The Strode Venturer (27 page)

“I
DON’T
believe it.” Ida’s tone was one of absolute conviction. “If Peter were dead I’d know about it. I’m certain I would.” She had come out to the airport to meet me and all the way in to London she had been questioning me, listening to my account of what had happened. Now we were back at the flat and her final comment was that I was wrong, everybody was wrong, that Peter was still there, on an island that couldn’t be found.

She accepted everything I had told her—the white water, the pumice, the stranding, the fire, even the sulphurous boiling of the sea around us—all the surprising, the unusual things, but not that the island had vanished. It made no difference that I had actually flown one of the searches; I’d probably have flown others if it hadn’t been for the urgency of her message. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you’ll have to accept the facts as we know them. The island’s just not there any more, neither the island nor the shallows on which we stranded.”

“Balls! You just haven’t searched in the right place, that’s all.” It could almost have been her father speaking—rude, obstinate, determined.

“Suppose you tell me where we should have searched?” It was the nearest we had come to a row since we first met.

She smiled, a little gesture of appeasement that didn’t reach to her eyes. “I can’t do that. All I can tell you is that he’s alive.”

“Then either you’re daft or Peter’s capable of performing miracles. There’s nothing there but sea.” And once more I
told her about the flight I’d made, but this time in greater detail. I thought if she could see it through my eyes it would help her to accept the truth.

It was Canning’s idea. He came down to the transit Mess the day Reece had run the
Strode Trader
aground east of the oil jetty. It was just after sundown and we had a beer together. Canning had been extremely helpful—billeting us ashore, the lascars in the Pak camp, the Europeans in the transit quarters, sending engineers out to the ship to see if they could patch the leaking plates, allowing Reece and myself to be present when the Shackleton skippers made their search reports. “Would you like to fly tomorrow’s search? I’ve had a word with Freddie Landor. He’d be happy to take you along.”

I guessed what was behind the offer. He wanted to prepare me for the moment when the search would be called off, to convince me that the R.A.F. had done everything possible. “Is tomorrow your last attempt to find them?” I asked.

“No. But two more flights will complete the pattern. We’ll then have had sight of a quarter of a million square miles of ocean. Anyway,” he added, “I thought it would help if you saw for yourself.”

“Is tomorrow’s flight part of the pattern?” I asked.

He hesitated. “You think they’ve overflown the island without seeing it?”

“They’ve put in a hell of a lot of flying hours,” I said. “And it gets pretty hazy after midday.” I wasn’t happy about putting it like that, but I’d seen the crews when they came in. It was three hours out to the search area, three hours back and ten hours flying the pattern—a long day.

He thought about it for a moment. “You could be right.” He took a pull at his beer. “Okay. Talk it over with Reece. I’ll tell Freddie he’s to fly you anywhere you like.”

Take-off was at 0300 hours. The crew truck picked me up at two-fifteen in the morning. There were nine of them for a Shackleton carries an extra navigator, an air electronics officer and up to four signals personnel as well as two pilots and an engineer. Nobody spoke very much as we trundled
out to the apron where the Shackleton’s bulk cast a dark moon shadow. Somebody gave me a spare flying suit and a helmet and when finally we took off I was told to sit braced on the floor just aft of the flight deck. The noise was deafening. Airborne, I was given the co-pilot’s seat and with my intercom plugged in could listen to the reports of the crew. We flew at 4000 feet, nothing to see but the pale expanse of ocean below and the stars above. Sandwiches and coffee were handed round as dawn began to break in the east. Afterwards Landor called me to the navigator’s table.

He was a skipper navigator, an arrangement peculiar to some Shackletons, and he had our position marked on the air charts. “In seventeen minutes we’ll be bang over the target.” I had discussed it with Reece and we had agreed that the day’s search should start from his estimated position and that I would then fly a circular pattern outwards. In one day it ought to be possible to cover an area big enough to take in any possible error. “If the position is correct and the island’s there, then it should be on the radar now.” We had come down to 1000 feet, but the scanner was empty, nothing showing.

The sun came up as we started to turn, beginning the ring pattern that would spread farther and farther out from the target as the day progressed. I was taken for’ard then, beyond the flight deck to the gun position in the nose. Here I stayed the whole day, searching and searching with my eyes and seeing nothing but the flat unending expanse of the sea below. The nose-gunner’s position had a Perspex hood and as the day wore on it became a hothouse, the sun blazing on my hands, burning through the rough denim of the flying suit. The sweat poured off me to be replaced every hour or so by the iced lemonade which they brought round.

Hour after heat-searing hour and the sea empty of anything. The monotony and the noise dug into my brain. More sandwiches and afterwards my head nodding and all my will-power concentrated on keeping my eyes open. Haze
was forming, visibility decreasing and the plane flew on and on, the circles much bigger now so that the position of the sun changed only gradually. Coffee and still I had to fight to keep awake in the blazing heat. “Captain to Bailey—are you all right there or would you like to sit in on the radar?”

“Bailey answering. No, I’m fine, thanks.”

They’d been flying this monotonous, soul-destroying routine every other day for almost a week. I wasn’t admitting that I couldn’t take it though it was like being roasted alive. Somehow I kept awake, regarding it as a sort of penance for being the cause of their having to go over the same ground again. Then the sun was going down, the heat lessening. At sunset we turned for home and that was that—nothing seen, and nothing to report. All that time and energy and fuel wasted.

And when we landed Canning met me. A lift of his eyebrows, but he didn’t need to be told. He knew from the look on my face. “Well, no good worrying,” he said. “We’ll keep at it until we’re ordered to stop.” And he handed me the telex with Ida’s message.

I looked across at her. She had her eyes closed and the lines of strain showed on her face. “Why the urgency?” I asked.

“The annual general meeting is the day after to morrow.”

“I know that. But what’s the trouble? It was just luck that there was a spare seat in a Britannia that night to Aden. Whimbrill has my proxy.”

“I think I’d better leave him to tell you. I rang him at his home this evening to say you’d be in the office in the morning. The shares have slumped, of course.” She opened her eyes, staring straight at me. “This wretched business has brought things to a head. But he’ll explain it to you better than I can.” She reached to the table behind her where she’d put her bag and gloves. There was a copy of the evening paper there and she passed it to me. “I didn’t tell you before. They’ve called off the search. You’ll find it in the Stop Press.”

It was on the back page.
An Air Ministry spokesman stated that they had now abandoned all hope for the men still missing on a volcanic island in the Indian Ocean.
It gave the names of the three Europeans. The decision was inevitable, of course, but it still came as a shock. “I’m sorry,’ I murmured.

“No good being sorry,” she said sharply. “It’s a question of what we do now.”

“What the hell can we do?” I said angrily. “The island’s gone and Peter’s dead.” I didn’t mean to put it as brutally as that, but I was tired and it worried me that she was still refusing to accept the truth of it.

An uneasy silence hung over the room. Finally she got to her feet. “I’m going to make coffee. And there’s some eggs and bacon in the fridge—will that do?”

I nodded. Sitting there, listening to her moving about in the tiny kitchen, I was thinking of Peter, wondering what it had been like at the end, trying to visualize it. All his hopes, all his plans vanished in one cataclysmic upheaval. And the Adduans—Canning hadn’t mentioned any vedis sailing. I wished now I had tried to visit Midu.

It was after we had fed, when we were sitting over our coffee, smoking, that Ida mentioned Deacon. “When Peter first went to the island it was in the
Strode Venturer
, and Deacon was in command. George sacked him, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

“Still at Aden, I imagine.”

She finished her coffee and stubbed out her cigarette. “It’s late,” she said. “I’m going now. But I think it might be worth having a talk with Deacon. Could we get him to London?”

“What’s the point?” I said. “Peter was just as secretive about the position of the island when he made the voyage in the
Strode Venturer
.”

“But Deacon is an older man than Reece—more experienced.”

“He’s also an alcoholic.”

“I know that. But drunk or sober a man who’s been to sea as long as he has ought to have some idea where his ship was.” She got to her feet. “Think about it, will you? I’m not accepting the situation until we have some sort of a check on Reece’s position.” She left it at that and I saw her to her car. And afterwards, when I was in bed, I lay thinking about it. In this she didn’t seem any different from the other women I had known—logic abandoned as soon as the emotions were involved. For the island to be outside the area of search the real position would need to be five or six hundred miles at least from Reece’s DR position. He couldn’t possibly have made an error of such staggering proportions unless he’d done it deliberately. And there was no question of that, for Blake had also kept a note of the courses and his estimate of the position had differed by less than 50 miles.

But doubt, once planted with sufficient forcefulness, is an insidious thing. It was still with me when I woke in the morning and I knew that for the sake of my own peace of mind I would have to try and see Deacon. And there was Hans Straker, the man who had sat with me all the way from Singapore when I’d flown back to London that first time. It seemed years ago now, but I remembered his interest in the Indian Ocean. He would know who to contact and even at this distance a seismograph would surely record volcanic activity large enough to cause a subsidence in that area?

But when I arrived at Strode House I was plunged back into a world where catastrophe was seen as something affecting a balance sheet, not in terms of human suffering. “We are naturally very upset at this news, both my brother and I—indeed everyone who knew him here in Strode House.” George Strode had risen on my entrance and the palms of his hands were pressed flat against the top of his desk as he leaned earnestly towards me. “Believe me, Bailey, we shall miss him—his energy, his cheerful optimism. And the men with him. It’s all very tragic.” He stared at me a moment like a frog with his protuberant eyes, as though
expecting me to thank him for his little funeral oration. Finally he straightened up. “Well, no good grieving over it. He’s dead and the whole venture with him. It’s for us to pick up the pieces.” He reached for a fat envelope on his desk. “Reece has sent in a full report. I’d like you to read it through and add anything to it you think relevant.” He wanted it back in time for a press hand-out the following day. “It’s come at a bad time, just ahead of the meeting. Henry will have to make a statement to the Strode shareholders and in the circumstances I think it would be as well if you were present.”

Reece’s report had been sent by telex from Gan and the final paragraph made it clear that it had been written after he knew the search was being abandoned. “The search pattern has been completed and they have not found any trace of the island. There is, therefore, no doubt that the re-submergence of the island …” I put it away in the drawer of my desk. Somehow I couldn’t face going over it all again—not then.

There was a strange feeling about Strode House that morning, a sort of hush, as though the abandonment of the search touched the members of the staff personally. They stood in little huddles at the end of corridors or in their offices, talking in whispers that ceased abruptly on my approach. The quick, furtive glances, the sudden silences more expressive than words; the ghost of Peter Strode seemed to haunt the building. “They feel his loss very deeply,” Whimbrill said. “It’s as though the spark that might have set this place alight with a new spirit of adventure had suddenly been snuffed out.” I think he was speaking for himself as much as for the staff, for at one stage, when they had received Peter’s message announcing the establishment of the shore base on the island, he said he thought the boards of both companies were beginning to swing towards wholehearted support of the venture. “Not George, perhaps. But le Fleming certainly, and also Crane, possibly Everett. Even Henry was becoming convinced of the need to go along with it. That was when the shares were still going up.” He
smiled a little sourly. “The mood has changed now, of course.”

“You mean they’re going to sell out?”

He shrugged. “The Lingrose nominations still stand, but I think perhaps they’ll wait until all the publicity has died down.”

“And then?”

“Presumably they’ll call an extraordinary general meeting—do it that way.” He sounded depressed, all the fight knocked out of him.

I left him shortly afterwards, feeling depressed myself. All the plans, all the energy and enthusiasm we had expended—gone, wasted. I went down the main stair, out into Leadenhall Street. I felt I couldn’t stand the atmosphere of Strode House any more. I needed a drink and it was in the pub by Leadenhall Market, standing alone with a large Scotch in my hand, that I remembered how I had seen Phillipson there with Reece. Why had he denied it? And Reece himself, that night we had re-floated the
Strode Trader
on the tide, so strangely reluctant to return to the island, so insistent that they had stores for a month. Was this a case of “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”