Gilliatt wished he could re-enter reassurance's safe, comfortable room. He nodded, and added merely, "Very good, sir." Ashe studied his face as if for mockery for a moment before he continued.
"You prepare the double sweep, Number One. Pilot, make sure we sail down the middle of the suspected channel."
"Sir." The pilot rubbed his long sallow cheeks as if to smooth out the entrenched lines or rub away the habitual stubble of beard. He appeared about to say something but took his cue instead from Gilliatt's silence. Ashe dismissed them both with a curt nod.
Gilliatt returned to the sweep deck to organize the double sweep, while the pilot returned to his navigation table. Ashe stood morosely, wrapped in a tight net of gloomy prognostications now he was silent again, in the starboard for" ard corner of the bridge until Bisley approached the suspected channel.
"Five minutes, sir," the pilot called from his table.
"Very well, Pilot," Ashe replied in a rusty, unused voice. "I want a course to steer to the northern edge of the suspect area, and then a course to steer down its centre. As he finished, a seaman from the signal cabin came up onto the bridge and seemed immediately unsettled by the suppressed, intent silence. He handed Ashe the Admiralty's decoded reply.
"As soon as check carried out to limits of area required in operation signal report back. If area is clear as believed detach from flotilla and proceed with all despatch to Milford where NOIC will give berthing and movement instructions."
Ashe held the signal in a hand he concentrated upon keeping steady for a long time. Then he dismissed the seaman with a nod. Ashe sat down in his captain's bridge chair delicately, as if his bones were made of glass. To Lieutenant Cobner, the pilot, he looked extremely old. Cobner dismissed his own surmises, shutting out everything except the chart under its table-light, the course he was plotting.
Eventually, he said to Ashe, "Steer 040, approximately two miles, sir, then turn to 198 degrees."
"Aye, aye, Pilot."
Cobner waited as he would have on some important, personal decision until Ashe gave the order to the officer of the watch, a young sub-lieutenant standing behind the yeoman. Cobner visibly relaxed.
Bisley reverberated to increased speed and to running across the swell as she changed course. Ashe said again to the officer of the watch: "Warn the Chief Buffer that I want no one below decks unless absolutely necesssey while we do the search sweep. Check all watertight doors and bulkheads. Warn the Engineering Officer, and every member of ship's company must be wearing lifebelts— you, too, sub!" The little personal joke fell heavily, inappropriately into the deep pool of the bridge's atmosphere. The sub-lieutenant proceeded to transmit Ashe's orders.
"Ready to turn now and point new course, sir," Cobner said.
Ashe raised himself from his chair and took over at the compass platform. Clearing his throat, he began barking his orders down the voice pipe to the wheelhouse where the Coxswain was now closed up and at the wheel. The Coxswain CPO had the gift of touch-steering, and Ashe always used him for anything other than routine. But the knowledge that CPO Fenwick was in the wheelhouse gave him no confidence now. Every perspective of sense or thought rendered old routines, old comforts, illusory.
"Starboard 15!"
"15 of starboard wheel on, sir." Bisley leaned to port as she swung round to starboard.
"Midships."
"Midships, sir!"
"Steer 198, Cox" n." Then he said to the yeoman: "Tell the First Lieutenant to stream sweeps." The yeoman picked up the bridge telephone and transmitted Ashe's message to Gilliatt on the sweep deck with his crew.
Gilliatt watched the wake of their change of course dissipate behind them, and the smoke from the rest of the flotilla — small grey shapes sailing a different course — dragged into stiff, unreal shapes by the offshore breeze, and shut out reflection. There was a peculiar pointlessness in opening perspectives which were better shut off by a concentration on the smaller futilities of routine.
"Stream sweeps, port first!" Both sweeps were in the water smoothly and swiftly, veering out onto their quarters. When the kite had been shackled to each sweep wire, they, too, disappeared into the green water. The small grey toys of the flotilla had now passed astern of the Bisley. Distant explosions, fountains of water, the pattering of gunfire. Normality. "Sweeps running smoothly," he said into the telephone. He could feel the ship straining against the drag of the double sweep, feel the reverberation as Ashe increased revolutions.
Gilliatt moved to the starboard guard-rail, watching the two floats, his eyes flickering between them like those of a tennis spectator. His hands gripped the rail unnoticed. He knew they must now be clear of their own swept area. No mines rolled with the swell, bobbing up to the surface. A watery sunlight which hurt the eyes less than the cloud-cover had done gleamed weakly off the water. He saw Knap Hill, now leading the flotilla, flash a signal to them.
"God be with you."
And Fraser's Scottish Presbyterianism no longer seemed overdone or antiquated but moving instead — and forbidding. He wondered whether Ashe would return his habitual signaclass="underline" "The Devil looks after his own." He didn't think so. Gilliatt turned his attention to the bridge, and smiled as he read the reply. Ashe must have recovered something of his confidence.
"May the Lord lighten our darkness and unfold His mystery."
When he had sent his reply, Ashe returned to his chair, and sat unmoving, minute after minute, making the bridge an electric, charged, cramped space where the pilot, the yeoman and the officer of the watch fidgeted, coughed, shuffled to dispel the mood he created. The humorous reply to Knap Hill's captain, Fraser, seemed to have drained some last reserve of pretence or resolution from Ashe. The pilot, as he tracked their progress through what should have been a minefield, willed Ashe to look at the chart. It was a channel, it was—
Ashe continued to sit, carved or petrified by his own knowledge. The silence beyond the bridge deafened them.
They all knew it, Cobner thought, there was no need to go on. Gilliatt down on the sweep deck would know it, the sea empty of cut mines, the coxswain would know it, subby knew, the yeoman — the men on deck, shuffled for" ard of the sweep deck like a transported herd. Come on, man, come on—
And then Ashe was at his shoulder, staring at the chart. Cobner's finger rested on their position. Ashe breathed in deeply, once, then crossed to the voice pipe.
"Cox" n, reduce revolutions." Then, galvanized, he was at the bridge telephone. "Number One, stand by to take in sweeps — in sweeps!" He paused, then: "Report to my cabin on completion, Number One." He turned to Cobner, eager now to escape the bridge, as if a stranger himself to the atmosphere he had created and not yet dispelled. "Take over, Pilot. Steam north again on 020 until we're heading east again, inform me and we can relax ship's company a little." The brief smile that he tried to fit to his mouth when he had finished speaking did not seem viable and he abandoned it.