Another thought came into his head. It was now two weeks since he had met the woman on Halsskär. He felt an increasing need to go back to the skerry. Two mornings in succession he had untied the painter and set off in one of the tenders, but at the last moment changed his mind. The temptation was strong, but forbidden.
He wanted to go there, but he did not dare.
The snow became heavier. The sea was calm, blue-grey. The black clouds crept past. Lieutenant Jakobsson came out on deck with a scarf wrapped round his head and a peaked cap. One rating burst out laughing, then another, but Jakobsson was not angry: he seemed to be amused.
‘This is totally against the rules,’ he said with a smile. ‘Scarves are for old women, not for ships’ masters in the Swedish Navy. But there’s no denying that they keep your ears nice and warm.’
Then, to the general surprise, he bent down and scooped up some snow from the ship’s deck and managed to shape it into a snowball despite his deformed hand. He threw it at Sub-Lieutenant Welander’s back.
‘Swedes practise to become soldiers or sailors by fighting snowball battles as they grow up,’ he shouted, pleased with himself to have scored a bullseye.
Welander was surprised, shook the snow from his overcoat; but he said nothing, just turned on his heel and walked to the rope ladder and climbed down into his launch. Jakobsson watched him all the way. He frowned.
‘Sub-Lieutenant Welander’s launch has been given a secret nickname,’ he confided to Tobiasson-Svartman. ‘The crew think I don’t know about it, but the most important task for a commanding officer, second only to making sure that his ship doesn’t set sail for Hell, is to know what rumours and whispers are circulating among his crew. I have to be aware if one of the crew is being badly treated. I don’t want a case like Richter’s on my ship, somebody who gets bullied so badly that he prefers to jump into the sea. Sub-Lieutenant Welander’s launch is known as “The Shilly-Shally”. It’s a malicious name, but an accurate one.’
Tobiasson-Svartman understood. Welander was sometimes in two minds about various sounding results and demanded, quite unnecessarily, a second measurement.
‘What do they call my boat?’ he said.
‘Nothing. That’s surprising. Sailors are generally an inventive crowd. But your crew doesn’t seem to have discovered a weakness in you that warrants the smashing of an invisible bottle of champagne against the bows and presenting the boat with a nickname.’
Tobiasson-Svartman felt relieved. He had not made himself vulnerable without knowing it.
Jakobsson suddenly pulled a face.
‘I have a shooting pain in my arm,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’ve strained it.’
Tobiasson-Svartman decided he would raise the matter he had been suppressing ever since coming on board.
‘I sometimes wonder about your hand, of course.’
‘Everybody does. But very few satisfy their curiosity. In my view it displays disgraceful cowardice not to dare to ask those you work with about their physical defects. The world is full of admirals who walk around with their heads under their arms, but no subordinate dares to ask them about their state of health.’
Jakobsson chuckled merrily.
‘When I was a child I used to fantasise and say my hand had been injured in a pirate attack in the Caribbean,’ he said. ‘Or munched by a crocodile. It was too uninteresting and woeful to admit that it had always looked as it does now. Some people have a club foot, others are born with a hand that looks like a club. I still prefer to think that I came by it from a swarthy knave and his bloodstained cutlass, but it goes against the grain to tell lies to a fellow officer.’
The snow was now falling very heavily. Welander’s launch was already on its way to the greyish white buoys that marked where the previous day’s soundings had finished.
Tobiasson-Svartman boarded his launch, the ratings started rowing and he prepared his lead. As it was snowing he had his chart, notebook and pens in a waterproof oilskin wallet.
The ratings were shivering in the snow. Two of them had bad colds and their noses were running. Tobiasson-Svartman was furious. He hated people with runny noses. But, of course, he made no comment. He was one of the disgraceful cowards Lieutenant Jakobsson had recently referred to.
They rowed towards the buoys. He stood in the stern, gazing at Halsskär and thinking about Sara Fredrika. The thought of her husband made him jealous.
The snow continued falling.
He felt as if the sea were keeping watch on him, like a sharp-eyed animal.
Chapter 41
Shortly after ten o’clock Welander shouted that he had come across a significant underwater peak. Over twenty metres the depth of water had decreased from sixty-three metres to nineteen. It was like coming upon a cliff wall that had risen unnoticed beneath the surface of the sea. Tobiasson-Svartman sank his own lead. The last sounding, a mere ten metres astern, had been fifty-two metres. He held his breath, hoping for the same measurement again. But his lead came to a stop after only seventeen metres. What he had feared had come to pass. They had hit upon an underwater ridge that had not previously been marked on charts.
The sea had raised its voice and refused to cooperate.
Instead of continuing along the transit line, he requested readings at right angles to the course the launches had been following so far. They must find out if the ridge was a long one or just an isolated stack. They took soundings every three metres and shouted the results to each other. Welander found depths of 19, 16, 16, 15 and then suddenly 7 metres, thereafter 7 again, then 4, followed by another jump to 2 metres. For a further stretch of a hundred metres the distance to the seabed was between 2 and 3 metres.
Tobiasson-Svartman had the same result. This was no minor irregularity: they had come across a stretch of shallow water that for some reason had hitherto been missed. Off the top of his head he could not remember it being mentioned as a good place for herring fishing in old documents describing the best fishing grounds around the Sandsänkan lighthouse.
The snow was falling even more heavily. He felt disappointed. The sea had tricked him.
He shouted to Welander, instructing him to stop work for the day. The thoroughly soaked ratings came to life. One of them yawned noisily as he took hold of his oar. A lump of yellowish-green snot was trickling down his upper lip. Tobiasson-Svartman stood up abruptly and hit the sailor in the face with the chart pouch. It was a hard blow, and blood appeared immediately on the rating’s lip.
It all happened so quickly that nobody had time to react.
Weakness, Tobiasson-Svartman thought. Now I have made myself vulnerable. I lost control.
The ratings carried on rowing. He sat with his eyes fixed on Halsskär. Nobody spoke.
Over dinner, which consisted of roast beef, potatoes and pickled gherkin, he told Lieutenant Jakobsson about the invisible cliff wall.
‘What are the implications?’ Jakobsson asked.
‘I shall be able to relocate the navigable channel closer to the mainland, but it will not be as wide as I had hoped.’
‘So it hasn’t been a complete failure?’
‘No.’
He went on to speak of the other incident.
‘I gave a rating a good dressing-down today. It was necessary. He wasn’t rowing as he should have been. I hit him with the chart pouch.’
Needless to say, Jakobsson knew about it already. He smiled.
‘Naturally, the crew has to be punished if they don’t obey orders or fail to carry out their work properly. I must ask you, though, from curiosity purely, what are you doing when you are not “rowing as you should be”?’