North Star (6 page)

It took me the rest of the afternoon to track down the equipment I thought I might need and to establish some sort of relationship with the yards. The smallest proved the most helpful. It was out beyond the breeze-block plant on a dirt road that led to the old gun emplacements on Green Head. The owner, a cheerful, bald-headed man named Jim Halcrow, had been an engineer in the Navy. It was little more than a workshop with no slip and only four men employed. He serviced engines and deck gear, and as luck would have it one of the boats he was working on at the moment was an oil rig supply vessel in for emergency replacement of a fractured prop shaft. ‘We’ll be going for trials about a week from now, and who’s to care if I take her up to South Nesting on test? If I did, an’ if we hapt on yon trawler lying afloat, it’d be natural for us to take her in tow, now wouldn’t it?’ He gave me a broad wink. ‘Provided, of course, we’re doing the engine repairs for you.’

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘Say fifty for the tow, cash and nobody breathing a word, and the rate for the job on her engines.’

It was a little after six before I got back to the hotel. Fuller was waiting for me in the entrance lounge, a solid man with grey hair and a grey face. He smiled when I asked him if he had found the trawler he was looking for. ‘We’ll be needing two and with summer coming there’s not many owners
interested in chartering. I’ve got the offer of one, but it’s old and available only at the end of July. That’s too late.’ He offered me a drink, and when he had given the order, he enquired whether I was a trawler owner.

‘Not at the moment,’ I said.

‘Your note said you had a proposition.’ He had a faintly harassed air.

For answer I handed him my copy of the
Shetland Times.
But he had already seen it and he knew about the auction. Briefly he explained his requirements: a vessel in commission and complete with crew to act as watchdog to a drilling rig his company would start operating in Shetland waters about a month from now. It would probably be drilling through into the late summer, early autumn; the stand-by boat was required to keep station, whatever the weather, which was why he had wanted trawlers rather than small coasters. ‘And we don’t want to own them. We just want to charter.’

‘I wasn’t suggesting you bought it.’ The drinks came and I asked him what the charter rate would be. His figure was too low and I told him so. ‘You loan me twenty thousand for six months at a nominal 2 per cent and I’ll accept the charter at your rate.’ And I went on to give my qualifications and the general outline of how I thought I could get the stranded trawler serviceable enough to pass survey inside of a month.

His questions were mainly financial. I think he had been trained in accountancy. He had that sort of a mind and he knew very little about ships. But he was desperate to get something settled. That was obvious when he invited me to stay on for dinner. The reason emerged during the meal. He worked at the Head Office of a shipping line that had just been taken over by a City finance company run by a man who, as he put it, had a flair for getting into the right thing at the right moment. This man was arriving at Sumburgh next day, flying his own plane, and as soon as he mentioned the name I understood his need to have something to show for the two days he had been up here. Vic Villiers had been acquiring a
reputation for the ruthless exploitation of under-developed assets when I was still at the LSE. This was his first venture into oil.

‘One of our subsidiaries has a rig operating in the North Sea. The present contract has less than a month to run. After that Mr Villiers plans a crash exploration programme of the two licences we acquired in 1971, both of them licences to drill on the continental shelf west of Shetland.’

I didn’t care what their plans were. All I wanted was the money to bid for the
Duchess
, but when I suggested he take Villiers down to see the trawler tomorrow, he smiled at me sourly. ‘I don’t think he’d appreciate that. He’ll have the chairman of one of the big merchant banks with him and will be travelling on to Unst for a week-end’s birdwatching. He’s a very keen ornithologist.’

Then come down and see it for yourself,’ I said. ‘Now, tonight – then at least you’ll be able to tell him what the proposition is.’

He was a creature of settled habits and not at all keen on a night visit to a lonely inlet. But he was even less enthusiastic about my coming with him to Sumburgh in the morning and putting my proposition to Villiers direct. He borrowed a torch from the management and half an hour later we were walking the grass verge of the voe. The hills to our left were black against the night sky, the trawler a dark shadow in the pale sheen of the water. I took him out to the spit, playing the beam of the torch over the hull and superstructure, explaining again, and in detail, how I thought I could salvage her.

He didn’t say much, but I hardly noticed I was so keyed up; a mood of excitement, of elation almost, that I hadn’t felt in years. And suddenly I was stripping off my clothes. If Sandford could swim out to her, then so could I, and the desire to stand on her bridge for a moment was urgent and overwhelming. Also I wanted to check the size of the hole in her hull and make certain there was nothing else seriously wrong with her.

‘Wait here,’ I said, ‘I won’t be long.’

I think he tried to dissuade me, but by then I was wading naked into the water. It was cold, but not as cold as it had been on the edge of the pack up by Bear Island. It didn’t take more than a few strokes to bring me alongside the hull. The torch was rubber covered, virtually watertight, so that I was able to dive down and examine the rent. It was much as Sandford had described it, but the plates were buckled over a wider area. I dived to the bottom, saw that she was grounded at the stern, and then swam all round her, checking the hull. But that was the only damage. I came back to the rent, cold now and feeling tired. I wasn’t at all sure I could pull myself up by the rope dangling over the side, and with the hole gaping in front of me, I took a chance and swam through, wary of the jagged edges of the plating.

I surfaced in the engine-room, the taste of oil on my lips the water black and scummy, full of floating debris. The two banks of diesels were awash, the coupling to the single screw completely submerged. I floated cautiously to the ladder leading up past the header tank into the crew’s quarters and clambered out. The air was warm and stale, smelling faintly of diesel oil. I stayed there for a moment, wondering how the hell those diesels had functioned at all with the engine-room half under water. But then of course, she was on the bottom now and the tide making. Afloat, most of that rent would have been above the waterline.

I was beginning to shiver; rubbing my hands over my body, I could feel the goose-pimples below the film of oil. I started up the ladder then, unwilling to dive down again into the black murk of dirty water out of which the engines protruded like rocks awash. The ladder led up to an alleyway, and I went aft, past the galley and the mess room, to a door that opened on to the deck, with toilet and showers right in the stern. I moved for’ard, making a quick tour of the ship, careful of my feet and trying to memorize every item of damage. It was dark now, a cold breeze fluttering the flag of a dan buoy, all the nets neatly stowed along the inside of the bulwarks. Up
on the road a car’s headlights blazed and then vanished.

‘You all right?’ Fuller called.

I shouted back to him that I wouldn’t be long and made my way to the bridge. It was an old-fashioned lay-out, a telegraph on the starboard side and the wheel at the back. But new equipment had been added, most of it ranged haphazardly under the half-circle of insloping windows – Decca radar, navigator and recorder, echo-sounder, log and speed indicator. The skipper’s seat was fixed to a piece of metal piping socketed into the floor, and on the wall behind was the VHF set and the Warden receiver.

It was old equipment, probably secondhand. Leading off the starboard gangway, to the right of the companionway down to the quarters, was an enclosed space with a shelf for chartwork, and on it was the main R/T set, a big Cresta-Vega doublesideband. The door to the master’s cabin was not locked. Inside, I found the bedding neatly piled on the bunk, all vestige of its dead occupant removed. Somebody – the girl probably, or that shambling giant of a man, who might well be the mate – had been on board and collected the old man’s things, all except an aged reefer jacket hanging on the back of the door, salt marks white on the dark cloth and traces of mildew. I put it on and went back into the bridge, standing for a moment with my hands on the wheel, trying to visualize how she would be in a seaway with the diesels at half ahead and her crew shooting the trawl, myself the owner and skipper. It was a dream, no more, and I was too cold to think very clearly, but the longing was there, deep inside me.

It was only a moment I stood at the wheel, but I can still remember the odd feeling of companionship I experienced, as though there was a presence beside me in the darkness of the bridge. Not hostile, just watchful. I let go of the wheel and it was gone, as though it were the helm itself that had communicated with me. How long, I wondered, had the 81-year-old Olav Petersen been master on this bridge?

I went back to the radio shelf outside the skipper’s cabin,
remembering I had seen charts there. I thought perhaps the log might be there too, hoping that, if it went back far enough, it might give some indication of why Petersen’s daughter-in-law had become the owner. Had her husband also died on board?

But there was no log book, only the charts. These were the two Shetland Isles charts, Nos. 1118A and B, and I opened them out, laying them flat along the shelf and following the pencil marks of their last cruise. They had been trawling off Ramna Stacks on the 23rd, off Gloup Holm and The Clapper on the 24th, and had started south down Bluemull Sound at 05.35 on the 25th. It was all there, every fix, every change of course, the pencilled figures thin and shaky. But on the 25th the writing had changed. It was larger, firmer, and there were erasures, as though whoever had taken over was unaccustomed to making chart entries.

I was shivering by then, my teeth chattering uncontrollably. I put the charts back in the drawer and with a last glance round the bridge, I went out along the starboard gangway into the chill of the night breeze. I had forgotten about the reefer and I took it off and hung it in the shower compartment at the stern. The freeboard was so small with the tide near the high that I did not bother about a rope, but dived straight over the side and headed for the spit. The coldness of the water took my breath away and I was gasping for air as my feet touched bottom. I heard Fuller speaking, but I didn’t catch the words. Then the beam of a torch stabbed the night and a voice demanded, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ It was a woman’s voice, loud and very clear, vibrant with anger.

I stopped, blinded by the glare and shivering. ‘I’ve no clothes on,’ I said, feeling foolish.

She laughed, a furious snorting sound. ‘Do you think I haven’t seen a man naked before? Now come on. Get out and explain what you’ve been up to.’ And she kept the torch full on me all the time I was stumbling ashore over the boulders. I heard Fuller trying to explain, but by then I was past caring.
I just reached for my clothes and dragged them on without bothering to dry myself. I thought she was some farmer’s wife out after sheep or ponies, and then I heard her say, ‘Sharks. You’re like sharks, coming out here in the dark –’ Her voice was wild and high – ‘sniffing round the ship as though it is a bloody carcase.’

I grabbed the torch and turned it on her, the violence of her emotions warning me. Her face was no longer that of the young woman I had seen following the coffin that morning. Gone was the serenity, the tight-lipped control. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. What else? I knew how she must feel. I could see it in her eyes, the blaze of anger brightened by tears. And she was right. Sandford, Fuller, myself, others probably – all of us for our different reasons wanting to know whether the trawler could be floated again. ‘You shouldn’t have come –’

‘Shouldn’t have come! My ship, an’ you tell me –’

‘Feeling the way you do about her.’ I lowered the beam of the torch, not wishing to intrude into the private world of her emotions. ‘We’ll go now.’ I heard a sob in the darkness. That was all. She didn’t say anything. ‘If I had known …’ I murmured, then left it at that. No good making excuses when to her we were sharks with our teeth into the prey. But whether the ship was just an outlet for her grief, or something more, I didn’t know. Men grieve over the loss of their ships, but for a woman …

I was thinking about her most of the time Fuller was driving me back to Hamnavoe. I’d never met a woman owner before. I was still thinking about her next morning as I took the road to Brough again, walking through a light drizzle. Fuller had said he would put my proposition to Villiers and I was remembering the blaze of anger in her eyes, wondering whether she would attend the auction. I was quite sure she had been on board when her father-in-law had died, and this I was able to confirm when I stopped at Miss Manson’s cottage. ‘She has always gone out with them, even when Jan was alive. He was her husband and she had to, him being so sickly, you see.’

She couldn’t tell me very much. The Petersens had only been on East Burra four or five years. Jan Petersen had died about two years ago – of pneumonia, she thought. He had been in the hospital at Lerwick, and after his death the trawler had been anchored between voyages in the shelter of The Taing instead of at Hamnavoe. ‘So it’s not often we see Gertrude now.’ And she added, ‘She’s Norwegian, you know. The old man, too, and most of the crew, they’re all Norwegians.’

I walked on then to Grundsound and the little church, but it was the grave with its bunches of daffodils I saw; I wasn’t thinking about my father. I paused for a moment on the bridge, gazing across at the mound of fresh earth. I think I had half hoped to find her there. I could have explained to her then … But perhaps not. I went slowly on and ate my lunch in a field with three Shetland ponies watching me and a view of the calm circle of water sheltered by a tongue of land that was marked on my map as The Taing. Her house, which was an old farmhouse little bigger than a cottage, stood at the base of the tongue. It was built of stone with a slate roof, superbly set against the steep backdrop of the hills beyond Clift Sound. I could just imagine how it would have been for her, coming back after a week’s trawling and waking up in the morning to look out of the window at her own ship lying snug to its reflection. But the inlet was empty now and the house looked deserted, no sign of life.