Endangered Species (10 page)

Well, he thought as the ship recovered and swung back, the purchase wires suddenly running slack and the low-loader creaking under its burden, thank God he
could
still laugh at himself! Those damned refugees had unsettled him rather more than he cared to admit.

But suppose he picked some up? The anxiety tormented him. He could ignore them – there were stories of such things happening, of patrol boats of various embarrassed governments towing the cranky craft outside territorial waters and leaving them adrift to their fate – but such a consideration was unthinkable to John Mackinnon, himself a survivor from a drifting boat. The notion appalled him. Had he sunk so low in his comfortable life that he could even contemplate such an action? He shied away from the selfishness of it.

Nevertheless it was early August. Navigational conditions in the South China Sea took a turn for the worse about now. The typhoon season was upon them and, judging from the news and the evidence they had seen, there were at that moment several hundred, perhaps thousands, of people afloat on the bosom of the ocean. Captain Mackinnon had a feeling of inevitability lurking in the pit of his stomach. A premonition. He swore again, recognising the existence of the law of imbuggerance: that if something could go wrong it would.

Captain Mackinnon was a seaman to his fingertips and what he lacked in knowledge of the seduction of eager young women he more than made up for in his knowledge of sea lore. Instinct played a significant part in the practicality of his mind; it was instinct that made him plan for eventualities, and it was instinct which combined with the discipline of his mind to make him the kind of shipmaster that he was. ‘Gorilla' might be his soubriquet, but it was one containing its own kind of grudging admiration, expressing the impression of gentle strength Captain Mackinnon generated.

The
Matthew Flinders
was fortunate in having such a commander, though at that moment John Mackinnon privately thought he had run out of luck.

Stevenson straightened up from the gyro-compass repeater on the port bridge-wing, rubbing eyes tired from the last hours of cargo-working in Singapore. He let the Horsburgh Lighthouse flash a couple of times before bending again, aligning the needle of the azimuth mirror with the winking light as it came on to the alter-course bearing.

‘On, sir!' he called to Captain Mackinnon standing expectantly in the wheelhouse door, and hurried into the chart-room to plot the ship's position.

Mackinnon spoke softly to the helmsman and the
Matthew Flinders
swung slowly to port, her deck heeling slightly under the influence of the rudder.

‘Steady on o-two-six, Cap'n,' reported the shadowy figure of Braddock at the wheel as he took off the counter-helm and fingered the Turk's head on the amidships spoke. Above him the illuminated tell-tale showed the rudder come to rest on the division between the red and green sectors. The ship eased out of her heel and Stevenson emerged from the chart-room.

‘Right on track, sir, making sixteen and a half.'

‘Very good, Mr Stevenson. You can put her on auto pilot now . . .'

Clear of the Singapore Strait the ship headed north-northeast into the South China Sea between the mainland of the
Malay peninsula and the off-lying archipelago of the Anambas Islands. Stevenson set up the Arkas and dismissed the helmsman.

‘Okay, Brad. You carry on.'

‘Fancy a cuppa char, Sec?'

‘Good idea. Better ask the Old Man if he wants one.'

Stevenson waited by the Arkas a moment, checking the automatic responses of the machine's sensors. Then, satisfied with its performance, he reported to Mackinnon. ‘She's on auto, sir, steady on o-two-six.'

‘Very good.' Mackinnon straightened up from the bridge rail on which he was leaning. ‘She's all yours, then.'

‘Aye, aye, sir.'

But Mackinnon lingered, turning forward again, both elbows on the teak rail. ‘It's a beautiful night,' he remarked, ‘if you've an eye for these things.'

‘Yes, it is,' Stevenson agreed, taking the remark as an invitation to join the Master. Both men stared ahead. The ocean lay dark, like rippled silk below the stars which twinkled in their millions, displaced in brilliance only where the moon shone among them. High and full, it lit the ship with a pale fire in which details stood out with almost unnatural clarity.

‘Tea, Cap'n . . .'

Mackinnon accepted one of the mugs Braddock held out to him and Stevenson took the other. ‘Thank you.'

‘I'll be in the mess-room, Sec.'

‘Sure.'

Both white-shirted figures turned forward again, studying the bow wave curling out from the cutwater and the moonlit highlights along the lengths of the crutched derricks.

‘You'll be staring out over a load of boxes next trip,' said Mackinnon.

‘If there is a next trip, sir.'

‘You're not packing it in, are you?'

Stevenson shrugged. ‘I think it'll be a case of having to,
don't you? That or sailing on some rust bucket under a foreign flag with a crew that don't know a reef knot from a refrigerator.'

‘We're under a foreign flag now,' said Mackinnon sadly. ‘Besides, you don't need that acquired wisdom really, do you? The fruit of experience is just so much excess baggage. In fact you're better off without it. It reminds you of what you're not any more.'

‘You mean all the sailors died with Nelson?' asked Stevenson.

‘A bit after his time, son, if you don't mind.' Mackinnon chuckled ruefully. ‘There was a time when you had to be bred to it, right enough. You had to serve your time and learn the job from the bottom up. It was tough, but we had to go through it one way or the other. Now technology has . . . well, you know . . .'

‘Depersonalised it.'

‘Yes.' Mackinnon sipped his tea, then asked, ‘What'll you do?'

‘I don't know, sir. See what turns up, I suppose. When this ship goes it's the end of Eastern Steam. Suddenly the phrase “on the beach” has a nasty ring to it.'

‘Aye. I read somewhere that to live a full life a man has to experience poverty, love and war. The first and last have little to recommend them.'

‘And the middle one has its complications,
that
I do know, sir.'

‘So does the Third Mate,' Mackinnon threw in shrewdly.

‘Er, yes, so I believe, sir,' Stevenson said guardedly.

Mackinnon drained his mug. ‘It's downhill now,' he said, staring out over the vast emptiness ahead of the ship. Somewhere away on their port bow beneath the rippled surface lay the wrecks of the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
, the British battleship and battle cruiser lost to overwhelming Japanese air superiority in the dark days of the Second World War. The bodies of their companies had
long ago dissolved into the ooze of the seabed. No, not all the sailors died with Nelson . . .

He sighed and cast the Second Mate a sidelong glance: if only he and Shelagh . . .

‘I had a wee daughter, mister,' he found himself saying. ‘If she'd lived she'd have been about your age.' For a moment he regretted the confidence; he could not recall ever having mentioned the lost child before and wondered what had made him reveal the intimacy at that moment.

‘I'm sorry,' Stevenson said. ‘I didn't know.'

‘No reason why you should.' Mackinnon lapsed into silence, then said, ‘I'm not complaining. But sometimes you wonder.' He straightened from the rail, suddenly formal. ‘Well, good night to you, Mr Stevenson. Keep a sharp lookout and call me if you need to.'

The time-honoured formula uttered by every shipmaster leaving his bridge to a subordinate expressed the utmost discharge of Mackinnon's duty before he could turn in. Stevenson responded in the time-honoured way:

‘Aye, aye, sir.'

It was as punctilious an exchange as the preceding remarks had been personal. Both men, the older with his hands on the ladder rails as he paused for a moment, staring astern at the orange glow in the sky above the city state of Singapore, and the younger as he began to pace the wide bridge of the
Matthew Flinders
, knew that its historical utterance would soon be a thing of the past.

‘Old bugger,' Stevenson muttered affectionately to himself, smiling in the moonlight as Mackinnon's bulk faded into the shadows of the boat-deck below.

In his cabin Mackinnon found he was unable to sleep. Perhaps he had brought something of the disturbing magic of the night with him from the bridge, magic which had prompted him to expose himself to Stevenson, for it was uncharacteristic of the Captain to be so candid. Oddly he felt
no guilty regret over a momentary lapse of reticence, but an odd anxiety that the frankness did not disturb him. The paradox made him restless and he sat on the settee in the darkened cabin. It was lit only by the shaded desk lamp which illuminated the scattered remains of the bureaucracy of Singapore littering its top. He sighed. The windows which looked forward were uncurtained, the neat chintz fabric looped tidily up to hooks on either side of them. In the old, munificent days, the Master of the
Matthew Flinders
would have had his personal steward, his ‘Tiger', a Chinaman whose sole task was to minister to his wants and one of whose duties would have been to draw the curtains at sunset. Now Mackinnon had to remember to attend to the matter himself, and since he had been on the bridge for the past three hours the task remained undone.

He declined to move; as long as the cabin remained lit only by the small, shaded bulb in the desk lamp it would not affect visibility from the bridge above.

How odd it was, the paperwork, the curtains, the trivial stuff of which his life had been made with its rituals and rather pompous little formalities. Some marked the point at which the machinery of a state touched him as Master of a foreign-going merchant ship, some irked him with their burden of responsibility, some reminded him of his diminishing status.

Woo still liked to call himself Mackinnon's ‘Tiger', because once he had occupied the office and could not now lose face; but he no longer attended to the Captain's curtains at sunset and both men knew their respective positions had shifted upon the uncertain sand of social change.

Such changes, Mackinnon thought, made the leaving palatable just as they made confidences easier, though why he had felt the need to make them to Stevenson he was not sure. Was he expressing some quiet satisfaction that his own life had been full? He had known war and love, and if not abject poverty then something like it in the indigence of the
merchant seaman. But the recollection of those lost warships, which he had never traversed this point on the surface of the earth without recalling, had tonight touched him with an almost potent poignancy. He well remembered news of their loss, remembered his boyhood sentiments as first they, and then Singapore, had fallen to the Japanese. His arrival at Singapore on the
James Cook
had seemed to his young and fanciful imagination to have been a renewal, a picking up of the torch of British maritime endeavour, a carrying on after the reverses of adversity.

How was it put in the words of the prayer alleged to have been written by Drake to support his near-mutinous crews in his circumnavigation?

It is not the doing of a thing that yields the true glory, but the continuing until it be ended
.

Would it be ended when the
Matthew Flinders
was passed to the scrapyard? Or was he just morbid because it was the end of him personally?

No, it was Stevenson who had touched him tonight; Stevenson who had prompted the confidences; Stevenson who was a natural seaman and for whom there was no future. He liked and respected the Second Mate and would have wished to hand on the torch to the younger man, but he knew the thing was impossible, a sentimental chimera. Stevenson would wait in vain for something to turn up . . .

Sadly Mackinnon heaved himself to his feet and stood for a moment looking down at his desk. Something tugged at his memory which, he realised regretfully, was not what it had once been. His eyes fell upon the gilt title of the book about the Uffizi and he thrust aside any thought of Shelagh. Then he remembered, riffled among the litter of papers on the desk and picked up the telex the agent's runner had left with him at the very moment of departure.

‘It's not urgent, Captain,' the runner had said, handing over the envelope, ‘you can open it when you have sailed.'

Mackinnon tore it open now.

To the Master, MV MATTHEW FLINDERS

From DENTCO, LONDON

Anticipate ship may be resold for further trading. Shanghai interests indicate this now likely. Do not prejudice vessel's condition
.

Dentco
.

Mackinnon grunted and let the flimsy telex fall upon the papers on his desk.

‘Do not prejudice vessel's condition,' he murmured disgustedly. ‘What do they think I'm going to do? Sell the brass clocks?'

As Captain Mackinnon shuffled irritably to bed, Alex Stevenson lit a cigarette and settled to his watch. He was glad to be at sea again, clear of the taint of the land with its disquieting distractions. His envy of Taylor lost its immediacy and if he was still unable to think of Cathy without a deep yearning, at least here, beneath the majesty of the tropic sky, it was poetry that seeped into his mind, blunting the keen edge of lust.

He ground out the cigarette, took one last fix on the coast of Malaysia and marked up the departure position on the chart. Recording it in the log, he worked up a dead-reckoning position for 0400, after which he resumed pacing up and down. The ship cut through the smooth level of the calm sea with an occasional flash of bioluminescence. The dull rumble of her engines rose to a muted grumble; a faint cloud of exhaust gases and the occasional spark spewed from her tall funnel as she laid her wake straight astern to where the loom of the Horsburgh Light dipped below the rim of the world. Low on the eastern horizon a bank of cloud was building, the roiling heads of the rising cumulus catching the moonlight. Above them the impassive stars rolled their sidereal paths round the earth and it was as though the
Matthew Flinders
and her officer of the watch were at the
very hub of the universe.