The Strode Venturer (13 page)

A few minutes later we passed right over the
Strode Venturer.
The barges were gone, the booms stowed, the hatch covers on. She was all ready for sea, yet the anchor was still down and no sign of life on board. She hadn’t even got steam up as far as I could see.

Back at Gan I went straight to Station H.Q. But Canning
wasn’t there. “He’s down at the trading post discussing the situation with the President,” Easton said. “And you’re not very popular at the moment. He feels you should have warned him.”

“About the vedi? I didn’t know.”

“But you knew this man Strode was going to jump ship.”

“So did Canning,” I said. “Or at least he’d a pretty shrewd idea after our talk this morning.”

“Did you know there were two Adduans on the
Venturer
?”

“No.”

I don’t think he believed me, but when I asked for the details he went to his desk and picked up a sheet of paper. “Don Mansoor and Ali Raza. They’re both from Midu. Goodwin went on board this morning to have a word with Strode. When he couldn’t find him he had the whole crew lined up. That was how he found two more were missing. We’re holding the ship until we find out what it’s all about.”

“What are you going to do with Strode?”

“Ship him out. The Adduans are another matter. They signed on for the voyage and in theory they should be returned to the ship to complete it. But that’s for the President to decide, presuming that the captain is willing to release them.”

I went down to the jetty then, but though I waited there for an hour the high-speed launch did not return. There was no breeze, the lagoon flat calm and the
Strode Venturer
quivering in the sultry heat. Canning didn’t come into the bar that morning. He arrived late for lunch, had a quick meal and left immediately afterwards. In theory nobody worked in the afternoon, but the demands of the station made few concessions to climate. Shortly before three he sent for me. He was alone in his office.

“Where’s Strode?” I asked him.

“Still on Midu, and I’ve spent half the day arguing with our local President about him. As soon as Goodwin reported he was missing and two Adduans with him I sent the launch out there, but the people wouldn’t let Wilcox land. My jurisdiction doesn’t extend to the islands and the queer
thing is I got the impression the President not only knew about Strode but approved whatever it is he’s trying to do.” He was smoking a cigarette and he seemed ill-at-ease. “However, that isn’t the reason I sent for you. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.” He reached for a message form that lay on the desk. “Com. Cen. have just sent this over.” He glanced at it and then handed it to me. “I’m sorry, Bailey.”

The message read:
Please inform Cdr. Bailey that his wife Barbara was found unconscious in their bungalow this morning. She died in hospital about an hour later. Cause of death is believed to have been an overdose of sleeping pills. Also convey our sympathy.
It was signed
Alec.

“If there’s anything I can do?” Canning said. “Anything you want?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

I stumbled out of his office and the brilliance of the sun outside seemed to mock. Its tropical warmth held the promise of life and what I held in my hand was the death of all the years we’d had together. I couldn’t believe she was gone. All that vitality, that desperate energy—wasted. To sorrow was added guilt, the feeling that somehow I ought to have done something to prevent it. I hadn’t loved her—not for several years. It hadn’t been possible, yet now I felt the loss of the love that had once been between us, and it hurt. It hurt like hell to think she’d found it necessary to go like this.

I don’t remember walking through the camp. I don’t remember much of what I thought, even. I heard the sound of the sea and have a vague impression of coral sand. In the end I went back to H.Q., to the adjutant’s office. There were messages I had to send—to Barbara’s parents, to various relatives and friends in different parts of the world. Hers was a Service family and very scattered. “There’ll be a flight through from the U.K. to-morrow morning,” Easton said. “The C.O. has told Movements to make a seat available for you on it to Singapore. Take-off will be around nine o’clock.”

I thanked him and walked back to my billet. It was the
end of the day now and the dhonis were taking the Adduans back to their islands, the palms turning black against the setting sun and the sky to the west taking on that violent synthetic hue. Four men in white shorts were playing tennis in the fading light and the first of the fruit bats, the flying foxes, was coming in from Fedu, the beat of its wings slow as a raven. I went into my room and shut the door. The soft hiss of the fan revolving, the liquid murmur of the two house-boys talking on the verandah outside, the sound of tennis balls—how often had Barbara and I shared such sounds. I wrote some letters, then stretched myself out on the bed, my mind numb, my body drained. It was over now, finished, done with. She had been my first love and it would never be quite the same for me again. My tired mind groped for some consolation and finding none produced its own remedy. I slept, and when I woke the light was on and Hassan was standing over me. He was holding out a piece of paper.

It was from Strode:
All my plans have been upset by the authorities here and it’s urgent I discuss the position with you. Can you come at once? There will be a dhoni waiting for you off the jetty. Hassan will take you to it.
He had signed it
Peter S.

I looked up at the dark figure standing over me. “Have you come from Midu?”

“Midu.” He nodded.

I hesitated. But what the hell—anything was better than just lying here with all the night before me. “Okay,” I said. And he waited whilst I put on my shoes. I took a sweater with me, but outside the night was still warm. Ten minutes later we were on the end of the jetty. There was no moon, but it didn’t matter; the sky was all stars, only the water was black. “You give me cigarette please.” I handed him one and he lit it, letting the match flare against his face. A white glimmer showed suddenly against the black darkness of the water and in an instant it became identifiable as a sail filled by the light breeze coming in from the north. I heard the gurgle of the water at the dhoni’s bow, but no human
sound as the square of white was abruptly snuffed out. Then the dark shape of the boat itself glided alongside. Hands reached out to grasp the concrete and fend her off, a mast against the stars and dark faces, almost invisible, eyes glinting in the starlight. A thin hand reached out to draw me on board, and as Hassan jumped to the thwart beside me the bows were pushed clear, the oars dipped and the long black lines of the jetty slid away.

They sailed out as far as the
Wave Victor
and then they began to row, keeping up a steady tireless rhythm and heading straight into the wind. It took them over two hours to reach Midu and closing the shore we passed the high-speed launch lying like a watch-dog chained to its anchor. Peter Strode was waiting for me at Don Mansoor’s house.

“Sorry to drag you out here, but it’s important. You saw that launch as you came in?” I nodded and he hitched his chair forward, his face urgent in the harsh light of the pressure lamp. “What the hell are they so worried about—that I’ll try and run a cargo to Ceylon?”

“Canning doesn’t want any trouble,” I said.

“There isn’t going to be any trouble. I’m going south, not north.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

“Exactly. That’s why I asked you to come out here. If I give you my word that I’m not going north …” He wanted me to persuade Canning to call off his watchdogs.

But I knew it wasn’t as simple as that. “Suppose you tell me where you are going?”

“No.” His refusal was immediate and final. And he added quickly, “You must know by now that I have the local President’s agreement—his support, in fact.”

“It’s no use,” I said. “Canning’s worried about the political implications.”

“Then he’s a bloody old woman. What the hell’s it got to do with him?”

“Only that he’s answerable to Whitehall. You can’t blame him.”

“You won’t help me, then?”

“I can’t unless I know what you’re up to.”

He was silent then and I waited, listening to the liquid sound of the Adduans talking amongst themselves. In the end it was Don Mansoor who answered. “You must understand that we are very poor peoples here on Addu. Very poor indeed before the R.A.F. are coming to the island.” His voice was soft and gentle, his English nearly fluent. Later I discovered he had been educated at Bombay University. “We are always very distant from Malé and the government of the Sultan. Now we have our own government. But we have nothing but fish and cowrie shells to sell to the world outside. We wish to be less dependent upon the R.A.F. They are our friends. They have been very welcome to us. They raise our conditions of living so that we have lamps and oil to put in them, flour and cigarettes, even radios. But what happens next year or the year after? We do not know. We want independence for all times, but we are not being certain of our independence if we are not having—if we do not have …”

“Resources,” Peter Strode said. “What he is saying is that they will never be truly independent until they have resources of their own quite apart from what they get out of the R.A.F.’s presence on Gan. In other words, they don’t trust the British to support their separatist movement.”

“This is political, then?” I was thinking of the launch anchored out in the lagoon and how right Canning was from his point of view to station it there.

A silence had descended on the room. “You want me to join the board of Strode & Company—so that you can get your foot in the door of what’s left of your father’s shipping line. Correct?” Peter Strode’s voice was urgent, so tense that it trembled slightly. “Well, I can tell you this, Bailey, unless I can get out of here, free to sail where I want, I won’t do it. I’ll sell my shares in the company and you can go to hell. Understand?” I could almost hear his teeth grate, the frustration he felt was so violent.

“Yes, I understand,” I said. “But trying to blackmail me won’t help you, and what you do with your shares is your own
affair. I can only help if I know what your intentions are.”

His fist came down on the table. “You stupid bastard—why don’t you stay in the Navy if you’re not prepared to take a chance and back your own judgment?” He was leaning towards me across the table, in silhouette against the lamp, the pointed ears standing out on either side of the black shape of his head. “Can’t you understand what it means to these people? Can’t you trust me?”

“You’re wasting your breath,” I told him. “It’s not me you’ve got to convince. It’s Canning.”

“But I’m not talking to Canning. I’m talking to you. I’m asking you to help me.” His voice was quieter now. He seemed to have got a grip on himself. “All right. It seems I have to convince you first that I’m not some bloody crackpot.” He jumped from his seat and went to a wooden seaman’s chest that stood against the wall. A moment later he was back. “Know anything about minerals?” He dropped what looked like several knobbly black potatoes on to the table in front of me. “Take a look at those.” I picked one up and carried it over to the lamp. It was heavy—heavy and hard, with a metallic gleam. “Lava?” I asked, thinking of a visit I had once paid to the island of Stromboli.

“No. They’re manganese. Manganese nodules to use the geological term.” He sat down again facing me. “Listen,” he said. “I’m not telling you where they came from. All I’ll tell you is this: When I came out of the Hadhramaut I found Don Mansoor at Mukalla just about to sail. He was bound for Addu Atoll on the monsoon. That was how I came to visit the Maldives and write that paper for the Royal Geographical Society. That’s how Don Mansoor and I became friends. He’s not only a damn’ fine navigator—he’s a very brave man. Last year he had a crack at running the blockade. Down here on the equator the monsoon winds are light, mere trade winds. Storms aren’t very common—not storms of any duration. But he hit one and it carried him into an area that he’d never been in before. Probably no one has. It’s right off the track of any shipping, away from any route that aircraft take, even R.A.F. planes.” He paused
there. I think he was afraid that he was being betrayed into telling me too much.

“An undiscovered island?” I asked.

“Perhaps.” He picked up one of the lumps of ore and held it in his hand, staring at it as though it contained some magical property. “Strange, isn’t it? Here’s a people desperate for independence and this little fragment could be the answer—for them and for me. For you, too, perhaps.” He set it down on the table carefully. “But I was telling you about Don Mansoor. In the end he did reach Ceylon. He sold his cargo of dried fish privately instead of doing it through the Malé Government representative. As a result his ship was impounded and his crew sent back to the Maldives. Don Mansoor and another intrepid character, Ali Raza—he’s over there.” He pointed to a small, wrinkled old man standing in the shadows. “They worked their passage to Singapore knowing that at Singapore they could catch the
Strode Venturer
back to Addu. I was down at Strode House the day they applied to ship as crew. That’s how I learned what had happened to them—that’s how I got hold of these. They’d kept them as souvenirs to prove that they really had seen something strange. Do you know anything about seismology? Did you know a tidal wave had struck this atoll, that there has been evidence for several years of submarine volcanic activity in the Indian Ocean?”

I nodded, my mind going back to Hans Straker and what he had told me on the plane between Singapore and London. “Isn’t there a plan for a proper hydrographical survey of the Indian Ocean this year? If you wait a few months you’d probably get …”

“Wait? I’m not waiting a day longer than I have to. The International Indian Ocean Survey—the IIOS they call it—includes the Russians as well as ourselves. It’s a fully international survey and if I wait for them to confirm whatever it was that Don Mansoor saw, then I’ll have missed the chance of a lifetime.” His fingers reached out, toying with the metallic nodules on the table between us. “I’ve had this analysed. It’s high-grade manganese, about
forty-five per cent. There’s a ready market for it—in Britain, in Germany, in any of half a dozen industrialized countries. Now do you understand?” And he added pounding the table, “But I must have confirmation. I must know it’s there in quantity and not part of a blazing ash heap that can’t be worked. And I’ve got to find that out ahead of the International Survey. Now then—are you going to help me or not?”