The Penal Colony (29 page)

The decision to patrol in daylight as well as
after dark had been just one consequence of making the escape
project public. Franks had explained the plans in detail, even down
to the sonar. He had also explained the risks. According to
Appleton’s calculations, the occupants of the ketch had less than a
one-in-five chance of surviving the voyage. If the attempt failed
and they were lucky they would drown. If they weren’t, the boat,
which would carry hardly any rations, would go off course and into
mid Atlantic. If they were discovered by a patrol-boat there was
every chance of being deliberately rammed and sunk.

The lottery for the remaining eight places
would be held three weeks before sailing. As matters stood at the
moment, departure date would be 1 May, or possibly, depending on
the weather, 2 or 3 May. The original idea had been to sail in July
or August, when sea temperatures were more favourable, but that had
been prevented, Franks had said, by mainland factors.

The announcement had had a remarkable effect
on the Community. The first reaction had been one of astonishment,
not only at the project itself, but also at the audacity of the
thinking behind it. This was followed by a polarization, not
anticipated by Routledge but foreseen by the Council, of the
Community into two groups: those who wanted to go, and those who
didn’t. Generally it was the older men who belonged to the second
group, which was anyway much in the minority. For the others, the
ketch and the lottery immediately became the sole topic of
conversation. Then, a little later, the excitement was tempered by
a realization of just how great were the odds against securing a
place. To alleviate this, Franks had said that all plans, tools,
and a construction diary were to be left behind so that the ketch
could be duplicated.

There was also disappointment over the news
that Franks, not to mention Appleton and Thaine, intended to leave.
But there was little or no resentment. On the contrary. The
prevailing sentiment was that the four Council members richly
deserved their places. Franks had worked harder than anybody, and
for longer; it was he and Appleton and Thaine and Godwin who had
conceived the escape and were making it happen. The eight spare
places were manna from heaven.

At first Routledge had been surprised that
Franks had made the announcement so soon, and that he had gone into
such detail. Franks seemed to have no fears that anyone would leak
the information in a letter home. Considering this further,
Routledge marvelled at his own naivety. Clearly, and there could be
no other implication, all outgoing mail was secretly vetted by the
Council. Routledge had hinted at the subject in conversation with
King, without response.

More surprising was the Council’s implicit
trust that the project would not become known to the outsiders.
This also implied that, between now and the launch, no one would
need to be expelled from the Community. Soon after the
announcement, however, this anomaly had begun to be explained.

The Council’s attitude towards the outsiders
had undergone a marked change. Two new arrivals, deemed to be
unlikely candidates for acceptance, were rumoured to have been
clandestinely disposed of rather than have them swell the
outsiders’ ranks, though Routledge greatly doubted the truth of
this. Indisputably, however, the period new arrivals were spending
outside had been reduced.

Foster and Johnson now spent all their time
on surveillance, and border patrols were organized round the
clock.

Talbot was in charge this afternoon and
carried the crossbow. He, Routledge, and a man named Huggins had
been detailed to cover the eastern part of the border, from the red
halfway marker rock to Star Cove.

Heavy rain was again falling, cold,
miserable, an ocean rain not meant for land-based men to endure. It
had hardly stopped since the weekend, since the last day of Summer
Time. Darkness now arrived before five-thirty: the real autumn had
begun. Until now, with the light evenings, Routledge had almost
been able to believe that he was here on a temporary basis,
roughing it, that when the weather turned bad he would be going
home to classify the specimens he had gathered or write an account
of his experiences. He could delude himself no longer. He had
finally become a fully fledged prisoner of Sert. And worse: for
seven whole weeks now there had been no word from Louise.

“Boring, ain’t it?” Huggins said.

Routledge nodded, although he did not
agree.

“Don’t knock it,” Talbot said.

Patrolling was irksome and tedious, but not
boring. Despite the rain and cold, despite the work rotas and the
demands of the Village, being out day after day in the open air,
learning to be dependent on his surroundings for his food and drink
and warmth, living in a thin-walled shack virtually exposed to the
elements: all this, together with a sense of his own increasing
physical strength and fitness, was beginning to effect a profound
change in the way Routledge viewed the natural world. He had,
together with most people, dismissed as over-reaction the protests
raised by the Greens when Sert and the other penal islands had been
taken over. Now he began to understand what the protesters had been
fighting for. There were interludes in his self-pity, in his
gnawing anxiety about Louise, in the grim business of survival,
when he became conscious not only of the heart-stopping grandeur of
the island, but also of his own place within it. He knew every inch
of shoreline on the Village peninsula and, after beachcombing,
blackberrying and goating expeditions with Daniels and the others,
much of the rest. The ruins on Beacon Point, the peninsula where he
had shot the wild man, were indeed, as he had guessed, those of the
old monastery. He knew now why the monks had come to Sert. Among a
handful of his fellow villagers he had sensed the same unspoken
feeling. Talbot shared it, Talbot whom Routledge had at first so
disliked. In him the feeling took expression as a fascination with
birds and plants. The South London gangster, a four-year veteran of
the island, had become a naturalist.

The patrol had reached the cliffs once more,
still without seeing anyone. Outsiders had too much sense to risk
catching pneumonia on a day like this. They were all safely under
cover. But during bad weather incursions by wild men were much more
likely, and yesterday another patrol had caught and ejected a pair
of them at Vanston Cove, within five hundred metres of the bungalow
itself.

Talbot glanced southwards along the cliffs,
towards the drop zone. “I wonder if the ’copter’s coming
today.”

“Should be,” Huggins said.

“Yeah. He comes in worse than this.”

“What’s the time?”

“One o’clock.” A rivulet was running from
Talbot’s sou’wester and down the back of his oilskin coat. He
looked out over the sea. Routledge followed his gaze to the
horizon, where, though the murk, came the distant flash, pause,
flash of the southern lightship. Huggins, meanwhile, was scanning
Pulpit Head with the binoculars.

“Can’t see a bloody thing,” he said. “They’re
all fogged up.”

“Have you got rain on the eyepieces?”

“No, it’s condensation inside.”

Each time he came to Star Cove now Routledge
thought about the cave where, according to the Father’s
announcement, the ketch would be assembled and launched.

“Look,” Talbot said to Routledge, pointing
out to sea. “Killers.”

With a fluttering escort of gulls, five black
dorsal fins, six, seven, eight, were slicing through the outer part
of the cove, all but indifferent to the swell, picking an easy
course through the reefs, coming in diagonally towards the
beach.

Routledge watched in amazement and alarm; he
had not known that killer whales occurred in British waters.

“Holy Joe, look at ’em go,” Talbot said, his
sense of wonder unconcealed. “They can do twenty-five knots when
they feel like it. See that tall fin, Mr Routledge? That’s a male.
There’s another one. Two males. The rest is females and young. It’s
a pod, a family group.” He turned to Huggins. “What they after?
Seals?”

“Could be,” Huggins said, now studying the
group, which was slowly spreading out, through the magnifying mist
of the binoculars. “Yep. Seals. There’s three, at least.”

“Fancy a dip, Mr Routledge?”

Routledge had never felt more glad to be on
land.

Huggins was glued to the binoculars. “Jesus,
they already got one! There’s red, there’s red! It’s bleeding!”

The waters at the head of the cove had been
turned into a maelstrom. Routledge glimpsed the piebald pattern of
the larger male, the wounded seal, a big adult, in its jaws. With a
toss of its head the seal was hurled several metres upwards and
back, coming down with a tremendous splash among the other whales,
which seemed instantly to tear it to pieces.

Two fins were almost on the beach. As they
reached the shallows the enormous glistening bulk of the whales was
exposed, the white oval behind the eye, the dramatic division along
the flanks between black above and white below. There could be no
depth left: surely the whales were already grounded, but still they
were advancing.

Exploding from the surf with a terrified
sideways leap, a huge bull seal scrabbled desperately up the narrow
stretch of stones under the cliff. Only the middle state of the
tide had allowed it to escape: with chilling, synchronized grace
the two whales pursuing it turned and swam back into deeper water,
rejoining their companions in the chase. “They’ve got another one!”
Huggins shouted. “God Almighty! Swallowed it whole!”

A minute later it was over and the whales
were heading out to sea, leaving only the gulls searching for
scraps and the refugee seal still cringing on the beach, its dread
of man forgotten. Beyond the foaming reefs at the mouth of the
cove, one by one, the fins dived, surfaced, dived, surfaced, and
disappeared from view.

“Opportunist feeders,” Talbot said. “Ever
seen killers before, Mr Routledge?”

Stunned by what he had just witnessed,
Routledge shook his head. The sheer speed of the attack, as much as
the realization that the anonymous seas surrounding Sert held such
monsters, had shaken him to the core. Neptune had just shown his
hand. “How did they know the seals were there?”

“Heard ’em fooling about, I expect. They use
sonar too.”

Fleetingly he thought of the almost
insuperable technical problems of echolocation, requiring all
Godwin’s ingenuity and expertise, effortlessly solved in flesh and
bone by nature, by evolution, by the Creator – whatever you wanted
to call it. “Are killer whales common here?”

“Not common. But they’re about.”

“Mr Talbot,” Routledge said. “This is Star
Cove.”

“So?”

“This is where the boat launches.”

Talbot and Huggins exchanged glances. “You’re
right,” Talbot said. “D’you still want to be included in that
lottery, Mr Routledge?”

“Reckon you ought to think about dropping
out,” Huggins said.

Talbot, seeing Routledge’s face, relented
with a smile. “It’s all right, Mr Routledge, don’t worry about it.
No one knows why, but they don’t never go for humans. Not unless
they’re provoked. Maybe it’s the taste, or our funny skin.”

The raid on the seals had been utterly
ruthless. But then seals showed small mercy in their dealings with
the crabs and fishes which comprised their prey. The whales, the
seals, inhabited just the same world as Routledge himself. He
thought of the man at Beacon Point, still the subject of his
nightmares, emerging from the ruins of the chapel, from the ruins
of civilized life, and knew that from now on the nightmares would
not be the same. Eventually they might even dwindle and cease.

“Come on,” Talbot said. “We can’t hang about
here all day. Time to get back to it.”

* * *

Her letter came that afternoon, reaching him
just before four. The handwriting on the envelope, in black
rollertip, was even more careful and controlled than usual.
A.
J. Routledge Z-160683, c/o H. M. Prison, Princetown, Devon, PL20
6SA.
Even the stamp had been stuck in its corner with
meticulous precision. It bore, not the Watford district postmark
carried by Rickmansworth letters, but a neat dark circle inscribed
London W1
. This alone, documentary proof of the fact that
her work now took her to the West End, would have been enough to
cause him unease; but that stage had already been passed. In the
last seven weeks there had been plenty of time for thought along
these lines. Not long enough, though, to prepare him for the
reality of the two sheets of buff paper which, seated at his desk,
he now unfolded and began to read.

“Bad news?” he heard Godwin say, after a
while.

“No,” Routledge said, stuffing the pages back
in their envelope.

In a daze he tried to resume work. The desk
looked the same, the pencils, the calculator keys. Physically,
everything was just as it had been before the delivery. The rain
was still falling. A dismal autumn day. The same autumn rain had
fallen on the helicopter which, carrying her letter deep in the
darkness of its hold, had flown towards him, low over the sea, all
the way from the mainland. Under Mitchell’s direction the boxes had
been collected, the mail innocently sorted into alphabetical order.
Ross, Routledge, Sibley. Stamper had rung the gong. Fitzmaurice had
offered to go. He had received a luxury parcel. “Here you are, Mr
Routledge,” he had said.

Now Routledge heard him say, “Are you all
right, Mr Routledge?”

“What?”

“I asked if you wanted a chocolate
toffee.”

“A what? I’m sorry. I wasn’t listening.”

“A chocolate toffee.”

Fitzmaurice must have received them in his
parcel. Already eating, he thrust the bag further in Routledge’s
direction. Routledge saw that Godwin was chewing too.