Alan Hunter - Gently in the Sun

He was still nearly running when he got to the beach, but he had known, at every step of the way, that he was making haste too late. His instinct had been right — he should have fastened himself to the Sea-King! It was useless now to pretend that he didn’t know how Esau worked.

From the top of the gap, panting, he saw the whole tragic tableau. The rays of the pre-tempest sun drew it in almost psychic luminosity. The sea was as green as grass and the beach shining white. The men on it were as dark brush strokes, the boat, a knifed daub. In the sky, a breathless bowl, there echoed a single, trembling sound: it was the chanting of the motor as the boat put out from shore.

Straight out to sea it was heading, leaving a rulered wake behind it. The surface was now so oily and placid that one could trace every arrowing ripple. Esau was standing to his helm, his upright figure stiff and implacable: he wore no cap over his silvery locks and they lifted slightly in the gentle air. On the beach they were mostly fishermen, but with a sprinkling of hangers-on. All of them were watching silently and in attitudes of bewildered awe.

Gently plunged down the shallow slope, his feet dragging heavily in the sand.

‘Ahoy there… Esau Dawes!’

His voice sounded hoarse and futile.

‘Ahoy there… Keep Going! Ahoy!’

The strange acoustics made the sandhills ring with it. But one might as well have hailed the moon as to hail the departing Sea-King. All the reply was the putter of his engine, growing momently, inexorably fainter. On the air was a whiff of exhaust, on the shingle the print of the keel. Esau had beaten him by five short minutes, but they were as final as five long years.

‘It’s no good shouting — he won’t hear you.’

The fishermen were watching the intruder oddly. Did they know, these alien men, what had made the Keep Going put out? Spanton stood there biting his lip. Hawks could hardly get near enough to the sea. Pike, with one or two of the others, was muttering something under his breath.

‘But in heaven’s name… why let him do it?’

They had obviously assisted Esau to launch. The blocks, down which the boat had ridden, still lay in position on the beach.

‘He said he’d got some business.’

‘What — with this lot coming up?’

‘You don’t ask Esau what he’s doing. If he wants to launch, that’s up to him.’

But they knew, of course they did: they were showing it like so many children. Without the exchanging of a word they had divined the state of affairs. Esau was launching, and that was enough they were fishermen and understood. They huddled together in a defensive knot and threw strange glances at the policeman from London.

‘Right — then we’ll launch another boat.’

There was a shrugging and shaking of heads.

‘As a police officer I’m ordering you to give me assistance!’

‘What’s the use of that, when we couldn’t blessed-well catch him?’

It was Pike who volunteered the explanation:

‘He’s got a Perkins petrol engine aboard her. On a sea like this she’ll do eleven knots… there isn’t one of us others can make eight between us.’

‘You — Spanton! How much fuel did he have on board?’

‘Full tanks.’ The young mate didn’t bother to look round.

‘How far will that take him?’

‘To Holland if he wants to go there. But you don’t need to worry — he’ll never get to Holland.’

‘Let him go!’ snarled Hawks. ‘It’s his own affair, isn’t it? He knows his own business or nobody can’t tell him.’

‘The glass has dropped to nothing.’

‘He’s got eyes in his head! Let him go, I say — what’s the sense in bringing him back?’

A gust of hot air whirled suddenly over the beach: it tossed up scraps of litter and hissed spitefully through the marrams. It was followed by a moaning sound, hollow and frightening. The sun was now trapped in a net of the haze.

‘You hear that, Jimmy?’

Like blood was the sun. A pulsating ruddy eye, it seemed to boil behind the wrack. To the south the horizon was shuttered under mountains of solid darkness, their outriders advancing with malevolent rapidity. The noose of a hunter! On the glassy lake they were closing, on the clockwork toy that clattered naively over its surface.

‘It’s going to come on a-rummun.’

‘When you hear the Old Man groan…’

How had the air, from being torrid, grown cold so quickly — as though someone had opened the door of a gigantic refrigerator?

Dutt came plugging over the beach:

‘I’ve brought the car up the track, sir. Inspector Dyson’s gone to telephone to Air-Sea Rescue. He took one look down here, sir.’

‘Air-Sea Rescue!’

‘That’s right, sir. From Starmouth. He reckons that they might be able to get here.’

It was the barest of possibilities. The launch could be there in half-an-hour. From Starmouth, by sea, it wasn’t more than seven or eight miles. But then they had to get their hands on Esau — and then they had to get home again. And meanwhile, like the wrath of God…

Who could calculate the chances?

‘Is this something to do with us, sir?’

The reporters would liked to have known that, too. With their nostrils attuned for a killing, they were watching the event with a dour pertinacity.

‘For the moment, I want him back.’

Dutt accepted the hint without pressing his senior. The fishermen, who couldn’t have heard what was said, seemed to shrink a little closer in their obstinate huddle. A wind, now hot, now cold, was gusting wailfully up the beach: on the terrible pall to the south a net of lightning had started to flicker.

‘You won’t see no Air-Sea Rescue!’

They could hear the thunder in distant explosions. The sea had gone black only a few furlongs away, and in a moment the first raindrops were beating on their faces.

‘Look at it — ask yourself!’

Hawks was shaking in his glee.

‘There ain’t nothing going to fetch him — no, not nothing in this world. In a minute it’s going to blow like it never blew before!’

‘You shut your trap up, Bob!’

Young Spanton had turned on him in a fury.

‘Don’t you talk like that to me.’

‘Shut your trap, or I’ll knock you down!’

Hawks’s reply was lost in the uproar: the thunder was suddenly over their heads. A whirlwind of rain lashed down on the beach and immediately, it seemed, they were surrounded by darkness. There was a general rush for shelter, though everyone was drenched: it may have been the darkness that sent them all running. Their feet made leprous tracks in the newly-darkened sand, while above them the thunder was sundering the very air.

Somebody had the key to the net store and into this the fishermen tumbled. There was little room inside except what was taken up by gear. The door was slammed and secured with a cord: a hurricane lamp was found and lit. The rain, pelting down on the sheet-iron roof, made a continuous roar between detonations of thunder.

‘Damn my hat, but it’s a clinker!’

The wind shrieked over the little hut. From its corrugated eaves there were produced a variety of whistlings.

‘We won’t never beach her again.’

‘Nor he’ll never get to Holland!’

‘Watch your tackle there, old partners — there’s a Dutchman got amongst us.’

For they weren’t alone in their cluttered den — Gently had managed to squeeze in behind them. A bedraggled figure in his clinging shirt, he stood with his back to the clamouring door. The fishermen silenced themselves directly. Pike, reaching up, trimmed the flickering hurricane. Every second or so it was bleached out by lightning: there was a small, cracked window which faced the sea.