Gently in the Sun (14 page)

‘Beyond the church. I was only thinking …’

But he could get nothing out of Gently.

The lifeboat shed was a tall timber structure, its pent roof jutting out firmly above the beach. A shallow ramp led to the lower level, and from the bottom of this blocks were already in position. Gently jammed the car on to a patch of marrams. Nobody appeared to notice their arrival. The sea, breaking heavily on the beach below them, had a tremendous look to the eye of a landsman.

‘Come in here a moment, will you?’

They followed a hand that beckoned to them. Inside, under brilliant lights, the big lifeboat towered on its slip. A small tractor with tracks chuffed fussily in a corner and the crew stood by in yellow oilies and gumboots.

‘Here … in here.’

The cox’n led Gently into the office. He was an elderly man with a shrewd, weathered face. He pointed to a chart which lay spread out beneath an anglepoise:
for a moment it looked strange and unintelligible to Gently.

‘Confound the blessed thunder! Do you see where we are? There’s Hiverton, see, and there’s the Ness above it. I’d like you to estimate his speed if you can … if you’re right about his course, he’s making good east by north …’

He consulted a table, his lips working noiselessly, then he drew two lines with a parallel rule.

‘North-east a quarter north made good should fetch him … he couldn’t make more than seven, and we’ve the wind aft of the beam.’

Gently was hustled into oilies, gumboots and a life jacket. The cox’n poured him a tot of brandy and clinked glasses with ceremony. Dyson stood
mournfully
by, his opinion in his face. There were limits, it seemed to say, to the proper duties of C.I.D. men.

At the last moment he came forward.

‘Under the circumstances, don’t you think?’

Gently shrugged and scribbled some notes on the back of a borrowed message form.

‘For the background to it get hold of Pagram at the Yard. The rest you can piece together … Simmonds, of course, you needn’t detain.’

The launch, when it came, was improbably casual – in point of fact, the sea had not yet risen very high. They were nudged through the breakers with no untoward incident, the clutch was knocked in, and they were surging on their way.

‘Go below if you want to.’

The cox’n nodded towards the doorway. Through a couple of fixed ports one could see the lighted cabin.

‘If you don’t mind I’d sooner …’

‘Just suit yourself, of course. But if you want to be sick, anchor your toes under this rail.’

They were striking the seas at an angle and the boat soon took on a roll. Every so often one hammered her and flushed the cockpit with uncomfortable gallons. The shore disappeared as if by magic. One saw it only in the blazes of lightning. For all practical purposes their world was a few acres, capped in by murk and pummelled by the screaming rain squalls.

‘Further out they’ll come bigger.’

The cox’n seemed to relish the prospect. His eyes rarely strayed from the illuminated compass card. The wheel kicked visibly in his tanned, hairy hands, but each time it was met with a sort of mechanical reflexion.

‘And if you want to be sick …’

Why did he have to harp on that? Gently hunched himself uneasily against the white-painted coaming. In the usual way he was quite a good sailor, in his youth he had done the trip to Stockholm in a cargo boat.

Some distance out they changed course, which brought the seas almost astern of them. The lifeboat now had a pitching motion which was very far from happy. Twice she was pooped by curling rollers, rather heavily the second time. Gently, caught on the hop, was partially choked by the torrent of salt water.

‘You can always go below.’

But he clung to his post in the cockpit. His
experience of past trips had taught him that this was the safest way. The pity of it was that he’d had no food – it always helped, a well-filled stomach. At lunch he’d had nothing but salad, followed by a sickly tasting trifle.

He tried to concentrate on the boat and its thrashing, ponderous motion: but then, almost at the same time, he knew that he would have to be sick. His stomach and bowels were staging a sudden rebellion, they were snapping away his efforts at conscious control.

‘Toes under the rail!’

The rest was unrelieved misery. Before long he had ceased caring about the storm or anything else. After retching he succumbed and tumbled down into the cabin, and there, on a heaving bunk, had wanted nothing but to die.

Later on, it seemed to him that he had been below for hours. He could remember every minute of that pitching inferno. Two of the crew were actually playing cards – they used the engine-casing for a table: a third, cigarette in mouth, was holding down the pile of discards.

‘Twist!’

‘I’ll go a bundle.’

He never found out what it was they were playing. Their absorption in the game lent a crazy touch to the scene. At the end of every hand a copper or two was passed between them. He could have sworn it went on for a week, although his watch said forty minutes.

‘Try to drink some of this, old partner.’

They had slopped him out some coffee. A
thermos-flask
, as big as a barrel, was being tilted over the cup.

‘We all get a touch of it, now and then.’

How could the fellow lie to him like that? Gently
knew
that they’d never been seasick: they were a different style in humanity.

Then finally, to end the nightmare, had loomed a dripping figure from the cockpit:

‘We’ve sighted a vessel ahead, sir … cox’n would like to have you on deck.’

Really, he couldn’t have cared less, but he dragged himself up the steps again. Fortunately the tumult he stumbled into had the effect of clearing his brain. It was a good deal lighter, now, and one could see for considerable distances. Behind them, which was
southerly
, there was a horizon of watery yellow.

‘That’ll be her, I reckon.’

The cox’n pointed briefly over the fairing. At first Gently could make out nothing except the rolling bulks of waves. Then, as they lifted, he glimpsed it, only a few hundred yards away: it was sliding down a greyback, its varnished counter pointed towards them.

‘We’ll be up with him very shortly.’

Gently caught a quizzical side glance.

‘I know all about old Esau … what do you think you’re going to do?’

There wasn’t any answer to that one. Gently crouched miserably under the bulkhead. He felt abjectly at the mercy of these men of the sea. In his pursuit of the Sea-King he had been lured out of his
element, and now, as he closed with him, he was being made to feel the folly of it.

‘We can beat him for speed in a seaway like this, but there’ll be no going aboard him, if that’s the idea.’

‘Will I be able to speak to him?’

‘You can use the loud hailer.’

‘In this … could she last?’

‘He’s rode out the worst of it.’

They bullocked closer and closer, rolled on waves like small mountains. Ahead of them the
Keep Going
switchbacked easily over the crests. Esau still stood to his helm, his feet planted a little apart; he swayed to the boat’s motion as a circus rider to his horse.

For the cox’n the seas held a clinical interest:

‘Up here, we don’t often get them this size.’

One of the crew drew attention to the
Keep Going
’s buoyancy:

‘He must have a power pump – there’s everything on that boat!’

At last they had closed to within fifty or sixty yards of him: they were near enough to read the gilded lettering on the name board. The cox’n nudged Gently and motioned towards the loud hailer.

‘You can call him up now, but we shall have to keep a distance.’

Gently unclipped the instrument, which resembled a clumsy megaphone. Never before had he felt so strongly the futility of what he was going to do. Sick, and feeling weak as a child, he balanced the hailer on the fairing. His knees were cockling under him each time they smacked into a trough.

‘Ahoy there,
Keep Going
!’

The wailing voice was not his own: a mournful sea thing, it went protesting through the chaos.

‘Esau … ahoy! Can you hear me … Esau!’

Only a few hours before he’d been making the same appeal to Simmonds.

‘Esau … listen!’

But why should he bother to listen? What was this mewling landsman’s voice to the storm-riding
Sea-King
?

‘Esau, as a police officer …’

That was the biggest joke of the lot! He could feel the cox’n’s eye running over him, half in irony, half in pity.

‘Esau, you have a duty—’

Mercifully, he was spared the rest. The Sea-King, till now unmoved, suddenly stirred and reached down beside him: when he straightened up he had something in his hand, and it was something that drew a shout from the cox’n.

‘Watch out – he’s got his signalling pistol!’

The wheel was twisted through several turns. The result, from Gently’s view point, was catastrophic to a degree. From pitching on an even keel the lifeboat staggered into a roll: the man from the Central Office went immediately spinning across the cockpit.

‘Everyone … heads down!’

A roar and a flash accelerated the panic. A scorching blast swept over the cockpit and something hammered against the fairing. The boat seemed trying to bury her side, she was literally on her beam ends. A
mountainous wall of sea swept up to obliterate the watery sky.

‘My God … he blew his tank!’

The cox’n heaved at the wheel with all his might. Slowly, like a drunken whale, the lifeboat payed up and righted itself. A sea crashed stunningly over the bows, pouring havoc through the cockpit. A shower of glowing debris hissed into the water near them like shot.

‘Look – just look over there!’

Gently dragged himself up to the coaming. Off their port bow the sea was alight, a spreading lake of orange flame. Somehow it was beating the racing seas – had the explosion chopped them flat? – it had made a calm for its writhing tongues, a forcible truce in the turmoil of waters.

‘I saw him unscrew the cap!’

They were lurching towards that forest of flame.

‘He shoved in the muzzle and pulled the trigger. He still had his other hand fast on the tiller.’

And he was gone, like the wind itself; gone, like a myth of the sea. Nobody was ever to put Esau behind bars: when the shadow reached out, he slipped his moorings and kept going.

‘I’ll turn in the oil here … there’s nothing we can do.’

Grim faced, the cox’n steered into the burning petrol. The object which struck the fairing tumbled off into the cockpit – it was the Sea-King’s shattered name board, still attached to a fragment of transom.

Gently stooped to pick it up. And the splinters pierced his finger.

T
HE TEMPEST PASSED
away with all the
éclat
that marked its arrival, and at sunset there were twenty minutes exceeding everything that went before. The whole of the sea and the sky were involved in the exhibition. It was as though the spirit of Ruebens had broken loose with an Olympian palette.

The storm bank had retreated northwards and lay now edged with angry crimson. Beneath it stretched a band of neutral colour, raked end to end by soundless lightning. Overhead hung a bulbous formation of cloud. It was flooded with an aerial, golden yellow. To the south rose great banks of purest turquoise, one of them streaked and tongued with scarlet. A panel of clear pea green held the foreground, descending, pink bordered, into cinnamon and umber. Above this the clouds parted on a royal blue sky, its expanse etched over with sheer white fire.

And the sea – how could one believe in that sea? It was divided between a golden lemon and turquoise.
The blue that glowed there mocked any description: it was bluer than all the lakes of Italy.

For twenty minutes one could only gaze foolishly, apparently standing at the threshold of heaven. Then it faded almost instantly, as though the artist had done with it: the whole burning fabric turned to the colour of lead.

This ultimate flourish haunted Gently all night. It seemed an acknowledgement and a comment on the tragedy that preceded it. In his fretting mind Esau appeared as supernatural, as a demi-god briefly
enlarged
from some Valhalla. This had been more than man! He’d had the stamp of a divinity. He hadn’t died his death as much as received a translation. Impatient of his hunters he had cast his mortality aside, and the heavens themselves had borne witness to his return.

Over a morning cup of tea the vision lost some of its glamour. There were aspects of the Sea-King which were all too pitifully human. He had been weak with all his virtues, fallible in the midst of strength. He had fallen to a lesser man and carried misfortune into tragedy.

‘Hawks – he’s the mystery man of the piece.’

It was thus that Gently had prefaced his remarks to the Wendham super. Stock had arrived soon after breakfast, intent on hearing the minuter details. Dyson’s account on the previous evening had
succeeded
only in whetting his appetite.

‘You think he knew that Dawes had done it?’

‘No. I’m fairly certain he didn’t.’

‘Or that he’d done for his wife?’

‘He may have guessed it, but there again …’

They were sitting on the terrace at Gently’s favourite spot beneath the oak trees. After the storm the sunlight was brilliant and the air had a liquid sweetness. About them the life of the Bel-Air
proceeded
– tennis, basking, the strains of a record. The Midlands couple had gone down to the beach and Colonel Morris was now due to appear.

Everything changed but remained the same! Or was it, perhaps, the other way about?

‘I’m beginning to get the idea a little clearer. At the same time, judging from what Dyson could tell me …’

‘A great deal of it will have to be guesswork.’

‘I appreciate that, but I dare say you’ll realize …’

‘It’ll tie-up neatly on the available evidence.’

Gently was wanting to think rather than to talk about the case. It was just the minuter details that no longer interested him. Behind them lay a broader concept, dimly shaping in his brain; it had begun to press upon him as he lay, half-dead, in the lifeboat.

‘Hawks was certainly Rachel’s father, though we shan’t be able to prove it. But there was only one reason why he should want to check the register. He had begun to suspect about Rachel and the register gave proof of identity. Until the episode at the church, I imagine he was still blaming Simmonds for her death.’

‘I’d like to get back to Mrs Dawes for a moment.’

‘The report on the dentures has settled that one.’

‘The identity, yes. But I’d like a little more.’

‘As I said, a lot of it will have to be guesswork.’

Yet it was guesswork which lacked every element of doubt: Esau had opened the whole matter to him on those scarifying marrams. He had taken Gently to the grave and had made sure that he grasped its import. In his own inarticulate way he had confessed to the murder of his wife.

‘He chucked her out because of Hawks – again, there won’t be any proof. At the time he may not even have known that Hawks was the man in question. They were always having rows, I’m told … no doubt she threw it up at him. It’d be when she came back that he caught her with Hawks, and that, I believe, was what finally did her business.’

‘Why do you suppose she came back?’

‘Only Hawks can tell you that. To tell him about his child, perhaps, and to fix up something with him.’

‘And Hawks knew what Esau did?’

Gently shrugged. ‘Not in my opinion. But he knew that Esau had found out about him and he may have tumbled to the rest. And so it went on, for thirty-odd years.’

For three hundred and ninety fisherman’s moons. The boats had gone out and the boats had come home, the skeps had been filled, the nets hung to dry. And on it had festered, that unhealing wound, in the ugly village, by the beautiful shore.

‘Campion came here quite by accident?’

‘Of that one can be positive. Her grandmother would have told her nothing about Hiverton. The match was disapproved and Mrs Dawes disowned – Rachel took the family name. I expect a suitable tale was told her.’

‘Why did Dawes do her in, would you say?’

‘Because she was too much like her mother!
He
recognized her directly, almost as soon as he set eyes on her. He part told and part showed me that he’d been spying on her movements.’

‘Revenge, too, on Hawks?’

Gently shook his head deliberately. ‘If it had been the other way … but there wasn’t any revenge in Esau. No, he was executing the law, the law
according
to Esau Dawes. Rachel came of a tainted stock, and having sinned, she had to go. Once she’d gone into the tent with Simmonds it was only a matter of time.’

‘And then he tried to throw it on Simmonds?’

‘I’m not entirely convinced of that. He may have wanted to punish Simmonds – it was Hawks and Mrs Dawes over again.’

Who could tell what had been going on in the inaccessible mind of the Sea-King? At what point had the deed’s consequences come starkly and squarely home to him? Was it when he accosted Gently with the account of Simmonds’s thrashing – was it when he witnessed the artist being hounded off the marrams?

One thing alone was certain: he had faced the consequence unmoved. In the fearless court of his spirit he had first condemned himself to die. And he would have Gently understand him, he wanted the circumstance known in full: this was not the petty violence of a Hawks, a Maurice, or a Mixer.

Yesterday, on the hedge bank, he had sat waiting for Gently to arrest him.

‘What do you make of that church business? Dyson told me all about it.’

‘At the time it occurred to me …’

How could he explain his tangled ideas? There Esau had made his restitution, he had given Simmonds back his life. Also he had provided Gently with a token which the latter was too dense to perceive. This is not the man, it had said, this is not the one who is to die. The inference was crystal clear … now, as one looked back on it!

‘At the time Hawks thought that Simmonds had done it and he was possessed with a desire for revenge. When the rescue took place he couldn’t contain his anger. It was then, I think … after Esau struck him.’

‘He guessed, do you mean?’

‘It’s impossible to say.’

‘He’ll be able to guess some more after the inquest on Mrs Dawes!’

The thing you had to remember about this was the sea: in sum, that was Gently’s grand conclusion. He’d begun to take it in as he lay on the bunk, as he shrank by the cox’n in the wave-swept cockpit. The sea that was not the land – but more than this, too! The sea that was a life, a separate cosmos on its own. For it possessed a reality that irradiated men’s souls: it blinded their understanding to the sobriety of the shore.
There
they refuelled, restocked, rested up:
that
could be ugly, penurious, wretched. Their lives only began again when the keel left the beach, when the bows started to rise over the intoxicating waves.

And ashore they watched the sea with vacant,
far-searching eyes. Each day they went down to gaze at the element that had bewitched them. To these, what were the shanties and villas of Hiverton, or the ghostly shore people who quarrelled and scolded there?

If one of them offended you, why, you put a stop to it. They were too little real to trouble one’s conscience. And if they gathered together and rattled their gallows, to the boat! to the sea! – let them follow if they dared.

Yes, it was the sea that one had to acknowledge, the sea that derided the values of landsmen. Wherever a man went down to it in a boat, there began an allegiance beyond the kenning of cities. The sea had its children and they belonged not to the shore.

‘Seriously, do you think the old man would have made Holland?’

He could have made the Celebes or far-distant Cathay.

‘Well, it’s saved a lot of money, the way it’s turned out.’

And perhaps something else, even more precious than that.

By a vagary of chance he was to hear some more of Simmonds. The young man went to live in a village in Wiltshire. A relative of his mother’s took him in for a time, and it so happened that Gently’s married sister lived in the vicinity. The artist had changed his name from Simmonds to Symons. He had given up insurance and was devoting his time to his brush. During the
autumn he had held an exhibition in Salisbury, and though he didn’t sell many pictures, was at least making an income.

‘But he looks a nervous wreck.’

Bridgit’s phrase was twice underlined.

‘He slinks about the village as though someone was going to bite him. By all accounts he isn’t so terribly popular with his aunt – she only puts up with him because of the time he’s had.’

In the spring he went off to Cornwall and Gently lost sight of him.

Hiverton, however, he saw again a year later. He had been called out to Crowlake to give evidence of identification. His way was on the coast road which passed within a mile of the place, and indulging a mild curiosity, he made a detour to take it in. It was just as nondescript as he had remembered it. There was little that was fresh to be discovered. A new sunblind was being sported over the steps to the Beach Stores, another council house or two had been erected down the lane.

He had a pint in the bar of The Longshoreman, where only the publican seemed to recognize him. At their tables the old men still shuffled their dominoes and the fishermen still huddled together in a
conclave
. There was only one change in the established order. Until he was going out, he failed to notice it. Now it was Hawks who was sitting in Esau’s corner, and drinking, from the evidence, one pint after another …

He looked in also on the vicar, who kept open house for everyone, and he found him in his garden
tying up some gladioli. He had lately, he said, married off his youngest daughter; now, excepting for his housekeeper, he was living there alone.