Алистер Маклин: Bear Island

‘You seem to know your Otto,’ Smithy said.

‘Anybody who has read the first five pages of the prospectus for his last film would know his Otto. I’ll let you have a copy. Never mentions the film, just Otto. Misses out words like “nauseating” and “despair” of course and you have to read between the lines a bit. But it’s all there.’

‘I’d like a copy.’ Smithy thought some, then said: ‘If he’s in the red where’s the money coming from? To make this film, I mean.’

‘Your sheltered life. A producer is always at his most affluent when the bailiffs are camped outside the studio gates – rented studio, of course. Who, when the banks are foreclosing on him and the insurance companies drafting their ultimatums, is throwing the party of the year at the Savoy? Our friend the big-time producer. It’s kind of like the law of nature. You’d better stick to ships, Mr Smith,’ I added kindly.

‘Smithy,’ he said absently. ‘So who’s bankrolling your friend?’

‘My employer. I’ve no idea. Very secretive about money matters is Otto.’

‘But someone is. Backing him, I mean.’

‘Must be.’ I put down my glass and stood up. ‘Thanks for the hospitality.’

‘Even after he’s produced a string of losers? Seems barmy to me. Fishy, at least.’

‘The film world, Smithy, is full of barmy and fishy people.’ I didn’t, in fact, know whether it was or not but if this shipload was in any way representative of the cinema industry it seemed a pretty fair extrapolation.

‘Or perhaps he’s just got hold of the story to end all stories.’

‘The screenplay. There, now, you may have a point – but it’s one you would have to raise with Mr Gerran personally. Apart from Heissman, who wrote it, Gerran is the only one who’s seen it.’

It hadn’t been a factor of the height of the bridge. As I stepped out on to the starboard ladder on the lee side – there were no internal communications between bridge and deck level on those elderly steam trawlers – I was left in no doubt that the weather had indeed deteriorated and deteriorated sharply, a fact that should have probably been readily apparent to anyone whose concern for the prevailing meteorological conditions hadn’t been confronted with the unfair challenge of Otard-Dupuy. Even on this, what should have been the sheltered side of the ship, the power of the wind, bitter cold, was such that I had to cling with both hands to the handrails: and with the Morning Rose now rolling, erratically and violently, through almost fifty degrees of arc – which was wicked enough but I’d once been on a cruiser that had gone through a hundred degrees of arc and still survived – I could have used another pair of arms.

Even on the blackest night, and this was incontestably one of the blackest, it is never wholly dark at sea: it may never be possible precisely to delineate the horizon line where sea and sky meet, but one can usually look several vertical degrees above or below the horizon line and say with certainty that here is sky or here is sea: for the sea is always darker than the sky. Tonight, it was impossible to say any such thing and this was not because the violently rolling Morning Rose made for a very unstable observation platform nor because the big uneven seas bearing down from the east made for a tumbling amorphous horizon: because tonight, for the first time, not yet dense but enough to obscure vision beyond two miles, smoke frost lay on the surface of the sea, that peculiar phenomenon which one finds in Norway where the glacial land winds pass over the warm fjord waters or, as here, where the warm Atlantic air passed over the Arctic waters. All I could see, and it was enough to see, was that the tops were now being torn off the waves, white-veined on their leeward sides, and that the seas were breaking clear across the foredeck of the Morning Rose , the white and icy spume hissing into the sea on the starboard. A night for carpet slippers and the fireside.

I turned for’ard towards the accommodation door and bumped into someone who was standing behind the ladder and holding on to it for support. I couldn’t see the person’s face for it was totally obscured by wind-blown hair but I didn’t have to, there was only one person aboard with those long straw-coloured tresses and that was Mary dear: given my choice of people to bump into on the Morning Rose I’d have picked Mary dear any time. ‘Mary dear’, not ‘Mary Dear’: I’d given her that name to distinguish her from Gerran’s continuity girl whose given name was Mary Darling. Mary dear was really Mary Stuart but that wasn’t her true name either: Ilona Wiśniowiecki she’d been christened but had prudently decided that it wasn’t the biggest possible asset she had for making her way in the film world. Why she’d chosen a Scots name I didn’t know: maybe she just liked the sound of it.

‘Mary dear,’ I said. ‘Aboard at this late hour and on such a night.’ I reached up and touched her cheek, we doctors can get away with murder. The skin was icily cold. ‘You can carry this fresh air fanatic bit too far. Come on, inside.’ I took her arm – I was hardly surprised to find she was shivering quite violently – and she came along docilely enough.

The accommodation door led straight into the passenger lounge which, though fairly narrow, ran the full width of the ship. At the far end was a built-in bar with the liquor kept behind two glassed-in iron-grilled doors: the doors were kept permanently locked and the key was in Otto Gerran’s pocket.

‘No need to frog-march me, Doctor.’ She habitually spoke in a low-pitched quiet voice. ‘Enough is enough and I was coming in anyway.’

‘Why were you out there in the first place?’

‘Can’t doctors always tell?’ She touched the middle button of her black leather coat and from this I understood that her internal economy wasn’t taking too kindly to the roller-coaster antics of the Morning Rose . But I also understood that even had the sea been mirror-smooth she’d still have been out on that freezing upper deck: she didn’t talk much to the others nor the others to her.

She pushed the tangled hair back from her face and I could see she was very pale and the skin beneath the brown eyes tinged with the beginnings of exhaustion. In her high-cheekboned Slavonic way – she was a Latvian but, I supposed, no less a Slav for that – she was very lovely, a fact that was freely admitted and slightingly commented upon as being her only asset: her last two pictures – her only two pictures – were said to have been disasters of the first magnitude. She was a silent girl, cool and aloofly remote and I liked her, which made me a lonely minority of one.

‘Doctors aren’t infallible,’ I said. ‘At least, not this one.’ I peered at her in my best clinical fashion. ‘What’s a girl like you doing in these parts on this floating museum?’

She hesitated. ‘That’s a personal question.’

‘The medical profession are a very personal lot. How’s your headache? Your ulcer? Your bursitis? We don’t know where to stop.’

‘I need the money.’

‘You and me both.’ I smiled at her and she didn’t smile back so I left her and went down the companionway to the main deck.

Here was located the Morning Rose’s main passenger accommodation, two rows of cabins lining the fore-and-aft central passageway. This had been the area of the former fish-holds and although the place had been steam-washed, fumigated and disinfected at the time of conversion it still stank most powerfully and evilly of cod liver oil that has lain too long in the sun. In ordinary circumstances, the atmosphere was nauseating enough: in those extraordinary ones it was hardly calculated to assist sufferers in a rapid recovery from the effects of sea-sickness. I knocked on the first door on the starboard side and went in.