Pincher Martin (11 page)

The ship rolled heavily and here was Nat descending the upper ladder like a daddy-longlegs, carefully placing the remote ends of the limbs for security and now faced with a crisis at the sight of the face and the cap. Here is Nat saluting as ever off balance, but this time held in position by one arm and two legs.

“Wotcher, Nat. Happy in your work?”

Dutiful Nat-smile though a little queasy. See the bright side.

“Yes, sir.”

Amble aft you drawn-out bastard.

Climb, climb. The bridge, a little wind and afternoon.

“Hallo. Mean course o-nine-o. Now on zag at one-one-o. And I may say, dead in station, not wandering all over the ocean the way you leave her. She’s all yours and the Old Man is in one of his moods, so watch out for sparks.”

“Zig coming up in ten seconds? I’ve got her.”

“See you again at the witching hour.”

“Port fifteen. Midships. Steady.”

He looked briefly round the convoy and then aft. Nat was there, tediously in his usual place, legs wide apart, face in hands. The corticened deck lurched under him,
rearranged
itself and he swayed on the rail. The luminous window that looked down at him bent at the sides in a snarl that was disguised as a grin.

Christ, how I hate you. I could eat you. Because you fathomed her mystery, you have a right to handle her transmuted cheap tweed; because you both have made a place where I can’t get; because in your fool innocence you’ve got what I had to get or go mad.

Then he found himself additionally furious with
Nathaniel
, not because of Mary, not because he had happened on her as he might have tripped over a ring-bolt but because he dared sit so, tilting with the sea, held by a thread, so near the end that would be at once so anguishing and restful like the bursting of a boil.

“Christ!”

Wildebeeste
had turned seconds ago.

“Starboard thirty! Half-ahead together!”

Already, from the apex of the destroyer screen, a light was stabbing erratically.

“Midships! Steady. Slow ahead together.”

There was a clatter from the ladder. The Captain burst at him.

“What the bloody hell are you playing at?”

Hurried and smooth.

“I thought there was wreckage on the starboard bow, sir, and couldn’t be sure so I maintained course and speed till we were clear, sir.”

The Captain stopped, one hand on the screen of the bridge and lowered at him.

“What sort of wreckage?”

“Baulks of timber, sir, floating just under the surface.”

“Starboard look-out!”

“Sir?”

“Did you see any wreckage?”

“No, sir.”

“—I may have been mistaken, sir, but I judged it better to make sure, sir.”

The Captain bored in, face to face so that his grip on the rock tightened as he remembered. The Captain’s face was big, pale and lined, the eyes red-rimmed with
sleeplessness
and gin. It examined for a moment what the window had to exhibit. The two shadowy noses on either side of the window caught a faint, sweet scent. Then the face changed, not dramatically, not registering, not making obvious, but changing like a Nat-face, from within. Under the pallor and moist creases, in the corners of the mouth and eyes, came the slight muscular shift of complicated tensions till the face was rearranged and bore like an open insult, the pattern of contempt and disbelief.

The mouth opened.

“Carry on.”

In a confusion too complete for answer or salute he watched the face turn away and take its understanding and contempt down the ladder.

There was heat and blood.

“Signal, sir, from Captain D. ‘Where are you going to my pretty maid?’”

Signalman with a wooden face. Heat and blood.

“Take it to the Captain.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

He turned back to the binnacle.

“Port fifteen. Midships. Steady.”

Looking under his arm he saw Nathaniel pass the bridge messenger in the waist. Seen thus, he was a bat hanging upside down from the roof of a cave. Nat passed on, walking and lurching till the break of the fo’castle hid him.

He found he was cursing an invisible Nat, cursing him for Mary, for the contempt in old Gin-soak’s face. The centre, looking in this reversed world over the binnacle, found itself beset by a storm of emotions, acid and inky and cruel. There was a desperate amazement that anyone so good as Nat, so unwillingly loved for the face that was always rearranged from within, for the serious attention, for love given without thought, should also be so quiveringly hated as though he were the only enemy. There was amazement that to love and to hate were now one thing and one emotion. Or perhaps they could be separated. Hate was as hate had always been, an acid, the corroding venom of which could be borne only because the hater was strong.

“I am a good hater.”

He looked quickly at the deck watch, across at
Wilde
beeste
and gave orders for the new course.

And love? Love for Nat? That was this sorrow dissolved through the hate so that the new solution was a deadly thing in the chest and the bowels.

He muttered over the binnacle.

“If I were that glass toy that I used to play with I could float in a bottle of acid. Nothing could touch me then.”

Zag.

“That’s what it is. Ever since I met her and she interrupted the pattern coming at random, obeying no law of life, facing me with the insoluble, unbearable problem of her existence the acid’s been chewing at my guts. I can’t even kill her because that would be her final victory over me. Yet as long as she lives the acid will eat. She’s there. In the flesh. In the not even lovely flesh. In the cheap mind. Obsession. Not love. Or if love, insanely compounded of this jealousy of her very being.
Odi
et
amo
. Like that thing I tried to write.”

There were lace curtains in decorous curves either side of the oak occasional table with its dusty fern. The round table in the centre of the almost unused parlour smelt of polish—might one day support a coffin in state, but until then, nothing. He looked round at the ornaments and plush, took a breath of the air that was trapped this side of the window, smelt of last year and varnish like the vilest cooking sherry. The room would suit her. She would fit it, she was the room at all points except for the mania.

He looked down at the writing-pad on his knee.

Zig.

“And that wasn’t the half of it. And the acid still eats. Who could ever dream that he would fall in love—or be trapped—by a front parlour on two feet?”

He began to pace backward and forward on the bridge.

“As long as she lives the acid will eat. There’s nothing that can stand that. And killing her would make it worse.”

He stopped. Looked back along the deck at the
quarter-deck
and the empty, starboard rail.

“Christ! Starboard twenty——”

There was a sense in which she could be—or say that the acid flow could be checked. Not to pass Petty Officer Roberts’ message on was one thing—but that merely acquiesced in the pattern. But say one nudged circumstances—not in the sense that one throttled with the hands or fired a gun—but gently shepherded them the way they might go? Since it would be a suggestion to circumstances only it could not be considered what a strict moralist might call it——

“And who cares anyway?”

This was to run with a rapier at the arras without more than a hope of success.

“He may never sit there again.”

Then the officer of the watch in the execution of his duty gives a helm order to avoid floating wreckage or a drifting mine and no one is any the worse.

“But if he sits there again——”

The corrosive swamped him. A voice cried out in his belly—I do not want him to die! The sorrow and hate bit deep, went on biting. He cried out with his proper voice.

“Does no one understand how I feel?”

The look-outs had turned on their perches. He scowled at them and felt another warmth in his face. His voice came out savagely.

“Get back to your sectors.”

He leaned over the binnacle and felt how his body shook.

“I am chasing after—a kind of peace.”

Barmaid’s blush with hair that was coarse even for a barmaid. He looked at the ledges of rock.

“A kind of peace.”

Coral growth.

*

He shook his head as though he were shaking water out of his hair.

“I came down here for something.”

But there was nothing, only weed and rock and water.

He climbed back to the Red Lion, gathered some of the uneaten mussels that he had left from the morning and went up the High Street to the Look-out. He sat under the south side of the winking Dwarf and opened them with his knife. He ate with long pauses between each mouthful. When he had finished the last one he lay back.

“Christ.”

They were no different from the mussels of yesterday but they tasted of decay.

“Perhaps I left them too long in the sun.”

But they hang in the sun between tides for hours!

“How many days have I been here?”

He thought fiercely, then made three scratches on the rock with his knife.

“I must not let anything escape that would reinforce personality. I must make decisions and carry them out. I have put a silver head on the Dwarf. I have decided not to be tricked into messing about with the water-hole. How far away is the horizon? Five miles? I could see a
crow’s-nest
at ten miles. I can advertise myself over a circle twenty miles in diameter. That’s not bad. The Atlantic is about two thousand miles wide up here. Twenty into two thousand goes a hundred.”

He knelt down and measured off a line ten inches in length as near as he could judge.

“That makes it a tenth of an inch.”

He put the blade of his knife on the line at about two inches from the end and rotated the haft slowly till the point made a white mark in the grey rock. He squatted back on his heels and looked at the diagram.

“With a really big ship I could be seen at fifteen miles.”

He put the point of the knife back on the mark and enlarged it. He paused, then went on scraping till the mark was the size of a silver threepenny-bit. He put out his foot and scuffed the seaboot stocking over the mark until it was grey and might have been there since the rock was made.

“I shall be rescued today.”

He stood up and looked into the silver face. The sun was still shining back at him. He traced mental lines from the sun to the stone, bounced them out at this part of the horizon and that. He went close to the dwarf and looked down at the head to see if he could find his face reflected there. The sunlight bounced up in his eyes. He jerked upright.

“The air! You fool! You clot! They ferry planes and they must use this place for checking the course—and Coastal Command, looking for U-boats——”

He cupped his hands at his eyes and turned slowly round, looking at the sky. The air was dense blue and interrupted by nothing but the sun over the south sea. He flung his hands away and began to walk hastily up and down by the look-out.

“A thinking day.”

The Dwarf was all right for ships—they were looking across at a silhouette. They would see the Dwarf or perhaps the gleam of the head. But to a plane, the Dwarf would be invisible, merged against the rock, and the glint from the silver might be a stray crystal of quartz. There was nothing about the rock to catch the eye. They might circle at a few thousand feet—a mile, two miles—and see nothing that was different. From above, the stone would be a tiny grey patch, that was eye-catching only by the surf that spread round in the sea.

He looked quickly and desperately up, then away at the water.

A pattern.

Men make patterns and superimpose them on nature. At ten thousand feet the rock would be a pebble; but suppose the pebble were striped? He looked at the trenches. The pebble was striped already. The upended layers would be grey with darker lines of trench between them.

He held his head in his hands.

A chequer. Stripes. Words. S.O.S.

“I cannot give up my clothes. Without them I should freeze to death. Besides if I spread them out they would still be less visible than this guano.”

He looked down the High Street between his hands.

“Pare away here and here and there. Make all smooth. Cut into a huge, shadowed S.O.S.”

He dropped his hands and grinned.

“Be your age.”

He squatted down again and considered in turn the material he had with him. Cloth. Small sheets of paper. A rubber lifebelt.

Seaweed.

He paused, lifted his hands and cried out in triumph.

“Seaweed!”

T
here were tons of the stuff hanging round the rock, floating or coiled down under water by Prospect Cliff.

“Men make patterns.”

Seaweed, to impose an unatural pattern on nature, a pattern that would cry out to any rational beholder—Look! Here is thought. Here is man!

“The best form would be a single indisputable line drawn at right angles to the trenches, piled so high that it will not only show a change of colour but even throw a shadow of its own. I must make it at least a yard wide and it must be geometrically straight. Later I will fill up one of the trenches and turn the upright into a cross. Then the rock will become a hot cross bun.”

Looking down towards the three Rocks he planned the line to descend across the trenches, parallel more or less to the High Street. The line would start at the Red Lion and come up to the Dwarf. It would be an operation.

He went quickly down the High Street: and now that he had found a job with point, he was muttering without knowing why.

“Hurry! Hurry!”

Then his ears began to fill with the phantom buzzing of planes. He kept looking up and fell once, cutting himself. Only when he was already pulling at the frondy weed by Food Cliff did he pause.

“Don’t be a fool. Take it easy. There’s no point in
looking
up because you can do nothing to attract attention. Only a clot would go dancing and waving his shirt because he thought there was a plane about five miles up.”