The Forgotten Story (28 page)

Giddy and in danger of more sickness, he felt he could exist no longer without some water to moisten his parched throat; so he pulled himself to the other side of the cabin and opened the door.

Voices greeted him. Perry and Aunt Madge and Captain Stevens were in the dining saloon, which was in a state of chaos and semi-darkness. No one noticed him enter; there was far too much noise to take heed of a little more: rattling doors, straining woodwork, creaking chairs, loose things carrying on a scattered conversation of taps and rattles; above all, the roar of the sea and the scream of the wind.

‘Persistent neglect of running gear, ma'am,' the captain was saying. ‘We've got to take that into account. I wouldn't mention it only … mind you, it's not a question of danger yet – and these 'ere sharp sou'westers often blow themselves out as quick as they get up. But I'd not fancy tackling the Bay in this weather. Not as things are aboard. Mebbe you remember I asked –?'

‘Turning back,' said Aunt Madge hoarsely to the table. ‘Absurd. Hear no more. Wind'll go down. Face it out in due time. My dear husband always said,
The Grey Cat
, utmost confidence, captain and ship.'

‘Thank you, ma'am. It's my wish to please you. But I've got my crew to consider. I put the facts before you just in case. We can ride this out till nightfall. If it don't abate we'll have to turn and run into the nearest port.'

‘Think you could make the Sallies?' Perry asked, pushing his hair back.

Captain Stevens tapped the water out of his sou'wester. ‘I don't. And shouldn't want to.'

‘I don't fancy the Bay meself in this weather,' said Perry. ‘Stap me, I've seen the seas flying as high as the royals. It makes a man cautious. But maybe it'll abate before morning.'

‘Of course it will.' Mrs Veal put a handkerchief to her mouth and wiped away a hiccup. Apart from the fact that her cheeks seemed looser than ever and to shake with the pitching of the ship, the monument was not yet overthrown. A night of nausea had not prevented her putting on her pearls and her earrings.

‘Well, there it is,' said Stevens. ‘ I trust you're right. The cook'll prepare you some hot cocoa if you've a mind for it. That's the best we shall be able to do just at present.'

By means of various fixtures he pulled himself round to the saloon door and went out. About half a gallon of water came down the companion and slipped about on the floor of the saloon as if seeking a way of returning to its own element.

Anthony let himself go and brought up with a rush against the table. ‘ I want a drink. Is there any water?'

Both stared at him suspiciously as if they suspected him of eavesdropping. Perry's face was yellow with sea-sickness and rum. ‘In there,' he said, jerking his thumb.

The boy entered a little wash-up, and found some water in a carafe fixed to the wall. He drank it too greedily and was sick again. He stayed in the wash-up about half an hour, feeling too ill to move, but at last plucked up the strength to crawl up a hill back into the saloon.

Neither his aunt nor Perry was there; presumably they had gone into her cabin, for the space of movement was very limited. In the din he found a chair and sat on it and leaned his head back and watched the whole saloon at its dizzy acrobatics. After a time he found his eyes accustoming themselves to the changes of position; he was moving in exactly the same relationship and that helped. He began to feel better. The time by the clock above the door was nearly two, so they had been at sea nineteen hours.

There was a clatter of boots and Mr O'Brien, the mate, came into the room. He took no notice of Anthony but, maintaining his balance in a remarkable way, went over to a cupboard, knelt before it and began rummaging inside.

Anthony said: ‘This is a bad storm, Mr O'Brien.'

The mate gave him a half glance but did not reply.

‘Are we in danger?' the boy asked.

Mr O'Brien thumped something back into the cupboard. ‘Not if it was a ship ye was in, me little fellow,' he snapped. ‘ I wisht I'd never signed on but stayed in Hull with me two feet on dry land. Well, well.'

There was a crack above them and a thud, and water suddenly came down the companion ladder to join up the pools which already existed.

‘Are we far from Bristol yet?'

O'Brien rose to his feet. His fat red face under the sou'wester gleamed with water. Salt had whitened the stubble of his beard.

‘I wish we was nearer. But, Holy Mary, why Bristol? If I could see the colour of Mount's Bay I should be satisfied.'

‘Well, we're going to Bristol, aren't we?'

O'Brien buttoned up his oiler. ‘Not this trip, young feller. Oporto we was making for. But where we shall make landfall if this breeze don't drop, God only knows.'

Anthony ran after him as he went to the door.

‘I know the ship's going to Portugal. But we're calling at – at Bristol first to pick up more cargo. That's – that's where I'm getting off.'

O'Brien pushed away his detaining arm.

‘Och, I've no time to stand here arguing the toss. Ask your mother, or whatever she is. She'll set you right.'

Nightfall brought no abatement of the wind but only a slight shifting of direction.

At 8
P
.
M
. Captain Stevens came down and with a steady hand entered the following particulars in the log:

8/12/98. Days on passage, 2. Course SSW. Wind and weather: SW 7–9. Rain squalls; steep seas. Ship taking seas solid over fo'c'sle head, pitching and labouring. Later came three other entries. 9/12/98. Midnight. Wind and weather: SW 9-10. Running before full gale under foresail and tops'l only. Course now approx. NNE by 1/2 E. Heavy squalls. Two helmsmen. Heavy damage on deck. 2
A
.
M
. Wind and weather: W by S 9. Fore topm'st carried away. Seas breaking over all the time. Ship labouring heavily. 4 a.m. Wind and weather: W by N 9–8. Bare poles. Trying to set up jury rig for'ard. Water gaining on the pumps. In much danger of being pooped.

A superstitious person might have imagined that Joe Veal was taking some part in the situation and exacting his revenge. If nothing more, his parsimony was coming into its own.

But Madge Veal was not a superstitious woman. She was far too self-centred to believe in omens. She was not interested in retribution, divine or astral-human, nor if she had been would she have thought herself a subject likely to incur it. Anything she had done she had done with the best of intentions; indeed, she had never acted but on the highest principles and from the highest possible motive, that of her own welfare.

But Perry … Perry, like all sailors, had a strong thread of superstition in his character. Not that he had been a sailor any length of time. Three years of hardship before the mast when a young man had given him a working knowledge of the argot but no further desire to employ it in its proper element. After that when he travelled he travelled as much as possible on dry land. Cab-driver in Cape Town, waiter in Buenos Aires, casual cow-hand in Texas, hobo, soft-drink attendant at a drug-store in San Francisco; these were casual points in the career of a rolling stone who had attracted a record low level in moss. Then a lucky ticket in a sweepstake had put him on top of the world and given him the money to travel home to England first class. It had been the beginning of a run of luck which had brought him a comfortable corner by his brother Joe's fireside and the favour and side glances of his brother's statuesque wife. It wasn't that he'd ever been really attracted by Madge, it was only that he never could resist an implicit challenge of that sort: there was the mischievous temptation to know what the statue was like when it was tipped off its pedestal.

Well, he knew now.

He had thought then that it never would end, that run of luck; there seemed no reason why it should. But imperceptibly the change had come. Not at any single point could he say the vein had given out; nor was he the sort of man who would ordinarily concern himself with regrets that it had done so. Not ordinarily.

But these last few weeks he had begun to wish he had never left San Francisco.

He knew now, although his mind was working in a haze of rum and sea-sickness, that there was only one serious concern in his head: to cut the painter and slip away. To do that he would take any reasonable risk. His was not a conscience which had been unduly exercised in the past; it had accepted shady little episodes and adventures without protest. But the essence of them was that they were
little.
He knew his limitations. And for the last few months he had been playing right out of his class. For the last few weeks he hadn't been able to call his soul his own.

The knowledge was on his lungs. Not so much his conscience as his lungs. The knowledge was a weight; it was a tangible thing. Sometimes he found he could hardly breathe for it. The only palliative was rum.

As the storm grew worse he left Madge and went to lie down in his bunk, aware of the quiet figure of the boy in the other bunk. If he had any beads to tell he would have ‘told' them. He could not escape a superstitious twinge at the fury with which the gale had broken upon them, but he still had the gambler's belief that his sudden bad luck was about to change and that the gale might yet turn to his own benefit. Now that they were being forced to run for one of the Bristol Channel ports he might get a chance to slip ashore unobserved.

What disconcerted him in this hope was the manner in which Madge was bearing up. By all the laws this storm should have shaken her nerve. The only sign she gave was that of going into her most withdrawn mood. But she was far from any mood in which she could be easily given the slip.

The boy stirred and sneezed but didn't speak, although he was certainly awake and had seen his uncle come in. Perry had never wanted to bring the boy at all. To him he represented an encumbrance and an added risk. But Madge, with an inside knowledge of the facts, had said that he could not be left behind to bear tales and tell everyone where they had gone, or at least
how
they had gone. During his five months' stay he had seen too much. Little boys had big eyes. Besides, he had done all her shopping for her. If examined by some impudent prying busybody he would give too much away. And, though she did not put it into so many words, Anthony still fulfilled a purpose he had fulfilled for some time: he lent respectability to a
ménage
which without him would be morally suspect. When they reached Portugal, Aunt Madge said, they could put him on a boat to Canada from there; it would be a nice surprise for his father who, even if he hadn't sent for him, would certainly be glad to see him. But Perry was not quite sure if she meant this; he would never be sure of anything Madge said again. He was coming to appreciate Madge's conscience which, if always active, was always malleable; he had known it to make the most acrobatic
volte-faces
. He was not exactly comfortable about the future of the boy.

Anthony would have been much better left behind.

But as the night advanced Perry's fuddled humanitarian promptings were lost in fear for his own safety. In his few years at sea he had known enough of storms to recognise the dangerous quality of this one; and his experience of ships was at least sufficient to tell him that the barquentine was fighting for her life, and fighting with declining heart.

At five o'clock Captain Stevens was brought down into the water-logged saloon amid the wreckage of the furniture. A wave had brought a broken spar round and knocked him down with it. He was conscious but in considerable pain. Nobody but himself had the least knowledge of medicine, but he said he thought he had broken some ribs. At this stage Perry realised that their chances of survival were becoming slight. In the Atlantic they might have drifted before the storm until it abated. In these narrow seas they were likely to pile up on the rocks which could not be far away.

They took Stevens into his own cabin where Mrs Veal sat stubbornly in a corner and would speak to no one but herself. Perry made an effort to get him comfortable in his bunk and then put on the captain's oilskins and went on deck. At least he succeeded in opening the companion doors and putting out his head as one will put one's head out of a train when it is rushing through a tunnel. (There is only the noise and the pitch blackness and the flying wind.) The doors banged to after him as he retreated into the cabin and more water followed him down.

He wiped water from his face and poured himself out a tot of rum.

He sat there all alone, feeling desolate and trapped and frightened. He would have given a good deal merely for a confidential friend to talk to. But in one cabin there was a sick boy distant and reserved; in the other was an injured man watched over though not tended by a woman who frightened him more than anything else in the world except the things she had done.

So there was nothing for it except to get drunk, and that was something beyond his powers; all he could do was take enough to solace his loneliness and deaden the worst of his fear.

A member of the crew sighted land at 6.35 when dawn had begun to thin the blackness of the flying night. For twelve minutes with O'Brien and another man at the wheel, barely able to cling to it and constantly washed by half seas, they kept their distance from the high desolate coast. More desperate attempts were made to increase the jury rig, not without success, and O'Brien brought her up a little to the north. But then as they plunged on he saw through the slow, fitful daylight that the coast ran out ahead of him across the path of the wind.

He knew then that
The Grey Cat
was on her last voyage.

A wave came over and swept the length of the deck, licking like a hungry animal over a bone which has already been picked clean.

‘May!' he shouted at the top of his voice to the carpenter. ‘Below! Get 'em up.'

May the carpenter did not hear what was said, but he understood the gesture that went with it. He glanced backwards at the hurrying mountainous seas, then quickly unlooped the rope about his waist and dived towards the hatchway.