‘Went quite well really.’ He looked tense, the muscle on the side of his jaw twitching slightly, his oilskins dripping water. ‘Rain’s taking off now.’ I could almost feel him trying to unwind. ‘Didn’t like it running in. Lot of tide around here. Not too sure of the chart. Conditions didn’t help either.’ He was pulling off his oilskins. ‘What about some coffee?’
‘I’ll go and see about it,’ I said.
‘Thanks, and put something in it. You’ll find a bottle of Scotch in my cabin.’ He was already at the chart table, leaning over it and at the same time keeping an eye on the echo-sounder. Luke was standing by the helmsman.
‘Coffee?’ I asked him, and he nodded.
When I got back with four mugs, some sandwiches and the bottle of whisky, the rain had almost stopped and the light on Double Island Point showed as a distant flash low down on our starboard quarter. Our course for the gap between the Saumarez and Frederick reefs took us close inshore the whole 100-mile length of Fraser Island. Only when Sandy Cape was abeam would we be in deep water. Holland drained his coffee, put the mug on the chart table and turned to me. ‘I’ll relieve you at four. That all right with you?’
I glanced at the clock at the back of the wheel-house. ‘That gives you barely two hours’ sleep.’
He nodded. ‘Can’t be helped. It’s the same for both of us. Just keep your eye on the depth and the radar. Call me if you’re in any doubt. The Double Island light gives you a perfect back bearing, and if the rain holds off, you should have it in sight until just before I relieve you.’
It gave me a certain sense of satisfaction that a man who spent his whole life navigating the island-infested waters of the South West Pacific should have sufficient confidence in my navigation to leave me in charge of his ship running close along the shore of an island I had never seen before. ‘Just don’t go to sleep, that’s all,’ he added as he went out.
I sent Luke to check that the bow doors had been properly secured. He was gone a long time, finally reporting that he had had to root out the crew again and oversee the job himself. ‘They don’t think it important.’
‘And you?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘We never do it before.’
‘That’s because you could always run for shelter under the lee of an island. This voyage you can’t.’
He stayed with me for the first hour of my watch. It was a help, for once the effect of the coffee had worn off the whisky in it took over, and I began to have difficulty keeping my eyes open. The rain, the constant strain of peering into the darkness, the nervous tension of the beaching and the fact that I had been on watch now for almost seven hours, all in a climate that was quite different from England, had made me very sleepy. I was sorry when he finally left me. We hadn’t talked much, but his company had been comforting.
Alone, I paced back and forth, thinking about Holland’s problems, wondering where his sister was, vague fantasies flitting through my mind. Oddly enough, it was those damned stamps and the fate of the Holland Trader that were the recurring theme of my thoughts. There had to be some connection, some connection that was relevant, not just to what had happened in 1911, but to now, to this ship, to Jona Holland, Perenna, that wretched arrowhead, all those masks and pictures in the Aldeburgh house.
My brain went round and round, chewing at it like a mincing machine, like the echo-sounder interminably making its trace. Periodically I stood watching it, half mesmerised — 22 fathoms, 21, 24, 18, 20 … and then I would go out on to the bridge wing, take a bearing with the hand compass on the Double Island light, now barely showing above the horizon. And all the time my mind half occupied with strange thoughts that gradually resolved themselves into the conviction that what had happened to the Holland Trader would happen to the Perenna, that we’d mysteriously disappear to become a ghost ship, a latter-day Flying Dutchman damned for ever to steam the South West Pacific, always heading for Bougainville and the Buka Passage, but never making it. Lost in the Coral Sea — 19 fathoms, 20, 18, 17 … I was back at the echo-sounder but couldn’t remember how I got there. A coral reef? But that would have left her a wreck with at least her mast and her upper works showing. A volcanic disturbance? That would account for it. And there was a volcano on Bougainville, something about Rabaul also; hadn’t it been half destroyed about the turn of the century? Or the sea cocks, perhaps they had been opened, in error, or purposely. There could have been an explosion in the engine-room, boilers bursting, something that had blown a hole in her bottom. But the stamps. And that cover. There would have been a letter inside it. What the hell had it said? To get that stamp, the man must have been on board the ship, and I wondered whether that half-breed aborigine up in Cooktown still had the letter or could remember what it said. Even if he couldn’t read, his mother might have told him. I wished Perenna Holland were here. So many questions, and the need of somebody to talk to, somebody to share the half-formed fears that had begun to take root in my imagination.
‘Lait, Kepten.’
I turned, peering vaguely towards the helmsman, my eyes barely open, my thoughts still confused. ‘Where? On the port bow?’ But the Sandy Cape light was still 50 miles away.
‘Lukluk!’ He was pointing to starboard.
I saw it then, two tiny pinpoints widely separated. A ship south-bound down the coast. I noted it in the log, and the time, which was 03.47. Only another thirteen minutes before I called Holland. Watching the slowly changing bearing of that ship gave me something to occupy my mind, and ten minutes later I went to Holland’s cabin and gave him a shake. He started up abruptly, his eyes looking wild. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
‘Your watch,’ I said.
He shook his head, smiling thinly, his hair hanging over his eyes limp with sweat. ‘Dreaming.’ He pushed his hand up over his face. ‘I dreamed we were aground and then … ’ He shook his head again. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Just coming up to o-four-hundred.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll be glad of some air.’ He swung his legs off the bunk and sat there staring at me. ‘You all right?’
‘Tired, that’s all. Everything’s okay. We’re in seventeen fathoms with the coast about eight miles off.’ I left him then, and a few minutes later he came into the wheelhouse, his hair slicked back and looking fresher. The helmsman had already been relieved and I didn’t linger.
Back in my cabin I didn’t bother to switch on the light, undressing quickly, dumping my clothes on the foot of the bunk. And then, as I went to get into it, my bare feet stumbled against something on the floor. I just managed to save myself, cursing, my hand on the bunk and something moving under it. Then the bunk reading light went on, and I was standing there in my vest and pants, staring at her stupidly. She was sitting up, the orange-red hair falling across her face, her eyes blinking in the light. ‘Sorry if I startled you.’ She wasn’t wearing much, some sort of a slip, and she was smiling a little uncertainly. ‘I borrowed your bunk. I was a bit tired. I hope you don’t mind.’
I shook my head, still feeling dazed. It was her bag I had stumbled against. ‘How did you get here? You weren’t at the beach.’
‘Yes, I was. I was on that first truck. You talked to the driver, remember? I kept low because I was afraid Jona would send me ashore if he knew.’
‘You were taking a chance with a man like that,’ I muttered, remembering the hard-bitten face, that crack about a harem. She laughed and shook her head, her hand reaching up to a leather thong round her neck. ‘How did you persuade him to smuggle you on board?’