Dead Calm (13 page)

“He came on deck. Bellew, of course, was in the cockpit.

Neither of them spoke. Hughie went over to the rail and was looking down into the water when he saw the school of dolphin which had been following the boat and playing around under it for the past two days. These are dolphin, the fish, you understand, and not porpoises.”

Ingram nodded. “Very beautiful fish, like flame under water. The Mexicans call them
dorado
—golden, or gilded. They like to lie under anything floating on the surface.”

“They’re the ones. Anyway, while he was looking at them he remembered that Estelle had said she’d like to see if she could photograph them from below the surface if the school was ever around when we were becalmed. So, still without speaking to Bellew, he went back below. Only, when he passed through the deckhouse, he went forward first into the main cabin—that is, the saloon—and called out to Estelle through the curtained passage at the forward end of it, telling her about the fish. She was eager to try to photograph them, so she said she’d put on a swim suit and meet him on deck. Bellew, still aft in the cockpit, heard none of this, of course. Hughie then went back up into the deckhouse and on down into our cabin to put on his swim trunks and get a diving mask and snorkel. But I didn’t know it, because by this time I was asleep.

“Hughie was below probably only a few minutes, but when he came back up through the deckhouse and stepped on deck Bellew was no longer there. He’d gone below, into the main cabin, to make a sandwich. This, of course, is forward, toward the Bellews’ cabin, so—since the two of them hadn’t met in the deckhouse—Bellew had no idea Hughie had returned to the deck. Fortunately, you know the layout below, and you can understand why we had to reconstruct this whole thing afterward to try to understand how it could have happened.”

Ingram nodded. He could see the tragedy already beginning to take form, like the choreography of some death scene in a ballet, where every movement had to fit.

She went on. “In another minute or two Estelle came on deck from the forward hatch, the one leading up directly from their cabin. She had on her swim suit and was carrying a snorkel and mask and an underwater camera. That is, it wasn’t really an underwater camera with a housing, but one of her thirty-five-millimeter cameras that she’d made a watertight bag for with some kind of clear plastic and carried slung around her neck on a cord. Hughie put the ladder over just forward of amidships, and they eased down it into the water—not jumping or diving in because they didn’t want to frighten the dolphin.

“It was a rule, of course, since all of us did swim when we had the chance, that nobody should ever go in the water without notifying whoever was on watch. But Hughie apparently thought, since Bellew was gone from the deck, that he was forward in his own cabin and that Estelle had told him before she came up. And Estelle, since Hughie had been the one who’d brought up the whole thing, must have assumed that Hughie had notified him. She hadn’t even seen Bellew, because he was in the main cabin. So they put on their masks and snorkels and began trying to get close to the school of fish, which was now moving away from the boat. There was a moderate groundswell running, so even when Bellew came back on deck he probably wouldn’t have seen them unless he’d happened to be looking in their direction at the moment they rose to the top or the near side of a swell.

“Hughie has never been completely rational since, and when I saw him again, six hours later he was raving and incoherent, but as well as I could piece it together they’d been in the water about ten minutes and were not over a hundred yards from the boat when it happened. They were fairly close to the dolphin and they’d both dived, Hughie just looking at them while Estelle tried to snap a picture. Hughie came up first, and when his head was above water he was aware that something had changed. It was a second or two before he realized what it was. A breeze was blowing across his face. He turned and looked toward
Orpheus
and screamed. But Bellew didn’t hear him.

“As I said, this was at two p.m. I awoke a little after three-thirty and could tell from the angle of heel and the lessened rolling that we’d picked up a breeze while I was asleep and were under way. I noticed Hughie wasn’t in his bunk, but paid no attention to it. In a few minutes I got up, dressed, washed my face, and went up through the deckhouse to the main cabin to brew a cup of tea. It was ten minutes of four when I carried it out on deck. Bellew was at the wheel, of course. We were on the starboard tack and probably making around two knots in a breeze that didn’t much more than fill the sails.

“Bellew merely grunted when I sat down in the cockpit, but in a minute he said, ‘Did you call the great Magellan? Or are you going to take his watch?’

“That was the first second it dawned on me I hadn’t seen him anywhere. I jumped up, spilling the tea, and ran below, and I was all the way down in the main cabin before I realized that if he had gone to that woman’s cabin, if he’d been silly enough to go in there with her husband on deck, I’d already given it away and Bellew would probably beat him to death. I spoke outside the curtain. There was no answer, so I pulled it back. The cabin was empty. I pounded on the door of the washroom and opened it. There was no one in it, nor in the one aft.”

She was whimpering and numb with terror by the time she made it back to the deck and saw the ladder hanging over the side. Bellew already had the wheel hard over, and
Orpheus
was coming ponderously about.

She had got her voice back at last and was shrieking at him as she set up the weather runner and trimmed the jib sheet.
“When? How long ago?
You blind, stupid, forgetful fool, you’ve killed them!”

”Shut up!” Bellew ordered curtly. “They didn’t tell me.”

“Well, you must have seen them! You were supposed to be on deck!” She broke off then, realizing at last that they were wasting precious seconds on this idiocy when there was so much to be done. They had to figure out the reciprocal of the course he’d been making and estimate the distance they’d come since the breeze sprang up. And none of it was easy. The wind had been erratic, and he’d had to tack twice when it headed him. Their speed had varied from an estimated less than one knot to an estimated three and a half. None of it had been written down because he’d intended to write a rough average of it in the log when he was relieved. She took the wheel, heading back in the approximate direction, while he struggled with the figures. In around ten minutes he had it calculated as closely as they ever would—somewhere to the east-northeast, four to five miles.

She began to hope again. It was only two hours, and they were both good swimmers. Hughie, she knew, could stay afloat four hours easily, and they would have been swimming this way—no, he couldn’t even see the masts at this distance, not down in the water. But for at least half the time he would have been able to see them, anyway each time he came to the top of a swell. It was still three hours and more till dark, and she’d get Bellew to hoist her to the top of the mainmast in a bosun’s chair. They’d get there in time. Then the breeze began to falter. It came on again for three or four minutes, dropped once more, and then died completely.

They couldn’t run the engine. They’d already used up all the fuel. They lay helplessly in the trough and rolled.

They launched the dinghy. Bellew wanted to go because he could row faster, but she insisted. She was two hundred yards away before she realized she didn’t have the faintest idea which direction she was going in. She came back and got a compass and set it between her feet, even though she knew it was hopeless looking for them in the dinghy. She was too low in the water to see anything or to be seen. She was far out from
Orpheus
when the sun went down and it began to grow dark. She stood up in the dinghy, calling his name until she could no longer see anything but the distant gleam of the masthead light Bellew had turned on. She rowed back and went aboard. She lay in the cabin in the darkness, trying not to think of what it must have been like to see the boat sailing away from him a thousand miles from land. Bellew came in and tried to speak to her. She didn’t even know what he said. He went away, into the forward cabin.

About half an hour later she heard him run through the deckhouse on the way to the deck, shouting, “I heard something.” She ran up. The spreader lights were on, as well as the masthead light, but they were glowing only faintly, scarcely brighter than candles, because the batteries were discharged. She ran back into the deckhouse for a flashlight. She began throwing its beam out across the water. Then she heard the sound too, a faint whimpering, but it was coming from aboard rather than from the water. She threw the light forward.

Hughie had come up the ladder and was lying at the foot of the mainmast, his arms locked around it, his face pressed against the wood. His shoulders shook, and he was still making that not quite human sound deep in his throat. She noticed, in that way you sometimes fix your attention on details in moments of overwhelming emotion, that there was a gaping and bluish cut, no longer bleeding, across the knuckles of his right hand. He was alone. Estelle hadn’t come back.

“As weak as he was after six hours in the water,” she went on, “it took both of us to pry his arms loose from the mast. We half led and half carried him below and put him on his bunk. He opened his eyes; at first they were completely blank, and then he began to recognize us. He cringed back and jumped off the bunk and cowered back in a corner, screaming at us. He was almost incoherent, but we could understand bits of what he was saying. We’d tried to kill him. We’d gone off and left him deliberately. I was only pretending to be asleep and knew he’d gone into the water. And there was something about a shark, over and over.

“In the end, Bellew had to hold him while I injected a sedative dose of morphine in his arm. He fought us, and when he felt the prick of the needle he screamed.

“He never let either of us come near him again. He slept, if he ever slept at all, in the sail locker up forward, with the door barricaded inside. He looked rational, at least most of the time, but he was silent and withdrawn. He would never approach the rail without that look of horror on his face and a death grip on something solid, like a man with acrophobia frozen to a girder a thousand feet above the street. When we’d try to question him about Estelle, he’d go all to pieces and begin shouting again about a shark. I made Bellew stop asking him.

It was three days before I got a more or less coherent story of what had happened.

“They’d been attacked by a shark. He still had his mask on, and he swam down and hit it on the snout with his fist, trying to drive it away. That was the way he got that wound on his hand. It had avoided him because he was under the water, but had come up and gone for Estelle, who was threshing on the surface. It cut her in two. There was nothing he could do. He swam out of the bloody water and got away, but the sight of it was too much—that and the fear, and the belief we’d done it deliberately. He cracked up.”

So Bellew was right, Ingram thought. He was on the point of asking if she believed the story herself, but realized the futility of it. If she did believe it, it was only because she refused to accept the truth. She, better than any of them, should know what Hughie was really running from, but if she had already made the choice and was determined to accept the blame, argument was useless, and there were more urgent things to think about at the moment. No doubt a psychiatrist could dig it out of her and force her to acknowledge it, but he wasn’t a psychiatrist, they were on a sinking boat in mid-ocean, and nine-tenths of his mind was occupied with the cold and relentless struggle to keep the thought of Rae from swamping it. And, in the end, perhaps the specific act for which she blamed herself wasn’t significant anyway. The guilt she accepted was the blanket indictment of having been the link at which the lengthening chain of Hughie-protection had finally snapped. She’d been minding the baby when it crawled into the goldfish pond and drowned.

It was possible, of course, that Hughie did think—or had managed to convince himself—that they’d deliberately gone off and left the two of them to die. And naturally he might have an irrational fear of water, after having been in it for six hours in mid-ocean, part of the time in the dark and thinking of the bottom ten thousand feet below him. But neither of these was the horror he was trying to escape, the thing he saw when something was sinking in the water below him. That was Estelle. The only part of it that was difficult to understand was what sick compulsion had kept him there, looking down through the mask at her body falling into the depths after he had killed her.

He’d seen the wound on Hughie’s hand. And it wasn’t an abrasion such as he’d have received from striking the sand-papery skin of a shark. It was a cut. It had been caused by human teeth, or the broken glass of a diving mask.

So Estelle had panicked and tried to climb up on him to get out of the water, the way the drowning often did. He’d beaten her off with his fists and knocked her out. And the ironic part of it was that, for anybody willing to accept at least a portion of the blame, there’d still have been a way out. Subduing the panicky person who was threatening to drown both himself and his rescuer was an accepted part of lifesaving. Somebody else might have convinced himself he’d hit her only to try to save her, so he could turn her on her back and tow her, and then she’d slipped away from him and drowned before he could get her back to the surface. But not Hughie, who couldn’t accept any of the penalty for anything. He’d had to invent his nonexistent shark, which even he couldn’t believe. But he had to believe it, and go on believing it, or face an unpleasant fact for the first time in his life. And, for a beginner, he’d been handed a rough one to face.

She must have still had the camera slung around her neck. Those 35 mm. jobs were heavy for their size, and with none of the built-in buoyancy from a standard underwater housing it must have been just enough to tip the scales beyond that state of near equilibrium of a woman’s body in salt water—any woman except the very thin and muscular and heavy-boned—and keep her falling straight below him after she was unconscious. Even then, the rate of descent was probably very slow, at least until she was down to where the pressure began collapsing her chest cavity. And Hughie had watched her.