Sea Fury (1971) (2 page)

“It d-d-didn’t s-s-s-” Finch let out a stream of sibilants, could get no further and decided to try a different route. “I d-didn’t think I n-n-needed one.”

The fact was that Finch had a very weak beard; hair grew on his face in very limited areas, and there only thinly. A shave every other day had always seemed as much as was necessary to keep this wispy growth under control, and
Captain
Leach had never previously made any complaint about it. Finch supposed that this morning he must be more observant than usual; or simply in a worse temper.

“As long as you continue to serve in my ship, Mr. Finch, you will shave every morning, whether you imagine you need a shave or not. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Remember it then.”

Captain Leach turned away from Finch. He checked the compass reading, scowled at the small, dark, silent man at the wheel, walked out of the wheelhouse on to the starboard wing of the bridge, rested his hands on the bleached teak rail and gazed down at the foredeck, at the battened
hatch-covers,
the cradled derrick booms, the winches and the
bulwarks
. His gaze travelled on towards the forecastle and the bows of the ship cleaving a way through the blue water. He had seen it all before, so many times, so many different ships, different oceans. So long, so long; and to what end?

Finch had been correct in surmising that Leach was in a black mood; it had been on him when he had awakened, and the early morning whisky had done nothing to alleviate it. There was nothing unusual about that; he was more often than not in an evil temper. Captain Leach looked upon life with a jaundiced eye and saw in it little that was good.

It had not always been so. Thirty years ago things had been very different. Then he had been a rising young
Merchant
Navy officer, recently married to a wife in whom, so it seemed to him, were embodied all the virtues. It was the beginning of World War Two, a time of danger and
opportunity
for men like Bartholomew Leach with ability and ambition; he had his first command before he was thirty. Two years later he had won the D.S.O. and had lost his wife. It was then that he had begun to drink heavily.

Captain Leach glanced at the sky; it was cloudless; there was scarcely any wind. A thousand miles or so to Fremantle; discharge cargo; disembark passengers; take a fresh cargo; back to Singapore, Hong Kong. What a life it was. At his age, with his experience, he should have been commanding a crack liner, not a rusty old rattle-trap like this. If things had not gone wrong …

He pushed himself away from the rail, turned and gazed aft along the boat deck. That woman was taking up her usual position near the funnel. Every morning the same place, as if she had staked a claim to it. Attractive woman; too damned attractive maybe; the kind that often spelt trouble.

Gas rumbled in Leach’s stomach; it came up sour in his
throat, a minor eruption leaving a foul taste in his mouth. He needed another drink. He went back into the wheelhouse, snarled something unintelligible at the inoffensive Mr. Finch and then left the bridge. Finch was glad to see him go.

Moira Lycett settled herself in the deck-chair that the obsequious oriental steward had placed for her. Mrs. Lycett was wearing a floppy straw hat, a sun-top and white shorts. She had chestnut hair, good legs and a body that was only just beginning to show signs of deterioration. From any
distance
of more than a foot or two she might have been judged to be still in her twenties. Only if you looked more closely were the tell-tale signs apparent; the puckering at the corners of the eyes, the incipient creases around the throat, the slight coarsening of the skin. Moira Lycett was close to forty and hated the thought; but she was, as Leach had
acknowledged
in his own mind, still a highly attractive woman. And she was very well aware of the fact.

She had brought with her the usual assortment of accessories: sun-glasses, handbag, paperback novel, cigarettes, lighter, cosmetics. She stretched out her legs on the extension of the deck-chair and breathed in deeply.

“The air is good mebbe?”

She looked up and was not surprised to see the mate of the
Chetwynd
gazing down at her. By some strange
coincidence
that recurred each morning, Mr. Johansen always seemed to find it necessary to visit the boat-deck when Moira Lycett was there.

“It’s better up here than in the cabin.”

“Sure. Cabins too hot. No air-conditioning. Ship too old.”

Carl Johansen was a Dane, tall and bony and flaxen-haired, with a misleadingly boyish look. There was in fact nothing boyish about Mr. Johansen except that look. He was not even
particularly young, having come into the world only a year or two after Moira Lycett. Johansen’s trouble was not liquor, though he could drink with the best; it was an evil temper. He had been gaoled for assault in more than one country and once he had half-killed a seaman simply because the man answered him back. Like Bartholomew Leach, though for a different reason, Johansen had found it difficult to get
employment
with the more selective shipping companies. Finally he too had found his level with the Barling-Orient.

For quite apart from his unpredictable temper, Carl
Johansen
had another failing: women. At an earlier stage in his career he had been second officer on board a cruise liner which did the Canaries, Bahamas, Caribbean, Rio circuit. Johansen had found that job very much to his taste, but it had come to a sudden and unsavoury termination when one of the passengers complained to the captain that the second officer had seduced his wife.

Johansen had not troubled to deny the charge; it would have been pointless to do so, seeing that the husband had caught him in the act. Johansen could never understand how he had forgotten to lock the cabin door; though even a locked door would scarcely have saved him. There is not as a rule a rear exit from a ship’s cabin, and a porthole is a poor substitute for a window as a way of escape for surprised lovers.

That had been the end of cruise liners for him.

Moira Lycett looked up at Johansen, her eyes shielded by the sun-glasses. She understood the Dane very well; she could have made a pretty shrewd guess concerning the thoughts that were passing through his mind as he stood there with one hand resting negligently on the back of the deck-chair and his frankly admiring eyes taking in every voluptuous curve of her body. Not that she resented being gazed at in that way. Quite the contrary in fact. She dreaded only the
day when men would cease to be attracted, cease to be moved by the desire to possess her. When that day came life would have lost most of its savour.

She liked the look of Johansen; she liked men who were lean and bony. It was Morton’s softness that disgusted her, the flabbiness that he had allowed to overtake him. She knew that Johansen was a hard man, mentally as well as physically; she was not misled by the boyish air; there was a steeliness about the pale blue eyes, a hint of ice; and the mouth had a cruel twist. He was, she thought, the kind of man who might beat a woman. She felt a secret thrill of pleasure at the idea of being beaten by Johansen.

“Why do you work on an old ship, Mr. Johansen?”

He grinned. “Why do you travel in an old ship, Mrs. Lycett?”

“You think perhaps we are both the victims of
circumstance
?”

“Mebbe so.”

When Moira Lycett looked at Johansen she could imagine what the Vikings must have been like. Give him the right gear and he would not look out of place in a longship, one of those fierce and brutal invaders, leaping ashore with sword and shield to murder and rape and plunder. Again that secret thrill passed along her spine, but she gave no indication that his proximity in any way affected her; she remained outwardly cool, apparently even a little bored. She gave the smallest of yawns, suppressing it with a touch of the fingers on her lips. It did not escape Johansen’s notice.

“You find life tedious, Mrs. Lycett?”

She answered lazily: “You don’t have to be so formal. My name is Moira.”

“And mine is Carl.”

“I know. And as to finding life tedious, why yes, I do.
What could be more boring than a sea voyage? Each day is just like the last—and the next. The scenery never changes; nothing happens.”

“Sometimes things happen.’

“You mean the ship might hit a reef, spring a leak? That sort of thing.”

“No, Moira, I do not mean that sort of thing. I do not speak of the ship.”

“No? Of what then?”

He moved his right hand a little on the back of the
deckchair
, closer to her shoulder. His head bent over her and she could see his eyes and the smile curving his mouth, a smile of intimacy, of something shared.

“Things happen to people. When they want them to happen. There is no need to be bored.” He straightened up. “You understand me?”

“I understand you very well,” she said. “Oh, yes, Carl, I understand you.”

He began to laugh a little. Moira Lycett also laughed.

Morton Lycett was in the lounge playing two-handed pontoon with the Australian, Grade. There were glasses of beer on the table and both men were sweating. Two electric fans made a humming sound but did little to cool the air; they dispersed the cigarette smoke, that was all.

Lycett was a plump, bald-headed man, approaching with no delight in the prospect his fiftieth birthday. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses because, much to his annoyance, he had discovered that his eyesight was no longer good enough for reading without their aid. His cheeks looked as though they had dropped under their own weight and they hung down on each side of his jaw like the pouches of a hamster. His mouth was small, the lips slightly pouting, and he had a
bristling moustache of the military type. His ears were
singularly
ugly, closely resembling those strange fungoid growths that attach themselves to the trunks of trees. He spoke with the clipped accents of Sandhurst and made short stabbing gestures with a stubby forefinger when emphasising a point.

“Twist.”

Grade turned up the three of diamonds.

“Twist again.”

This time it was the king of hearts. Lycett threw down his cards in disgust.

“Tough luck. Major,” Grade said.

Lycett had never been a major in the regular army; it was a rank he had held in the R.A.S.C. during the war. But he liked to use it; he felt that it gave him style; there was a certain ring to Major Morton Lycett that plain Mr. Lycett could never have. For a man in his line of business a thing like that could be important.

As to what his line of business was, Lycett avoided giving any precise information; he preferred to drop hints, alluding vaguely to international projects, expanding interests, capital investments, world trade. People were given to understand that he had a finger in quite a number of different pies, that innumerable extremely useful strings were grasped in his capable hands and that a stock market tip from him was as good as money in the bank—always supposing he could be prevailed upon to give such a tip.

“You may wonder,” he had once remarked to Grade, “why a man in my position should choose to travel in a ship like this.”

“It’s cheaper,” Grade said, looking at him from half-closed eyes.

Lycett laughed, cheeks wobbling. “You really think that consideration swayed me?”

“I wouldn’t know, Major.”

“My dear fellow, it’ll be a sad day when Morton Lycett has to count the cost of a steamship ticket—or an airline ticket either for that matter. Fact is, I like it. You can keep your Boeings, your crack liners. Give me an old boat like this and I’m happy. A ship like this has character.”

He had almost convinced himself that he really did prefer to travel in ships like the
Chetwynd.
That was the secret of his persuasiveness: he believed in what he was saying—at the time.

Tom Grade was about thirty-five, with hair the colour of a new copper coin, a snub nose and a face entirely covered with freckles. Lycett said it made him feel several degrees hotter just to look at Grade’s head; it positively glowed. Grade, like Nick Holt, had joined the ship in Hong Kong. What he had been doing there was even more of a mystery than Lycett’s activities. He said he had been looking around, searching for an opening. Lycett would have imagined there were more openings in his native Australia for a man like Grade, and perhaps that was the conclusion he himself had reached, since he was on his way back.

Grade shuffled the cards and dealt. “You going to Australia on business or pleasure, Major?”

Lycett picked up his cards. “A little of both perhaps.”

“Looking for room to spread yourself?”

“You might say that. I’ll buy one.”

Grade handed him the card face downward. “Maybe I could help. Put you on to something really good. Nickel, should we say?”

Lycett picked up the card, looked at it, looked at Grade. “That’s a very useful mineral.”

“And I’ve got connections.”

“I’ll remember that.”

They played in silence for a while. Then Grade said, “Mrs. Lycett’s on deck, I suppose?”

Lycett answered him offhandedly, “I imagine so. She likes sitting in the sun.”

“You don’t?”

“Frying myself never did appeal to me.”

“Your wife is a very attractive woman, Major.”

“You think so?”

Grade said softly, “I’m not the only one who does.”

“Anyone in particular you had in mind?” Lycett’s tone was still offhand; he seemed only mildly interested. He did not fool Grade.

“Mr. Johansen seems very attentive.”

“The chief officer?”

Grade nodded.

“It’s his job to be attentive to passengers. I’ll buy
another
.”

Grade dealt the card. “Just so long as he doesn’t exceed his duties.”

“What exactly do you mean by that?”

“I’ve heard things about Johansen.”

“Tell me.”

Grade told him. Lycett listened.

“What are you going to do?” Grade asked.