Hammond Innes: The Black Tide

She didn’t move for a moment, standing there, staring at me as though seeing me for the first time. “You bastard!’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll show you.’ And she turned and walked slowly off up the path, back to the cottage.

I stayed there for a moment, thinking back over all that had been said, wishing I could have handled it differently. But it had been building for several days now, ever since the Petros Jupiter had stranded within sight of our home. I was out of understanding, totally exhausted by her emotional behaviour and her refusal to accept that everything was being done that could be done. She was so impractical. She knew about ships. She’d been brought up with them, her father a crane driver in the docks, but she’d never understood the a, how cruel it could be — not until she had come to live here.

My gaze lifted from the lifeless razorbill sloshing back and forth like an oily rag in the suck and thrust of the wavelets to the edge of the slick, pushing a dirty brown tongue round the rocks that hid the tanker from view. Something moved in the film of oil, a wing flapping. I turned away in disgust, climbing the path slowly, but not to the cottage. I struck away to the right, across the knoll above the elephant rock, striding out furiously as I reached the top.

I was cursing under my breath — not at Karen, not entirely, but at the whole sodding bloody mess, the way our idyll of a simple life was breaking up under the pressure of outside events. I could remember so clearly the day we had first seen Balkaer snugged into the grass and wild flowers and rocks above the cove, so remote, so peaceful on that still, sunny day in early spring two years ago. Doubtless that was why it was being offered at such a reasonable price. For a quick sale, they had said, but it was really the lack of any amenities. Who wants a cottage perched on an exposed coast with no services and the nearest track for vehicles over 500 metres away? Only people like ourselves. Karen from the dust and polyglot overcrowding of a Welsh port, and me with my earliest memories of a tiny hospital on the edge of the desert. For us that Atlantic coast, its soft salt air, the solitude of the cottage perched above the cove, it was all irresistible. We had put our deposit down that afternoon, moved in a week later, and for almost a year we had been sublimely happy. The tourists hadn’t bothered us as much as we had feared, I had sold several magazine pieces and had started on a book, Mate of the Balkaer. And then, at the tail end of a March gale, the first oil had come ashore and we had spent hours clearing up the beach.

That was when I discovered how unreasonable Karen could be, how taut her nerves were under that beautiful, smooth, rain-soft skin. The birds that came ashore that first time were all dead and whenever she found one she’d hold it out to me in mute accusation. Perhaps she didn’t mean it that way, but that’s how it

had seemed to me. And though she said she remembered my warning, I doubt if she really remembered what I had told her that day when we had stood in the cottage doorway and decided Balkaer was what we wanted. Three years tramping round the world, then two on the Gulf-Karachi-Bombay run; I knew the sort of men who manned the smaller, older vessels. There’ll be engineers, I had told her, who’ll pump the bilges out whatever the regulations, tanker skippers who’ll turn a blind eye to tank cleansing at sea, even order it, and sooner or later Cornwall will have another oil spillage disaster like the Torrey Canyon. But she was happy, dreaming dreams. She hadn’t been listening, she hadn’t really taken it in. And then, when it happened …

I had slowed my pace, staring ahead beyond the white sand sweep of the bay, beyond the road slanting down to Sennen and its cluster of houses, to Land’s End and the rocks off, and that tanker sitting there, stern-on to the rocks and leaking oil. The slick now stretched in a great smooth, brown, greasy layer right •cross the bay, the spraying vessels moving through it with scarcely a ripple like two water beetles. I was dunking back to the other spillages then. The first one hadn’t been too bad, a minor slick that had stayed offshore. But the second, which had happened sometime in the early hours of the morning, had been very different — bigger, longer-lasting, heavy, black glutinous oil that stuck to the rocks like glue, and because it was spring and the start of the breeding season many more birds had been involved. A shift of wind had brought

them ashore, some of them still very much alive so that we had spent time and money getting them to the cleansing centre.

Now, here, staring me in the face, was the thing I had dreaded. I wondered how much of her cargo they had managed to pump out. Three small tankers festooned with fenders had been working in relays to lighten her all through the quiet weather period. Doubtless they’d tell us at the meeting tonight. But the glass had started to fall and now that the sky was visible I could see mares’ tails showing high up to the southwest. If it started to blow… I stopped and stared back along the coast to Cape Cornwall and beyond. In the stillness and the cold slanting sunlight it all looked green and fresh, everything washed clean as though waiting for the spring. But for us it wouldn’t be a spring like our first spring. If it were going to blow and she broke up, if the Petros Jupiter split open, spilling the rest of her oil, all that lovely shoreline would be polluted, the marine life killed off and birds that should be nesting coming ashore again as oil-sodden bundles. It would drive Karen out of her mind.

Bloody stupid, incompetent bastard! I was thinking of the master, risking a ship like that so close to Land’s End just for the sake of a few miles and a tiny saving in bunker fuel. Or had it been deliberate? First the boiler out of action, then the secondary reduction gear stripped. If it wasn’t an accident, then the chief engineer would have to be in on it — one of the engineers, anyway. Would any man in his senses deliberately

cause a tanker breakdown close off such a notorious headland? But then if the money was right…

I shrugged. No doubt the Enquiry would produce the answer and we’d probably be told tonight when it would be held.

I walked as far as Sennen, where I had a word with Andy Trevose, the lifeboat’s relief cox’n. One of the salvage boys had told him in the pub that if the weather held there was a chance they’d float the Petros Jupiter off on Monday’s tide. Apparently she’d been given enough buoyancy for’ard to lift most of her hull dear of the rocks. Only her stern remained fast on Kettle’s Bottom. He also told me there was a rumour die second engineer had jumped a foreign trawler off Porthcurno and disappeared.

The sun had set by the time I got back to Balkaer, night closing in and the mares’ tails gone, the sky clear again and beginning to turn that translucent green that indicates cold. The door was on the latch, but Karen wasn’t there. I thought at first she had gone up to see old Mrs Peever. She did that sometimes when she was upset about something. Or Jean Kerrison perhaps. Jean ras more her own age and they got on well enough, It would have been natural considering what had happened and the mood she was in.

It wasn’t until I went out to the stone cleit I’d built above the path to get peat to bank up the fire that I thought of looking down into the cove. I saw her then, out in the rubber dinghy. She was paddling it along the edge of the slick, not using the outboard, though she had it mounted. I called to her and she looked up,

but she didn’t wave. I thought she was out there to pick up any live birds caught in the slick and I went back into the cottage, banked up the fire and got my things. The meeting was at six in Penzance and Jimmy had said he would pick me up at the bottom of the lane at five-fifteen.