Scend of the Sea

She faced the other photograph, of the airliner, perhaps so that I could not see her face.

'He's dead, isn't he?'

'Yes. I saw him go in.'

'You saw him go in! The papers didn't say that.'

I told her briefly of our rendezvous, the beat-up of the weather ship by the Buccaneer, the way Alistair's lights vanished.

'Mock attacks on shipping are strictly forbidden in flight orders,' I added. 'Alistair knew that. Discipline is razor-edged in the Buccaneers. He simply laughed it off when I raised it.. '

She came and stood by me at the chart. She had never been as close to me as this. The line of her profile was exquisite against the chart's parchment. The tell-tale question mark with its circle at the end of the plot near the Bashee Mouth told her everything.

There? Waratah.

'Waratah — there,' I replied.

'Was it your idea, or Alistair's, or both?'

It was the only time she hurt me. I did not know that the detachment almost in the curt query meant that she had clamped on the rebellious emotions which, when she saw me, threatened to run riot.

I replied slowly. 'Almost the last words Alistair said to me about the Waratah were that if he had me in his squadron, he'd ground me and send me to a psychologist.'

She pretended to be studying the chart. I thought the way her lips moved meant that she was repeating the plot to herself. She could not trust herself to speak.

I waited, and she waited in her own unique fashion, shaping things her way. She wanted to give me the comfort I needed, soothe the rawness of having killed my own brother, and the censure of the authorities. How then did she manage to square that with the cyclone of feeling within her heart?

I had to lean down to hear her murmur. 'It reached out for you, too, that night — remember that. And I bless it while I hate it, whatever it might be, that it missed.'

She looked up from the chart and I saw her eyes, and the double pain was gone. Currents greater than Agulhas were carrying us along; our incomplete words were the snow-plumes blown from the iceberg while the great mass of it remains out of sight, inarticulate, known but only hinted at.

'I came to the cabin that night,' I said. 'I — remembered.'

'I… I… watched a lighthouse. I was — aware.'

There were a thousand banalities which I might have resorted to, but each one would have denied her, Tafline. She pretended to be studying that circle on the chart ringing the question-mark whose name was Waratah; she played unconsciously with the big navigational dividers with her left hand. Her hair was short and soft, and I could see the white skin in the nape of her neck as she bent forward.

I said, picking my words in order to navigate my tumultuous inward current. 'Walvis Bay did not catch it immediately. Alistair's lights went out, all of a sudden. He had started to bank. I thought — Feldman did too-that he was coming back. The Air Force refused to believe that. Their plot put Alistair well to the north of where I last saw him. They said my positions were too uncertain to work on. They maintained that, because the weather was bad, he would have gone.straight on to make his attack on East London, once he had identified the Walvis Bay.’

She still played with my dividers and pencils.

'What about the low-flying?'

‘I’ll have to do my best at the inquiry. It'll be held in public. I should hate them to put his death down to negligence, or breach of discipline, or anything that he really wasn't'

The search hasn't been called off yet, though they've found nothing,' she replied. 'You talk of an inquiry already.' She looked up at me then. 'You believe he's dead, don't you, Ian?'

'Yes. When his lights snapped off, that's when it happened. Don't ask me why, but it is so. If I had been a few miles further to the south, I might have seen what took him.'

She made a quick gesture to take in the shattered photograph and the wrecked deck above our heads. She lifted a corner of the veil on her night of agony.

'If you had been to the south, it would have been Alistair and not you I would be talking to now-if ever I had got in touch with him.'

She drew an unconscious pattern with the V of the dividers: its apex settled on my circled question mark, and a pencil on either side completed the doodle. She had formed the letter 'W'.

She smiled a little crookedly. 'It always comes up that way, doesn't it?'

'Yes,' I answered. 'It's been that way for a long time with me.'

‘I didn't know it could be so big,' she murmured, and I had to crane my neck to hear her speak, as if to the chart. 'A dead ship, ruling the living. Superimposed on everything one does, says, thinks. Reaching into recesses. Reaching into. .' She did not go on. I longed to hear more, but there was her curb.

She gave a slight shake of the head as if to dispel her thoughts, and said levelly, ‘I want to know from you, yourself what happened that night.'

'The gale was working up to full strength,’ I said mechanically. 'A full-blooded southwesterly buster. After Alistair vanished, I knew that Walvis Bay couldn't take much more at the Waratah's speed.. ’

She glanced sharply at me for my reconstruction and her lips twitched, but she did not interrupt.

'Then, when the speed was off her, I sensed that something-don't ask me specifically what, because I've thought and thought about the answer and haven't got it_-something maybe in the conjunction of the gale and the Agulhas Current, something maybe about the counter-current with the weight of that gale behind it, something maybe about an unexplained upcurrent caused by the sea-bottom contour thereabouts — something was different. Jubela sensed it too. It was what so bedevilled things later when they pressed me as to my exact position when I last saw Alistair. Frankly, I don't know. Not within miles.'

'They found a lifejacket,' she said. 'The papers were full of it. Near Port St John's.'

I shrugged. The drama was starting to get cold for the newspapers after a couple of days, I expect. I heard about it on the radio. It seems it was the sort of lifejacket ski-boaters wear.'

She came close to me, searching my face. My pulse raced. The shadows were in her eyes.

'Why did they push you aside, Ian, the very man who saw the Buccaneer vanish? They had everything to gain from consulting you.'

'I defied an explicit order from the Weather Bureau and the Navy to clear out of the storm area. I still have to answer for it. I smashed up a fine ship and thousands' worth of valuable equipment. They won't forgive me for that in a hurry. When I tried to explain my motives to the Navy … I am branded as unreliable, overwrought, a nut chasing a crazy notion. That is why they wouldn't listen to me about the search area, despite the fact that I made no secret of the fact that I wasn't sure of my position at the time.'

'South of the Bashee?'

She let the words fall slowly, deliberately.

I nodded, and there was silence.

Then I said. 'South of the Bashee! You'll find with this thing that the same words keep coming back, recurring like a symptom in a disease that mocks every change of treatment Some have a rhythm, and seem to beat about in your brain. You claw for meaning, light, anything. Bashee — I don't know what it means. The experts say it is lost in time. Yet I beat against it!'

I pulled myself up. 'Walvis Bay wasn't in danger immediately after the Buccaneer disappeared,' I resumed. 'At that stage she was taking a bad beating, but she wasn't damaged. Yet-there was something peculiar about those seas which I've tried again and again to define. It was the same for all of us.' ‘Us?’