Dead Calm (12 page)

He was conscious now of his own tiredness and of the fact he had eaten nothing since breakfast. But he wasn’t hungry; it was too hot to eat, even if there was anything aboard not ruined by the water. He picked up the binoculars and climbed atop the deckhouse. Very slowly and carefully he searched the horizon all across the southwest, finding nothing but emptiness. When he lowered the glasses he saw Mrs. Warriner’s eyes on him. He shook his head. She nodded, her face as expressionless as his own, and went on pumping.

He stepped back to the ventilating hatch and looked down at the water washing back and forth in the after cabin. It was worse, he thought; even with one of them pumping and one bailing, they were barely keeping up with it. He started to drop the bucket in but turned and glanced back at Mrs. Warriner. She was on the verge of collapse. The hell with it. There was no use letting her kill herself. He tossed the bucket on the deck, then went over and picked up her cigarettes and lighter from the deckhouse.

“Here,” he said. He set one of the cigarettes between her lips and flicked the lighter. “Let me take it for a while.”

She surrendered the pump reluctantly. “But how about yourself? You haven’t had any rest at all. And won’t it gain?”

“It’ll just have to gain. You’re not going to help things by keeling over. And while you’re resting, you could finish telling me what happened—that is, if you feel up to it.”

She sat down on the deck, facing him. “It’s not the pleasantest thing in the world to tell, but since we did this to you, I’d say you had every right to know how we did it.” She took a puff on the cigarette and went on. “To understand why he thinks we tried to murder him, you need a little background and a thumbnail sketch of the characters involved. Hughie, as I’ve told you, was an oversheltered boy who never had a chance to grow up; Mrs. Bellew was a rather plain, very gentle woman with an infinite amount of compassion; Bellew, of course, is a pig; and I’m an arrogant and insufferable bitch.”

Ingram paused in his pumping. “Do you have to do that?”

She wondered herself. She’d always held a dim view of the therapeutic value of catharsis or confession and regarded all breast-beating and cries of mea culpa as being more vulgar exhibitionism than anything else. If you’d bought it, you lived with it as well as you could and with as little fuss as possible. But on the other hand, if you’d wronged another human being, you at least owed him an explanation.

“You wanted to understand, didn’t you?” she asked curtly. “I’ve never been greatly addicted to the use of euphemisms and evasions, and if I thought you were responsible for something I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you. To be any good, it has to work both ways.”

“I know. But aside from the fact I don’t think it’s true—”

“Thank you. You are nice, Mr. Ingram. But you haven’t heard the story.”

“No.” He resumed pumping. “But there’s more to it than his thinking you tried to kill him. Why is he so afraid of water?”

“Because he thinks that’s the
way
we tried to kill him, by drowning—”

He shook his head. “No. It’s still not that simple.” He told her briefly of Rae’s throwing the whisky bottle overboard and of Warriner’s reaction to watching it sink.

She nodded. “Yes. I know about that part of it.” She was silent for a moment, thinking. “I’m not sure I can explain it myself, except that I think it’s a fear of drowning carried to the point of phobia. You know what acrophobia is, of course?”

“Yes. A morbid fear of heights. But it has nothing to do with water.”

“I know. But in his case I think it does.” She nodded toward the sea around them. “When you look out there you see nothing but the surface. So do I; so does everybody. We realize vaguely that two miles down there’s a bottom, but we never think of it, even if we’re swimming in it—probably even if we’re in trouble in it. It makes no difference whether you drown in seven feet of water, or seven miles; you still drown within a few feet of the surface. But you’re in the water; I think he imagines himself rather precariously suspended on the surface of it, as if it were a film of some kind, ten thousand feet above the bottom. In other words, I get the impression he sees it all the way down. Hence, acrophobia. As I say, I’m only guessing, but how else can you account for that horror when he sees something sinking below him? To him, it’s not sinking; it’s falling. And, like all people with acrophobia, he imagines himself falling with it.”

Ingram nodded, though still not convinced she was right. “But he wasn’t always like that?”

“Oh, no. He was an excellent swimmer. And skin-diver. It’s simply because of what we did to him ten days ago. But you have to understand what happened before, and what the situation was. Explosive is a good one-word description. To begin with, not one of us was competent to take a yacht across the Pacific, and incompetence multiplied by any number up to infinity is still incompetence. Four people who don’t know what they’re doing—”

“Are simply four times worse than one,” Ingram said. “So nobody was in charge?”

“No. Not after things started to fall apart. Hughie, as legal owner of the yacht and the only one with any sailing experience at all, should have been in command, but you can’t force a man to command, to fight back, to accept responsibility, if the only responsibility he’s ever had in his life was to be acceptable and pleasing to a succession of overprotective women who took care of him. And if you happen to be in love with him and have to stand there helplessly day after day and watch this disintegration under pressure, this thing you can’t do anything about, eventually your own frustration may goad you into doing something stupid and cruel and unforgivable. But I didn’t intend to make excuses, and I’m getting ahead of the story anyway.”

“Hughie,” she went on, “has always been obsessed by a feeling for the greatness of Gauguin, and it’s been a lifelong ambition of his to go to Polynesia and live among the islands as he did, escape from the rat race the same way, paint the same subjects, experience the same things. So, when we were married in Europe almost a year ago, I let myself be persuaded, in spite of the fact I had some misgivings about it. In the first place, there’s no escape from our so-called civilization any more; the twentieth century is something we’re locked into and there’s no way we can get out; when we got to Papeete we’d probably find the same jukeboxes, the same headlines, the same cocktail parties, the same jet service from here to there, the same Bomb, and the same exhortations to embrace the finer life by buying something. And in the second place, I was more than a little doubtful of our ability to sail a boat down there. But at heart I wanted to be persuaded, and I was. From my point of view there were several things in favor of it. No doubt you can guess what some of them were, but in the interests of clarity they might as well be included in this confession. I’m considerably older than Hughie, and when I met him I was a widow, a fairly wealthy one. You know what he looks like. The picture is trite to the point of banality, except that in this case it’s not true at all. He’s no glorified beach-boy, and we were genuinely in love with each other. And while I bleed very little over the opinions of other people, I didn’t want him regarded as something he wasn’t—at least, not yet, by the grace of God. I have a small but very good collection of paintings, and I know the work of talent when I see it. I wanted to help him, and in Hughie’s case one way of helping him—and me—was to keep him out of the reach of all that gaggle of
soi-disant
benefactresses and panting patrons of the arts who couldn’t keep their hands off him.”

She broke off with an impatient gesture and then went on. “But enough of that. Hughie bought and studied all the books he could find on yachting and navigation. We chartered a yacht, with a professional crew of two, for a cruise in the western Mediterranean, from Cannes down to the Balearics, to learn as much as we could from practical experience. We came back to the States last winter, bought
Orpheus
, and began getting ready.”

She smiled musingly. “Then I think we were betrayed. No doubt you remember the old ploy of crooked gamblers, letting the sheep, the intended victim, win the first few hands in order to increase the stakes. It was as if the Pacific Ocean, or fate, did it deliberately. The passage from Santa Barbara down to La Paz was ridiculously easy. Nothing went wrong at all. The weather was perfect, Hughie’s navigation was seemingly accurate enough, the couple with us, who were old friends of mine from San Francisco, were congenial, and we were never at sea long enough for the confinement and too close association to cause any friction, because we made stops at San Diego and Ensenada. If anything had gone wrong in that first leg of the trip we would have been brought face to face with our own inexperience and incompetence, and we’d have had sense enough to give it up. But nothing did, and we were far too overconfident and cocky by the time we reached La Paz.

“Then the other couple had to abandon the trip there and go back to San Francisco because of illness. We lay at anchor in the harbor for nearly three months.”

“Were you living aboard all the time?” Ingram asked.

“No. We came back to California, by plane, for several weeks, and part of the time we lived ashore at a hotel. Why?”

“I think that’s when the dry rot began to run wild.
Orpheus
may have still been sound enough to make it to Papeete when you left Santa Barbara, but after three months of lying there in La Paz, probably with no ventilation below, she was eaten up with it by the time you sailed.”

She nodded. “At any rate, we were stranded.
Orpheus
was too large for two people to handle, even if we’d dared attempt it alone. None of my friends who would have liked to go could get away. We wrote to the yacht broker who’d sold us the boat, and he managed to locate a professional willing to make the trip, a man named Grover or Glover, who turned out to be utterly impossible. He arrived on the plane from Tijuana dead drunk, and somehow managed to stay that way the five days he was in La Paz, without, as far as we could discover, ever taking a drink. And while it might have been interesting from a medical point of view to see if he could stay bagged all the way across the Pacific with no visible intake of alcohol, as a yacht captain he was hopeless. We paid him off and decanted him into the Tijuana plane. So we were on the point of selling
Orpheus
and flying to Papeete to buy another boat there where we could hire an Island crew, when we met the Bellews at the little hotel ashore. Bellew was gathering material for an article on big-game fishing in the Gulf of California, and we became quite friendly in the two weeks they were there. We asked them to make the trip with us.”

It was a tragic mistake, but one that had been very easy to make. It was banal to say that Bellew had seemed different ashore, but in the end that was what it amounted to. She supposed they all had, for that matter. Bellew was a man it was easy to get along with sitting around a cafe table sipping tall iced drinks in a backwater fishing port as limited in other diversions and other friends as La Paz. He’d led an intense and active outdoor life and had a great fund of entertaining stories which he told exceedingly well and with only a little suggestion of boasting. He played the guitar and sang folk songs in the manner of Burl Ives, and he and Hughie, who also sang very well, had two or three times put on highly successful impromptu shows for the other patrons of the hotel. He was big and outgoing and, if a little loud at times, not offensively so, and there was a male competence and assurance about him she’d instinctively trusted because they somehow reminded her of her first husband. It would take more trying circumstances than sitting in cafes or fishing for marlin with him to bring up the other side of the coin, the cruelty and the contempt for any kind of weakness.

Perhaps, on the other hand, Bellew could feel with some justification that he’d been fooled too. He’d claimed no experience with the sea except that highly specialized business of big-game fishing, in power cruisers and usually very near to land, while Hughie, emboldened by the complete success of the trip down the coast from Santa Barbara, had perhaps sounded a little too salty and seagoing, sitting around the drinks.

And she’d liked Estelle Bellew—at least at first. Estelle was a rather shy and only moderately attractive woman of around forty, who was completely wrapped up in her photography and had no apparent designs on Hughie. This turned out to be another mistake, of course. While she didn’t have any amatory interest in him—then or later—she did have a great reservoir of unexpended gentleness and compassion she’d never had any occasion to use, living with this hairy and domineering bastard she was married to, and she was possessed of an equally frustrated mother instinct that Hughie brought out in full, especially after it became apparent how badly Hughie needed a mother or somebody to protect him from the Pacific Ocean and from Bellew’s abrasive contempt.

“Why did he want to make the trip?” Ingram asked. “Bellew, I mean.”

“I don’t even know who first suggested it,” she replied. “It was just one of those ideas that can burst on the scene fully grown when four people are sitting in a bar with their second or third round of drinks. It was about ten days after we’d met them, and we’d just come in from a day’s fishing as his guests on the boat he’d chartered. He already had all the material for the story he was doing on the fishing at La Paz and was sure he could get a story, or perhaps two, out of the trip. I told him we would be glad to pay their air transportation back from Papeete. And, after all, it would only take a month.” She smiled bitterly. “We sailed from La Paz twenty-six days ago.”

Before they were more than a week out, everything began to go wrong. They blew out a sail in a squall and lost another overboard. Leaks began to show up from opened deck seams so that when they were shipping any water aboard everything below was soaked. They missed Clipperton Island because something had apparently slipped up in Hughie’s navigation. They used up most of their fuel trying to beat their way back to it, which was ridiculous, since it was uninhabited anyway, but by now they were no longer acting rationally but only motivated by their endless quarrels. They gave up trying to find the island after it failed a second and a third time to appear where Hughie said it was.
Orpheus
began to leak alarmingly, so it took more pumping every day to keep the water out of the cabins.

But beyond all that, it was the old story of clashing personalities jammed into too small a space with nowhere to go to avoid each other. Bellew became caustic, loud-mouthed, and finally insufferable, openly contemptuous of Hughie’s mistakes in navigation and seamanship, while Hughie, instead of fighting back, retreated into sullenness and pouting. Estelle Bellew was sympathetic and tried to shield him from her husband. Lillian herself lashed out at Bellew in defense of Hughie—or she did at first, until she decided that wasn’t the answer—but at the same time it was lacerating to have to admit to herself that he even needed defending against another man. Some of her hurt and resentment must have showed, for Hughie began turning increasingly to Estelle rather than to her for comfort when he backed down from Bellew. And Estelle tried increasingly to help him, as though he were a boy, and alone.

“That in itself was infuriating,” she went on. “The implication was that I was some species of heartless monster who had no sympathy, no feeling for him at all. She had the best intentions in the world, but she simply couldn’t seem to understand that that was the trouble in the first place, that he’d never in his life had to accept the responsibility for his own actions or fight for his rights, because there was always some woman panting to shield him from the one and buy him the other. And she was simply doing it again. I was trying to help him in the only way he could be helped—or that I hoped he could be helped—by letting him work it out for himself, no matter how I cringed and wanted to go somewhere and cry when he simply retreated into petulance in the face of Bellew’s contempt, or no matter how much easier it would have been to set him behind me and then remove Bellew’s skin in strips. So I began to treat her—Estelle—with the same insufferable nastiness that Bellew treated Hughie.

“In the end I couldn’t stand it any longer—the helplessness of it, I mean—watching Hughie being browbeaten without the spirit to fight back, and not being able to do anything in the world about it except drive him more and more to some other woman for sympathy. I hated both of them, and I hated myself. I blew up. I did the one thing that was guaranteed to hurt everybody. I made an open, deliberate pass at Bellew.”

“Well, it’s been done before,” Ingram said.

“But seldom by people who are assumed to be adult. And seldom with consequences as tragic. It happened one night just at the end of the second week.”

It was shortly after dinner and they were all on deck. She was at the wheel, having relieved Hughie just at dusk so he could take a series of star sights while he could still see the horizon. Bellew was sprawled in the cockpit beyond her, while Estelle was sitting alone on the forward end of the deckhouse, looking at the fading afterglow of sunset. Hughie’s star sights didn’t work out. He’d got three of them, with three lines of position several hundred miles apart, none of which crossed, or were anywhere near the dead-reckoning position based on the equally dubious fix he’d got at noon. Either his figures were wrong or he’d mistaken his stars. A long time went by while he checked and rechecked his work. Then he came out on deck with a star chart, but in the meantime the moon had risen and the stars were fading and hard to distinguish. And Bellew started on him again. Her flesh crawled.

“How’s it look, Magellan? We still seem to be in the same ocean?”

Hughie made no reply. He went on futilely trying to match up at least one of the stars with his chart. Her heart ached for him. She wished she could help him. And why, oh why, in the name of God, didn’t he turn on the badgering and idiotic
salaud
and tell him to shut up?

“I’ll tell you what, Commodore,” Bellew went on, “if it turns out we’re anywhere near Greeley, Colorado, I got a friend runs a bar there…”

She closed her eyes. Do
something,
Hughie!

He did. Like a sullen child, he threw the star chart on the deck. “Hughie,” she called out quickly, trying to save him from utter shame, “let me try. Maybe I could help—” But without even a glance at her he’d already turned and gone forward to Estelle. She could see the two of them sitting close together in the light of the rising moon. She’d bitten her lip to keep from crying, and she could taste blood in her mouth. Then out of some dark and insensate desire to wound them all, herself included, she said to Bellew, “We don’t seem to be entirely necessary, do we? But it is a beautiful night, and if you’d like help with some of
your
problems, why don’t you bring up a couple of drinks?”

The others had seen, all right—at least the merged silhouette against the moon—and heard the laughter and the singing. One of them was dead now, and the other was mad, at least partly as the result of it, so she was the only one left—besides Bellew, of course—with any true and rational appreciation of the scene as something to be treasured forever. It had taken perhaps fifteen minutes to sicken herself to the point where she had to go below or jump overboard. She removed the repulsive hand from inside her bra, got up, leaving the wheel untended, and went down to the cabin and locked the door. Hughie never came down at all. Apparently he’d slept on deck.

She went on in a minute. “So there you have the situation. We had everything we needed now for disaster, or for something very messy, but when it came, two days later, it was only an accident.

“I’ll try to give it to you in chronological sequence, as we reconstructed it afterward, though it concerned four people in different places, I was asleep through a good part of it, and at the end only two of us were still alive and able to give a coherent account of what had happened. It was two p.m., and we’d been lying becalmed for over an hour, with all sail still set, but the booms sheeted in to keep them from banging. It was Bellew’s wheel watch, and he was sitting in the cockpit, keeping an eye out for signs of a breeze. Estelle Bellew was lying in her bunk in the forward cabin, reading, I think, and Hughie and I were in our cabin aft. I was pretending to be asleep; that way we had at least the semblance of an excuse for the fact we weren’t speaking to each other. Hughie went out.