The coastline is cut by innumerable rivers, and each one seems to have an exquisite lagoon at its mouth. In the first dim light I could see solid columns of mist marching down each river to the sea, shaped and squared by the cliffs on either side.
One- two- three flashes.
Bashee Mouth light.
Tafline screamed from below.
For a moment I sat rigid. Her voice seemed to hang against the dark backdrop of the cliffs, the shadowy forests and the river mouth white with breakers.
I raced to the cabin.
She was sitting up on the bunk, wide-eyed, shaking. 'The storm, Ian! That wind …!'
I held her, trembling. In the dim light coming through the porthole I could see that consciousness had not come fully into her eyes.
'My darling, the wind is gone. It's a quiet, still dawn. There's no storm.'
‘I heard. .' she shook her head as if to clear it. 'But he stood here, and his oilskins were wet.1 She buried her face against me. 'Thank God, it's you, my darling. It was only a dream.'
I soothed her. But the strange, deep eyes were full of shadows.
‘I can see him now, standing by the bunk,' she said, smiling a little wryly. 'I could hear the wind, and his oilskins were dripping'
'Who was standing?' I asked gently, cold at the recollection of Sawyer
'It was just an ordinary person,' she said hesitatingly. 'No not him. There was nothing like that Just a man.' She looked at me searchingly. 'His face was like yours, a little. I could hear the gale. His oilskins were streaming wet, it's all so vivid. Why, what is the matter?'
It was I who was trembling. She had on almost nothing except a thin slip of a thing; I could see her breasts and her body now where she had pushed aside the bedclothes in her agitation.
Where before I had seen the mystic the sea-ancestry, the knight with unadorned armour against the panoply of the Waratah in the lists. Now I saw the woman.
She sat and held my gaze. She extended her arm to touch me. Not taking her eyes from me, she slipped off the wispy thing. She brought my hands to her breasts in the tender lycanthropy of love. We searched for each other's eyes, lips, hair. Then her lips went cold. Her body lost its fervour to be one with mine.
She drew back. She wept — a quiet, passionless sobbing, a grief as deep, it seemed, as the passion of the moment before.
'We could love, we could forget,' she said softly, 'but we can't forget, and it would come and take our love away from us. It would only be pretending. You are committed and I am committed. We are not free to commit our love until we find the Waratah. I said before, and my body and my heart say it now, until we are free of this burden, we will not be able to realize our love properly.'
All I could say, was: 'We're at the place now. South of the Bashee.'
She ran her hands over her breasts and down her thighs; she clasped them round her knees and hid her face. She gave a last broken, half-sob.
I moved to comfort her, but she shook her head without looking up. 'I'll dress and come up to you in the cockpit.'
As I went to the door, she said in a smothered voice, 'When we have the Waratah, I am yours.'
She was tense, alert, when she came on deck as if being at the Bashee would in itself solve everything. She had come across at once to me at the wheel. She did not kiss me, or stand close, but faced me from the other side of the helm, her hands warm on mine by contrast with the stainless steel circle of the wheel.
‘I know now you will never love me less,' was all she said.
But as we ghosted through the placid water towards the land, I felt her tenseness and disappointment growing at the sight of the empty sea. With daylight, we could make out the deep cleft the Bashee makes between the forested hills, the signal station on a grassy cliff with more forest for a backdrop, and a group of thatched holiday rondavels nearby.
Then the bubble of pent-up feeling burst.
'It's so ordinary!' she exclaimed. 'There's just nothing here, Ian!'
I took in the sails and Touleier lay in the easy swell, perhaps a mile offshore.
'It's the normality of it like this which breaks down the picture of whatever I saw in Walvis Bay's path that night,' I replied. I was tired, drained of feeling. Like that moment at the flower-sellers, I hated the Waratah. But, again, I knew she was right.
'Yet,' she went on, and I still recall her vehemence-'where we are now, maybe right under our keel, a great liner went down and an airliner too. I feel I want to tear the sea apart and look.'
Tear apart! I remember her words now: the answer was all too improbable, too simple, when one came to think of it. I wonder if we would have accepted it, had we known then, without having to live it out?
She jumped on the rail and gazed astern, as if to probe that gentle sea for the undefined spot where Alistair had died.
'I didn't expect anything like this!' She was puzzled, angry. ‘I took it for granted there would be a sinister sea, a sinister setting, somehow. My reason tells me your brother died somewhere right here. You nearly did, too, but I see nothing. We have the most concrete proof that your father sent you a message from "south of the Bashee", but where, where?'
She gestured helplessly. One of the big supertankers ploughed south; a coaster was coming up fast behind us, closer inshore.
'The sea has a lying face,' I retorted. 'I know. I know how savage and remorseless it can be, this stretch of apparently guileless water, and it does cover up the Waratah’s secret; we have narrowed it down to here.’
She looked at me and said: 'Maybe I was wrong to make you come. Maybe I am wrong about the Waratah. If I am wrong about her, then I am wrong about last night.'
I gave the wheel to Jubela and sat beside her, looking south-west.
'No,' I replied. ‘I am the only person who has seen the other side of the coin and lived to tell it.' 'That's what I believe.'
'Everything else, all speculation for sixty years, every sea and air search ends here, south of the Bashee.'
It is not enough simply to be here, Ian. There must be something more.'
'The murderers of my brother, my father and my grandfather, were never brought to trial.'
'What do you mean, Ian?'
‘The sea, and the wind.’
She gestured at the gentle sea, turning a deep blue-green in the new light. 'It seems impossible to credit.'
'Except for the Skeleton Coast, there are more wrecks to the square mile along this coast than anywhere else in the world,' I replied.
Tafline shivered, and she was silent a long time, staring at the empty sea. Then she said. 'If this thing — whatever it is-occurs only at long intervals, what is the use of our coming so soon after it hit at Walvis Bay! I was crazy to suggest we come in a small boat like Touleier. We're simply risking our. necks to no purpose, if the same wind and sea conditions recur.'
My thoughts were only half on my reply. The Waratah now held to ransom the slim, lovely creature beside me; my throat constricted at the recollection of her a few hours earlier. Find the Waratah and find my love! For her sake, for my sake, there must be no mistake!
I answered, far from convinced: 'It's just the other way round. The bigger the ship, the less chance it has, because it has a much longer length exposed to a wave. A sixty-foot wave would threaten a long ship whereas a small thing like Touleier would simply rise to it.'
She did not seem quite reassured and did not reply. Then she turned and I found my pulses racing at those deep eyes.