Her eyes never left mine. She, too, was living on two levels.
'They're not — sacking you!’
'Not quite. On extended leave, pending repairs to the ship and investigations. It will take at least a month to get her shipshape again. My first run of the gauntlet is my interview tomorrow with the C-in-C …'
She laughed softly, and the drops showered through the leaky umbrella.
'Mr Hoskins! There weren't any doubts before, as far as he was concerned, and there'll be fewer now!'
I was at a loss to follow, but she raced on. 'Mr Hoskins and I spent a lot of radio time over you, Ian Fairlie! I don't think he'll find it so strange when I ask for my holiday to coincide with your ship being repaired.'
I held her round her slim waist, pressed hard against mt' and we faced the city and the great mountain. A month! What would we find among those streets and houses, she and I, during those coming weeks which would be ours, inalienably ours, because it was we who would set our hearts' seal upon them?
I drew her round. Her eyes were alight. I looked into their depths.
She smiled. Her smiles seemed to start as light far back in her face and be the distillate of her quiet moments, a kind of gathering together of all the joy which had gone before, as if it were awaiting that one moment for expression.
I held her close.
CHAPTER NINE
'Then give me the position, bearing, and depth of the wreck of the Waratah, and the nature of the phenomenon which sank her.'
The C-in-C leaned sideways, flipped a switch on his intercom, and said crisply, 'Watch that recorder, Perry. This is important.'
The sulky hum of the tape-recording machine limped slightly on a warped cassette. There was no other sound in the big room. The officer was monitoring our conversation-from the next room; the two of us were alone. For hours we had sat like that in his office at Simonstown, once the headquarters of the British South Atlantic Command. For over a century Simonstown was an enclave of the Royal Navy at the tip of the African continent, and the room was impregnated with that long occupancy. Under a huge painting of the sinking of the famous Birkenhead troopship off the Cape was a signed letter from the first German Kaiser eulogizing the men in her who had gone steadfastly and unflinchingly to their deaths. A faded print showed a steam-cum-sail warship attacking a land stockade. The title hit me — HMS Hermes!
Only yesterday, on the deck of my ship, everything had changed. One chapter had closed, another had opened. We should have been free to have taken the Mini and lost ourselves inland — away from the sea — somewhere among the ine-rich earth and purple mountains of the Cape; or gone laughing and skiing in the snow; to have drunk wine; simply to have been with one another. Mr Hoskins had readily agreed to her leave and we found ourselves together, a little uncertain and greatly excited about our weeks ahead together. In that spirit I had brushed aside the significance of my appointment with the C-in-C; I'll be back in an hour, I told her, arranging to meet her nearby at an eccentric aunt's who kept a thirty-acre wild garden under the batteries of the naval base.
Now almost the whole day had passed. When I had first been shown in, the C-in-C had been curt.
The Weather Bureau has requested me to conduct a one-man investigation on its behalf into the damage suffered by the Walvis Bay and the causes of it,' he told me. The Bureau itself has no experience of maritime matters.' He stared at me penetratingly. 'As well you know.' He gave a throaty, mirthless chuckle. They nearly lost the one ship they had. Both the Bureau and I felt it was logical for me to act, since the Navy has already been so closely implicated in this. . uh. . incident concerning your ship and the storm order. Kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.'
I had decided the previous day, after Tafline had left me, that my best defence of my actions would be to make a clean breast of the whole Waratah saga and weather enigmas. I could justify my actions to a sailor, I reasoned, and the C-in-C was a sailor. He had boasted publicly of his descent from the Sea Beggars of William the Silent. The emotionless moon face and rather flabby eye-sockets gave no hint of the iron personality in whose hands lay the destiny of Britain's great trade and oil routes round the Cape. In line with my decision, I had brought with me for the interview a mass of Waratah documents, as well as a scale model of the liner I had originally begged from Lloyd's of London.
It was not, however, an interview but a trial.
For hours I had expounded, argued, reasoned, explained, sought to justify. I had shown him on the model a hundred technicalities which might have caused the liner's end. I had gone into every facet of the contradictory storm weather which the Waratah and the Walvis Bay had shared.
The C-in-C had been a good listener. He ordered mid-morning coffee; his only relaxation was to get up and speak to a budgie in a cage which repeated after him, 'Don't talk about ships and shipping.'
Ten generations in his ancestry since the war,’ he had remarked with a ghost of a smile. 'Still says the same damn thing.'
It was the only warmth I saw.
The C-in-C had sent the officer who was in charge of the big tape-recorder into an ante-room, while he himself kept an eye on the revolving cassettes. I appreciated his gesture of privacy between us. Nonetheless, every word, every hesitation of mine, was remorselessly logged. Now my throat constricted. Should I answer, south of the Bashee? I remembered Lee-Aston's reaction.
I wanted to get up and tear that grinding cassette from its socket. Its rhythm willed me to say, a ship without a soul!
I looked away, fiddling with my documents.
The C-in-C said in his deep bass. ‘I have three warships in the area. Lee-Aston's a good man. Has a great interest in these sort of things — weather, currents, seabeds. I sent him to the French inquiry when one of our subs on delivery nearly sank a Frenchman in a collision off Southern Spain. There are all sorts of tricky currents and sets where the Med meets the Atlantic'
Lee-Aston! I wish I had known. It would have made all the difference to my approach.
The C-in-C bridled in his chair. 'Well, man?’
‘I am uncertain what my position was at the time,' I mumbled.
'Captain Fairlie, you have based your entire justification for your extraordinary actions on your need to find out where the Waratah sank, and what sank her. I ask you, where did she sink, and you say, I am uncertain of the position.'
'That is correct.'
'How far are you uncertain?’
'I was south of the Bashee. My dead reckoning became suspect once I became aware that although I was actually supposed to be doing thirteen knots, I felt I was in fact losing way over the ground.'
'Captain Fairlie!' snapped the C-in-C. 'No destroyer ever laid a smokescreen like you are trying to do. You have talked ceaselessly, articulately, for two hours. At one straight question you dodge behind a screen of words and uncertainties.'
'If I had found the Waratah I would have solved one of the greatest mysteries of the sea …' I stumbled on.
The C-in-C threw his big bulk back in the chair with a snort.
'But you chose to try, nevertheless, using a valuable ship and highly expensive scientific equipment. You defied orders to get out of the storm area. Why?'
The oil rigs,' I said helplessly. 'I tried to tell you…'
'Again, nothing but a smokescreen of words!'
'My actions were inseparably connected with the safety of the oil rigs.'