She did not reply, but took three steps across the cabin, as if pacing it for size. From the inward-angled bookshelf — designed to prevent my books falling out in a seaway-she picked out a blue-covered one.
‘I suppose a hermit finds compensations in his cell,’ she murmured, as if to herself. 'Compensations!' She turned to me and quoted the title. ‘ "The Antarctic Pilot, comprising the coasts of Antarctica and all the islands south of the usual route of vessels."' She did not look up from the print, but put it back among half a dozen others of the same ilk, reciting their titles volume by volume.
The irritation which I had felt earlier from the pressures of getting the weather ship to sea returned, and I was on the point of asking her whether she expected me to spend my leisure hours at sea listening to mushy radio programmes or gazing at pin-ups. But her action stopped my comment. The bookshelf had been only a ploy, a kind of vestibule, as it were, to her true purpose.
She went quickly to the big framed photograph of a ship on the bulkhead, turned, and faced me.
My eyes, she told me afterwards, went blank like iceblink in the sky when the great bergs haze a blue Southern Ocean sky with their dead reflection.
She waited, but this time I did not respond. She stared at me and I at her. I should have let her go then.
She had taken another inexorable step.
She had stepped under the photograph of the Waratah.
She frowned and dropped her eyes from their long penetrating assessment of mine.
'I have been very, very presumptuous,' she said softly. The slight shake of the head was more a plea in extenuation than in defence. She rapped the glass face of the wind gauge with a finger. This time it was not to share, but to probe, its secret. 'One cannot see an altar and not be awed, even if the altar of someone's life is. .' It was half a question, half an assertion '. . the wind?'
I remained silent. She turned and stared at the photograph of the Waratah. I heard the clump and thump of the crew on the deck above, and somewhere a gull screamed in rage. The points of her hair in her neck, short like a boy's, curled where they touched the polo collar of her jersey.
She ran her left fingers round the heavy frame of the photograph, speaking more softly still, addressing it almost, not me.
'Can it really mean so much-simply this photograph of an old high-funnelled liner with a signature in each corner?'
I seemed to hear myself reply; I kept my voice level. 'You can't read the name-photographers weren't that good in 1909. If you could, you'd see that it was — Waratah.'
Only on rare other occasions in my knowledge of her did she give that quick jerky sigh, half intake of breath, half a smothered exclamation. Still she did not turn from the ship.
'Waratah’
The sound of the name spoken by someone else was unreal to me; I had lived with it, buried, for so long; now it seemed to stir in its grave-clothes at her startled exclamation.
'I suppose more has been written about her fate and more speculations let fly than about any other ship which ever sailed the Seven Seas,' I ventured.
She replied hesitatingly, but her concentration was on my reaction, not on her own words. 'There was some appalling tragedy connected with her-I don't know the details-'
She told me later that I spoke mechanically: the words seemed to have been learned by heart.
"The Waratah was one of the finest ships of her day-before the First World War. She was big for those days, too — 10,000 tons. She was brand new, on her second voyage only. She sailed from Durban bound for Cape Town one winter's night in 1909 with 211 people on board. Next day, nearly a couple of hundred miles to the south, off the coast of Pondoland, she was spoken to by another steamer. Waratah exchanged signals; there was no hint of trouble. Then, a few hours later near East London, she disappeared. Vanished. She was never seen or heard of again, and no wreckage or bodies were ever found, not so much as a matchbox. Just like that. In broad daylight. In sight of the coast. Ships behind and ahead of her. It remains one of the greatest mysteries of the sea.'
I wanted to hide my tenseness from those clear eyes. So I gestured. 'Read the signatures on the photograph.' She read, ' "J. E. Ilbery, Master."' 'Go on.'
' "Douglas Fairlie, First Officer." ‘
Someone tapped on the cabin door, but we ignored it.
'There's no need to go on, is there?' she said.
I shook my head.
‘I repeat, I was very presumptuous,' she went on. 'I had no idea I was treading into a place of such grief.'
She looked startled at my unnatural laugh.
'Douglas Fairlie was my grandfather. I never even saw him, nor did my father, for that matter. Douglas Fairlie was lost in the Waratah over sixty years ago.'
The line of her lips was puzzled. 'But you — it's sixty years — is it grief, still?'
I said brusquely, 'Look at the other photograph.'
'It's an airliner — South African Airways.'
The cabin seemed hot, and I slipped off my oilskin. I did not join her at the photographs.
I'm sorry, I forgot the signature's on the back. I'll tell you what it says: "Ian, what do you think of my flying Gemsbok’ Love from Dad." Do you follow?'
She said slowly, 'The South African Airways airliner Gemsbok crashed while coming into land at East London. All on board were killed.'
'The pilot was Captain Bruce Fairlie,' I added. 'No bodies or wreckage were ever found.'
She looked from one photograph to the other and said very deliberately, Those are Waratah words.'
'The Waratah vanished near East London without trace,' I said. 'The Gemsbok vanished without trace near East London.
Bruce Fairlie commanded the Gemsbok. Douglas Fairlie was first officer of the Waratah. ,
The papers were full of it — the Gemsbok was the worst air crash until then in South Africa.'
'It's four years ago now.'
'Wasn't there something about the pilot dying at the controls. .? I'm sorry, I mean your father. .'
I heard myself talking in that flat, official jargon again. To hide — what?
The court of inquiry found that the possibility of my father having died of a heart attack at the controls as the Viscount came in to land could not be ruled out. .'
She gave a slightly perceptible, impatient toss of her short hair and frowned. She had lost me for the moment; it warmed me to be wanted back.
So I said, 'What I am trying to say is that my father and my grandfather died at roughly the same place, at an interval of over sixty years, one in a fine ship and the other in a fine plane.'
She added, 'And from neither were any bodies or wreckage ever found. Yet the son-the grandson-is at sea, on as hazardous a job as is possible in these days of push-button safety.'
'I told you, it suits me.'
'Did he — your father, the pilot-approve of your single-handed ocean racing?'
'Touleier came after the Gemsbok crash. The sea comes first with the Fairlies. In my father that love mutated into flying. He acknowledged that it was so. My brother too.'
'Your brother, too?'
‘I have a younger brother who is a South African Air Force pilot — Buccaneer sea-jets. They say that if you can handle a yacht, it gives you a feeling to handle a plane. Perhaps there's really not much between us either way.'