That, in a way, was the end of our adventure. Nothing more happened to us. Nothing more? But, as you see, nothing at all had happened to us. And it was this nothingness that made my vigil over Ruth sleeping in the chair the most nerve-destroying experience of all my life. A clock ticking away quietly on the chimney-piece told me that it was half-past nine. A tear-off calendar lying on a writing-table told me that it was 24 December. Quite correct. All in order.
The hurricane-lamp faded and went out. I lit a lamp, shaded with green silk, that stood on the table amid the waiting supper. The room became cosier, even more human and likeable. I prowled about quietly, piecing together the personality of the man or woman who lived in it. A man. It was a masculine sort of supper, and I found a tobacco jar and a few pipes. The books were excellently bound editions of the classics, with one or two modern historical works. The pictures, I saw now, were Medici reprints of French Impressionists, all save the one over the fireplace, which was an original by Paul Nash.
I tried, with these trivial investigations, to divert my mind from the extraordinary situation we were in. It wouldn’t work. I sat down and listened intently, but there was nothing to hear save the bell and the water – water that stretched, I reminded myself, from here to America. This was one of the ends of the world.
At one point I got up and locked the door, though what was there to keep out? All that was to be feared was inside me.
The fire burned low, and there was nothing for its replenishment. It was nearly gone, and the room was turning cold, when Ruth stirred and woke. At that moment the clock, which had a lovely silver note, struck twelve. “A merry Christmas, my darling,” I said.
Ruth looked at me wildly, taking some time to place herself. Then she laughed and said, “I’ve been dreaming about it. It’s got a perfectly natural explanation. It was like this . . . No . . . It’s gone. I can’t remember it. But it was something quite reasonable.”
I sat with my arm about her. “My love,” I said, “I can think of a hundred quite reasonable explanations. For example, every man in the village for years has visited his Uncle Henry at Bodmin on Christmas Eve, taking wife, child, dog, cat, and canary with him. The chap in this house is the only one who hasn’t got an Uncle Henry at Bodmin, so he laid the supper, lit the fire, and was just settling down for the evening when the landlord of the Lobster Pot thought he’d be lonely, looked in, and said: ‘What about coming to see my Uncle Henry at Bodmin?’ And off they all went. That’s perfectly reasonable. It explains everything. Do you believe it?”
Ruth shook her head. “You must sleep,” she said. “Lay your head on my shoulder.”
We left the house at seven o’clock on Christmas morning. It was slack tide. The sea was very quiet, and in the grey light, standing in the garden at the tip of the crescent, we could see the full extent of the village with one sweep of the eye, as we had not been able to do last night.
It was a lovely little place, huddled under the rocks at the head of its cove. Every cottage was well cared for, newly washed in cream or white, and on one or two of them a few stray roses were blooming, which is not unusual in Cornwall at Christmas.
At any other time, Ruth and I would have said, “Let’s stay here.” But now we hurried, rucksacks on backs, disturbed by the noise of our own shoes, and climbed the path down which we had so cautiously made our way the night before.
There were the stones of black and white. We followed them till we came to the spot where we found the stone with the obliterated name. “And, behold, there was no stone there, but your lost pocket-knife was lying in the heather,” said a sceptical friend to whom I once related this story.
That, I suppose, would be a good way to round off an invented tale if I were a professional story-teller. But, in simple fact, the stone was there, and so was my knife. Ruth took it from me, and when we came to the place where we had left the cliff path and turned into the moor, she hurled it far out and we heard the faint tinkle of its fall on the rocks below.
“And now,” she said with resolution, “we go back the way we came, and we eat our Christmas dinner in Falmouth. Then you can inquire for the first train to Manchester. Didn’t you say there are fogs there?”
“There are an’ all,” I said broadly.
“Good,” said Ruth. “After last night, I feel a fog is something substantial, something you can get hold of.”
South Sea Bubble
Hammond Innes
Location: Sumburgh Head, Shetland.
Time: September, 1973.
Eyewitness Description: “Every now and then I had the sense of a presence on board. It was so strange at times that when I came back from telephoning or collecting parts or stores, I would find myself looking about me as though expecting somebody to be waiting for me. . .”
Author: Ralph Hammond Innes (1914–98), who became one of the century’s most popular novelists with over thirty novels of high adventure, was born in Horsham, Sussex and after being educated at Cranbrook School in Kent became a journalist on the Financial Times. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Artillery, eventually rising to the rank of Major, and also began writing the type of books based on personal experience and exhaustive research that made his name, notably Attack Alarm (1941), based on his experiences as an Anti-Aircraft Gunner during the Battle of Britain. After the war he began his regular schedule of six months’ travelling and six months’ writing to produce an annual novel for his publishers, several of which were filmed, including Hell Below Zero (1954), Campbell’s Kingdom (1957) and The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959). His interest in the supernatural at sea had been evident in his very first book, The Doppelganger (1937), and continued through his career as well as in one of his best short stories, “South Sea Bubble”, written for the Christmas 1973 issue of Punch Magazine. Innes’ knowledge of the sea as an experienced yachtsman and his fascination with its mysteries are very evident.
She lay in Kinlochbervie in the north-west of Scotland, so cheap I should have known there was something wrong. I had come by way of Lairg, under the heights of Arkle, and four miles up the road that skirts the north shores of Loch Laxford I turned a corner and there she was – a ketch painted black and lying to her own reflection in the evening sun.
Dreams, dreams . . . dreams are fine, as an escape, as a means of counteracting the pressures of life in a big office. But when there is no barrier between dream and reality, what then? Draw back, create another dream? But one is enough for any man and this had been mine; that one day I would find the boat of my dream and sail her to the South Seas.
Maybe it was the setting, the loneliness of the loch, the aid of Nordic wildness with the great humped hills of Sutherland as back-cloth and the mass of Arkle cloud-capped in splendour. Here the Vikings had settled. From here men only just dead sailed open boats south for the herring. Even her name seemed right – Samoa.
I bought her, without a survey, without stopping to think. And then my troubles started.
She was dry when I bought her. Nobody told me the agents had paid a man to pump her out each day. If my wife had been alive I would never have been such a fool. But it was an executor’s sale. The agents told me that. Also that she had been taken in tow off Handa Island by a Fraserburgh trawler and was the subject of a salvage claim. With her port of registry Kingston, Jamaica, it explained the low asking price. What they didn’t tell me was that the trawler had found her abandoned, drifting water-logged without a soul on board. Nor did they tell me that her copper sheathing was so worn that half her underwater planking was rotten with toredo.