The boat came, Henrik nosing it into the stairway. I stepped down into the centre of it, and as we came out from under the platform's shadow I was thinking that perhaps I would rather be on the Duchess; it might be uncomfortable, but in a trawler there was at least freedom of manoeuvre.
CHAPTER TWO
What exactly the divers found on the seabed was not reported on the air, but something caused Ed Wiseberg to have the rig shifted ten metres to the north-west. They did it on the winch cables, which meant, of course, some thirty feet less cable holding the rig on the side from which winds blow hard at the tail end of a depression. Ken Stewart wanted anchors 1 and 2 re-laid, but with only a single supply ship servicing North Star, Ed Wiseberg overruled him. He was spudded in by then and finding the going better than expected. He needed mud and drill casing, and he wasn't going to have Rattler wasting time 'frigging around with the bloody anchors'.
We listened in to it all as Ken discussed it with the Rattler's skipper, sometimes by walkie-talkie, sometimes on the R/T, bemoaning the fact that Yankee toolpushers didn't know the difference between a semi-submersible off Shetland and a drilling barge moored in the shallows of the Gulf of Mexico. 'It's not right, Jock. It's my responsibility if we drag. But because we're drilling he makes the decisions.' And the other laughing and saying, 'Every barge engineer says the same. Ye canna win, can ye.'
They had started drilling on the 23rd, and as April ran into May, and the sea stayed calm, the danger of the rig dragging receded from my mind. It was a glorious spell of weather, the wind light and the sun shining day after day, except when there was a sea mist. Often by noon we were stripped to the waist, the ship just lying-to or drifting close along the rig with both engines shut down. We were saving fuel and a lot of wear and tear during those first ten days.
In that time we saw only two other ships, both small drifters out of Lerwick. And with the sun moving steadily north, the nights were shortening, the period of maximum alertness a little less each day. It was a pleasant interlude after all the hard work we had put into the ship, except for the monotony of it and the continuous racket of the rig. The draw-works, the big diesel up on the derrick floor, never stopped, an endless roar that only changed its note when they were using the winches to disconnect and screw on another ninety-foot length of pipe to the drilling string that was steadily moving down its casing as the bit thrust deeper and deeper into the seabed sediments. And added to the racket of the draw-works was the steady, continuous hum of the power plant. Even when we had drifted beyond the circle of the anchor buoys, the sound of the rig was almost as loud, the noise of it bouncing off the surface of the sea. And for me there was the sense of waiting, the certainty that this was no more than an interlude. Pacing the bridge in the dark hours, or in my bunk turning restlessly and trying to sleep, there was always at the back of my mind the fear that the work permits would be refused or something else would happen to disturb the new life I was trying to build for myself.
It was the loneliness more than anything else. It preyed on my nerves. I was so goddam lonely stuck out there beside that steel monster, drifting back and forth over the same patch of sea, with nobody to turn to, no living soul I could discuss it with. Once I started writing to Gertrude, but I soon gave it up. The things I wanted to say were not the things I could put in a letter. And she was so businesslike, always concerned about our supply of fresh meat, vegetables and fruit. Rattler was based on Aberdeen, but periodically the supply ship put into Scalloway, and then, as well as stores, there was always a note for me. Because Gertrude had sailed so often in the Duchess, she understood very well that our chief enemy would be the monotony and emptiness of life out here. She sent us ground tackle so that we could amuse ourselves fishing, and incidentally augment our food supplies for free. She sent out records and the new cribbage board I asked for after Henrik, in a fit of temper, had thrown the old one overboard, intending it for Flett's head. Little things were already beginning to assume larger-than-life proportions, the atmosphere among some members of the crew moving towards flashpoint.
Then the weather broke and we had other things to keep us busy. The wind, which had been mainly north-easterly, backed into the south-west — Force 7, gusting 8, low cloud and rain. A series of deep lows swept up between us and Iceland and we had three fronts pass over us in quick succession. After that it was unsettled and, with a big sea still running, we had difficulty going alongside Rattler when she finally came out to us. With the stores was the usual note from Gertrude. I didn't read it until we had finished standing by the supply ship while she hitched herself stern-on to the rig below the crane, with both spring-loaded mooring hawsers made fast.
A woman came to see me today. She says she is your wife.
I was in my cabin then and I stood with the note in my hand staring out of the window. The wind had veered a little and increased in strength, but I barely noticed it, balancing automatically to the swoop and twist of the ship. It was hard to imagine Fiona in that house by The Taing — Fiona with her pale pointed face, the small determined chin, the high white forehead surmounted by the black fringe of her pageboy cut, and deep-socketed eyes, the small mouth, that bitter tongue. And Gertrude, big and fair and solid as a rock, utterly reliable. Pity I could not fuse the two of them. I laughed at the thought, thinking of the result and wondering, if it was true that the attraction is towards opposites, what these two had got that I hadn't, other than a bosom and the means of satisfying me?
But Fiona had meant more to me than that, much more. She had been a force in my life — for a time at I6S any rate. We had met in Glasgow, at a teach-in on Che and his place in the self-awareness of emergent peoples. I was remembering how she had looked… She is nice I think, but very nervy. She stayed for tea and we talked, mostly about you, or I think perhaps it is more accurate to say that she do the talking while I listen. Some of it I do not understand. She is I think a most political woman. She talk and talk, that is the nerves I would suppose. Is that why you are separated? She told me. She also told me you are wasting your life in trawlers, that you could be a very important man. She is a Progressive, she tells me- I could not help smiling at that. Fiona had been so many things, at various times, a Trotskyist, a Maoist. She had been a member of the WRP, the PD; now apparently she was a good old-fashioned Progressive. She want to know how she can get in touch with you. I tell her if she wish to write she must send it to Aberdeen to go out by the supply ship. But she don't agree to that. She want to meet you. It is not easy to convince her that you are out there for a long time and not coming ashore. I think maybe you get a letter from her by the boat after this one. What do you want? She seems very worried about you, for what reason she do not say.
The last I had heard of Fiona she was in Dublin. But that was more than a year ago, and even if she had been working for the IRA, I doubted whether she would still be with them. Her allegiances never lasted long. There had to be a Cause, but always something different. She had never been consistent, except that she was anti- the present social order. And for her that had always meant the British social order, presumably because it was the one she had grown up with and was thus able to identify as the root of all that was wrong in society. To claim she was a Progressive could mean almost anything. But whatever her current Cause, it didn't explain what she was doing in Shetland visiting Gertrude Petersen and trying to contact me.