The Strode Venturer (9 page)

“God knows, sir,” the corporal replied. “Before my time anyway.” And he grinned as he swung the launch under the rounded counter and came up alongside under her lee. There was no gangway down. The black-painted hull was blotched with rust which shone redly in the launch’s port navigation light. We shouted and eventually one of the crew, a Chinese, put his head over the side. “Take my advice, sir,” Slinger said. “See the Chinese steward. He just about runs the ship as far as we can see. Calls himself the purser. You won’t get much sense out of the captain. He
an’ his first officer are just there for decoration as you might say.” A rope ladder hit the deck with a thud. “All right if I leave you for half an hour? I got to check the barges and landing craft.”

I told him half an hour would do fine and climbed the rusting sides of the ship. The deck above was cluttered with stores, the hatches open, the cargo booms not properly stowed. The ship looked a mess. From somewhere deep in the bowels of her a radio was blaring forth Eastern music. It was the only sound, the only sign of life—that and the man who had thrown me the rope ladder. He appeared to be some sort of steward dressed in cotton trousers and jacket. But when I asked for Captain Deacon he grinned at me and said, “Yessah, Capting not seeing anybody.”

It was a good start. But these ships are all roughly alike and I pushed past him and made for the captain’s cabin which was in the usual place, below the wheelhouse. I knocked. There was no answer so I pushed open the door. The cabin was dark, the curtains drawn and the portholes closed; it reeked a sour smell of whisky and sweat. I switched on the light. He was lying on his bunk, the waistband of his trousers undone and his shirt open. He was a big man and the great barrel of his chest, covered with a mat of black hair, rose and fell with quiet regularity. He wasn’t asleep, nor was he in a stupor, for I could see his eyes watching me. “Captain Deacon?”

He didn’t say anything. He just lay there staring up at me with his head twisted a little on one side whilst I told him who I was and why I’d come. It was a very strangely-shaped head, almost bald, with a high bulging forehead. “Strode, you say.” His voice was no more than a whisper as though all his life he’d had to keep it in check.

“Yes, Peter Strode. He’s on board and …”

“What d’you want with him?” The big hooked nose, slightly bent to one side, lifted as though to sniff a scent, and the small eyes, still staring at me from under the shaggy brows, glinted suspiciously in the glare of the unshaded light.

“I want a word with him, that’s all,” I said.

“A word with him.” He repeated it to himself as though chewing on a lean piece of meat. “And you say you’re from the London Office. Well, it’s got nothing to do with London who I ship as crew.”

“A member of the Strode family,” I said. “Surely you must have realized …”

He shifted angrily in his bunk. “If a man wants to lead his own life, well, Christ, he’s entitled to, isn’t he? I’d have given him my own cabin if he’d wanted it. Did it once before when he came on board half-dead with fever. What the hell’s it got to do with London if he insists on shipping as crew?”

“Nothing,” I said. “They don’t even know he’s here.”

“Well, what are you here for then?” He reached up a hand and twitched the curtain back from one of the portholes as though he thought it might still be daylight outside. Then he grunted and heaved himself up on one elbow, peering at me closely. “What’s your position with the company?”

“I’m acting for the chairman of the board,” I said. “I’ve full authority …”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that. But there’s something about you …” That bulging, bony forehead of his was creased in a frown. He shook his head, still with that puzzled frown, so that he looked like a great bloodhound. “Queer. My memory——” He passed his hand up over his face and swung his legs off the bunk. “Plays me tricks now and then. I’ve met so many men—all types—but seeing you …” His bloodshot eyes were still staring at me and there was a sort of shocked expression in them as he reached automatically for his glass, which was empty, and felt the floor with his stockinged feet. “Time passes,” he mumbled.

“I’m waiting to see Strode,” I reminded him.

He sat quite still, staring down at his empty glass. He seemed to be thinking it over and it was a process that took time. Finally he nodded his big head slowly. “Well, it’s up to him, I suppose.” And he suddenly threw back his head
and let out a great bellow. “Mr. Fields! Mr. Fields!” There was the sound of movement from the deck below and then a door banged and a small man with sandy hair and a long, drooping face appeared. “This is my first officer,” Deacon said. And he asked where Strode was. “Is he still on board?”

The mate’s eyes shifted uneasily between the two of us. “I dunno. I think so.”

“Well, find out.” Deacon turned to me. “What did you say your name was?”

“Bailey.”

He nodded. “Tell him there’s a Commander Bailey from the London office wants a word with him.”

The mate hesitated. Curiosity flickered in his eyes. “He’ll want to know what it’s about, won’t he?”

“Just tell him I’d like to see him for a moment—in private,” I said.

Deacon rumbled something that sounded like a cross between a belch and the words “Get out,” and the mate hurried away, closing the door behind him. There was a long silence then, the cabin sealed and completely airless. Sweat began to trickle down behind my ears. “So your name’s Bailey?”

“Yes.”

Deacon stared at me, not saying anything more, his heavy cheeks, covered with stubble, giving him a grey, ghostly look. He moved his head from side to side; finally he lumbered to his feet. “Drink?”

“No, thanks.”

He poured himself a Scotch from the half-empty bottle on the rack above his bunk and then he subsided into the only chair, watching me covertly out of the corners of his eyes. “You wouldn’t remember the old Waverleys, I suppose?” And when I shook my head he nodded. “It’s a long time ago now. Before you were born almost. Christ, it’s bloody years and I was the youngest first officer in the Line.” He was staring down at his drink, smiling to himself and that smile seemed to change his face so that for a moment I
caught a glimpse of the young man he’d once been. “It’s like I was saying. Time passes. Time and people—opportunity, too.” He told me how he’d been offered the post of third officer on one of the crack P. & O. ships and had turned it down out of a misguided sense of loyalty, and then he was rambling on about some Court of Inquiry in which he’d been wrongly blamed for endangering his ship. “I’d the wrong owners then, nobody to back me up.” And he fell suddenly silent, sitting there, huge and hairy, with great sweat patches under his arms, staring morosely up at me out of those veined, bloodshot eyes.

The heat in that cabin was stifling. I wished Strode would come. “Have you been at sea all your life?” I asked him, not because I was interested, but because there was something uncomfortable in the silence and the way he stared at me.

“Thirty-seven years,” he said. “Thirty-seven bloody years and I end up working for a bunch of Chinamen.” And then he was back in the past again, to some old ship—the
Lammermuir
I think he said; not a Strode ship at all. “Another year and I’d have been captain of her. But she was torpedoed in the Malacca Strait with two hundred women and children on board. I beached her on the Oostkust—Sumatra—and spent nearly four years in a Jap prison camp and afterwards——” He was staring down at his drink. “Afterwards everything was different—new ships, new men, new countries, too, and the trade all gone to hell, and I was suddenly too old.” He swirled the whisky round in his glass. “And the ship—a scrapheap relic of the war … I was given the same bloody ship. What do you think of that now?” He looked up at me with a bitter twisted smile and a gleam of hostility in his eyes. “Didn’t they teach you to drink in the Navy?” The way he said it I knew he hated the Navy.

“It’s too hot,” I said.

He laughed, an almost silent movement of his great belly. “You tell that to the directors sitting on their fat arses in London. There are ships now with air conditioning, quarters
for the crew got up all airy-fairy like a tart’s boudoir. Jesus Christ! They should make a voyage in some of their own ships once in a while. And I’ll tell you something else.” There was a sudden gleam in his eyes. “One of these days this old bitch is going to lie down and die on me. Christ knows how she passed her last survey. She’s patched in a dozen different places and in a sea we have to keep the pumps going. If we ever hit a real storm——”

The door opened and the mate put his head in. “He says he doesn’t wish to see you.”

I hadn’t expected that. “Did you give him my name?”

“Oh, yes.” And the way he said it, with a glint of malice, revealed him as one of those who resent authority.

“Where is he?” I asked.

He hesitated, glancing quickly at Deacon. “In the crew’s quarters aft.”

It wasn’t the place I’d have chosen to see him, for I knew the interview was going to be a difficult one, and as I made my way aft I was thinking of our previous meeting. That had been difficult, too, at first. For the purposes of an exercise the anchorage at Abu Musa Island was being regarded as a submarine base from which the enemy was endeavouring to stop our oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Our orders were to lay mines off the anchorage and endeavour to destroy any submarines returning to base. We had the co-operation of one submarine, which like ourselves was on passage to Trincomalee, and as certain special A/S equipment was involved the presence of an Arab dhow was quite unacceptable. I, therefore, went ashore to clear the dhow out of the anchorage, but instead of an Arab nakauda I was faced with Strode who calmly informed me that since the dhow was there first the Navy should shift their exercise to another island if they wanted the place to themselves. The fact that he was dressed in little more than a loin-cloth and that I was there as representative of one of H.M. ships didn’t apparently strike him as being in the least incongruous. We had argued for nearly half an hour and by the time I had decided that there was no hope of budging him a
shamal was blowing and I had had to spend the night there.

I was still thinking about this, remembering the absurdity of the situation and my complete impotence in the face of it, when I reached the after deck. I pushed open the door of the crew’s quarters to find myself in a sort of mess room slung with hammocks and crowded with Chinese. I didn’t see him at first for he was squatting on the floor with three others, dressed in a coloured sarong and a faded khaki shirt, engrossed in a game of Mah Jong. He looked less emaciated than when I’d seen him last. Also he had grown a beard, one of those little French beards that fringe the line of the jaw. It altered the whole appearance of his face so that I barely recognized him. He looked up as the chatter and the laughter died, the “tile” he had just drawn still gripped in his hand. He recognized me all right. But there was no welcoming smile. Instead, his eyes had a wary look and there was a tenseness about him, an air almost of suspicion that somehow communicated itself to me. It was an odd feeling, standing there amongst those yellow-skinned men, and no word of greeting from him, only that flat, near-hostile stare; and when I suggested he came outside so that we could talk in private, all he said was, “I’m not prepared to discuss my affairs—with you or anybody else from London.” He glanced down at the ivory-and-bamboo piece in his hand and then discarded it. One of the others said “kong” and took it up.

The “wall” was still virtually complete, the game only just begun, so that I knew very well his absorption in it was a deliberate attempt to freeze me out, and I wondered why as I stood there watching him. The Chinese seamen, quick to catch a mood, were silent. The only sound was the click of the “tiles” and the blare of a radio. It was a strange meeting after all these years and in the end I took Henry Strode’s letter from my wallet and dropped it, open, in front of him. It wasn’t easy to see his eyes in that dim light, but as he took it up and read it through I thought I caught a gleam of satisfaction. He sat for a long time with the letter in his lap. Finally he looked up at me. “Where do you come into this?”

The suddenness of the question took me by surprise—that and the hardness of his tone, the look of distrust back in his eyes as he stared straight up at me.

“And how the devil did you know where to find me?”

I hesitated, for I saw immediately what was in his mind—the connection between my visit and the cabled offer he’d had from Slattery. He handed the letter back to me, not waiting for me to formulate a reply. “You can tell my brothers I’ll consider their proposition when I get back to Singapore.” The finality of his tone and the way he consciously turned back to the game made it a dismissal. It was his turn and he reached out his hand for a “tile”. He drew one of the Seasons and cracked some joke to the others in their native tongue as he laid it down.

I tried to talk to him, but it was no use. The whole atmosphere of the crowded quarters was against me. And there was something else, I felt, something that stood between us, blocking all communication. The old lawyer’s advice, his own sister’s words made no impression. I even told him how I’d come into it, but it was like talking to a brick wall. And yet I knew his mind wasn’t on the game, for he missed two “kongs” in succession.

I’d come six thousand miles to offer him a directorship and fees of four thousand a year and all he did was to sit there on the floor in a dirty sarong pretending to be engrossed in a Chinese game and waiting anxiously for me to go. It didn’t make sense—unless … unless he had some objective, some secret objective so immediate and all-absorbing that my arguments touched only the outer fringes of his consciousness. At what point I became certain of this I don’t quite know. Nor do I know how it was communicated to me, whether by some form of thought-transference, or by the more reasonable processes of observation and deduction. All I know is that I was suddenly convinced of it. “You wrote a paper on the Maldives.”

He looked up at me then and even in that dim light I couldn’t miss the look of sudden animal wariness.