Acts of Mutiny (40 page)

‘I’ve got to find some people. Can you help?’

‘Sorry. You can’t come in here.’

She thought she recognised the purser’s voice. ‘It’s Mrs Kendrick. I’m here about the Cootes’ daughter. We’ve got her. She’s been badly burnt. We’re not sure. We’re trying to find the parents before she …’ The torch beam dropped. Her eyes adjusted a little. She could pick out the purser’s shape. He let go her arm and played his torch across the floor by way of answer.

Revealed were the dead. She realised that at once. The dance space was being used for the casualties. They had brought them up and laid them here. It was an obvious, sensible thing to do. Nevertheless she was horrified. The torch showed up her shipmates, half-known faces she recognised in the sweep of its passing. They had teeth and hair. They wore clothes she was familiar with. They moved, some of them, with the pitch of the ship. But they were all dead.

‘See what I mean, ma’am. No passengers, please. It’s for the best, I’m afraid. You’d better leave this to us.’

She swallowed. ‘Russell and Clodagh Coote?’

‘Couldn’t say, ma’am. As you can see there’s quite a few of them.’ He flashed his torch back on her and then showed her the door. ‘You’d really better go.’

‘All right.’

The sluice of rain hit her like something thrown. The force of the wind pinned her momentarily to the superstructure. But it was better on deck, better than that shifting morgue, though she found she was shivering uncontrollably. She hit her arms with her fists. ‘Come on!’ The queue was moving. People were hoisting themselves gingerly over the rail. She pushed aft against the flow.

Robert embraced her when she got back to him. But she shook her head. ‘They would have come looking for her. They wouldn’t have gone off in the boats without her. If they were alive they’d have come by now. Wouldn’t they? Mitchell would have come.’

‘You think they were among the people who were trapped?’

‘I saw them. In the dance space.’

‘Russell and Clodagh?’

‘No. Just … rows of them. Bodies. Rows of them.’ The tears sprang up against the rain. She buried her face in his soaked shirt. ‘Robert, this is terrible. I mean really terrible. And the worst thing is that it feels like our fault.’

Mary Garnery had not moved from her kneeling position beside Finlay. Now she looked up. ‘I’ve been meaning to say,’ she fixed her attention on Robert, ‘I admired what you did.’

Penny stared back at her, still in Robert’s arms. She could not tell what the other woman had in mind. Was it his saving of Finlay? Penny pictured again the sight of her lover emerging with the injured girl, hours ago. Now his black curls had been plastered down by the rains. Or was it how he spoke out at the meeting? She recalled Mr Barnwell’s face, and smiled despite everything. Or was it perhaps, after all, that Mary admired what they had done together, becoming lovers, and had spoken to reassure her. Penny doubted it. She felt guilty and frightened. She felt Mary wished only to have dealings with Robert. What was the matter with her, this difficult, emaciated woman who took nothing, and would give nothing away?

Mary broke her gaze and looked down at Finlay again. But she said something else. ‘You must both come and visit me – when all this is over. Come to Sydney, will you? Both of you?’

Penny said, ‘Thank you, Mary. We will.’ It was suddenly as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

‘If she doesn’t get some sort of treatment …’ Mary’s voice faltered away, and then became firm again and matter of fact. ‘Still, shouldn’t be long now.’

It was three o’clock by Robert’s spattered watch when the quartermaster mustered them, with the megaphone, to join the queues. The destroyer had left for Darwin half an hour ago.

At the head of the ladders, by torchlight, the officer said, ‘You may be on the water for some time.’ He wore an oilskin against the rain. His eyes were strangely visible, in the hood made of his sou’wester brim.

‘Yes?’ said Robert, bracing himself on the rail.

‘We’re waiting for the Australian Navy. Another little destroyer. And there’s a frigate coming up by all accounts. They shouldn’t be too long. The order’s been given.’ The wind whipped the words away. ‘Better to get you all away from this bloody death-trap as soon as possible. Every boat’s been given the instruction to pull for it. The able-bodied among you should see to that straight away, as soon as your boat’s full.’

‘But what about all the other people?’ Penny indicated the stern of the ship. ‘They’ve been waiting as long as us. More cramped. More dangerous. What’s the situation? What are the casualty figures?’

The officer’s sigh was audible above the weather. The torch’s beam flashed on to Finlay. ‘The captain is with them now. We’ve done all we can, ma’am, for the time being. He’ll give them the solemn assurance of what we know to be the case: that another ship will be here within the hour. The fire hasn’t gone through to them, you see. And probably won’t. Actually they’re safest where they are for the minute. But it’s a terrible situation, I know. The worst decisions have to be made. Now if you’ll get into the boat please, and we’ll have your Lite girl dropped down to you in a sling. Badly hurt, is she?’

Penny and Robert climbed down into the pitching boat, which jostled dangerously alongside the
Armorica
’s hull, one in a line of three. It was nearly full with people they knew only by sight – faces and families with whom they had shared the voyage but loosely. They took their place near the bow, and then looked up, waiting for Finlay.

‘Ready!’ Penny shouted, as they swung on the wave. The rain, which had eased for a minute or so, grew worse again. Spray from above and below dashed off the white metal into her face.

But Mary called down, ‘I’m not coming!’

‘What? Why? Mary, please hurry!’

‘I can’t. I’m not coming.’ Mary thrust her head out defiantly over the rail. The torchlight silhouetted her hair, loose and soaked and haphazard about her unguessable features like black seaweed. The shoulders of her ruined jacket made a stark, obstinate outline. ‘I’m going to stay! I’m insisting on staying. Someone has to! There’s no sign of trouble yet. I can stand it much hotter than this.’

‘Mary! What d’you mean? Do hurry! Please!’

But Mary’s figure disappeared from its station and Penny was thrown back against the gunwale of the lifeboat, as the ship, lying awkwardly right across the sea, found herself rolled in an ungainly wallow between ridges. The boat smacked hard into the side, and, in desperation, the two men holding her on her lines cast off. She drifted free, leaving Penny’s cry unanswered. ‘Mary! What about Finlay?’

In pitch dark for another two hours before daybreak, the company of the lifeboat endured, stunned, waterlogged, saying little. Robert and Penny clung together. Presumably so did their neighbours, for the Lite craft so leaped and skidded that it was a matter of holding on for dear life. There was an attempt at the oars, an attempt to understand the shelter that could, theoretically, be rigged. Neither was very successful. One of the ship’s officers slumped in an oilskin cape next to Robert. He was exhausted and had difficulty breathing.

The rain stopped. The thunder went away. Someone near the stern was overcome with persistent tears. The officer woke with a shudder and passed his waterproof along to her. He was dressed in his tropical whites, very faintly visible. ‘Bloody smoke,’ he coughed to Robert. ‘I shall have to bloody give it up.’

Gradually their contact with the
Armorica
was lost. The pinprick glows and needle streaks of her torches became harder and harder to locate. Then, much later it seemed, in the far distance there was a glow of flame-coloured brightness against the black. It was hard to say how long it lasted. Time stretched and contracted under those circumstances, even as the water heaved and raced, twisted, or collapsed suddenly into a dizzying slide. There was a moment when it looked as though the sea all around the distant
Armorica
was on fire. The officer was watching intently. ‘Wish I had my binoculars.’

Robert watched too. He wondered precisely what nautical ghoulishness it was made the other man so keen to see the tragedy magnified.

‘Bastard. I never thought the bastard would do it. If that doesn’t beat bloody everything.’

‘What do you mean?’ Robert asked.

‘If you’ve seen it before you know what to look for. Mum’s the word; but oh, Christ, this is a bloody bad day and no mistake.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No. You wouldn’t. You don’t know what we know, do you. And best you don’t, old son.’

‘Why?’

‘Military matters. Nothing I can say. The daylight’s coming, you see. She’d be visible for miles.’ Then he muttered something under his breath which sounded distinctly like the word ‘torpedo’.

Robert heard himself gasp.

‘I didn’t say anything. Is that understood?’ The officer shifted his position and turned away.

But Robert could not help staring at the
Armorica
from the top of the next wave. And although there could be no hint of phosphorescence in that great churn of a swell which the storm had whipped up, it was almost as though he could see the path of the thing, still there, straight as an arrow towards the now leaping streaks of flame.

Then dawn came, like a light bulb again, and everything was changed. A boat and its collection of people was delivered suddenly out of the dark. On the horizon rose a great plume of black smoke. It appeared to coil and snake into a vast column, widening as it climbed. And then, within twenty minutes as they watched, there was no more sign of it, and the traces of its cloud lifted upwards and faded out.

My lifeboat is much nearer. Smoke billowing, the body of the thing lifts momentarily, as though a whale has mistakenly tried to surface under her keel. We hold our breath, and curiously, there is no sound other than the wind. Then we are in a trough. The roiling column of black flattens and streaks to the south-west. When she comes into view again, the burning
Armorica
sits back in the water, not well.

Now every time a sea lifts us up, while the sky lightens and lightens, we watch the poor creature sit lower and lower in the water. But it is not until about twenty minutes later that there comes the frightful tip-up of her bows against the horizon, by which the fire’s tumult is suddenly extinguished. The sea boils. I watch the twist that reveals all the cloud-wreathed red paint under her water-line. She gathers pace, gathers, and slips away. There is almost a hole in the burning slick. Then nothing. It is unbelievable. It is too much to take in. We have and have not seen.

Hours have passed, perhaps; or perhaps only minutes. One other lifeboat is visible far away in the rain, which has started again. Next to it, there is a small black square standing up, like a matchbox flipped endways and carried along the wave crests. I know it is a sub. I have seen them at Chatham. When the sea permits, I can just make out the dark line of its topsides. Now a man in a life-jacket stands right next to us in a buzzing noise. He hails us from an inflatable. He is looking for Mr Barnwell, the senior officer. And the captain. We do not have them. We have no officers in our boat. Help is on its way, he tells us.

No one speaks of what has happened. The talk is of muddling through. A couple near the stern have taken charge. They have found a bar of chocolate in somebody’s handbag and are busy dividing it into twenty-seven equal pieces. We are all for rationing. There is no attempt to make sense of what we have seen: the dawn, the clearing skies, the sub. No one wants to put two and two together. Not for a moment.

A man has a watch that still works. There is a desultory singsong every ninety minutes: hymns and camp-fire songs, even Vera Lynn.

‘Not long to go now, everybody. We have to remember that. Just keep saying to yourselves: Not long now. All right? All agreed?’ It reminds me of school assembly.

‘That chappie in the rubber boat’s been gone at least three hours. Can’t be long now. Could be worse. That lady, there. Your turn, dear.’

The lady cries for a moment.

‘Now, now!’ The man from the stern jollies her.

She steadies herself. She recites a poem she has by heart. It is a jig-jogging, classroom thing. We all applaud. Her chin trembles. We all feel better and I wonder what piece I shall do myself when the hands tick round. ‘The Lion and Albert’? We do not know each other’s names.

‘Do you think the sub …?’

‘Lucky they happened to be passing, eh? Pay us a visit, so to speak. Lets you know you’re not alone.’

This close the waves loom right over us, like glass slopes, up which the boat slips sickeningly sideways at the last minute. Some crests break over the gunwales. They have a taste and a weight. There is a slopping surge running back and forth about our feet. We chart the progress of the next rain. Then it pelts on us and the men take awkward turns with the baler.

I wake and look at my knuckles. They are split open and bleeding slightly. Erica’s are similar. It is the cold, and the salt. Waking is vile; for the wind blows again and yet more rain sluices down. Nothing is dry inside the boat. A man in the boat keeps shaking me, saying to Erica, ‘You let ’em drop off like that and they get to like it. Seen it happen. That was in the Atlantic. Quicker in the cold seas. Still. You be careful, sonny.’