Acts of Mutiny (2 page)

Penny seemed to comply. ‘Yes. I must decide what to wear. So uncomplicated for the men, isn’t it. They can just rush down at the last minute and hurl themselves into a dress suit.’

Robert felt desperate with her; then hated himself for it. They strolled back as a foursome, past the housing for the smokestack, towards the stairs in the white steel wall of the bridge. To their right the shapes of five lifeboats were slow white moments running out.

Penny stopped to rummage in her bag. He waited beside her.

‘We’ll see you shortly, then? Perhaps a drink before?’ Mrs Madeley raised her voice from the companion-way door, which she held open. Strains of some light string trio crept up from below. Douglas, his long tropical shorts unflattering above brown knees and scout socks, had reached it now and was edging inside.

‘Probably see you in a minute,’ Robert called. He dreaded the next ritual Pimm’s. ‘Isn’t there a film tonight, Douglas?’ Penny’s words ‘so uncomplicated for the men’ mocked him. His feelings were jangled.

Yet Penny had managed to contrive them a moment; effortlessly, daringly – unless she
was
only checking her bag for her compact, or whatever, and actually did intend to follow the Madeleys away.

‘Not our sort of show, Mr Kettle,’ Douglas answered. ‘We like musical comedies. Can take any amount of them, can’t we, dear?’ They disappeared downwards. Penny straightened, and allowed her straw bag to hang from her shoulder again.

So at last Robert was alone with her; really alone for only the third time on the voyage.

‘In Adelaide?’ She continued the conversation several days old. He read her tone, as if the intervening time with its meals and games and the ship’s daily run had collapsed. ‘Did you mean an observatory in Adelaide? There would be one?’ she asked.

‘Oh no.’ His nerve wavered. They had missed each other. She had not known where he would be going. She had not allowed for it. ‘Well, yes, there is one in Adelaide. But I meant up in the salt lakes. Beyond the hills … North. The desert. The Flinders Range.’ Some anxiety made him forbear to trot out the government name of the town-cum-missile-base, although there was no real reason why he should not. There was no secret. Nothing to feel ashamed of. For a moment his sunburn from the Red Sea began to itch again, and to ache.

They waited for a moment in the deck tennis markings. Then she moved under the boats to lean on the rail; and he stood next to her.

‘When I mentioned the tracking station, I thought you’d know’

‘I don’t. Tracking what? And what lakes would they be? I don’t know anything … about the lie of the land.’ She shifted her hands on the rail, through which as always the churn and drive of the engines could be felt, a constant background.

‘I thought
he
might have told you. Your husband. You said he’d gone out to Adelaide “in the weapons interest”.’

‘To the research establishment at Salisbury, yes. But he doesn’t write to
me
about that sort of thing – they’re not quite supposed to, are they? Anyway, it isn’t really an interest we’ve managed to have in common.’

Robert laughed and caught her smile, the lipstick now star-glazed. How unfamiliar it was still, that here, close to the Equator, day just switched off, and then it was dark; without lingering or pause for reflection. What
did
he write to her, then, was what he wanted to ask. But dared not.

He looked up at the swinging, coruscating lightfield itself, and tried to-make himself consider it professionally. But it had such a personal quality – as if the huge stars were curving down to meet them and the dusted blackness was only something rushing the other way.

Besides, more intense even than the visual drama above was the knowledge that her hand on the rail was a mere inch from his own. But he would not look at that. Achernar, the southern tip of Eridanus, River of Heaven. Follow the jab down: Reticulum, the Net, just rising. If they could stay out here all night, they would see the Southern Cross. He had waited to see it last night. It reminded him that a difficult and salty continent lay somewhere down there, under the dark line of the horizon. Keeping still, they could hear the subdued crash of the bow wave, and feel the ship’s eastward movement. It was dodging sideways in order to call at Colombo, and then Singapore. It gave them some time.

Her voice: ‘I didn’t have the courage to ask you before, exactly what on earth we’re going to do when we get there. Because it makes a difference to what we do now, doesn’t it.’ She stated it flatly, not as a question.

So they were a fact. She had just given it form and lodged it in between sunset and dressing for dinner. He was amazed, full of joy; that people could do that, and it was them. And he was also afraid. Shouts and laughter reached them from just below. Late for their high tea, a party of children, myself the last amongst them, could be heard along the promenade deck. They funnelled inside somewhere, chattering. Robert felt for her hand, and held it, touching his fingertips cautiously round to her palm.

She returned the pressure. ‘You can change your mind. If you’re not sure.’

‘I never imagined. I’m sure, but I never imagined.’ He noticed how snatches of illumination leaked out from the decks below or crept between cracks in the fittings.

‘Liar, darling.’ She smiled again.

Ventilator cowlings, pipes, davits, and a spice wind from behind them: their astonishment continued, as the ship slipped on into the tropic dark. He felt they were bathed in a wordless beauty that did not belong in the world. Yet it was palpable; it was all around them.

For the first time in his life he felt at home. ‘You are braver than I am.’

From that moment the whole ship also acknowledged them as a fact. And although people said nothing quite directly – although they continued furious and put out – they no longer attempted, in the shape of Mrs Madeley, or Mary Garnery, or Paul Finch-Clark, or a general conspiracy that operated out of the
Armorial
’s paintwork, the furniture, or the tannoy, to keep them apart.

Flashes of memory are glittering, dangerous things. Lifted from the Falklands War, I was too ashamed to show my face. For some weeks I believed myself one of those poor souls who cracked on the way south and had to be flown home before hostilities even began. No shame in that – it happens. But to me it felt as though I had let everyone down, the family member at last who shirked when England expected.

It was only gradually my nightmares started to cohere. Subdy my coward’s badge was streaked through with fire. I had been there after all, trapped in the inferno of my burning destroyer; yet still unshakeably convinced I had ducked my duty.

Even as the true events bore themselves in, I could not relate to them. I watched news footage of my stricken vessel and remained disconnected. A carapace had shaped itself so closely around the horror that as it split open I was both naive and knowing at once. But that was a military disaster, and the eerie phenomena of battle stress are now well documented.

Memories have their species, though. Mine of Penny Kendrick and Robert Kettle is like a swarm of finches, if such could accompany so large a ship so far from land, roosting suddenly on the wires above the boat deck in order to catch their words, or sense their thoughts. Their love is birdlike, full of vibration and scribbled chattering. Or like the schools of flying fish that would skim and dart on the bow wave. Or like a current and its accompanying breath that presses imperceptibly now this way, now that upon the vessel’s direction, enveloping them both. This is a memory of what must have been. It is the most beautiful of all the memories, one of ornament, how it was between them.

And I would spend my time telling you of them only, bringing them to their consummation, had not voices of an altogether different nature begun to attend the passage. Consider the steely-eyed albatross, riding empty air above the mainmast head, looking down. This
was
– I saw it happen.

And there is the memory that comes back like a spit in the face, like a gob of poison. It was Hugh Kendrick’s visit long after we had arrived in Adelaide, with his terrible story of the lovers in the desert, and what I had done. That strikes at me with its own coil, clear, and of a piece – with detail like scales. How I felt like a salamander in the fire that night after the scare at the township dump. That memory refuses to leave me, yet I cannot make it fit.

You are cast adrift with me now, and must trust in my navigation.

Creatures of air see nothing beneath the surface. The ocean has layers. Deep down there are lanterns, great-swallowers, dragonfish, star-eaters who rise up near the surface only for the night sky, and then sink back nearly a mile at dawn. Beneath them in turn it is perpetually sunless. There the blanched light-emitters blitz and glow. Angler fish, gulper eels, black bristle-mouths, oarfish. No living mariner knows of these depths; though thirty thousand corpses reach them a year, and scarcely a news column of concern.

Consider the scars across the forehead of an old sperm whale. These tell of the giant squid. Consider the tentacles. Consider the hideous beak. This is a species that eludes us, lying in wait, unfathomably huge, maybe. It is rumoured to rise up once in a century to take a ship or two. It throws us into confusion.

But memory can play us false. No record of the
Armorica
exists. Not with the shipping company itself, nor with Lloyd’s, nor with the Maritime Museum at Greenwich; not even at the Admiralty. I have rung everywhere and anywhere that passenger liners might be registered or listed. It is the same polite response: that I must be mistaken. We have nothing here on file in that name, sir.

I have pulled rank, requested double-checks, paid for searches. I have been told to ‘hold the line’ and have patiently held. I have insisted: ‘But I was there. I once sailed in her.’ To no avail. And my family also deny knowledge. My aunt claims she is too upset to think about such things. Anyway, she has no recollection of all that. Why had I never bothered asking when my father was alive? It is almost as though I had killed him myself. Erica, my mother … is too ill. Moon-faced, full of drugs, she attended the hospital rather than the funeral. They may give her electro-shock. Under general anaesthetic, of course: what only the body undergoes, the nurse said, the mind need never know.

Memory is a dangerous subject. Let me warn you once more. Quite apart from this bereavement, I have been under pressure. There was a woman the other day – she was brought to an interview room. I found her badly disfigured, burnt, presumably. The eyes brown, the silver hair still showing traces of a youthful black, the skin a pale tan – what original was left of it. She was scarred massively at one time or another, but who knows by what. Perhaps an unfortunate household accident. And she might have been anything, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Algerian, Vietnamese. She was screaming in a quiet, tired way that was horrible. She could have been white, even. I lost my temper – I suffer from dark moods. I almost lost my job. The department has to be careful; we pride ourselves. She was referred and will be deported, of course.

She claimed … but how can you determine a torture victim? The doctor examined her. What are its precise badges? Terror? Depression? Incoherence, yes. Apathy, very often. She could give no precise account of what she had experienced. She was crazy, certainly; and articulately incoherent in her own version of English. There was an accent, but not a definitive one. She had seen God up there on the way. Courtesy of Qantas. She was the Holy Ghost and I was the recording angel.

Then she demanded asylum, claiming Commonwealth citizenship – for what that is worth – but could give no country of origin. I have seen a lot of claimants, fished out of passport queues, flushed out of cargo holds. I have seen forged documents exposed, and various scars upon the body, some genuine. The airport becomes its own island beach, where the world’s wretched are washed up. She could, as I say, have been anything. She called me ‘frozen-faced
douanier
’, and she is right, it is my official persona – policeman of boundaries. Perhaps it was Carla’s presence that made this particular encounter stay in my mind, just after the night of our intimacy. A woman’s body, that
Terra Australis Incognita.
Carla is a member of my department. We sometimes work together.

Could I have mistaken the name?
Armorica?
It is some slip, perhaps, where an idea loops back on itself and we find ourselves positive about an erroneous fragment. That is a commonplace of the witness-box, after all. No two people ever see quite the same incident. Details get confused. Could I have crossed one ship’s name with another? A burnt woman …

While I should have been writing reports, I have been researching passenger lists: for the relevant years from the relevant companies. No Ralph and Erica Lightfoot appear. No David Lafayette Chaunteyman. There are two Kendricks and one Kettle, but they are not Penny or Robert.

If you asked me to describe the night of my return to Abbey Wood with Erica, I could not. There may have been scenes, recriminations, blows. What I do know is that afterwards the name
Armorica
never crossed our lips. Not once. The voyage’s memorabilia were trashed from our luggage: the menus with their little seabed illustrations, the brochures of ports, the bus tickets, waiter’s bills and so on. Our Australian effects, my school notebooks – even Erica’s snaps were handed over to be destroyed. When we returned and my grandfather was ‘gone’, the house was brought ruthlessly up to date. A proper television went in, fitted carpet, a three-piece suite, all hire purchase. It was fumigated of its past. And the television stayed on all the time, sealing them into their marital capsule.