Dead Water (18 page)

One of the ironies of Eric’s change of life – from local fishing magnate to international shipping entrepreneur – has been the growing frequency and duration of such trips. For years now he has been languishing, week after week, month after month, in one hotel after another, in this capital city or that, alone, unmarried, his feelings for Vibeke still undeclared – and to think that all this while his secret love has been tramping, dark and supple, among the hills of his island kingdom!

From Svolvaer, Vibeke writes him letters full of observations of animals and birds. He’s reading one now:

The older greylags have enjoyed the run of the house for over a year, and have learnt to treat the dogs as their social inferiors. The dogs, in their turn, barely tolerate the ducks.

Pippi holds himself aloof, as always. Without a companion, he grows ever more neurotic. He is terrorized by the sight of the end of his own tail, poking up from under the shreds of newspaper lining the bottom of his cage. When I take him out he hides behind the curtains and does not make a sound. If I leave the room for a moment, I return to find him perched on the pelmet, screaming with loneliness.

When Pippi first made his appearance in her letters, Vibeke omitted, in a welter of other domestic and zoological detail, to say what kind of animal he was. In his reply Eric forgot to ask. Now it is impossible for him to admit to his own ignorance. He imagines an unhappy, indeterminate creature with bright red fur, somewhere between squirrel, cat and monkey.

A policeman leans in through the door and calls the waiting businessmen to attention: the flight is refuelled and ready for boarding.

As he crosses the apron, clouds peel away from the sun: light turns the orange hull to a slab of flame so that Eric, disoriented, must grope halfblind for the handrail. Tin steps wobble underfoot.

Eric’s contact, sitting by the window near the front of the aircraft, arrived with the plane. Though the man’s eye is keen and his handshake is firm, his torso is sunken, twisted, as though the hours spent in his seat have caused an essential mechanism to unwind.

The pair sit in a silence that you could not really call companionable until the DC3 takes off and the racket of the propellers is sure to mask their conversation. ‘Nice day,’ the man says, with a certain sourness.

Eric, whose humour is simple and direct, never knows what to do with sarcasm. ‘Yes,’ he says, in a neutral tone, falling back on his usual reticence: the fisherman’s friend.

The DC3 is circling Kastrup as it gains cruising height. Winter sun flushes their side of the plane, filling the cabin with a light that is, in all senses of the word, neutral. Neutral by the common accord of hostile parties; neutral, too, in its lack of heat, its absence of association, the way it accentuates edges while robbing surfaces of their texture, so that it feels for a moment as if they are sitting in some photographic developing agent, their surroundings only half-realized.

The young Frenchman speaks. His accent reveals a German education, which is only to be expected given his area of expertise: ‘The by-product represents little in terms of bulk. Less than a hundred kilos.’

Eric is not interested in reassurances, least of all reassurances that assume his ignorance concerning deuterium oxide. As if bulk were the issue!

Deuterium, a regular hydrogen atom with a newfangled neutron at its heart, bonds with oxygen to make a kind of water, and if you filled a bucket with it, and filled another from the tap, you might just be able to guess which bucket was heavier. In every cup of ordinary water there’s a little heavy water. To get at it you have to electrolyse the ordinary water away – an expensive business, but not if you need to split oxygen and hydrogen for some other profitable process – say, the production of fertilizer. Which is what the plant at Vemork is – or was, before the new physics arrived: a fertilizer factory. The Frenchman’s talk of ‘by-product’ is accurate in its coy way.

‘I would feel a lot more comfortable if you would allow me to float a little oil over the contents of each barrel. Carting drums of water across the North Sea would attract anyone’s attention.’ It pleases Eric to play the fool sometimes with these scientific types, as Svolvaer’s practised whaling crews once played the fool with him.

‘Maintaining the purity of the by-product is our first priority.’ The Frenchman sounds as though he is reciting from a book. Eric admires the man’s control.

How much do the French assume he understands? The role of heavy water as a neutron modulator is most definitely
not
a piece of information the French expect Eric to possess, and it is almost worth dropping it into conversation just to see what colour the Frenchman’s face will turn in this acidic orange light.

Of course, Eric will not do any such thing. Because he is Eric. Because the stakes are too high. Most of all, because the experiment would fail. This light would fail to conduct the fiercest passion; would shine alike on lovemaking and murder, so that you would not be able to tell one from the other; would dull the passions themselves in time. Why did they have to paint over the windows anyway?

The Frenchman wants to dictate the route. He wants Eric’s sea captain to ply the coast as far as Tromsø, then sail west to Skye. The naivety of the plan is predictable: it assumes the sea is as neutral and featureless as the charts that represent it. Eric replies: ‘Your route at least doubles the risk to your cargo from the weather and increases the journey time fourfold.’ This last is a lie, but Eric has grown used to the business of bluff. You don’t get to relocate your fleet in foreign harbours – at a discount, at that – without acquiring some of the flashier tricks of the persuasion game.

Quite what this man thinks German agents will make of an unfamiliar cargo vessel heading so far north, into the haunts of Lappish reindeerherders and fishermen, is another point against the plan, but not one worth airing since the plan is void anyway. Eric’s captains have his complete confidence and they choose their own routes. ‘Your people will be welcome on board, as before,’ Eric offers, and the man’s abrupt and immediate acquiescence leads him to wonder whether this whole argument was not a red herring, a test of his urgency in acquiring the shipment – too much keenness being deemed suspicious.

Their business done, the Frenchman loses interest in him and reaches under the seat in front for his briefcase. He has been far too long in his seat; his balance is shot. He has to lean with his free hand on the seat in front to keep himself from slipping sideways. He balances the case across his legs. Eric stares for a second, then looks quickly away. The material of the man’s trouser leg has folded up under the weight of the case, flattening to a shape that cannot be natural. The man has lost a leg. Maybe he has lost two legs. A child casualty of the last war? Anyway, he is wearing at least one artificial leg.

Eric wonders how he could have failed to notice this till now. Were the man’s trousers structured to assume a natural fullness when not crushed by the weight of some object? What kind of arrangement would that involve? Some form of inflation, perhaps. Balloonettes. He wonders how far these mechanisms extend.

Can the operating company simply not pay someone sometime to scrape the windows of this aircraft clear of orange paint? A small square would be enough. A chink scraped clean with a razor blade, just enough so that the world might catch its breath. Without that chink of earth-blue light it is impossible to associate this interior with the idea of forward motion. The propellers rattle and churn but they don’t seem to be going anywhere.

Is the man’s torso real? His arms are real, because Eric can see the man’s hands, leafing through his papers – but is this inference justified? Might real hands be attached to unreal arms? His head is real. Is his chest real? Or are the real parts connected to an artificial centre, like gondolas hung from an airship? How much does he weigh? If the pilot decreases the plane’s altitude, and the cabin’s pressure rises, will the Frenchman levitate?

Caught up in these thoughts, if you can call them thoughts, tangled in absurd speculations, Eric doesn’t even notice they are descending until the Horror’s wheels hit the tarmac at Poole.

With a stifled little cry, Eric clambers out of his seat, even while the plane is taxiing to a standstill. He isn’t the only one. Week by week, as the news worsens and the European war spreads west, this fragile flight is becoming a test of nerves. Eric allows the crush of eager passengers to carry him away towards the front of the plane. He glances back at the Frenchman, who gives him the curtest of nods. He has not tried to leave his seat. Naturally, he is waiting until everyone else has left the plane. It will take him some time to arrange his artificial leg, to get his balance, to move, crabwise, through the plane, and this is why he has not yet moved. Though it comes to Eric that he never saw the man move from his seat, so it is possible – not likely, but possible – that the man has somehow been made part of the plane.

Vibeke tells Eric in her letter that her camera is broken: Pippi knocked it off a shelf and it is beyond repair. She is saving up for another.

Once in London, Eric buys Vibeke a camera. Heavy. Specialized. A Tropen Adoro: its teak body was conceived to withstand the humidity of the East Indies, ‘so I think you will find that it will prove more than equal to the mists and drizzle of Voksenkollen’.

In his room in the Dorchester Hotel he stares at his letter, the complacency of it, the hint of self-congratulation: this is the warmest his correspondence ever gets.

He unscrews his pen and stares through the sparse, pale green of new foliage, over Park Lane to Hyde Park and the crackled grey hide of the Serpentine, drained to deprive German bombers of a landmark. His insides churning like an overworked Kvaerner blubber digester, he writes:

Invasion of the south seems inevitable, but you will be safe enough on the Lofotens, I think. And you will always have a home here in London should you need it. It may be prudent to arrange your passage while these dealings can be conducted openly. Take what money you need from the house and speak to Frodhi, a trustworthy man and a good seaman – and no friend of the Hun.

He could weep with frustration. No matter how close he comes to her in thought, his words serve only to carry him further and further away. He will have to find some other way to express his clotted feelings. He walks into town and visits Liberty’s department store to buy Vibeke a gift. After an hour’s wandering, he drifts into the orbit of the perfumery. There’s pre-war stock here, on sale at an eye-watering mark-up. He settles on the most expensive brand he can find.
Étude
. The salesgirl, unable to believe her luck, insists on delivering her pitch anyway. In common with the world’s finest perfumes, she explains,
Étude
contains ‘ambergris’!

Listening to her, Eric wonders idly, mischievously, what the girl would say if he were to tell her what he knows of this rare and magical stuff. That sperm whales subsist largely on a diet of Antarctic octopus. That the octopus wrap themselves around the heads of their attackers, and the whales dive, head-butting their prey to death against the ocean floor.

‘... with a top-note of patchouli...’

The octopus can only cling; it has no other defence. Its arms are not muscular. Its suckers, though, are blade-edged and tear fiercely at its foe. The octopuses are big; their tentacles reach as far as a whale’s rectum.

‘... Jean-François Houbigant...’

That a whale coming away from battle with a sore arse will manufacture a foul-smelling grease to cleanse and soothe its wounds. And men who work for Eric Moyse, killing the whale, will look for this grease. Retching, they will scrape it out of the whale’s arsehole. And they will put it in jars and sell it to dealers in Oslo, who will sell it to parfumiers in Paris and Amsterdam and New York.

‘... presented in a flacon by Cristalleries Baccarat...’

‘I said, I’ll take it.’

Back in his room at the Dorch, Eric inspects the gift. He turns the thing over and over in his hands, aware of a growing dissatisfaction. The bottle, as chunky and irregular as a salt crystal, rests on a silver-plated base. The more he thinks about it, the more he tries to imagine it, the more impossible it seems that Vibeke will show the slightest interest in it. He may as well have bought her a ball gown, or a lapdog, or a season ticket to the opera. His mistake appears doubly inept when he thinks of the trouble he has gone to in encouraging the girl, in his long absence, to adopt a life of loneliness and high purpose.

Her notes. Her observations. Her science and fieldwork. Studies to rival anything by Austria’s Konrad Lorenz or the Netherlands’ Niko Tinbergen. Nights spent sleeping rough in barns and ditches. An endorsement from the Geographical Society. By encouraging her love of the Arctic seaboard he has successfully sequestered her from outside influence. He has made her a myth. A sprite. He has made her untouchable.

Sunday, 29 September 1941

London’s Dorchester Hotel is made out of concrete, its wall cavities filled with seaweed to deaden the sound of traffic on Park Lane. It is a new kind of building, built to insulate its clientele from a new kind of world. It is, simply, the most sumptuous air-raid shelter in London.

Tonight the Luftwaffe are dropping wave after wave of high explosive over Whitehall, but nothing short of multiple direct hits could breach the hotel’s reinforced concrete shell. The restaurant – it has been moved to the Gold Room to avoid the danger of flying glass – is sumptuously decorated, a mass of gilded stucco, and the bombardment is shaking it free, piece by piece: an absurd, decadent rain. The diners shelter under their tables, entertaining each other as best they can: titles, MPs, American spies, minor royalty. Mrs Greville of Polesden Lacy. Ministers, ambassadors, industrialists. It-girls of every hue and stripe. Emerald, Lady Cunard has come prepared. Self-contained, unflappable, seated among folds of tablecloth like Scheherazade in Shahryar’s tent, she reads to her party from a volume of Paul Verlaine. Eric’s French is rusty enough to shield him from the poet’s more baroque indecencies.