Fellow Passenger (17 page)

‘Cabo Culebra,’
I said, remembering that there really was a Spanish line whose ships all had the names of capes.

The captain was delighted. For one thing, he had succeeded where the engineer had not; for another, he knew all the lines which regularly traded in and out of London and he had been tied up alongside Cabo boats. He told his assembled crew - all of them except the mate and a deckhand had now found their way to the engine-room - that the Cabo owners provided free wine. The crew were much impressed, except the cook.

‘Nasty stuff,’ he said. ‘That’s ‘ow they fall overboard.’

The captain would have none of that. He rightly said that it made no more difference to them than water. He had evidently enjoyed hospitality on a Cabo ship. He turned to me and remarked shyly, for he was no linguist:

‘Veeno? Bong?’

‘Bong!’ I answered.

‘You come along o’ me, my lad,’ he said and winked.

I obeyed him with alacrity. He could make me understand English a lot quicker than the engineer. I hope his stock with the crew went up.

He led me, wrapped in my blanket, to the tiny saloon and produced a bottle of port. I seemed destined to port in trouble. There were gin and whisky in the locker, but he was giving me - bless him! - what he thought I would most like. I made him a speech in which I truthfully told him what I thought of him. He gathered what it was all about.

‘That’s all right, lad,’ he said with faint embarrassment. ‘Drink up!’

I put down a full tumbler of port.

‘Now if you nip along to the galley,’ he added, ‘cookie will have some bacon for you.’

I damn nearly understood this, but managed to look blank. He led me up a companion to the deck-house where the galley was. I saw that we were passing a port which, I was nearly certain, must be Tilbury.

‘Teelbury?’ I asked him, pointing to it.

‘Aye.’

My agitated ship was not there. I looked down river. She was not anchored anywhere in the reach. As I dived into an immense plate of bacon and fried bread, I chuckled. The cook looked on benevolently. His opinion of wine might be perverted, but he did not believe in talking while a hungry man ate.

Of course she was not there! I should have guessed it already, if I had been in a mental state to give a damn what happened to her. It was most improbable that the captain - assuming he had now been found and replaced on his bridge - would put into Tilbury before he had received exact instructions what to say. He might be ordered to make a clean breast of Karlis’ and my escape, or to sink his ship, passengers and all, or to turn back to Riga. He could not possibly guess. The ship, according to Karlis, had never signalled any reason for returning. All explanations had been left to the Embassy, so that the arrival of the ship and the surrender of the spy might be released to the world like the sudden opening of a cage of peace doves.

This passion for secrecy had landed them all in a glorious hole. That unfortunate captain could not give helpful suggestions to the Kremlin with the impertinence of a Howard-Wolferstan. There was nothing whatever he could do but anchor outside territorial waters, on the excuse that he had missed the tide, and pray that somebody would care enough for him to preserve his sanity. Meanwhile there would be no special hue and cry after me, unless Karlis started to tell the true story. He was unlikely to be so rash until he knew what the official story was.

So I had a chance - as high as an even chance I put it - of landing without being recognized. True, a distorted version of my face was familiar enough to public and police, but I was about to appear from so unsuspected a direction. It would demand a most brilliant flick of imagination to identify an unshaven, dishevelled Spanish seaman who spoke no English with the polished spy Howard-Wolferstan, the smooth type of Latin-American band leader whom those infernal, insular reporters had imposed upon the public.

Both my clothes and money were dry by the time we reached Erith. My blue sweater, ex-Bassoon, was neutral enough for any seaman. The corduroy trousers, although twice dipped in the estuary, were perhaps uncommon, but who could tell what a Spanish sailor would or would not wear? My saviours of the
Rochester Star
accompanied me on shore with the utmost kindness. I was not allowed to wander off alone, simply because they wanted to see their pet in safe hands. I listened to them blankly while they discussed what should be done with me, and rejoiced to hear that they thought the police station too formal. They didn’t want to alarm me. It wasn’t fair to rescue a poor bastard and then hand him over to the cops. They introduced me to an official of the Seamen’s Home, and all shook my hand and wished me luck. I felt a worm for not showing gratitude in a language they could understand, but I am sure they caught the spirit of my Spanish.

I sat in the Seaman’s Home office, and had another meal and some more tea while waiting for an interpreter. A grey soul in a grey middle age I thought him when he arrived; but as soon as he started to speak Spanish he began to light up, by degrees, like a slow electric fire - first his mouth, then his eyes and then his hands. He was an excellent fellow who had passed fifteen years of his life in the Argentine. The mere use of the language carried him back to the uninhibited generosity of life and manners which he had loved. Respectable Erith, its dirty bricks, its pubs and its furtive privacies were not, for this precious moment of his, realities.

He spotted my accent at once as South American, not Spanish, and I accounted for that by saying I had spent years in Venezuela. I had to go into details of the
Cabo Culebra
and gave her a cargo of grapes and melons from Valencia. It seemed to me a bit early in the season for both, but I was already committed to fruit. She was far more likely to have had sherry in her holds. As the slightest investigation would show that there had not been any
Cabo Culebra
at all in the Port of London, it didn’t matter - beyond reminding me that I had to be clear of Erith before any enquiries could be made.

The Seamen’s Home fellow began to be a little impatient at the length and good humour of our conversation, especially as much of its substance, when sketchily translated to him, had nothing to do with the
Cabo Culebra
and consisted of joyous reminiscences. He was anxious to call in the police. The
Rochester Star,
being only a Thames Estuary coaster, had known little and cared less about the clearing of aliens. That formality had to be completed, even if the alien had been roosting on a buoy.

My genial interpreter explained to me that we would now visit the police. I expressed the utmost willingness, but on the way to the station I begged him with tears in my eyes to telephone the Spanish Consulate and ask them to cable my wife that I was alive in case the
Cabo Culebra
had already wirelessed news of the accident. It was a dirty trick to play on him, but I could not help it. I gave him my wife’s name and address. I spread myself upon her misery and beauty, describing in fact and with enthusiasm my lovely Dr Cornelia.

We stopped at a post office. I had a feeling that it was going to be pretty difficult to get any sense out of the Spanish Consulate about a non-existent ship at nine-thirty in the morning when somebody reasonably inefficient would be there, and consuls and vice-consuls probably would not.

I watched my poor friend - ah, could I but entertain him in Ecuador! - sweating in the telephone box, and then edged out of the post office and walked to the railway station at a pace which any innocent Spaniard would have considered undignified. After a quick glance at the time-tables, I found that in four minutes there would be a train to London Bridge. I bought a ticket, asking for it in broken English. That was rather more than I was supposed to know; but if I were traced to the station, as within an hour I certainly should be, my little bit of English was not enough to arouse suspicion.

Once in the train, with time to think of long-term tactics, the difficulties overwhelmed me. The Spanish seaman, of no particular importance to anybody, could easily vanish. But Howard-Wolferstan could not. As soon as it was obvious that they were one and the same - which it would be, when those much delayed passengers told their story - the police and M.I.5 would be after me in full force. The dreaded M.I.5 I should call them - though they seem to me to be as subject to human error as the rest of us.

Clothes were the trouble. I was too conspicuous a figure. It was safe to assume that whatever I bought, I could be traced through the place where I bought it. When a description of me was out, the second-hand clothes dealer would be round at the nearest police station in five minutes.

I left the train at Greenwich, and by hanging about for a bit in the lavatory managed to leave the station without surrendering my ticket. In that way I might gain an hour while the pursuit bothered the staff at London Bridge. In Greenwich I counted the colours of the suits I saw on the streets, taking only men of what one might call pronounced middle-class, ranging, say, from foremen to commercial travellers. I found that blue came first - that may have been peculiar to a seaport - with greys and browns following closely; and there were a large number of well-worn suits which one man would describe as a sort of grey, and another as a sort of brown. They were colourless as a piece of wet driftwood. That, then, was to be my choice.

I came on a second-hand dealer in a back street, and bought myself a suit and hat for a couple of pounds. The suit was majority colour and would look respectable for a day or two until the worn cloth ceased to hold the shape ironed into it by the cleaners. I could not imitate cockney dialect with any real facility, and I feared I would attract attention if I spoke cultured English. So again I used a foreign accent.

With my new clothes in a brown paper parcel, I kept to the poorer streets until I came to a chemist’s shop. There I bought shaving kit, a bandage and a roll of cotton wool. So to a public lavatory - whence I emerged as a decent citizen who had had a nasty accident to one side of his face. I quietly dropped my old clothes into the ebbing tide. The Spanish seaman had vanished, and Howard-Wolferstan had come back to life.

The bandage, however, was a very weak disguise, and I knew only too well that I must change my appearance again in a matter of hours. I took a bus into London, settled myself down with a paper in the gardens of the Tower - it never occurred to me that I was important enough to become a lodger - and considered the next move.

I had to count that the purchase of clothes and bandage would be traced by the police within a few hours of the identification of the Spanish seaman, and that, if I remained as I was, I should be in a cell by midnight; but without the bandage I was plainly Howard-Wolferstan, whose photographs would be all over the morning papers. With the whole country on the look-out for a man of my build and of dark, un English complexion, life was going to be hell not only for me but for every Arab, Spaniard or Italian who happened to find himself in a town where he was not known. I could not take a train, buy, eat or appear in public at all. Even if I could find a hide-out I had no hope of reaching it.

My appearance had to be changed, but there was no way of turning myself into a fair or medium Englishman. Peroxide? It would deal only with my hair, and make me even more conspicuous. I envied regular criminals with a back room in which to go to ground, and escaped prisoners-of-war with an organization to help them. Then stay in my natural colours and account for my Latin face by some disguise? A turban, an Arab head-dress, a mask - any of them might enable me, with sufficient impudence, to get clear. But the present nameless citizen with a bandage over half his face could not enter a shop to buy comic hats, nor could Howard-Wolferstan.

Despairing, I wandered east along Wapping High Street, although I had had quite enough of ships and docks. I doubt if any fixed plan at all was in my mind. I was drawn vaguely towards the half-way house of dark faces, of lascar seamen and Goanese stewards, towards the only real southern frontier which England possessed. Equally vaguely I was drawn to the ships for South America in spite of knowing that every stowaway would be doubly suspect. All the while I kept my eyes open for any possibility. Much as I distrust violence as the last refuge of the brainless, it would not have been safe for anyone wearing an outlandish oriental costume to meet me in an empty lane.

I stopped to look at a shop entrance and window. Half ship-chandler’s and half ironmonger’s it was, full of brushes and gear for odd trades. There were new and second-hand chimney-sweeping brushes. I stared at them without remembering what they were for. And then the vision came to me of the local sweep pedalling along on his bicycle with his bundle of brushes over the handlebars.

To find a bicycle shop was the first and - as it turned out - the longest job. At last I hit one, off the Whitechapel Road, stocked with old bicycles from the reconditioned to the cheap and rusty Making a careful note of the street, I turned back towards the river to discover a reasonably private heap of coal. I did not have to go far. Near Shadwell station was a coal-merchant’s yard. It was the lunch hour, and there was no one about except a watchman eating sandwiches in his office. I sneaked past him and dived into a coal-heap as eagerly as a chilly man into a hot bath. In a moment my hands and face were black with coal dust, and my suit moderately dirty. Only moderately. I assumed that a sweep would wear overalls at work.

So back to the bicycle shop, now without the bandage which I had left hidden under the coal. I did not yet look my part, judging by the grins and remarks of the passers-by: ‘What ‘appened, myte?’’Must a emptied the truck over ‘im!’ ‘Did yer find the chap what pushed yer, myte?’ and so on. It was evident that in the absence of brushes the public took my face to be blackened by coal dust, as indeed it was, not soot.