Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

He was silent for a few moments, probably carrying out a rapid mental survey of the physical condition of cast and crew, then he said: ‘I must admit that I’m a bit worried about our people. I wonder if you’d mind having a look over them, just a quick check? Health’s a damn sight more important than any profit – hah! profit, in these days! – that we might make from the wretched film. As a doctor I’m sure you whole-heartedly agree.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Right away.’ Otto had to have something that had made him the household name that he had become in the past twenty years and one had to admire this massive and wholly inadmirable hypocrisy that was clearly part of it. He had me all ways. I had said that sea-sickness alone did not kill so that if I were to state categorically that some member or members of his cast or crew were in no condition to withstand any further punishment from the sea he would insist on proof of the existence of some disease which, in conjunction with sea-sickness, might be potentially lethal, a proof that, in the first place, would have been very difficult for me to adduce in light of the limited examination facilities available to me aboard ship and, in the second place, would have been impossible anyhow, for every single member of cast and crew had been subjected to a rigorous insurance medical before leaving Britain: if I gave a clean bill of health to all, then Otto would press on with all speed for Bear Island, regardless of the sufferings of ‘our people’ about whom he professed to be so worried, thereby effecting a considerable saving in time and money: and, in the remote event of any of them inconsiderately dying upon our hands, why, then, as the man who had given the green light, I was the one in the dock.

I drained my glass of inferior brandy that Otto had laid on in such meagre quantities and rose. ‘You’ll be here?’

‘Yes. Most co-operative of you, Doctor, most.’

‘We never close,’ I said.

I was beginning to like Smithy though I hardly knew him or anything about him: I was never to get to know him, not well. That I should ever get to know him in my professional capacity was unthinkable: six feet two in his carpet slippers and certainly nothing short of two hundred pounds, Smithy was as unlikely a candidate for a doctor’s surgery as had ever come my way.

‘In the first-aid cabinet there.’ Smithy nodded towards a cupboard in a corner of the dimly-lit wheel-house. ‘Captain Imrie’s own private elixir. For emergency use only.’

I extracted one of half a dozen bottles held in place by felt-lined spring clamps and examined it under the chart-table lamp. My regard for Smithy went up another notch. In latitude 70º something north and aboard a superannuated trawler, however converted, one does not look to find Otard-Dupuy VSOP.

‘What constitutes an emergency?’ I asked.

‘Thirst.’

I poured some of the Otard-Dupuy into a small glass and offered it to Smithy, who shook his head and watched me as I sampled the brandy, then lowered the glass with suitable reverence.

‘To waste this on a thirst,’ I said, ‘is a crime against nature. Captain Imrie isn’t going to be too happy when he comes up here and finds me knocking back his special reserve.’

‘Captain Imrie is a man who lives by fixed rules. The most fixed of the lot is that he never appears on the bridge between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. Oakley – he’s the bo’sun – and I take turns during the night. Believe me, that way it’s safer for everyone all round. What brings you to the bridge, Doctor – apart from this sure instinct for locating VSOP?’

‘Duty. I’m checking on the weather prior to checking on the health of Mr Gerran’s paid slaves. He fears they may start dying off like flies if we continue on this course in these conditions.’ The conditions, I’d noted, appeared to be deteriorating, for the behaviour of the Morning Rose , especially its degree of roll, was now distinctly more uncomfortable than it had been: perhaps it was just a function of the height of the bridge but I didn’t think so.

‘Mr Gerran should have left you at home and brought along his palm-reader or fortune-teller.’ A very contained man, educated and clearly intelligent, Smithy always seemed to be slightly amused. ‘As for the weather, the 6 p.m. forecast was as it usually is for these parts, vague and not very encouraging. They haven’t,’ he added superfluously, ‘a great number of weather stations in those parts.’

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s not going to improve.’ He dismissed the weather and smiled. ‘I’m not a great man for the small-talk, but with the Otard-Dupuy who needs it? Take the weight off your feet for an hour, then go tell Mr Gerran that all his paid slaves, as you call them, are holding a square dance on the poop.’

‘I suspect Mr Gerran of having a suspicious checking mind. However, if I may–?’

‘My guest.’

I helped myself again and replaced the bottle in the cabinet. Smithy, as he’d warned, wasn’t very talkative, but the silence was companionable enough. Presently he said: ‘Navy, aren’t you, Doc?’

‘Past tense.’

‘And now this?’

‘A shameful come-down. Don’t you find it so?’

‘Touché.’ I could dimly see the white teeth as he smiled in the half-dark. ‘Medical malpractice, flogging penicillin to the wogs or just drunk in charge of a surgery?’

‘Nothing so glamorous. “Insubordination” is the word they used.’

‘Snap. Me too.’ A pause. ‘This Mr Gerran of yours. Is he all right?’

‘So the insurance doctors say.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘You can’t expect me to speak ill of my employer.’ Again there was that dimly-seen glimpse of white teeth.

‘Well, that’s one way of answering my question. But, well, look, the bloke must be loony – or is that an offensive term?’

‘Only to psychiatrists. I don’t speak to them. Loony’s fine by me. But I’d remind you that Mr Gerran has a very distinguished record.’

‘As a loony?’

‘That, too. But also as a film-maker, a producer.’

‘What kind of producer would take a film unit up to Bear Island with winter coming on?’

‘Mr Gerran wants realism.’

‘Mr Gerran wants his head examined. Has he any idea what it’s like up there at this time of year?’

‘He’s also a man with a dream.’

‘No place for dreamers in the Barents Sea. How the Americans ever managed to put a man on the moon–’

‘Our friend Otto isn’t an American. He’s a central European. If you want the makers of dreams or the peddlers of dreams, there’s the place to find them – among the headwaters of the Danube.’

‘And the biggest rogues and confidence men in Europe?’

‘You can’t have everything.’

‘He’s a long way from the Danube.’

‘Otto had to leave in a great hurry at a time when a large number of people had to leave in a great hurry. Year before the war, that was. Found his way to America – where else? – then to Hollywood – again, where else? Say what you like about Otto – and I’m afraid a lot of people do just that – you have to admire his recuperative powers. He’d left a thriving film business behind him in Vienna and arrived in California with what he stood up in.’

‘That’s not so little.’

‘It was then. I’ve seen pictures. No greyhound, but still about a hundred pounds short of what he is today. Anyway, inside just a few years – chiefly, I’m told, by switching at the psychologically correct moment from anti-Nazism to anti-Communism – Otto prospered mightily in the American film industry on the strength of a handful of nauseatingly super-patriotic pictures, which had the critics in despair and the audiences in raptures. In the mid-fifties, sensing that the cinematic sun was setting over Hollywood – you can’t see it but he carries his own built-in radar system with him – Otto’s devotion to his adopted country evaporated along with his bank balance and he transferred himself to London, where he made a number of avant-garde films that had the critics in rapture, the audiences in despair and Otto in the red.’