oh, fuck it! Chas, I'm sorry, I really am . . .' Stevenson was abruptly aware of the difference in their ages. Taylor was suddenly a silent, crushed boy and Stevenson realised that his superciliousness was a facade, bred in him, or cultivated, it did not really matter.

‘I am sorry, I shouldn't have said that. I didn't mean it. Macgregor got under my skin.'

Very slowly Taylor uncoiled himself and stood up, facing the contrite and apologetic Stevenson.

‘Forget it, Alex. I'm going down to dinner.' He made to push past Stevenson as the notes of the steward's gong sounded.

It was the Radio Officer who saved the situation. His appearance in the cabin doorway was without the time-honoured formality of a knock and the obvious excitement on his face was sufficiently unusual to distract them both.

‘Hey, you guys, come and have a butchers at this lot.' He paused, sensing reluctance and insisted,
‘Come on!'
Stevenson and Taylor followed him on to the boat-deck, dodging the streams of water that cascaded down from the lower edges of the sagging awnings. By the rail and beneath the awning's shelter they joined Captain Mackinnon and Chief Officer Rawlings who were staring through the persistent rain.

The long line of merchant ships of many flags and nationalities lying alongside the shallow curve of the wharves of Keppel Harbour stretched as far as they could see on either hand. From the adjacent fairway, the muted grumble of slow-running, high-performance diesel engines announced the approach of a curious sight. The five Britons stood silently, staring at the rain-splashed strip of grey water and the burden it bore.

A sleek, evil-looking patrol launch of the Singapore Defence Force was coming up Keppel Harbour. A filthy brown haze of exhaust smoke trailed astern, throwing into sharp focus the light grey paintwork and the red and white of her ensign, but partially hiding what she was towing. As the big launch came abeam of the
Matthew Flinders
they saw clearly what it was.

Trailing astern of the immaculate patrol boat came a mastless junk, half the size of its tug. It was crammed with people, so crammed that no one individual could be discerned from the mass, like ants round the entrance to an ant hill, but with one important difference: the ants would
have heaved with a common energy, a mass of moving legs and bodies.

The people aboard the junk were immobile.

They sat, or lay, or stood like statues and it seemed to the watching British officers their stillness was not that of exhaustion, or hunger; not even of an oriental fatalism or hopelessness, but the awful dignity of silent reproach and this had, in some extrasensory way, preceded them, alerting the watchers to their coming.

They were towed the length of Keppel Harbour, past the idle ships of two dozen nations; past the manifestly opportunist convenience of, perhaps, no more than half that number of so-called national flags. It seemed, too, they dragged more than a cloud of the patrol boat's foul exhaust gases behind them, for as they passed the
Matthew Flinders
's officers, surprise had changed to a sort of half-comprehended embarrassment. The five men looked sheepishly at one another, and then avoided each other's eyes as though they were in some way guilty of something they were unable to put words to.

Then, in a hiss of intensification, heavier rain swept down the harbour, driving in under the awning and the watchers turned away for the shelter of the accommodation and the five-course dinner awaiting them in the saloon.

Stevenson was the last in the queue as they stumbled over the sea step in their haste. Perhaps because of the upsets of the last hour he felt most acutely that dumb accusation. He looked back.

The heavier rain had overtaken the boatload of refugees. They were blurred against the brown diesel fumes of the still-audible patrol boat, and then blotted out, as though nature itself was affronted.

But Stevenson was left with the indelible memory of several scores of people remaining perfectly motionless.

Captain Mackinnon was depressed and aware that if he did
not put a stop to this solitary drinking he was going to go to bed drunk and wake up tomorrow with a thumping hangover. In defiance of common sense he poured himself another gin and slopped the remains of a tonic bottle into the glass after it. Not wanting to drink the gin so undiluted he rose unsteadily to his feet, barked his shin on the corner of the coffee table and bent to reach in his drinks locker. He withdrew the last bottle of tonic, opened it and filled his glass.

A faint sensation of nausea uncoiled itself in his belly and perspiration broke out on his broad forehead. He swore horribly and trenchantly under his breath. He had been here before.

Alcohol, the inescapable lubricant which oiled the working of human imperfection, was too easily obtained, too freely part of the everyday, aboard ship. It accrued to itself a host of little rituals, small steps and bobs and curtsies of a sinister measure, the dance of a slow death.

There was no denying the sight of those unfortunate refugees had disturbed the self-confident equilibrium of Captain Mackinnon's life. He did not know quite why, for he was largely an unimaginative man, except that their plight had raised doubts in his mind. Firstly he doubted his own right to happiness, and his imagination in contemplating retirement saw his future solely in such terms, though the practical difficulties and trials of his life had conditioned him also to doubt its actual existence. Moreover, such an occidental assumption that he had earned his retirement was palpably unjust in the face of the misery he had just witnessed. And finally he doubted the value of human endeavour that seemed, eternally, to fail to achieve what must be achieved to improve the reality of existence.

He had found the imposition of these depressing considerations too gloomy, too insuperable to shrug them off ashore, and had settled to his longely binge, putting off the agent's invitation until the following evening.

Bleary-eyed he stared about him round the cabin and swore again. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, he would abandon this, this obverse of the panoply of command, to be sitting with Shelagh who had long ago pulled him back from the abyss upon whose edge he now teetered, remembering . . .

And, remembering, he knew the answers to his doubts: his love for Shelagh, their love for each other, marked him as lucky. He was a lucky man and Shelagh proved it. Not as lucky as some, he thought reasonably, but luckier than most; luckier than many men he had sailed with,
was
sailing with at the moment, and a damned sight luckier than those poor devils of boat people that had been towed pathetically past them three or four hours earlier.

Lucky he might be, but happy he was not.

It was foolish to imagine the world would ever be free from strife and injustice, poverty and hunger. There were so many people, more than the earth could support, even if the hugely rich and, perhaps, the not so hugely rich, relinquished some of their excess wealth.

Was he, a self-acknowledged lucky man, too greedy? The thought troubled him. He did not acknowledge what some had embarrassingly called heroism when he had brought the lifeboat ashore, but he reckoned he had paid the tariff by fighting in a war and skirting the edges of other conflicts. His uneasy feeling of not having paid enough, or not having kept his payments up, worried him. He felt touched by disappointment and uncertainty.

He experienced a surge of self-justification, falling back on a fierce, defensive pride in that to which he belonged. The Merchant Navy had fought the longest, most vital battle of the Second World War, the Battle of the Atlantic. He had read somewhere that proportionally more of its men had died than in any of the so-called ‘fighting-services', but they were mere sailors, scarcely men of the pipe-and-slippers/ missus-and-the-nippers variety, and few wept over their
copious drownings. Now, Mackinnon bitterly reflected, they were going down the tube, redundant, too expensive (though God knew they cost little enough, now as then). Only merchant seamen could be treated with the cavalier dismissal which stopped their pay the moment their ships were sunk. He remembered Bird railing about the outrage in the YMCA in Belfast . . .

But it was in the past now. The world had turned; their fates were governed by the accountants and even the old oligarchs, like Mrs Dent, were
outré
. It was bad luck on Sparks and Stevenson, of course, and even on that square peg Taylor who, Mackinnon considered, would never have survived in an open boat and had never been asked to, but it was not as bad as being aboard that rotting junk with the detention camp looming.

For himself, Mackinnon concluded, compromising an old man's selfishness with a due appreciation of good fortune, he could acknowledge his luck, deserved or not. There was no doubt about that. He had only to keep his nose clean for a week or two more, then Shelagh, and Rome and Florence, and the thing would come full circle . . .

His eyes fell on the big art book Shelagh had insisted he bring with him. He had trouble focussing on the gilt title, printed in Times Roman on its dark spine, but he had no need to read it. He knew it and its new, unopened state reproached him:
The Uffizi
.

He wondered why he had not opened it, aware that he had been moved to do so several times but had drawn back and postponed the moment. For pleasure? No, for wholly superstitious reasons, as if the physical act of opening the book and feasting his eyes upon the illustrations would be a direct challenge to providence, inviting its malice in thwarting his desire. So he had left the book, promising to look at it the moment he came down from the bridge for the last time, an act of finality which marked his passing from active employment to retirement, an act marking his
transition from operating as John Mackinnon, Master under God of the motor vessel
Matthew Flinders
, to pensioned status under the direction of his wife. He laughed at himself, then thought again of Shelagh, of her handing him the book and he asking, laughingly, ‘What the hell's the Uffizi?' And she had given him one of her silent go-on-with-you looks so he was still not quite certain.