Sixty Days to Live (34 page)

By this time Gervaise had stripped Hemmingway and got him into a suit of pyjamas. With Lavina’s help he bandaged the injured man’s head and he came round soon after they had lifted him into one of the bunks on the side of the cabin opposite to Derek. As the cut on his scalp did not appear to be serious they left the cabin to attend to the others.

Sam was hobbling painfully about fetching basins for Margery and trying to comfort her in the frightful bout of sickness from which she was suffering. Oliver sat patiently in a chair nursing his broken arm. They cut his coat-sleeve away and while they were setting the arm in splints he said:

‘I’ve been working out what must have happened. When we built the Ark our purpose was to provide against the possibility of a tidal wave caused by under-sea eruptions in the Atlantic temporarily flooding the lower levels of Britain. But even given the most serious disturbances in that area, no wave of such magnitude as the one which caught us could possibly have been created in that way. Besides, I’m sure that any wave thrown up in the district of the Azores would have reached us long before.’

‘What is your theory, then?’ Gervaise asked.

‘We know that the comet fell in the north-eastern Pacific,’ Oliver replied, ‘and such a huge body would naturally displace terrific quantities of water. That wave may have been a mile, or even two miles, high when it started. It must have traversed the whole of North America sweeping everything before it, poured
into the Atlantic and forced the Atlantic waters up with its momentum so that it was still between a quarter and half a mile high when it leaped right over Britain. If I’m correct, it was travelling at more than 300 miles an hour.

‘Then the whole world will be drowned in another deluge,’ said Gervaise.

Oliver winced as his brother tightened the bandage. ‘The wave, which is still moving east, may exhaust itself by the time it reaches Central Europe; but the effect of the comet must have been like that of a stone thrown into a pond. Australasia will certainly have been overwhelmed and the Far East would have caught the full force of the wave as it moved westward, so the bulk of Asia is certain to be flooded too.’

‘India might escape,’ suggested Sam, looking up from where he was kneeling by Margery.

‘Perhaps. The Himalayas and the highlands of Tibet should certainly be immune; but, even when the waters settle, the comet will have caused a great displacement. The oceans will have risen ten or perhaps twenty feet all over the world with the result that all low-lying lands will be under water. The Sahara will become a lake again and the plains of lower India are sure to be submerged.’

‘This is much worse than we bargained for,’ said Gervaise gravely. ‘You will remember you felt originally that the Rockies would prove a sufficient barrier to any wave the comet might throw up. You thought that only portions of the western coast of America and places like Japan and China would suffer; while we should get off comparatively lightly, with a local wave which would subside in a few hours and leave us safely aground on the mud.’

‘Yes,’ Oliver confessed. ‘This particular aspect of the catastrophe is far more serious than anything I had anticipated. I doubt if there will be a single human being left alive within two or three thousand miles of us by to-morrow morning; and when a deluge of this magnitude is likely to subside it’s quite impossible to say.’

Sam gave him an anxious look. ‘I suppose the danger now is that when the waters do settle we may have drifted so far that we won’t even come down in England?’

‘Exactly. We may find ourselves floating in the North Sea or the
Atlantic; but, of course, I shall be able to keep a check on our position as soon as the sun breaks through again and I can take observations.’

‘What I can’t understand,’ Sam went on, ‘is why the Ark wasn’t crushed like an egg-shell under all that weight of water. We must have been seven or eight hundred feet below its crest when the wave struck us and at that depth the pressure per square foot is simply enormous.’

Gervaise tied a neat knot at the end of the bandage he had been winding round the splints on his brother’s arm. ‘I think I can answer that. The pressure was mainly behind us and the sphere was free to move forward with the wave. Naturally, the Ark’s buoyancy caused it to start moving upwards the second the water covered it. Where we were fortunate was, that it must have been carried up very quickly; otherwise it would have been smashed to pieces against the trees on the far side of the park.’

‘Well,’ said Lavina cheerfully, ‘the great thing is we’re still all alive and kicking. Come on, Margery, my dear; although I haven’t got a bone left in my body, I’m going to put you to bed.’

Having attended to her sister while Gervaise got the electric light going again, she spent an hour tidying the cabin and generally took charge of all the arrangements in a way that Sam found surprising. As he could cook and she couldn’t she made him cook the dinner, but with quiet efficiency she selected what they would have, laid the table herself and, when the meal was cooked, carried trays in for Derek and Hemmingway. None of them felt much like eating as the Ark was now rolling slightly but continuously yet she cajoled and bullied them into eating up the food so that they should preserve their strength. When she was at last able to get to her cabin and undress, she found on her body a dozen great bruises which were already turning a yellowish purple, and her head was splitting with fatigue; but as she crawled into her bunk she had the satisfaction of knowing that she had shirked nothing and gone through with the hideous business as well as any old trouper would have done when called upon to play a similar part on a nightmare film set.

The night passed uneventfully, but in the morning no land was to be seen and it was impossible to take an observation of the sun as the sky was still overcast with thick layers of dull, grey
clouds. The compass showed them to be drifting west. It was raining gently and persistently as though it never meant to stop and a sudden change in the weather had made the temperature fall to such a marked extent that it seemed as if they had passed straight from June to October; but Sam coped with the heating plant, which had been thrown out of action, and once he had got it going the temperature in the Ark was soon adjusted.

Derek and Hemmingway both wanted to get up but, having taken charge of them, Lavina insisted that it would be better for them to spend the day in bed as, in any case, there was nothing for them to do and nowhere to go.

With her sister she was less merciful. Margery had passed a miserable night, but Sam’s ankle was now swollen and Lavina decreed that he must keep it up; as there was no one else who could do the cooking, Margery would have to bestir herself, for an hour or two at all events, to attend to it. With the air of a martyr Margery obeyed the commands of her imperious younger sister while Lavina, who considered that she had done everything that was necessary, employed herself in amusing Hemmingway and Derek.

The two of them had had a brief slanging match after Hemmingway had come to the previous evening, following which they had agreed to forget the borrowed car; but a definite animosity still lingered and Lavina’s presence was not calculated to have a soothing effect.

Derek had known her for so long that they had many subjects in common to talk about of which Hemmingway knew nothing. She treated Derek with the familiarity of a brother and now called him ‘darling’ or ‘my sweet’ in the same way that she had been accustomed to throw casual endearments about among her friends in the film world. Hemmingway kept on telling himself that he had not a shadow of right to resent their
camaraderie
but he did resent it nevertheless.

On the other hand, Derek had little but his good looks and self-confident manner with which to attract Lavina’s attention, whereas Hemmingway had not only an infinitely finer brain but a much quicker tongue, so he was able to offer much better entertainment.

Each would have denied it hotly if anybody had accused him of wishing to arouse Lavina’s interest in himself, as they were
both only too conscious that being married to Sam placed her out of bounds, but each was wishing secretly that he had her to himself, and cursing the presence of the other.

Lavina was perfectly conscious of the way they felt and, without the least malice, was thoroughly enjoying the situation. As Derek had very little to talk about outside the normal interests of a gentleman-farmer she had no desire at all for a
tête-à-tête
with him but while a heart-to-heart with Hemmingway would have intrigued her a lot she felt that would be too dangerous, in view of the experience through which they had been together.

After cooking lunch Margery retired to bed again, bemoaning the misery which the constant rocking of the sphere caused her. As there was nothing whatever for them to do Gervaise and Oliver decided to take a nap in the men’s cabin where the two invalids were also dozing in their bunks. In consequence Sam, who had volunteered to keep a look-out although there was nothing to be seen on the vast expanse of waters which encompassed them, at last got Lavina to himself.

As the wireless was out of action she had just put a selection of records on the gramophone when Sam called her over to him. He was sitting in one arm-chair with his injured foot resting on another and, switching off the gramophone, she sat down in his lap. He petted her a little and then said quietly:

‘My sweet, I’ve been wanting to have a chat with you.’

‘Well, now’s your chance,’ she smiled down at him.

‘It’s about Margery,’ he hesitated. ‘You’re not being very kind to her, are you?’

‘My dear, I never give her a thought. She’s just one of those people one doesn’t think about. I gave up trying long ago but I certainly haven’t been unkind to her.’

‘Don’t you call it unkind to drag anybody who’s feeling ill out of bed to cook lunch?’

‘Oh, that!’ Lavina lit a cigarette and, tilting her aristocratic profile in the gesture that Sam had so often admired, puffed out the smoke. ‘Well, somebody had to cook lunch and you’re the only one among us who can cook except Margery. I ought not to have let you cook dinner for us last night with a bad ankle like this and you must keep it up.’

‘I know, my dear, but surely you could have knocked up some sort of a meal for us yourself instead of idling away the whole
morning with Hemmingway and Derek? There’s plenty of cold stuff among the stores; it only meant opening a few tins.’

‘Really, Sam, I think you’re being rather stupid. Margery’s quite all right; only a little sea-sick, that’s all. Why should you want me to treat her like a pampered baby?’

‘She’s a woman like yourself and entitled to consideration. Think of the fuss there’d be if anybody expected you to do a job of work when you were ill.’

‘I have, often. Naturally, I like people to fetch and carry for me. Why shouldn’t they? They enjoy it. But many’s the time I’ve walked on to a film set feeling like death and gone right through till the small hours of the morning in order not to hold up the rest of the cast.’

‘Then I take off my hat to you, darling. But, all the same, I think you’ve got to take a different view of things from now on. Last week you were Lady Curry, a famous beauty with a millionaire husband, lots of servants and other people, either paid or willing, to run your errands in the sort of life we all knew. Now you’re just my darling wife, Lavina, but that’s the only thing that hasn’t changed.’

‘Like hell it is!’ broke in Lavina, ‘and how does that affect…’ but, having got into his stride, Sam cut her short and went on:

‘What’s going to become of us, God knows. But we’ve plenty of stores so if we’re not wrecked in a storm we ought to be able to hang out until we land up somewhere. Whether we do or don’t, everything’s going to be different from now on. You’ve got to forget this Princess stuff, become a real woman, and do your share of the work. As you can’t cook, the sooner you learn the better. I think you should start in at once as scullery-maid to Margery and when you’ve got the hang of it a bit you can do the job turn and turn about.’

Lavina removed herself from Sam’s lap, stood up, yawned, and stretched gracefully. For the thousandth time he admired the perfect lines of her slim little figure which showed to admirable advantage in the silk shirt and old bell-bottomed trousers she was wearing that day.

Still with her back to him she said quietly: ‘You know, Sam, I’ve never found you a bore before but this afternoon I don’t find you the least amusing. I’m going to read in my bunk,’ and without a glance in his direction she left him sitting there.

That evening she provided them with a cold supper for which Derek and Hemmingway, both now more or less recovered, got up. When the meal was finished she said suddenly:

‘I’ve been thinking that we ought to divide up the work of the ship. Gervaise, as Captain, issues the stores and is a father to us all; Oliver’s our navigator and looks after the instruments and things; Derek’s the engineer, so he’ll see to the electric light, the heating plant, and the motors if we have any chance to use them; Margery, quite obviously, was cut out for cook. That leaves Sam, Hemmingway and myself, doesn’t it?’

They nodded agreement and she went on:

‘Well, I’m easy. Somebody will have to mother you and I’m not at all bad with my needle; so if you loose a button or anything you’ll know where to come. Hemmingway can lay the table and do mess-waiter and, as Sam loves pottering about in kitchens, he’d better be scullery-man and help Margery with the washing-up. That’s fair division of labour, isn’t it?’

‘Fine,’ Derek and Hemmingway agreed simultaneously while Gervaise, Oliver and Margery smiled their assent. In the face of such a clear majority Sam could do nothing. His clever little devil of a wife had out-manœuvred him completely. She would sew their buttons on. Yes, when they lost them—which would be about once a month—and in the meantime she would lie about smoking and reading while the rest of them did all the work.

He saw her smiling at him beneath lowered lids and twitched his own mouth humorously in reply. He knew that, even if she sat about doing nothing day after day, she would provide them with splendid entertainment and keep their spirits up with constant laughter. That was her natural contribution; to be supremely decorative and delightfully amusing. He readily forgave her the trick she had played him, realising that he had been a fool ever to suggest that she should use those lovely hands of hers except to stroke his own face.