Bear Island (18 page)

    "But you must know of them?"

    "Not even that, but that's not surprising, I like acting but the film world bores me to tears and I don't mix socially. That makes me an odd-ball too. But Otto vouches for them-in fact, he speaks pretty highly of them, and that's good enough for me. They'll both probably act me off the screen when it comes to the bit." He shivered again. "Conrad's curiosity remains unsatisfied, but Conrad has had enough. As a doctor wouldn't you prescribe some of this Scotch which old Imrie is supposed to be dispensing so liberally?"

    We found Captain Imrie dispensing the Scotch with so heavy a hand that plainly it came from his own private supplies and not from Otto's, for Otto, heavily wrapped in a coloured blanket and with his puce  complexion still a pale shadow of its former self, was sitting in his accustomed dining chair and raising no objections that I could see. There must have been at least twenty people present, ship's crew and passengers, and they were very far indeed from being a merry throng. I was surprised to see Judith Haynes there with her husband, Michael Stryker, hovering attentively over her. I was surprised to see Mary Darling there, her sense of duty or what was the done thing must have been greater than her aversion to alcohol, and was even more surprised to note that she had so abandoned all sense of the priorities as to be holding young Allen by the arm in a positively proprietorial fashion: I was not surprised to see that Mary Stuart was absent. So were Heissman and Sandy. The two actors with whom Conrad claimed to have so little in common, Jungbeck and Heyter, were together in one corner and for the first time I looked at them with some degree of real interest. They looked like actors, no question of that, or, more accurately, they looked like what I thought actors ought to look like. Heyter was tall, fair, good-looking, young, and twenty years ago would have been referred to as clean-cut: he had a mobile, expressive, animated face. Jungbeck was at least fifteen years his senior, a thick-set man with heavy shoulders, a five o'clock shadow and dark, curling hair just beginning to grey: he had a ready engaging smile. He was cast, I knew, as the villain in the forthcoming production and despite the appropriate build and blue jowls didn't look the least bit like one.

    The almost complete silence in the saloon, I soon realised, didn't stem entirely from the solemnity of the occasion, although that element must have been there: Captain Imrie had been holding the floor and had only broken off to acknowledge our entrance and to take the opportunity of dispensing some more liquor, which I refused. And now, it was clear, Captain Imrie was taking up where he had left off.

    "Aye," he said heavily, “`tis fitting, "tis fitting. They have gone today, sadly, tragically gone, three of Britain's sons"-I was almost glad, for the moment, that Antonio was no longer around-"but it comes to us all, sooner or later the hour strikes, and if they must rest where better to lie than in those honoured waters of Bear Island where ten thousand of their countrymen sleep?" I wondered, uncharitably, what hour struck when Captain Imrie poured himself his first restorative of the morning but then recalled that as he had been up since 4 A.m. he was no doubt now rightly regarding the day as being pretty far advanced, a supposition which he proceeded to prove correct by replenishing his glass without, however, interrupting the smooth flow of his monologue. His audience, I noted with regret, had about them the look of men and women who wished themselves elsewhere.

    “I wonder what Bear Island means to you people," he went on.  "Nothing, I suppose, why should it? It's just a name, Bear Island, just a name. Like the Isle of Wight or what's yon place in America, Coney Island: just a name. But for people like Mr. Stokes here and myself and thousands of others it's a wee bit more than that. It was a kind of turning point, a dividing point in our lives, what those geography or geology fellows would call a watershed: when -,We came to know the name we knew that no name had ever meant so much to us before-and no name would ever mean so much again. And we knew that nothing would ever be the same again. Bear Island was the place where boys grew up, just over the night, as it were: Bear Island was the place where middle-aged men like myself grew old." This was a different Captain Imrie speaking now, quietly reminiscent, sad without bitterness, and the captive audience was now voluntarily so, no longer glancing longingly at the saloon exits.

    “We called it "The Gate," he went on. "The gate to the Barents Sea and the White Sea and those places in Russia where we took those convoys through all the long years of the war, all those long years ago. If you passed the gate and came back again, you were a lucky man: if you did it half-a-dozen times you'd used up all your luck for a lifetime. How many times did we pass the gate, Mr. Stokes?"

    "Twenty~two times." For once, Mr. Stokes had no need for deliberation.

    “Twenty-two times. I am not saying it because I was there but people on those convoys to Murmansk suffered more terribly than people have ever suffered in war before or will ever suffer in war again, and it was here, in those waters, at the gate, that they suffered most of all for it was here that the enemy waited by night and by day and it was here that the enemy struck us down. The fine ships and the fine boys, our boys and the German boys, more of them lie in those waters than anywhere in the world, but the waters run clean now and the blood is washed away. But not in our minds, not in our minds: thirty years have passed now and I cannot hear the words "Bear Island," not even when I say them myself, but my blood runs cold. The graveyard of the Arctic and we hope they are at peace now, but still my blood runs cold." He shivered, as if he felt a physical chill, then smiled slightly. "The old talk too much, a blether talks too much, so you know now how terrible it is to have an old blether stand before you. All I'd really meant to say is that our shipmates are in good company." He raised his glass. "Bon voyage."

    Bon voyage. But not the last goodbve, not the last time we would be saying goodbye, I felt it deep in my bones and I knew that Captain Imrie felt it also. I knew that it was some sort of foreknowledge or premonition that had made him talk as he had done, that had been responsible for a rambling reminiscence as uncalled for as it was irrelevant-or appeared to be. I wondered if Captain Imrie was even dimly aware of this thought transference process, of the substitution of the fearful things, the dreadful things of long ago for the unrealised awareness that such things were not confined to the actions of overt warfare, that violent death acknowledged no restrictions in time and space, that the bleak and barren waters of the Barents Sea were its habitat and its home.

    I wondered how many others of those present felt this atavistic fear, this oddly nameless dread so often encountered in the loneliest and most desolate places on earth, a dread that reaches back over the aeons to primitive man who as yet knew not fire, to those unthinkably distant ancestors who crouched in terror in their lightless caves while the forces of evil and darkness walked abroad in the night: a fear that, here and now, was all too readily reinforced and compounded by the sudden, violent, and inexplicable deaths of three of their company the previous night.

    It was hard to tell, I thought, just who was feeling affected by such primeval stirrings of foreboding for mankind does not readily acknowledge even to itself, far less show or discuss, the existence of such irrationally childlike superstitions. Captain Imrie and Mr. Stokes, without a doubt: they had gone into a corner by themselves and were staring down, unseeingly, I was sure, and certainly without speaking, at the glasses in their hands, and as the two of them rarely if ever sat together without discussing, at great length, matters of the gravest import, this was highly significant in itself. Neal Divine, more hollow-checked than ever but apparently slightly recovered from his very low state of the previous evening, sat by himself, continuously twirling the empty glass in his hand, his usual nervous preoccupied self, but whether he was preoccupied with mal de nter, the thought that he was about to begin his directorial duties and so consequently be exposed to the lash of Gerran's tongue or whether he, too, was feeling fingers from the dead past reach deep into him was impossible to say.

    Comin’ and Goin’ was seated by Otto at the head of the table and they, too, were silent. I wondered just what the relationship between the two men was. They seemed to he on cordial enough terms but they only sought each other out, I had observed, when questions of business were to be discussed. It could well have been that, personally, they had little in common, but the fact that Comin’ and Goin" had recently been made vice-president and heir-apparent to Olympus Productions seemed to speak highly enough of Otto's regard for him. And as they were together now and not talking I assumed that they were pondering over matters similar to those that were engaging the attention of Imrie and myself.

    The Three Apostles weren't talking, but that meant nothing, when they were deprived of their instruments, their music magazines and their garishly primary-coloured comics, the presence of all of which they had probably deemed as being inappropriate in the present circumstances, they were habitually bereft of speech. Stryker, still in solicitously close attendance upon his wife, was talking quietly to the Count, while the Duke was conspicuously not talking to his cabin-mate Eddie, but as they were rarely on speaking terms anyway, this was hardly significant. I became aware that Lonnie Gilbert was at my elbow and I wondered what degree, if any, of the underlying significance of Captain Imrie's words had penetrated his befuddled mind. Lonnie was clutching a glass of Scotch, both container and contents of genuine family size, a marked contrast to the relatively small portions he'd been pouring himself in the lounge bar about midnight: I could only assume that somewhere in the remoter recesses of Lonnie's mind there lurked some vestigial traces of conscience which permitted him only modest amounts of hooch not honestly come by.

    “Envy and calumny and hate and pain and that unrest which men miscall delight shall touch them not and torture not again," Lonnie intoned. He tilted his glass, lowered the liquid level by two fingers and smacked his lips. From the contagion-”

    “Lonnie." I nodded at the glass. "When did you start this morning?”

    “Start. My dear fellow, I never stopped. A sleepless night. From the contagion of the world's slow stain they are secure and now can never mourn the heart grown cold, the head grown grey-"

    Aware that he had lost his audience, Lonnie broke off and followed my line of sight. Mary Darling and Allen, proprieties observed, were leaving. Mary hesitated, stopped in front of Judith Haynes's chair, smiled and said: "Good morning, Miss Haynes. I hope you're feeling better today?"

    Judith Haynes smiled, a fractionally glimpsed set of perfect teeth, then looked away: a false smile meant to be seen and understood as a false smile, followed by a complete and contemptuous dismissal. I saw colour stain Mary Darling's cheeks and she made as if to speak but Allen, his lips tight, took her arm and urged her gently towards the lee door.

    "Well, well," I said. I wonder what all that was about. A clearly offended Miss Haynes but I can't conceive of our little Mary giving offence to anybody."

    “But she has done, my boy, she has done. Our Judith is one of those sad and unfortunate females who can't abide any other female who is younger, better looking or more intelligent than she is. Our little Mary offends on at least two of those counts.”

    “You disappoint me," I said. "Here I was, manfully trying to discount -or at least ignore-what appears to be the universally held opinion that Judith Haynes is a complete and utter bitch and now--'

    "And you were right." Lonnie regarded his empty glass with an expression of faint astonishment. "She isn't a bitch, at least she doesn't make a career out of it, except inadvertently. To those who offer no threat or competition, little children or pets, she is capable of generous impulses, even affection. But that apart, a poor poor creature, incapable of loving or inspiring love in others, to wit and in short, a loveless soul, perverse but pitiable, a person who having once seen herself and not liking what she has seen, turns away from reality and takes refuge in misanthropic fantasy." Lonnie executed a swift sideways scuttle in the direction of an unattended Scotch bottle, replenished his glass with the speed and expertise born of a lifetime of practice, returned happily and warmed to his theme.

    "Sick, sick, sick and it is the sick, not the whole, who require our help and sympathy." Lonnie could, on occasion, sound very pontifical indeed. "She's one of the hapless band of the world's willing walking wounded -how's that, four w's and never a stutter-who take a positive delight in being hurt, in being affronted, and if the hurt is not really there, why, then, all the better, they can imagine one even closer to the heart's desire. For those unfortunates who love only themselves the loving embrace of self-pity, close hugged like an old and dear friend, is the supreme, the most precious luxury in life. I can assure you, my dear fellow, that no hippo ever wallowed in his African mud bath with half the relish-'

    "I'm sure you're right, Lonnie," I said, "and a very apt analogy that is, too." I wasn't listening to him any more, my attention had been caught and held by the fleeting glimpse I'd had of a figure hurrying by on the deck outside. Heissman, I was almost sure it was Heissman, and if it were I'd three immediate questions that asked for equally immediate answers. Heissman was rarely observed to move at any but the most deliberate and leisurely speed so why the uncharacteristic haste? Why, if he were moving aft, did he choose the weather instead of the lee side of the superstructure unless he hoped to avoid being observed through the largely snow-obscured windows on the weather side of the saloon? And what, in view of his well-known and almost pathological aversion to cold-an inevitable legacy, one supposed, of his long years in Siberia-was he doing on the upper deck anyway? I clapped Lonnie on the shoulder. "Tack, as the saying goes, in a trice. I have to visit the sick."