Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

I nodded. ‘And when I come back I’ll tell you all about how I started it.’ He scowled at me and returned to his scotch. Mary, I noticed, was sipping at the brandy and shuddering at every sip. Lonnie held her glasses in his hand and I escaped with Allen before he gave them back to her.

I got Allen into his bunk and covered him up. He had a little colour in his battered cheeks now but still hadn’t spoken.

I said: ‘What was all that about?’

He hesitated. ‘I’m sorry. I’d rather not say.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘I’m sorry again. It’s a bit private.’

‘Someone could be hurt?’

‘Yes, I–’ He stopped.

‘It’s all right. You must be very fond of her.’ He looked at me for a few silent moments, then nodded. I went on: ‘Shall I bring her down?’

‘No, Doctor, no! I don’t want – I mean, with my face like this. No, no, I couldn’t!’

‘Your face was an awful sight worse just five minutes ago. She was doing a fair job of breaking her heart even then.’

‘Was she?’ He tried to smile and winced. ‘Well, all right.’

I left and went to Stryker’s cabin. He answered my knock and his face didn’t have welcome written all over it. I looked at the still bleeding cut. ‘Want me to have a look at that?’

Judith Haynes, clad in a fur parka and trousers and looking rather like a red-haired Eskimo, was sitting on the cabin’s only chair, her two cocker spaniels in her lap. Her dazzling smile was in momentary abeyance.

‘No.’

‘It might scar.’ I didn’t give a damn whether it scarred or not.

‘Oh.’ The factor of his appearance, it hadn’t been too hard to guess, was of importance to Stryker. I entered, closed the door, examined and dabbed the cut, put on astringent and applied a plaster. I said: ‘Look, I’m not Captain Imrie. Did you have to bang that boy like that? You could have flattened him with a tap.’

‘You were there when I told Captain Imrie that it was a purely personal matter.’ I’d have to revise my psychological thinking, clearly neither my freely offered medical assistance nor my reasonableness of approach nor the implied flattery had had the slightest mollifying effect. ‘Having MD hung round your neck doesn’t give you the right to ask impertinent prying questions. Remember what else I said to Imrie?’

‘You’d be obliged if I minded my own damned business?’

‘Exactly.’

‘I’ll bet young Allen feels that way too.’

‘That young Allen deserves all he got,’ Judith Haynes said. Her tone wasn’t any more friendly than Stryker’s. I found what she said interesting for two reasons. She was widely supposed to loathe her husband but there was no evidence of it here: and here might lie a more fruitful source for inquiry for, clearly, she wasn’t as good at keeping her emotions and tongue under wraps as her husband was.

‘How do you know, Miss Haynes? You weren’t there.’

‘I didn’t have to be. I–’

‘Darling!’ Stryker’s voice was abrupt, warning.

‘Can’t trust your wife to speak for herself, is that it?’ I said. His big fists balled but I ignored him and looked again at Judith Haynes. ‘Do you know there’s a little girl up in the saloon crying her eyes out over what your big tough husband did to that kid? Does that mean nothing to you?’

‘If you’re talking about that little bitch of a continuity girl, she deserves all that comes her way too.’

‘Darling!’ Stryker’s voice was urgent I stared at Judith Haynes in disbelief but I could see she meant what she said. Her red slash of a mouth was contorted into a line as straight and as thin as the edge of a ruler, the once beautiful green eyes were venomous and the face ugly in its contorted attempts to conceal some hatred or viciousness or poison in the mind. It was an almost frightening display of what must have been a very, very rare public exhibition of what powerful rumour in the film world – to which I now partially apologized for my former mental strictures – maintained to be a fairly constant private amalgam of the peasant shrew and the screaming fishwife.

‘That – harmless – child?’ I spaced the words in slow incredulity. ‘A bitch?’

‘A tramp, a little tramp! A slut! A little gutter–’

‘Stop it!’ Stryker’s voice was a lash, but it had strained overtones. I had the feeling that only desperation would make him talk to his wife in this fashion.

‘Yes, stop it,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Miss Haynes, and I’m damned sure you don’t either. All I know is you’re sick.’

I turned to go. Stryker barred my way. He’d lost a little colour from his cheeks.

‘Nobody talks to my wife that way.’ His lips hardly moved as he spoke.

I was suddenly sick of the Strykers. I said: ‘I’ve insulted your wife?’

‘Unforgivably.’

‘And so I’ve insulted you?’

‘You’re getting the point, Marlowe.’

‘And anyone who insults you gets what’s coming to them. That’s what you said to Captain Imrie.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘I see.’

‘I thought you might.’ He still barred my way.

‘And if I apologize?’

‘An apology?’ He smiled coldly. ‘Let’s try one out for size, shall we?’

I turned to Judith Haynes. I said: ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Miss Haynes, and I’m damned sure you don’t either. All I know is you’re sick.’

Her face looked as if invisible claws had sunk deep into both cheeks all the way from temple to chin and dragged back the skin until it was stretched drumtight over the bones. I turned to face Stryker. His facial skin didn’t look tight at all. The strikingly handsome face wasn’t handsome any more, the contours seemed to have sagged and jellied and the cheeks were bereft of colour. I brushed by him, opened the door and stopped.

‘You poor bastard,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. Doctors never tell.’

I was glad to make my way up to the clean biting cold of the upper deck. I’d left something sick and unhealthy and more than vaguely unclean down there behind me and I didn’t have to be a doctor to know what the sickness was. The snow had eased now and as I looked out over the weather side – the port side – I could see that we were leaving one promontory about a half-mile behind on the port quarter while another was coming up about the same distance ahead on the port bow. Kapp Kolthoff and Kapp Malmgren, I knew from the chart, so we had to be steaming north-east across the Evjebukta. The cliffs here were less high, but we were even more deeply into their lee than twenty minutes previously and the sea had moderated even more. We had less than three miles to go.

I looked up at the bridge. The weather, obviously, was improving considerably or interest and curiosity had been stimulated by the close proximity of our destination, for there was now a small knot of people on either wing of the bridge but with hoods so closely drawn as to make features indistinguishable. I became aware that there was a figure standing close by me huddled up against the fore superstructure of the bridge. It was Mary Darling with the long tangled blonde tresses blowing in every direction of the compass. I went towards her, put my arm round her with the ease born of recent intensive practice, and tilted her face. Red eyes, tear-splotched cheeks, a little woebegone face half-hidden behind the enormous spectacles: the slut, the bitch, the little tramp.

‘Mary Darling,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here? It’s far too cold. You should be inside or below.’

‘I wanted to be alone.’ There was still the catch of a dying sob in her voice. ‘And Mr Gilbert kept wanting to give me brandy – and, well–’ she shuddered.