I told him I did, that I had read it, but either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t take it in. His mind was far away on the hills of his youth. ‘Carreg-y-Bwci,’ he murmured. ‘The Hobgoblin Stone. I’ve danced on it as a kid in the moonlight, a great cromlech on its side — and the Black Mountain visible thirty miles away. It never did me any harm,’ he added in a whisper. Then his hand reached out towards me. ‘Or am I wrong then? Was I cursed from that moment?’ The dhow rolled, rolling him with it, and he clutched at his guts, screaming.
I steadied him and he stopped screaming, gulping air and holding on to me very tightly. I got his trousers open at the fly and in the light of my torch could see the neat hole the bullet had punched in his white belly. He wasn’t bleeding now and it looked quite clean, only the skin round it bruised and bluish; but I didn’t dare turn him over to see what was the other side, in the back where it must have come out.
I cleaned his trousers as best I could and all the time I was doing it he was rambling on about the Mab-inogion, and I thought how strange; the only other person ever to talk to me about it was Karen. She’d got it from the travelling library, asking for it specially. And when she had read it she had insisted that I read it, too, the four branches of it containing some of the oldest stories of the Welsh bards. A strange book full of fighting men who were always away from home and wives that gave themselves to any valiant passerby, and everything, it seemed, happening three times over, all the trickery, the treachery, the blazing hopes that led to death. Some of its eleven stories had borne a strange resemblance to the tribal life in the hills where my mother’s people had come from — the feuds, the hates, the courage and the cruelty. And this man talking of the country above Lampeter where Karen and I had stayed one night in a wretched little inn with hardly a word of English spoken to us.
It was just after we were married. I had been on leave from the Gulf and had borrowed her father’s car to drive up to the Snowdonia National Park. Just short of Llanwrtyd Wells I had turned north to look at the Rhandirmwyn dam and we had come out of the wild forested country beyond by way of an old Roman road called the Sarn Helen. I could even remember that huge cromlech lying on its side, the sun shinning as we stopped the car and got out to stand on the top of the earth circle in which it lay, and the late spring snow was like a mantle across the rolling slopes of distant mountains to the south. And as I was zipping up his trousers, hoping he wouldn’t mess them up again, I saw him in my mind’s eye, a wild Welsh kid dancing on that stone in the full light of the moon. A demonstration of natural wickedness, or had he really been cursed? I was too tired to care, too tired to listen any longer to his ramblings. And the stench remained. I left him with some water and dates and got out, back into the hot sun and the brilliance of sea and sky.
By sundown the sea was oily calm, the dhow waddling over the shallow swells with only a slight roll. She would now hold her course for several minutes at a time, so that I was able to examine the rusty old diesel engine in its compartment below the lazarette. I found the fuel tank and a length of steel rod hung on a nail to act as a dipstick. The tank was barely a quarter full. It was quite a big tank, but I had no idea what the consumption was, so no means of calculating how far a quarter of a tank would take us.
The sunset was all purples and greens with clouds hanging on the sea’s eastern rim. Those clouds would be over Pakistan and I wondered whether we’d make it as I stood there munching a date and watching the sun sink behind the jagged outline of the Omani mountains and the colour fade from the sky. To port, night had already fallen over Iran. The stars came out. I picked a planet and steered on that. Lighthouse flashes and the moving lights of passing ships, the dark confusion of the waves — soon I was so sleepy I was incapable of holding a course for more than a few minutes at a time.
Towards midnight a tanker overhauled us, outward-bound from the Gulf. I was steering southeast then, clear of the Straits now and heading into the Gulf of Oman. The tanker passed us quite close and there were others moving towards the Straits. Once a plane flew low overhead. Sometime around 02.00 I fell into a deep sleep.
I was jerked awake by a hand on my face. It was cold and clammy and I knew instantly that he’d come back to me out of the sea into which I’d thrown him. No. I didn’t do it. You must have fallen. I could hear my voice, high-pitched and scared. And then he was saying, ‘You’ve got to keep awake. I can’t steer, you see. I’ve tried, but I can’t — it hurts so.’
I could smell him then and I knew he was real, that I wasn’t dreaming. I was sprawled on the deck and he was crouched over me. ‘And the engine,’ he breathed. ‘It’s old. It eats oil. I can hear the big ends knocking themselves to pieces. It needs oil, man.’
There were cans of oil held by a loop of wire to one of the frames of the engine compartment. The filler cap was missing and there was no dipstick. I poured in half a can and hoped for the best. The engine certainly sounded quieter. Back on the poop I found him collapsed again against the binnacle box and the dhow with its bows turned towards the north star. A tanker passed us quite close, her deck lights blazing, figures moving by the midship derricks which were hoisting lengths of pipe. How I envied the bastards — cabins to go to, fresh water showers, clean clothes and drinks, everything immaculate, and no smell. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was food I wanted most or some ice-cold beer. The cold beer probably. My mouth was parched with the salt, my eyes gritty with lack of sleep. Choffel lay motionless, a dark heap on the deck and the minutes passed like hours.
Strange how proximity alters one’s view of a person, familiarity fostering acceptance. I didn’t hate him now. He was there, a dark bundle curled up like a foetus on the deck, and I accepted him, a silent companion, part of the ship. The idea of killing him had become quite remote. It was my state of mind, of course. I was no longer rational, my body going through the motions of steering quite automatically, while my mind hovered in a trance, ranging back over my life, reality and fantasy all mixed up and Karen merging into Pamela. And that black-eyed girl with a cold cursing me in French and spitting in my face. Guinevere. How odd to name a girl Guinevere.
‘That’s my daughter,’ he said.
I blinked my eyes. He was sitting up, staring at me. ‘My daughter,’ he said again. ‘You were talking about my daughter.’ There was a long silence. I could see her very clearly, the pale clear skin, the square strong features, the dark eyes and the dark hair. ‘She tried to stop me. She didn’t want me to go to sea again — ever.’ He was suddenly talking about her, his voice quick and urgent. ‘We have some caves behind our house. Champignons! Parfait pour les champignons, she said. So we grew mushrooms, and it worked, except we couldn’t market them. Not profitably. She would keep us. That was her next idea. She was a typist. She did a course, you see — secretarial — after she left school. I can earn good money, she said. But a man can’t be kept like that, not by his daughter. He’s not a man if he can’t stand on his own feet…’ His voice faded, a despairing whisper that was thick with something he had to bring up. ‘The Petros Jupiter,’ he breathed. A fish rose, a circle of phosphorus on the dark water behind him. ‘She was in tears she was so angry. They’ll get at you, she said. They’ll get at you, I know they will. And I laughed at her. I didn’t believe it. I thought the Petros Jupiter was all right.’ He choked, spitting something out on to the deck. ‘And now I’ve got a bullet in my guts and I’ll probably die. That’s right, isn’t it? You’ll see to that and she’ll say you murdered me. She’ll kill you if you let me die. She’s like that. She’s so emotional, so possessive. The maternal instinct. It’s very strong in some women. I remember when she was about seven — she was the only one, you see — and I was back from a year’s tramping, a rusty old bucket of a wartime Liberty called St Albans, that was when she first began to take charge of me. There were things to mend — she’d just learned to sew, you see — and cooking… living in France girls get interested in the cuisine very young. She’d mother anything that came her way, injured birds, stray puppies, hedgehogs, even reptiles. Then it was people and nursing. She’s a born nurse, that’s why she works in a clinic, and beautiful — like her mother, so beautiful. Her nature. You know what I mean — so very, very beautiful, so…’ His voice choked, a sobbing sound.