Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

‘Been sick?’ I asked. As a conversational gambit it lacked something but doctors aren’t supposed to have manners. She nodded. She was clasping her hands so tightly that I could see the faint ivory gleam of knuckles.

‘I thought you were a good sailor?’ The light touch.

‘It is not the sea that makes me ill.’

I abandoned the light touch. ‘Mary dear, why don’t you lie down and try to sleep?’

‘I see. You tell me that two more men have been poisoned and died and then I am supposed to drop off to sleep and have happy dreams. Is that it?’ I said nothing and she went on wryly: ‘You’re not very good at breaking bad news, are you?’

‘Professional callousness. You didn’t come here just to reproach me with my tactlessness. What is it, Mary dear?’

‘Why do you call me “Mary dear”?’

‘It offends you?’

‘Oh, no. Not when you say it.’ From any other woman the words would have carried coquettish overtones, but there were none such here. It was meant as a statement of fact, no more.

‘Very well, then.’ I don’t know what I meant by ‘Very well, then,’ it just made me feel obscurely clever. ‘Tell me.’

‘I’m afraid,’ she said simply.

So she was afraid. She was tired, overwrought, she’d tended four very, very sick men who’d been poisoned, she’d learnt that three others whom she knew had died of poison and the violence of the Arctic gale raging outside was sufficient to give pause to even the most intrepid. But I said none of those things to her.

‘We’re all afraid at times, Mary.’

‘You too?’

‘Me too.’

‘Are you afraid now?’

‘No. What’s there to be afraid of?’

‘Death. Sickness and death.’

‘I have to live with death, Mary. I detest it, of course I do, but I don’t fear it. If I did, I’d be no good as a doctor. Would I now?’

‘I do not express myself well. Death I can accept. But not when it strikes out blindly and you know that it is not blind. As it is here. It strikes out carelessly, recklessly, without cause or reason, but you know there is cause and reason. Do you – do you know what I mean?’

I knew perfectly well what she meant. I said: ‘Even at my brightest and best, metaphysics are hardly my forte. Maybe the old man with the scythe does show discrimination in his indiscrimination, but I’m too tired–’

‘I’m not talking about metaphysics.’ She made an almost angry little gesture with her clasped hands. ‘There’s something terribly far wrong aboard this ship, Dr Marlowe.’

‘Terribly far wrong?’ Heaven only knew that I couldn’t have agreed with her more. ‘What should be wrong, Mary dear?’

She said gravely: ‘You would not patronize me, Dr Marlowe? You would not humour a silly female?’

I had to answer at once so I said obliquely but deliberately: ‘I would not insult you, Mary dear. I like you too much for that.’

‘Do you really?’ She smiled faintly, whether amused by me or pleased at what I’d said I couldn’t guess. ‘Do you like all the others, too?’

‘Do I – I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t you find something odd, something very strange about the people, about the atmosphere they create?’

I was on safer ground here. I said frankly: ‘I’d have to have been born deaf and blind not to notice it. One is warding off barely-expressed hostilities, elbowing aside tensions, wading through undercurrents the whole of the livelong day, and at the same time, if you’ll forgive the mixing of the metaphors, trying to shield one’s eyes from the constant shower of sparks given off by everyone trying to grind their own axes at the same time. Everyone is so frighteningly friendly to everyone else until the moment comes, of course, when everyone else is so misguided as to turn his or her back. Our esteemed employer, Otto Gerran, cannot speak too highly of his fellow directors, Heissman, Stryker, Goin and his dear daughter, all of whom he vilifies most fearfully the moment they are out of earshot, all of which would be wholly unforgivable were it not for the fact that Heissman, Stryker and his dear daughter each behave in the same fashion to Otto and their co-directors. You get the same petty jealousies, the same patently false sincerities, the same smilers with the knives beneath the cloaks on the lower film unit crew level – not that they, and probably rightly, would regard themselves as being any lower than Otto and his chums – I use the word “chums”, you understand, without regard to the strict meaning of the word. And, just to complicate matters, we have this charming interplay between the first and second divisions. The Duke, Eddie Harbottle, Halliday, the stills man, Hendriks and Sandy all cordially detest what we might call the management, a sentiment that is strongly reciprocated by the management themselves. And everybody seems to have a down on the unfortunate director, Neal Divine. Sure, I’ve noticed all of this, I’d have to be a zombie not to have, but I disregard ninety-odd per cent and just put it down to the normally healthy backbiting bitchery inseparable from the cinema world. You get fakes, cheats, liars, mountebanks, sycophants, hypocrites the world over, it’s just that the movie-making milieu appears to act as a grossly distorting magnifying-glass that selects and highlights all the more undesirable qualities while ignoring or at best diminishing the more desirable ones – one has to assume that there are some.’

‘You don’t think a great deal of us, do you?’

‘Whatever gave you that impression?’

She ignored that. ‘And we’re all bad?’

‘Not all. Not you. Not the other Mary or young Allen – but maybe that’s because they’re too young yet or too new in this business to have come to terms with the standard norms of behaviour. And I’m pretty sure that Charlie Conrad is on the side of the angels.’

Again the little smile. ‘You mean he thinks along the same lines as you?’

‘Yes. Do you know him at all?’

‘We say good morning.’

‘You should get to know him better. He’d like to know you better. He likes you – he said so. And, no, we weren’t discussing you – your name cropped up among a dozen others.’

‘Flatterer.’ Her tone was neutral, I didn’t know whether she was referring with pleasure to Conrad or with irony to myself. ‘So you agree with me? There is something very strange in the atmosphere here?’

‘By normal standards, yes.’

‘By any standards.’ There was a curious certainty about her. ‘Distrust, suspicion, jealousy, one looks to find those things in our unpleasant little world, but one does not look to find them on the scale that we have here. Do not forget that I know about those things. I was born in a Communist country, I was brought up in a Communist country. You understand?’

‘Yes. When did you get away?’

‘Two years ago. Just two years.’

‘How?’

‘Please. Others may wish to use the same way.’

‘And I’m in the pay of the Kremlin. As you wish.’

‘You are offended?’ I shook my head. ‘Distrust, suspicion, jealousy, Dr Marlowe. But there is more here, much more. There is hate and there is fear. I – I can smell it. Can’t you?’

‘You have a point to make, Mary dear, and you’re leading up to it in a very tortuous fashion. I wish you would come to it.’ I looked at my watch. ‘I do not wish to be rude to you but neither do I wish to be rude to the person who is waiting to see me.’

‘If people hate and fear each other enough, terrible things can happen.’ This didn’t seem to require even an affirmative, so I kept silent and she went on: ‘You say that those illnesses, those deaths, are the result of accidental food poisoning. Are they, Dr Marlowe? Are they?’