The Piper's Tune (48 page)

‘I take it the father's absconded?'

‘Yes, and I feel sorry for her.' Gowry shrugged. ‘I only have to sleep there, thanks to God, but those further down the ladder have to live there. Families. Singles. This girl, she's a single. I'm not sure what she's going to do.'

‘There are places she can go. Charities.'

‘I don't think she'd be doing that.'

‘She could go back to her parents.'

‘They'd never take her in. Anyhow, I think she's an orphan.'

‘Are you making this up?' Lindsay said.

He grinned. ‘No. It's all true, I swear it is.'

Lindsay looked down at her son who, at last, seemed to have had his fill. His lips had slipped from her teat and his eyes were closed. She glanced at Harry who, in spite of his uncle's presence, had become absorbed in play again. He wrestled with hands and arms to keep the pile of bricks upright while balancing another on the top. Disaster, Lindsay reckoned, was inevitable.

Gowry said, ‘That's not why I came up here, really.'

‘Why did you come?'

‘I've something to tell you.'

‘What's that?'

‘My mam, she's planning to stay in Glasgow for the whole summer.'

‘Does Forbes know?' Lindsay asked. ‘Of course he does. Who will look after your father while she's away?'

‘He can look after himself,' Gowry said. ‘Anyhow, I thought you might like a wee bit of a warning and I know Forbes won't say anything.'

Lindsay was wary of Gowry. She suspected some trick or ruse but could not imagine what purpose would be served by it. She did not like her Aunt Kay, but she could hardly refuse to have her in the house. She would, however, issue due warning to her father who might choose to take a holiday just to escape, two or three weeks in a good hotel down the coast, after the submarine was launched and trials completed. Two or three weeks with Miss Runciman to look after him and provide him with company: would that be considered outrageous? Lindsay wondered. Given their ages, probably not. If they weren't too far off she might take the children down for a week or so, without Winn and, needless to say, without Forbes. Tom and Cissie might come too and Lilias and Uncle Donald; like old times it would be, happy times in the Bruce Hotel, only with a whole new cast of sand-babies.

Gowry got to his feet. ‘You won't say anything, will you? I mean, you won't say anything to Forbes, or to Winn and Bloss?'

‘About what?' said Lindsay. ‘Your mother – or this girl of yours?'

‘Either,' Gowry said.

‘No, I won't say anything,' Lindsay promised.

He watched her button her blouse and then came closer. He looked down at the child drowsing in her arms. ‘May I hold him?'

Lindsay felt a curious little squinch of apprehension. Gowry looked so tall, standing over her, and the uniform made him menacing.

‘Just for a minute,' Gowry said, ‘let me hold him.'

Forbes had never taken either of his babies into his arms. Even now it was all he could bring himself to do to allow Harry to clamber on to his knee for a few minutes at a time. She arranged the shawl about Philip's legs and feet then very carefully transferred the sleepy child to the Irishman's arms.

In spite of the uniform, Gowry was not awkward, not nervous. When Philip sighed and nestled against him, he uttered a crooning sound, and with the tip of his little finger brushed away a fleck of milk from the baby's bottom lip.

He looked up at Lindsay, grinning broadly.

‘That's fine, isn't it now?' he murmured. ‘Sure and isn't that fine?'

‘Indeed, it is,' said Lindsay.

*   *   *

Once before, on the Niger, Tom had feared for his life. He had been alone on the river, alone that is without Britons around him and only two gruff French agents for company. It had rained with tropical force most of the night and the currents had become so strong that the launch in which he had been travelling had lost power and had swung back and across the basin, broadside to the walls of cocoa-brown water. There was danger, but not an excess of it; what had really frightened him had been the smell of the floodwater, of Africa, a sudden awareness of his isolation and an uncharacteristic dread that he was being punished for daring to be there at all.

On the days of the submarine's trials there was no turbulence on the surface of the Gareloch, not a breath of wind, not a ripple on the shingle shore, and the moorland hills that flanked the upper waters of the firth were as still as painted scenery against a deep blue August sky; yet Tom was frightened, more frightened than he had ever been on the swirling flood currents of the Niger. He had attended several trials on the sheltered stretch of water that branched off the Clyde estuary. Measured miles and testing grounds for paddle steamers were here and the piers at Cree, Mambeg and Clynder had a familiarity that should have been calming. Nothing could calm Tom that hot August week, however, for an irrational fear had corroded his common sense.

Royal Naval observers manned the pier at Cree. It was a stubby, high-sided construction that nosed into water deep enough to accommodate the salvage vessel,
Kettledrum,
which had been brought up all the way from Sheerness to assist in the trials. Tom had already spent three hot glaring days on the deck of the
Kettledrum
watching the
Snark,
as the prototype was now called, being sealed and lowered to a depth of sixty-nine feet without crew or observers on board, sealed, lowered and raised again to ensure that the hull was absolutely watertight. She crossed this first hurdle with flying colours and as Commander Coles, chief naval observer, remarked, had ‘come up drier than she had gone down'.

But Tom was fretful and impatient. He knew that the hull would withstand pressure down to one hundred and fifty feet and he was uncommonly aggrieved at the navy's thoroughness. On the first manned trials, the
Snark
was given a good surface run, a little sniff of the wind, as it were, though there was no wind, not a breath. Results were not recorded; the official trials for speed and manoeuvrability, above and below water, would take place later in the week.

The navy's high brass were lodged in a hotel in Helensburgh and ferried round to Cree each morning, but Tom went home to Glasgow each evening to take a late supper with his wife, kiss his little boy, to lie down to sleep in his own bed with dread growling in his brain like an overture. There were several aspects to his anxiety. One which he shared with all Franklin's partners was a fear that the submarine would fail to meet the requirements of the Admiralty's commissioning body and that the vessel would prove ‘unacceptable'.

On paper the
Snark
was a perfect fighting machine, sleek, supple and fast, an ocean-going monster with a strike-range far in excess of anything that the Royal Navy so far possessed. On paper she represented a feat of advanced engineering and – on paper – she could not fail to satisfy. But a rejected submarine had no market whatsoever, was fit only for the scrap heap; if the navy did turn her down then Franklin's financial loss would be considerable if not ruinous and he, Tom, would have to bear a lion's share of the blame.

Tom's other anxieties were much more personal: fear of the unknown, of the underside of the sea, of pressures he could calculate mathematically but could not imagine, of tensile strengths and submergence limits, and darkness, the suffocating darkness that might turn the graceful metal shell into a tomb. He was afraid, desperately afraid, of going down in her.

But on Thursday, come what may, he would have to do just that.

*   *   *

It was early, far too early, so early in fact that dawn was still little more than a pearly promise in the eastern sky. Ewan was fast asleep in the room to the rear of the apartment, clothes thrown off, his little limbs spread out across the sheet for coolness.

In the kitchen, Cissie fussed with a frying-pan, breaking eggs and sliding ham into a clean, sizzling pool of fat. She wore a thin cotton dressing-gown over her nightdress and had stuck her bare feet into a pair of Tom's old carpet slippers. At that moment she reminded him of his Aunt Sarah who had raised him after his mother's final illness, and his mood lightened at the realisation that Cissie was not so very different from any one of the thousands of women across Clydeside who would be cooking breakfast and packing their husbands off to work. Cissie was a good wife, an attentive wife, a loving wife: Tom regretted that he could not explain what troubled him, not without seeming like a coward.

He had a suspicion that Cissie had guessed the reason for his brooding silences, and this morning she too was quiet. He missed her prattle, her small talk, the sharing of inconsequentialities. She plonked a second fried egg on to a clean tea-plate and put it down beside him.

‘Eat,' she said.

Tom was already dressed in his suit, shaved, groomed, ready for the long day ahead. He looked at the eggs, at the crimson slices of ham, and felt his throat close. He lifted his teacup and tried to sip the hot sugary liquid without gagging.

‘You're not being shot at dawn, Tom Calder,' Cissie said. ‘Stop behaving as if this is your last meal on earth.' She spoke over her shoulder from her stance in front of the gas stove, a green and black object that occupied a cupboard left of the sinks. The kitchen was spacious. Jenny, the maid, kept it spotless.

Cissie went on, ‘You built the blessed boat. If you can't be sure that it's watertight then who can?'

‘It's not that,' said Tom, abashed.

She carried her plate to the table and sat opposite him. The window was behind her, the blind drawn up. Pale light illuminated her head and shoulders and she looked cool and soft. He did not want to leave her, did not want to run the risk that he would not return, that the sea would claim him and transform poor Cissie into a grieving widow.

‘Yes, it is,' Cissie said. ‘You can't fool me, Tom, you're frightened of going underwater, aren't you?'

He managed to nod.

‘How deep is the Gareloch?' she asked.

‘We test at a hundred feet.'

‘I mean, how deep is the loch?'

Tom swallowed. ‘Deep.'

‘Theory and practice,' Cissie said. ‘Theory and practice; you just can't have one without the other. Don't start with the “what-ifs”. I had quite enough of those from my father and brothers.' She looked, he thought, a lot less soft than she had done a minute ago. She frowned, freckles glowing. ‘I'm not having it, Tom Calder. I'm not going to let you worry over nothing. Now eat that egg and hurry up or you'll miss the train, and that would never do. Eat.'

Alarmed and oddly amused, Tom ate.

She was right, of course. There was nothing much to be afraid of. The
Snark
was his responsibility as much as anyone else's. If he was reluctant to accept responsibility what hope was there for the programme in future? She wasn't made of paper; she wouldn't crumple under pressure. Every gram of steel had been checked for flaws; every rivet, every cable, every hinge, every valve double-checked. Experts had built her engines and boilers, the fuelling systems were infallible, the ballast tanks and air-supply intakes had been adapted by no less a person than Arthur Franklin. He would be safer inside the
Snark
than on the train to Helensburgh.

‘See, you see,' Cissie said, as if she could read his thoughts. ‘I'm right, aren't I? She's just another boat, really, even if she does run underwater.'

‘That's true,' Tom said.

‘I'm not worried. Why should you be worried?' Cissie said, then, with mock severity, ‘Now, sit up straight and finish your breakfast.'

‘Like a good boy?' Tom said.

‘Like a good boy,' said Cissie.

Ten minutes later, feeling better, Tom stepped out into daylight and headed west for the railway station. Above him in the window bay of the handsome sandstone tenement, Cissie waved and blew kisses until he turned the corner out of sight.

And then she wept.

*   *   *

The commander of the
Snark
was Captain John Bridges. He had been deputy in charge of submarines at Devonport for the best part of five years and had fought shoulder to shoulder with Geoffrey in the war of red tape. He had been instructed to select a crew of experienced submariners and had spent the best part of a fortnight prior to launch familiarising himself with the
Snark'
s operating systems. The crew, based at Rosyth, had been brought over only after the submarine had taken to the water, and had nursed her downriver under cover of darkness to the test berth at Cree.

The
Snark
was a powerful vessel brimful of innovations. Captain Bridges very much looked forward to taking her on her first sea-going voyage to Gibraltar as well as steering her through gunnery and torpedo trials and mock attacks that would surely prove her value as a fighting machine. He had no doubt at all that she would perform well in the flat calm of the Gareloch and would live up to all expectations.

Three Royal Navy observers would be taken on board for the first submergence run, together with three ‘workers' from the shipyard. Captain Bridges had met with Arthur Franklin and Thomas Calder several times but the third member of the shipbuilders' party was a stranger to him. He was not well pleased at being distracted from his preparations by the young man's questions and curtly took himself off.

‘What the devil are
you
doing here?' Arthur said.

‘I wangled an invitation,' Forbes said. ‘I'm a partner, after all, and this is too good an opportunity to miss.'

‘Why wasn't I told? More to the point, why wasn't I consulted?' Arthur said. ‘I knew nothing of this. Precisely what did you do to “wangle” yourself on board the
Snark
during secret trials?'