Scend of the Sea

CHAPTER ONE

What made her come aboard that first evening?

There was no compelling reason for it that I could discover later. There was no suggestion, as far as she knew, that I was in urgent need of the chart. I was sailing that night for Durban and I had told Mr Hoskins that I required a chart, but she was not in the chandler's at the time. Mr Hoskins had always been obliging and somehow — because of the three-barrelled name of the firm, perhaps — Merry, Baggs and Hoskins-I had thought of him more in the light of a benevolent lawyer from Lincoln's Inn than a ship's chandler. The name reeked of old briefs and faded documents, not of charts, rope, ships' stores and sailmaking, nor of Dock Road, Cape Town, within biscuit toss of the great array of ships which have made the port, since the closing of Suez, again worthy of the name Tavern of the Seas. Since I had taken command of Walvis Bay, I had fought a running battle with officialdom about stores and equipment for her: the Weather Bureau preferred its 'official channels' and I Mr Hoskins, who seemed to sense the wants of a ship as unique as Walvis Bay on her strange occasions among the great hectic wastes of the Southern Ocean.

I wonder now whether she came less because of Mr Hoskins' benevolent wish to cater for an unusual client of a skipper than under compulsion to what she was to call those strange forces which have surrounded the Waratah and her fate? Now that the whole long history of the ship has been laid bare, I have been able to trace a step-by-step inevitability which doomed her, and doomed those who sailed in her, and doomed those who came near her. The fates of men and of ships come down to these forces, they say, and the Waratah was fated. She was the first ship ever to be claimed as unsinkable — before the Titanic even — and I know now that even after the ship was dead, those vaunted watertight compartments of hers still carried the power to strike. I am prepared to believe, after all that has happened since, that it was indeed the forces of the Waratah which brought the girl to the docks that evening as I got Walvis Bay ready for sea.

I was aft watching the two Weather Bureau technicians unhouse some of the radiosonde equipment we used for balloon ascents at sea, which we would not want on the coast-wise passage from Cape Town to Durban since there are plenty of shore stations and our route would be close inshore. It was almost dark and we were working by floodlight. There was a thin speckle of rain from the northwest, but the Port Met. Officer and I had decided that there was not much to it and Walvis Bay would not have to put up with a winter's gale round the Cape of Storms. Nonetheless, I did not wish to risk the radiosonde gear when the ship was not on station: it had taken us, when Walvis Bay had been converted from a whaler to South Africa's first weather ship, too much ingenuity to install. The radiosonde gear had not been specifically designed to operate at sea from a ship, but we had got round that by shifting the mast forward and constructing a makeshift balloon-filling hut abaft the funnel-and it worked. Walvis Bay was, in fact, a compound of ingenuity, improvisation and enthusiasm by a small working group from a number of formidably-named state and semi-state organizations. Now we were bound for Durban to try and increase her weather watchdog usefulness by equipping her with special radar and other apparatus for observing the new American Itos weather satellites. From Durban I had been ordered to make a series of special observations along the line of the Agulhas Bank deep down south towards Bouvet Island and the Antarctic ice shelf, and then swing back towards my station between Gough Island and the Cape via the Discovery and Meteor Sea-mounts, where further scientific investigations were scheduled. Durban was where the whaler had been converted and, since it might be necessary to alter the ship still further, I wanted the shipbuilders there who had worked on her previously with such success. Cape Town, moreover, was so jammed with shipping, including the massive supertankers, that to enlist a shipbuilder for a relatively small but tricky job was virtually impossible.

I did not hear the Mini pull up on the dockside because of the noise of the electric drill we were using; the driver was invisible anyway to eyes blinded by the floodlight. The first I knew of her was when the bo'sun Fourie thrust his long sideburns into our circle of light and said, 'Lady to see the skipper, sir.'

Now, thinking of it, I see one of those tiny, inevitable, fateful steps, the first on the dark road to our venture. Why did she simply not hand over the oilskin-wrapped chart to the bo'sun with the request to pass it on to me? I would have thanked Mr Hoskins, who knew of the ship's projected sweep into waters hardly ever frequented by any but an occasional whaler, next time I saw him; he might have, if the interval had not been too long, passed on my appreciation to her. Perhaps I should have met her then, perhaps not. But she had asked to see me, and I walked for'ard to the starboard side where the gangplank to the shore was still in place. We were not due to sail until the Shell Mammoth was well clear of the Robben Island channel; I had no wish to tangle with a 200,000-ton supertanker on a murky night.

Outside the strong floodlight, I could not see her face clearly, and I asked her to my cabin under the bridge. The cabin also served, as a chartroom to the little ship (only 600 tons). She was wearing slacks and a thick grey yachting sweater with loose raglan sleeves and a complex pattern knitted into the wool. Strange, that it was to have such a place in our lives.

My attention when I came to the ship's side was certainly not on her or else I would have realized that she had made a special effort to get me the chart I had asked Mr Hoskins for. And I certainly had no idea, as she told me afterwards, that she had gone home, changed, and then motored seventeen miles to Kalk Bay, near Simonstown, to collect a chart from a friend of Mr Hoskins who had a yacht there, and then motored back again to the docks. It was so trivial a thing to involve so much coming and going — and yet she did it for a skipper who was a complete stranger. All I recall is my surprise and pleasure at this new evidence of Mr Hoskins' helpfulness, and the rain-dappled pattern from shoulder to neck of her sweater. 1 have no recollection of what she said and what I replied, nor of the first picture of her face.

The dockside was alive with all the movements of sailors going ashore; behind lay the murky bulk of Table Mountain, hazed out of its habitual dominance by the screen of rain, except for a house light here and there or a string of sodium-yellow street lights up its slopes; the broad waterfront driveway of the Heerengracht was flanked by the pallid wateriness of skyscraper lights, while a blue neon restaurant sign atop one concrete minaret called the faithful to eat.

She ducked under the steel-lintelled doorway of the cabin. I was behind and could not see what impact the starkness of my steel box had made upon her. I might have guessed, though, from the reserve in her voice.

'She's a very tiny ship.'

I took off my cap but not my oilskins. I scarcely expected her to stay. 'It's a very big ocean.'

Her eyes went to the wind-gauge repeater, then to me, and back again to the instrument. It was that scrutiny which, I think, first brought her face into sharp focus for me. Her cheekbones were quite high and exquisitely moulded, and the slightly thin nose and fine line of her lips contributed to an ascetic quality of loveliness which became more exciting when I came to know that it reflected an inward counterpart; my first comparison of the sea-green-blue eyes was an instinctive one: with the Minch off Skye, clear now that the sky was clear, but thoughtful always of the great Atlantic storms at its back which come to trouble its pellucid depths. The people of those coasts are an admixture of Celt and Viking; she was of the same fine-boned breed, and I was to discover that my instinct had not been amiss in placing her among those who sometimes seem to have less than one foot in this world. Her hair was short and light, emphasizing the lovely contour of her face. For a moment she had an abstracted, concentrated expression which I later came to know meant that something had moved her, and at the same time puzzled her. She started to say something, half to herself, but cut it short. She did not let me see her thoughts, then.

Instead, she said, 'Mr Hoskins thinks you must have about the loneliest job in the world.’

I avoided the clear eyes. 'He's very kind to me. Gets me all sorts of things you can't hope for from officialdom.' I gestured to the wrapped chart which she held close to her left breast and the strange pattern of her sweater.

Why do you say officialdom?'

I had been fretted by a host of small details in preparing the ship for the trip to Durban and the long voyage south, and my reply was sharper than intended.

'So many committees have had a hand in this ship that it's a wonder she got beyond the planning stage,' I retorted, but I pulled myself up. 'No, I'm being unfair. Anything like a first-ever weather ship in a small country like South Africa, and a great ocean like the Southern Ocean, requires a lot of things which don't strike the eye, especially the layman's eye. True, many organizations are involved, but there's been plenty of clear thinking too.'

'I thought you were a sort of floating weather station?'

'Correct. But the problem was to get that weather station floating-and to keep it floating.'

I wished she would hand over the chart. I hadn't a drink to offer her, and I had scheduled only an hour and a half for dismantling the radiosonde gear before sailing.

'Mr Hoskins says you are mainly responsible for that.’

I should have thanked her and let her go. Instead, I went on to explain.

'A couple of years ago, SANCOR — that's the South Africa National Committee for Oceanographic Research-got together with the Weather Bureau and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. .'

'Officialdom!'

I thought for a moment the interjection was mere frivolity, but she seemed too serious for that. She was staring at two big photographs screwed on to the steel bulkhead.

I went on, a little uncertainly. 'There are more: Fisheries Division, Oceanographic Department of the University of Cape Town. I don't know if you want to hear about. .'

She said, irrelevantly, still looking at the photographs, 'It takes courage.'

I didn't know her context then, so I said, 'And money. We — that is, the various bodies concerned who wanted a weather ship or some sort of automatic weather device stationed in the Southern Ocean. .'

She placed the chart on the glass face of the wind repeater, balancing it neatly.

‘I can't make out why you weather people must have your own special ship when there are plenty of other ordinary ships which can send you weather reports.'

I thought of my meetings in hot Pretoria committee-rooms. I had learned to fence, to explain, to argue, that same question while the fans hummed and a torpor of heat seemed to hang over my listeners, jacketless at the chairman's permission, or wearing cool 'safari suits' which are the civil service fashion in the capital.

'Surface and upper air observations from a weather ship stationed slightly south of the Gough Island meridian and between Gough and the Cape itself are especially valuable. This is a part of the South Atlantic bordering on Antarctica where even surface observations of current weather conditions are extremely rare. .'

She looked at me puzzled, disappointed even. Was I talking by rote, I asked myself, a bore addressing a group of unresponsive civil servants? Her glance went quickly to the two photographs and then to the wind repeater. I could see that in her mind something somewhere didn't tally.

She did not reply, but waited. She had a strange power of waiting, a way of building up forces to make things go her own way when they seemed to be taking a wrong channel. In the silence I heard the heavy boom of the Shell Mammoth's siren and the adolescent shrill of the tugs' sirens as they started to move her out of her berth.

For the first time, I responded to her quiet guide-lines.

'What I mean is, most ships stick pretty close to the South African coastline, and for our professional purposes they don't tell us much we don't know about the weather. They can give us only symptoms; we need a basic diagnosis, and that comes from regular, quick and reliable news of weather from deep down in the Southern Ocean. That is where the South African weather is really bora. The occasional ships which cross to South America don't go as far south as the areas from which we want reports. Understandably. The Roaring Forties aren't the place for pleasure cruises.'

She seemed easier, more relaxed at my colloquial explanation than my earlier jargon. I could see the rain droplets in her fine hair under the electric light and was about to say some politeness about them, but the clear, searching scrutiny of her eyes stopped me.

'How long have you been-out there?'

'Nearly a year. We radio back observations every three hours.'

'You haven't been out there a year! At sea!’

The puzzlement, the slight disappointment, were gone. She seemed satisfied at our rapport, and it brought the beginnings of a luminosity to her lovely face, like the first nimbus of light round a lighthouse seen in fog.

'No. I meant, I first took up station a year ago. I bring the Walvis Bay back to Cape Town once a month for bunkers and stores. It means being off station for a week at a time, but I'm afraid that can't be helped.'

'Afraid it can't be helped!"

I went on, warmed by her challenge, and too absorbed to realize how odd it must sound to her shore ears, to describe the need to keep up the continuity of the weather watch.

"Coming back to port really means that we lose one week's weather out of every four-on the spot, that is. We naturally take readings and observations on the way back to port and out again, but it's not quite the same.'

'I read somewhere that during the Napoleonic wars Admiral Collingwood blockaded the French port of Brest for twenty-two months without ever once stepping on to dry land,' she said. 'You're not doing too badly for yourself — once a month!'

She turned to the two photographs and stared hard at them, as if she had come to some decision. Her voice was subdued, warm in its sincerity.

'Now it's my turn to be unfair. I said just now, it takes courage. A year-that's what I really meant.'

I might have dodged into some conventional repartee, but her sincerity forbade it.

'No one has ever described it as courage before,' I replied a little wryly, wondering what had made her choose to work for a ship's chandler. 'Screaming boredom, insufferable separation from the bright city lights, wayout type of living, hermit existence-it's been called all that, and more. But courage — no.'

She waited. The electric drill was still and I guessed the crew was busy with the crating. Since she had begun to talk, perhaps I felt a little differently. It was their job. They could do it well enough by themselves. They didn't need the skipper to nursemaid them on every minor function connected with the ship.

Her eyes dropped to the wind repeater, as if silently urging me to go on.

‘In many ways it's better to be in a ship than be stuck on one of the weather observation islands down in Antarctica,' I said. The sea is always alive, and you have something to occupy yourself with all the time. They tell me that one of the biggest problems for men on Gough is boredom off watch, during leisure time.'

'I don't understand why there has to be a ship to observe the weather as well as the island stations.'

The trouble is that Gough is 1400 miles from the Cape; Tristan da Cunha, still nearer South America, is 2000,' I replied. 'On the east, the opposite side of Africa, we have a weather station on Marion Island, but it's 1200 miles from land. To the south, in Antarctica itself, there's the South African base-2300 miles from home. It's no good reporting a storm front passing over Gough and expecting as a matter of course that it will strike the Cape. Between cup and lip, so to speak, a lot can happen in 1400 miles. A storm front can sheer off to the north or the south of the main land mass, or change its whole character and form what we call a secondary low. . anyway, most of the storm systems which give the Cape its bad name start east of Gough towards the Cape — in other words, after they have passed over the island.'

'What about weather satellites?' she asked. I had begun to find my tongue; it was strange, and a little exciting, to be talking weather outside the sterilities of synoptic readings. 'There was a radio talk about them the other day. It seems they are able to photograph the build-up of storm-cloud formations over any part of the ocean.' She flicked a quick glance at me, wondering whether her question might kill the conversation. 'All you have to do, it would appear, is to sit tight in your office safely on land and wait for a satellite photo to come in-without going to sea at all.'

I smiled a little at her seriousness. 'You're trying to talk me out of my ship! No, weather satellites are valuable, but they're not the whole answer. From them you can see vast stretches of ocean and its weather. If I had some of the photos here I'd show you how you can actually watch the great battalions of cloud taking up storm formation as a front approaches South Africa from the south-west, from Antarctica. The storm may extend for a thousand miles. But we weathermen need a great deal more than a photograph. We want upper air temperatures, wind speeds, barometric pressures-a whole lot of technical things we lump together under the term synoptic reading. If we have these readings we can also work out, far more accurately than from a satellite photo, when and how a big storm system will strike the Cape.'

'It seems an awful lot of effort to go to in order to tell people whether or not to go for a picnic or a swim.'

'Fortunately, those people are at the bottom of our priority list,' I replied. 'Ships in coastal waters and aircraft are our main concern — farmers next. For them, however, I suppose we could have got by without the Walvis Bay. It's oil rigs which make this ship important. Without them, she wouldn't be here tonight.'

'Oil rigs?'

'The weather ship's main function is to supply accurate information for the big floating rigs drilling for oil on the continental shelf off the southern Cape coast. Our forecasts are of prime importance to them-there's a great deal of money involved in missing just one day's drilling, or having expensive equipment smashed because the oil-men didn't know what sort of seas to expect. When this little Walvis Bay starts to cavort in a southwesterly swell 600 or 700 miles out on the high seas, it's a fairly good bet that three or four days later the huge drilling platforms on the coast will likewise cavort. In fact, it was oil, which really clinched the whole weather ship project. Without finance from the backers of the oil rigs, none of the other bodies concerned could have afforded a ship like this with her special expensive equipment. When you arrived, I was dismantling some of it to make sure it wouldn't get damaged on the passage to Durban. It's a great responsibility, all this special apparatus, and it's a major part of my job to see it doesn't get smashed at sea. I sail Walvis Bay on a very light rein in the Southern Ocean, with one eye all the time on my equipment.' 'And this is your whole life?'

'I'm used to it,' I answered. Then it slipped out. Why should I have told her? I didn't need a confessional, but those steady, provocative eyes were on me.

'Single-handed yacht racing is a loner's game,' I said a little self-consciously. 'I graduated in that school. Whalers first. To the Antarctic-but that was more a bit of schoolboy fun than serious sea-going.'

She asked no questions. She simply waited, in that quiet, serious way of hers.

So I added. 'I raced Touleier in the Cape en Buenos Aires race. It was a sort of curtain-raiser to the big Rio race this year.'

'And won — I know.’ she answered. 'The whole world heard about Touleier's exploits — they even learned to pronounce her name.' She ran it round her tongue, as if it gave her pleasure to do so. 'Tow-layer.' She ran her finger round the dial of the wind gauge repeater, as if vicariously sampling those great gales which had swept me across the empty ocean between the two great continents of the south. 'You call it a curtain-raiser, the papers called it sorting the men from the boys.'

I remembered a field of ice as I neared the winning post, the gale blowing the spicules of ice so that they scored the face of the compass.

'If you can stand forty-four days alone in a yacht at sea, it's easy to take twenty-one days each month in a ship like Walvis Bay, which is thirty times her size, surrounded by men, in touch with the land every three hours by radio, discussing all the time things like pressures, wave heights, wind direction and force, plotting. .'

'Mr Hoskins didn't tell me it was the skipper of Touleier I was bringing a chart to tonight.'

'He was my backroom boy for the race. That was the first time he fathered my needs for a special outfit; Walvis Bay is also special. You get used to this sort of life. It has its compensations. Who do you know gets one week's holiday every four? That's what happens to my crew. Three weeks at sea, one in port. It's also got its rather imponderable academic rewards. No one has ever yet sat in continuous watch over the weather in the Southern Ocean where I'm stationed. Already some extremely interesting new developments have come to light which we could not have known without on-the-spot observations.'

She did not reply, but took three steps across the cabin, as if pacing it for size. From the inward-angled bookshelf — designed to prevent my books falling out in a seaway-she picked out a blue-covered one.

‘I suppose a hermit finds compensations in his cell,’ she murmured, as if to herself. 'Compensations!' She turned to me and quoted the title. ‘ "The Antarctic Pilot, comprising the coasts of Antarctica and all the islands south of the usual route of vessels."' She did not look up from the print, but put it back among half a dozen others of the same ilk, reciting their titles volume by volume.

The irritation which I had felt earlier from the pressures of getting the weather ship to sea returned, and I was on the point of asking her whether she expected me to spend my leisure hours at sea listening to mushy radio programmes or gazing at pin-ups. But her action stopped my comment. The bookshelf had been only a ploy, a kind of vestibule, as it were, to her true purpose.

She went quickly to the big framed photograph of a ship on the bulkhead, turned, and faced me.

My eyes, she told me afterwards, went blank like iceblink in the sky when the great bergs haze a blue Southern Ocean sky with their dead reflection.

She waited, but this time I did not respond. She stared at me and I at her. I should have let her go then.

She had taken another inexorable step.

She had stepped under the photograph of the Waratah.

She frowned and dropped her eyes from their long penetrating assessment of mine.

'I have been very, very presumptuous,' she said softly. The slight shake of the head was more a plea in extenuation than in defence. She rapped the glass face of the wind gauge with a finger. This time it was not to share, but to probe, its secret. 'One cannot see an altar and not be awed, even if the altar of someone's life is. .' It was half a question, half an assertion '. . the wind?'

I remained silent. She turned and stared at the photograph of the Waratah. I heard the clump and thump of the crew on the deck above, and somewhere a gull screamed in rage. The points of her hair in her neck, short like a boy's, curled where they touched the polo collar of her jersey.

She ran her left fingers round the heavy frame of the photograph, speaking more softly still, addressing it almost, not me.

'Can it really mean so much-simply this photograph of an old high-funnelled liner with a signature in each corner?'

I seemed to hear myself reply; I kept my voice level. 'You can't read the name-photographers weren't that good in 1909. If you could, you'd see that it was — Waratah.'

Only on rare other occasions in my knowledge of her did she give that quick jerky sigh, half intake of breath, half a smothered exclamation. Still she did not turn from the ship.

'Waratah’

The sound of the name spoken by someone else was unreal to me; I had lived with it, buried, for so long; now it seemed to stir in its grave-clothes at her startled exclamation.

'I suppose more has been written about her fate and more speculations let fly than about any other ship which ever sailed the Seven Seas,' I ventured.

She replied hesitatingly, but her concentration was on my reaction, not on her own words. 'There was some appalling tragedy connected with her-I don't know the details-'

She told me later that I spoke mechanically: the words seemed to have been learned by heart.

"The Waratah was one of the finest ships of her day-before the First World War. She was big for those days, too — 10,000 tons. She was brand new, on her second voyage only. She sailed from Durban bound for Cape Town one winter's night in 1909 with 211 people on board. Next day, nearly a couple of hundred miles to the south, off the coast of Pondoland, she was spoken to by another steamer. Waratah exchanged signals; there was no hint of trouble. Then, a few hours later near East London, she disappeared. Vanished. She was never seen or heard of again, and no wreckage or bodies were ever found, not so much as a matchbox. Just like that. In broad daylight. In sight of the coast. Ships behind and ahead of her. It remains one of the greatest mysteries of the sea.'

I wanted to hide my tenseness from those clear eyes. So I gestured. 'Read the signatures on the photograph.' She read, ' "J. E. Ilbery, Master."' 'Go on.'

' "Douglas Fairlie, First Officer." ‘

Someone tapped on the cabin door, but we ignored it.

'There's no need to go on, is there?' she said.

I shook my head.

‘I repeat, I was very presumptuous,' she went on. 'I had no idea I was treading into a place of such grief.'

She looked startled at my unnatural laugh.

'Douglas Fairlie was my grandfather. I never even saw him, nor did my father, for that matter. Douglas Fairlie was lost in the Waratah over sixty years ago.'

The line of her lips was puzzled. 'But you — it's sixty years — is it grief, still?'

I said brusquely, 'Look at the other photograph.'

'It's an airliner — South African Airways.'

The cabin seemed hot, and I slipped off my oilskin. I did not join her at the photographs.

I'm sorry, I forgot the signature's on the back. I'll tell you what it says: "Ian, what do you think of my flying Gemsbok’ Love from Dad." Do you follow?'

She said slowly, 'The South African Airways airliner Gemsbok crashed while coming into land at East London. All on board were killed.'

'The pilot was Captain Bruce Fairlie,' I added. 'No bodies or wreckage were ever found.'

She looked from one photograph to the other and said very deliberately, Those are Waratah words.'

'The Waratah vanished near East London without trace,' I said. 'The Gemsbok vanished without trace near East London.

Bruce Fairlie commanded the Gemsbok. Douglas Fairlie was first officer of the Waratah. ^,

The papers were full of it — the Gemsbok was the worst air crash until then in South Africa.'

'It's four years ago now.'

'Wasn't there something about the pilot dying at the controls. .? I'm sorry, I mean your father. .'

I heard myself talking in that flat, official jargon again. To hide — what?

The court of inquiry found that the possibility of my father having died of a heart attack at the controls as the Viscount came in to land could not be ruled out. .'

She gave a slightly perceptible, impatient toss of her short hair and frowned. She had lost me for the moment; it warmed me to be wanted back.

So I said, 'What I am trying to say is that my father and my grandfather died at roughly the same place, at an interval of over sixty years, one in a fine ship and the other in a fine plane.'

She added, 'And from neither were any bodies or wreckage ever found. Yet the son-the grandson-is at sea, on as hazardous a job as is possible in these days of push-button safety.'

'I told you, it suits me.'

'Did he — your father, the pilot-approve of your single-handed ocean racing?'

'Touleier came after the Gemsbok crash. The sea comes first with the Fairlies. In my father that love mutated into flying. He acknowledged that it was so. My brother too.'

'Your brother, too?'

‘I have a younger brother who is a South African Air Force pilot — Buccaneer sea-jets. They say that if you can handle a yacht, it gives you a feeling to handle a plane. Perhaps there's really not much between us either way.'

I thought then she was breaking off at a tangent, tactfully trying to end the overcharged conversation. 'You've told me about the Waratah and the Gemsbok, but can I ask you a question about yourself?'

'There's nothing much beyond what you already know.’

'Why do you live with a wind gauge repeater in your cabin?'

From anyone else it would have been prying impertinence. She was too deep for that.

'It's part of my job-an important part-to know the direction of the wind.’ 'Day and night? Where you sleep? Where you relax?’ I replied, 'You see, the big fronts which come up from Antarctica and affect the weather round the Cape and the oil rigs I told you about are from the south-west. .'

Suddenly I wanted to sail, to be at sea. Later, she was to tell me that my voice changed and the ice-blink blankness was back in my eyes. But she had the key she wanted — southwest!

She waited only a little, not pressing a reply, and said she must go when I paused on the word. Her voice was restrained; she did not look again at the two photographs.

I moved from the doorway and in doing so brushed off my oilskin from the chart where I had shed it. Her chart lay still unopened on the wind gauge repeater. She stared at the one the oilskin had laid bare.

'You have my chart already! ‘

It was impossible to explain to her, then.

'Yes, I have one chart of the Pondoland coast. But I wanted another.’

She frowned a little as she bent to read the superscription on mine. I noticed that her lips moved more towards their right-hand corner than the left. ' "East London to Bashee River, S.A. surveying ship Africana, 1934/35." It's marked full of lines and arrows which I don't understand.'

I was tired. I nearly said, I don't understand them either, but instead I covered up. "There are too many lines and markings on this chart of mine. I wanted a clean one for Walvis Bay's trip. That's why I asked Mr Hoskins for a new one.'

'I think he might be a little hurt if he knew you'd had one all along,' she said.

'He's never been in my cabin.'

'So he hasn't seen the Waratah?’

‘I think we should let it go at that, don't you?'

She went.

I did not leave the cabin. I did not know her name.