Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

‘But you must know of them?’

‘Not even that, but that’s not surprising. I like acting but the film world bores me to tears and I don’t mix socially. That makes me an odd-ball too. But Otto vouches for them – in fact, he speaks pretty highly of them, and that’s good enough for me. They’ll both probably act me off the screen when it comes to the bit.’ He shivered again. ‘Conrad’s curiosity remains unsatisfied, but Conrad has had enough. As a doctor, wouldn’t you prescribe some of this scotch which old Imrie is supposed to be dispensing so liberally?’

We found Captain Imrie dispensing the scotch with so heavy a hand that plainly it came from his own private supplies and not from Otto’s, for Otto, heavily wrapped in a coloured blanket and with his puce complexion still a pale shadow of its former self, was sitting in his accustomed dining chair and raising no objections that I could see. There must have been at least twenty people present, ship’s crew and passengers, and they were very far indeed from being a merry throng. I was surprised to see Judith Haynes there, with her husband, Michael Stryker, hovering attentively over her. I was surprised to see Mary darling there, her sense of duty or what was the done thing must have been greater than her aversion to alcohol, and was even more surprised to note that she had so abandoned all sense of the proprieties as to be holding young Allen by the arm in a positively proprietorial fashion: I was not surprised to see that Mary Stuart was absent. So were Heissman and Sandy. The two actors with whom Conrad claimed to have so little in common, Jungbeck and Heyter, were together in one corner and for the first time I looked at them with some degree of real interest. They looked like actors, no question of that, or, more accurately, they looked like what I thought actors ought to look like. Heyter was tall, fair, good-looking, young and twenty years ago would have been referred to as clean-cut: he had a mobile, expressive, animated face. Jungbeck was at least fifteen years his senior, a thick-set man with heavy shoulders, a five o’clock shadow and dark, curling hair just beginning to grey: he had a ready, engaging smile. He was cast, I knew, as the villain in the forthcoming production and despite the appropriate build and blue jowls didn’t look the least bit like one.

The almost complete silence in the saloon, I soon realized, didn’t stem entirely from the solemnity of the occasion, although that element must have been there: Captain Imrie had been holding the floor and had only broken off to acknowledge our entrance and to take the opportunity of dispensing some more liquor, which I refused. And now, it was clear, Captain Imrie was taking up where he had left off.

‘Aye,’ he said heavily, ‘ ’tis fitting, ’tis fitting. They have gone today, sadly, tragically gone, three of Britain’s sons–’ I was almost glad, for the moment, that Antonio was no longer around ‘–but it comes to us all, sooner or later the hour strikes, and if they must rest where better to lie than in those honoured waters of Bear Island where ten thousand of their countrymen sleep?’ I wondered, uncharitably, what hour struck when Captain Imrie poured himself his first restorative of the morning but then recalled that as he had been up since 4 a.m. he was no doubt now rightly regarding the day as being pretty far advanced, a supposition which he proceeded to prove correct by replenishing his glass without, however, interrupting the smooth flow of his monologue. His audience, I noted with regret, had about them the look of men and women who wished themselves elsewhere.

‘I wonder what Bear Island means to you people,’ he went on. ‘Nothing, I suppose, why should it? It’s just a name, Bear Island, just a name. Like the Isle of Wight or what’s yon place in America, Coney Island: just a name. But for people like Mr Stokes here and myself and thousands of others it’s a wee bit more than that. It was a kind of turning-point, a dividing point in our lives, what those geography or geology fellows would call a watershed: when we came to know the name we knew that no name had ever meant so much to us before – and no name would ever mean so much again. And we knew that nothing would ever be the same again. Bear Island was the place where boys grew up, just over the night, as it were: Bear Island was the place where middle-aged men like myself grew old.’ This was a different Captain Imrie speaking now, quietly reminiscent, sad without bitterness, and the captive audience was now voluntarily so, no longer glancing longingly at the saloon exits.

‘We called it “the Gate”,’ he went on. ‘The gate to the Barents Sea and the White Sea and those places in Russia where we took those convoys through all the long years of the war, all those long years ago. If you passed the Gate and came back again, you were a lucky man: if you did it half-a-dozen times you’d used up all your luck for a lifetime. How many times did we pass the Gate, Mr Stokes?’

‘Twenty-two times.’ For once, Mr Stokes had no need for deliberation.

‘Twenty-two times. I am not saying it because I was there but people on those convoys to Murmansk suffered more terribly than people have ever suffered in war before or will ever suffer in war again, and it was here, in those waters, at the Gate, that they suffered most of all, for it was here that the enemy waited by night and by day and it was here that the enemy struck us down. The fine ships and the fine boys, our boys and the German boys, more of them lie in those waters than anywhere in the world, but the waters run clean now and the blood is washed away. But not in our minds, not in our minds: thirty years have passed now and I cannot hear the words “Bear Island”, not even when I say them myself, but my blood runs cold. The graveyard of the Arctic and we hope they are at peace now, but still my blood runs cold.’ He shivered, as if he felt a physical chill, then smiled slightly. ‘The old talk too much, a blether talks too much, so you know now how terrible it is to have an old blether stand before you. All I’d really meant to say is that our shipmates are in good company.’ He raised his glass. ‘ Bon voyage .’

Bon voyage . But not the last goodbye, not the last time we would be saying goodbye, I felt it deep in my bones and I knew that Captain Imrie felt it also. I knew that it was some sort of foreknowledge or premonition that had made him talk as he had done, that had been responsible for a rambling reminiscence as uncalled for as it was irrelevant – or appeared to be. I wondered if Captain Imrie was even dimly aware of this thought transference process, of the substitution of the fearful things, the dreadful things of long ago for the unrealized awareness that such things were not confined to the actions of overt warfare, that violent death acknowledged no restrictions in time and space, that the bleak and barren waters of the Barents Sea were its habitat and its home.

I wondered how many others of those present felt this atavistic fear, this oddly nameless dread so often encountered in the loneliest and most desolate places on earth, a dread that reaches back over the aeons to primitive man who as yet knew not fire, to those unthinkably distant ancestors who crouched in terror in their lightless caves while the forces of evil and darkness walked abroad in the night: a fear that, here and now, was all too readily reinforced and compounded by the sudden, violent and inexplicable deaths of three of their company the previous night.

It was hard to tell, I thought, just who was feeling affected by such primeval stirrings of foreboding, for mankind does not readily acknowledge even to itself, far less show or discuss, the existence of such irrationally childlike superstitions. Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes, without a doubt: they had gone into a corner by themselves and were staring down, unseeingly, I was sure, and certainly without speaking, at the glasses in their hands, and as the two of them rarely if ever sat together without discussing, at great length, matters of the gravest import, this was highly significant in itself. Neal Divine, more hollow-cheeked than ever but apparently slightly recovered from his very low state of the previous evening, sat by himself, continuously twirling the empty glass in his hand, his usual nervous preoccupied self, but whether he was preoccupied with mal de mer , the thought that he was about to begin his directorial duties and so consequently be exposed to the lash of Gerran’s tongue or whether he, too, was feeling fingers from the dead past reach deep into him was impossible to say.