Алистер Маклин - When Eight Bells Toll

‘You have Sir Arthur.’

‘I have, as you say, Sir Arthur. There’s no one alive for whose judgment and intelligence I have greater respect. But at the present moment I’d trade in all the judgment and intelligence in the world for a pair of sharp young eyes. Going by to-night’s performance. Sir Arthur shouldn’t be allowed out without a white stick. How are yours?’

‘Well, they’re not so young any more, but I think they’re sharp enough.’

‘So I can rely on you?’

‘On me? I – well, I don’t know anything about handling boats.’

‘You and Sir Arthur should make a great team. I saw you star once in a French film about–’

‘We never left the studio. Even in the studio pool I had a stand-in.’

‘Well, there’ll be no stand-in to-night.’ I glanced out through the streaming windows. ‘And no studio pool. This is the real stuff, the genuine Atlantic. A pair of eyes, Charlotte, that’s all I require. A pair of eyes. Just cruising up and down till I come back and seeing that you don’t go on the rocks. Can you do that?’

‘Will I have any option?’

‘Nary an option.’

‘Then I’ll try. Where are you going ashore?’

‘Eilean Oran and Craigmore. The two innermost islands in Loch Houron. If,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘I can find them.’

‘Eilean Oran and Craigmore.’ I could have been wrong, but I thought the faint French accent a vast improvement on the original Gaelic pronunciation. ‘It seems so wrong. So very wrong. In the middle of all this hate and avarice and killing. These names – they breathe the very spirit of romance.’

‘A highly deceptive form of respiration, my dear.’ I’d have to watch myself, I was getting as bad as Uncle Arthur. ‘Those islands breathe the very spirit of bare, bleak and rocky desolation. But Eilean Oran and Craigmore hold the key to everything. Of that I’m very sure.’

She said nothing. I stared out through the highspeed Kent clearview screen and wondered if I’d see Dubh Sgeir before it saw me. After a couple of minutes I felt a hand on my upper arm and she was very close to me. The hand was trembling. Wherever she’d come by her perfume it hadn’t been bought in a supermarket or fallen out of a Christmas cracker. Momentarily and vaguely I wondered about the grievous impossibility of ever understanding the feminine mind: before fleeing for what she had thought to be her life and embarking upon a hazardous swim in the waters of Torbay harbour, she hadn’t forgotten to pack a sachet of perfume in her polythene kit-bag. For nothing was ever surer than that any perfume she’d been wearing had been well and truly removed before I’d fished her out of Torbay harbour.

‘Philip?’

Well, this was better than the Mr Calvert stuff. I was glad Uncle Arthur wasn’t there to have his aristocratic feelings scandalised. I said: ‘Uh-huh?’

‘I’m sorry.’ She said it as if she meant it and I supposed I should have tried to forget that she was once the best actress in Europe. ‘I’m truly sorry. About what I said – about what I thought – earlier on. For thinking you were a monster. The men you killed, I mean. I – well, I didn’t know about Hunslett and Baker and Delmont and the helicopter pilot. All your friends. I’m truly sorry, Philip. Truly.’

She was overdoing it. She was also too damn’ close. Too damn’ warm. You’d have required a pile-driver in top condition to get a cigarette card between us. And that perfume that hadn’t fallen out of a cracker – intoxicating, the ad-boys in the glossies would have called it. And all the time the warning bells were clanging away like a burglar alarm with the St Vitus’s dance. I made a manful effort to do something about it. I put my mind to higher things.

She said nothing. She just squeezed my arm a bit more and even the pile-driver would have gone on strike for piece-work rates. I could hear the big diesel exhaust thudding away behind us, a sound of desolate reassurance. The Firecrest swooped down the long overtaking combers then gently soared again. I was conscious for the first time of a curious meteorological freak in the Western Isles. A marked rise in temperature after midnight. And I’d have to speak to the Kent boys about their guarantee that their clearview screen wouldn’t mist up under any conditions, but maybe that wasn’t fair, maybe they’d never visualised conditions like this. I was just thinking of switching off the auto-pilot to give me something to do when she said: ‘I think I’ll go below soon. Would you like a cup of coffee first?’

‘As long as you don’t have to put on a light to do it. And as long as you don’t trip over Uncle Arthur – I mean. Sir–’

‘Uncle Arthur will do just fine,’ she said. ‘It suits him.’ Another squeeze of the arm and she was gone.

The meteorological freak was of short duration. By and by the temperature dropped back to normal and the Kent guarantee became operative again. I took a chance, left the Firecrest to its own devices and nipped aft to the stern locker. I took out my scuba diving equipment, together with air-cylinders and mask, and brought them for’ard to the wheelhouse.

It took her twenty-five minutes to make the coffee. Calor gas has many times the calorific efficiency of standard domestic coal gas and, even allowing for the difficulties of operating in darkness, this was surely a world record for slowness in making coffee at sea. I heard the clatter of crockery as the coffee was brought through the saloon and smiled cynically to myself in the darkness. Then I thought of Hunslett and Baker and Delmont and Williams, and I wasn’t smiling any more.

I still wasn’t smiling when I dragged myself on to the rocks of Eilean Oran, removed the scuba equipment and set the big, rectangular-based, swivel-headed torch between a couple of stones with its beam staring out to sea. I wasn’t smiling, but it wasn’t for the same reason that I hadn’t been smiling when Charlotte had brought the coffee to the wheelhouse just over half an hour ago, I wasn’t smiling because I was in a state of high apprehension and I was in a state of high apprehension because for ten minutes before leaving the Firecrest I’d tried to instruct Sir Arthur and Charlotte in the technique of keeping a boat in a constant position relative to a fixed mark on the shore.

‘Keep her on a due west compass heading,’ I’d said. ‘Keep her bows on to the sea and wind. With the engine at “Slow” that will give you enough steerage way to keep your head up. If you find yourselves creeping too far forwards, come round to the south’ – if they’d come round to the north they’d have found themselves high and dry on the rock shores of Eilean Oran – ‘head due east at half speed, because if you go any slower you’ll broach to, come sharply round to the north then head west again at slow speed. You can see those breakers on the south shore there. Whatever you do, keep them at least two hundred yards away on the starboard hand when you’re going west and a bit more when you’re going east.’

They had solemnly assured me that they would do just that and seemed a bit chuffed because of what must have been my patent lack of faith in them both, but I’d reason for my lack of faith for neither had shown any marked ability to make a clear distinction between shore breakers and the north-south line of the foaming tops of the waves rolling eastwards towards the mainland. In desperation I’d said I’d place a fixed light on the shore and that that would serve as a permanent guide. I just trusted to God that Uncle Arthur wouldn’t emulate the part of an eighteenth-century French sloop’s skipper vis-à-vis the smugglers’ lamp on a rock-girt Cornish shore and run the damned boat aground under the impression that he was heading for a beacon of hope. He was a very clever man, was Uncle Arthur, but the sea was not his home.