Then the Weather Bureau stated: 'Radio contact with the weather ship Walvis Bay in the storm area has been lost.'
At that, she had known the answer: Waratah!
She had made a long-distance telephone call from Cape Town to the Port Met. Office in Durban. Where, she asked, had I last been heard of? The weatherman told her more than he normally would a stranger. There must have been something in what she said which made him guess how close, how newly close, she was to me. He did not tell her, though, that the Air Force had confided that they held out little hope for the Buccaneer. The search would be their main concern now.
It would have comforted me, that night, to have known of her anxiety, but I did not. All I had was the decision-tapping attrition of icy gale and sea on a mind growing more and more numb as the hammer-blows followed one another unabated. When a pump burned out in some desperate hour of the night, I thought the storm had won. Scannel, disregarding the burns which had turned his upper chest into a Martian red surface of craters and blisters, calmly stripped it down with the unruffled patience and steady hand of a Grand Prix mechanic who sees the race roar past while his driver loses precious race-winning seconds. The pump drew again, and once again we sucked out the life-inhibiting load of water.
The first stunning wave had pitched the steel cabinet with all my Waratah material across the cabin on to my bunk. Hurrying below to visit the injured Feldman, I stopped at the sight of it. Like the peace at the heart of every cyclone, the outside roar ceased to exist for me, and telepathically she was there in that moment of exclusion. I did not try and move the cabinet; maybe it was safer on the bunk than on the floor, where the water from the bridge still sloshed past on its way to the depths of the ship. Beyond a wetting, the documents were in reasonable shape — another chapter of the same story was being written at that moment up above in wind, wave and water 1 Likewise, my marked chart escaped only with a drenching.
Automatically, I looked at the photograph of the Waratah. Something had been hurled across the cabin; its glass was cracked clean across.
The ship's wind direction and velocity gauge on the top deck had been wrecked; the cabin repeater pointed statically, ironically — south-west. The books she had taken from my shelf lay in a pulpy mess on the floor.
Where, Tafline had asked, had contact with me been lost?
Bashee, the weatherman replied. South of the Bashee.
There had been no need for her to hear any more then. She had thanked him mechanically, put down the telephone, and gone over to the window of her flat. The Mouille Point lighthouse nearby always used to flick an arrow of light against the flat wall, and she screwed up her eyes against it now. She loved the lighthouse as her Welsh grandfather had loved the one he had tended. Tafline — the Welsh ancestry had given her that soft name, and somehow the sixth sense of the Celt enabled her to identify herself so closely with the mysterious fate of the old ship. She loved the sea too, a derivative from Viking blood on her father's side. The Olens had come from Sweden to South Africa sixty years before and had pioneered a Scandinavian settlement in the Transvaal. It was this seafaring streak which let her understand, with almost Arab fatalism, the ocean drama being played out of which I was part. Below her window in the light winter rain car headlights made a home-going procession. She watched. She did not weep; she did not do any more than make that one telephone call. The cinemagoers, the diners, the dancers, would sleep tonight, but she would not.
There was a last news bulletin that night. The Buccaneer, Walvis Bay and the great storm took top place. Growing concern, said the radio, was being felt for the safety of the ship and the jet. Despite repeated attempts to make contact with the weather ship, there had been no response.
Feldman lay half-conscious in the ward-room, mumbling, only half-aware of his surroundings. We strapped him to the bunk to protect his damaged side from the ship's lurches. He was our only operator, even if we had had a spare, the radio hut was gone.
Finally, she heard the radio appeal to all ships to be on the alert for traces of the weather ship and to go to her assistance if spotted. The storm warning and order was repeated. Three Navy frigates had been ordered to the Pondoland coast, and Maritime Command was to fly rescue sorties at daylight, if the storm would permit.
Traces? she asked herself in agony. Had there been some further information behind the news bulletins which already presupposed the loss of the weather ship? For a moment she was tempted to telephone again, but she resisted it. She made some tea, put out the light, and let the recurring lighthouse flash be a pulsating, calculable goad across her face all through the long night. When it became colder, she fetched a rug and put it over her knees and pulled on the thick yachting sweater with its strange shoulder design, the one she had worn when she came aboard my ship in harbour. She remembered that too.
She sat and waited, because in her heart she knew, like the other Fairlie women who had waited, the one for the Waratah and the other for the airliner, that the man she loved was not dead.
When the light came, the lighthouse's scalpel no longer cut into her eyes, and she slept in the chair.
When the light came to my eyes, a bright imperative flash cut across the waves under the grey cloud scud. I could not see the signalling ship itself in that wild sea, but that quick, professional clatter of the shutter told me it was a warship. What ship is that?
'Get me a torch-a lamp — anything that signals,' I ordered Smit.
He went below to look. The warship was coming up fast; I began to make out her guns and radar through the water she was throwing over herself. For a moment the sailor in me paused to admire the splendid sight, but my pleasure was rapidly overshadowed by the fact that the warship represented, in the most tangible form, the authority I had defied. A string of explanations raced through my mind, for daylight had shown what a beating the staunch little whaler had taken. The flimsy radiosonde hut had been flattened to the deck; its companion, the radio hut, was still standing drunkenly, one side crumpled and askew. The fragments of the radar antenna, the high direction-finder forward of the funnel and the small stern mast were wrapped together in an inextricable embrace with stanchions and bridge plating which had been torn away. The catwalk for'ard to the bows from the starboard side of the bridge to the harpoon gun platform was bent to the deck in an untidy V. Two heavy steel supports with which it was normally attached to the starboard rail had been snapped off. We had managed to save the stocky foremast from going overboard by trapping the stays, but nevertheless it lay over drunkenly too; the metal outriggers which took the masthead lights seemed somehow to have woven themselves into the ratlines. Normally the harpoon gun was positioned between the flares of the bow, but I had had it removed in Durban, so that the break which it would have afforded to the head seas was missing. As a. result, a solid body of water had smashed on to the foredeck, ripping from its foundations the big winch, which had been thrown upwards through the centre of the bridge windows.