The dockside was alive with all the movements of sailors going ashore; behind lay the murky bulk of Table Mountain, hazed out of its habitual dominance by the screen of rain, except for a house light here and there or a string of sodium-yellow street lights up its slopes; the broad waterfront driveway of the Heerengracht was flanked by the pallid wateriness of skyscraper lights, while a blue neon restaurant sign atop one concrete minaret called the faithful to eat.
She ducked under the steel-lintelled doorway of the cabin. I was behind and could not see what impact the starkness of my steel box had made upon her. I might have guessed, though, from the reserve in her voice.
'She's a very tiny ship.'
I took off my cap but not my oilskins. I scarcely expected her to stay. 'It's a very big ocean.'
Her eyes went to the wind-gauge repeater, then to me, and back again to the instrument. It was that scrutiny which, I think, first brought her face into sharp focus for me. Her cheekbones were quite high and exquisitely moulded, and the slightly thin nose and fine line of her lips contributed to an ascetic quality of loveliness which became more exciting when I came to know that it reflected an inward counterpart; my first comparison of the sea-green-blue eyes was an instinctive one: with the Minch off Skye, clear now that the sky was clear, but thoughtful always of the great Atlantic storms at its back which come to trouble its pellucid depths. The people of those coasts are an admixture of Celt and Viking; she was of the same fine-boned breed, and I was to discover that my instinct had not been amiss in placing her among those who sometimes seem to have less than one foot in this world. Her hair was short and light, emphasizing the lovely contour of her face. For a moment she had an abstracted, concentrated expression which I later came to know meant that something had moved her, and at the same time puzzled her. She started to say something, half to herself, but cut it short. She did not let me see her thoughts, then.
Instead, she said, 'Mr Hoskins thinks you must have about the loneliest job in the world.’
I avoided the clear eyes. 'He's very kind to me. Gets me all sorts of things you can't hope for from officialdom.' I gestured to the wrapped chart which she held close to her left breast and the strange pattern of her sweater.
Why do you say officialdom?'
I had been fretted by a host of small details in preparing the ship for the trip to Durban and the long voyage south, and my reply was sharper than intended.
'So many committees have had a hand in this ship that it's a wonder she got beyond the planning stage,' I retorted, but I pulled myself up. 'No, I'm being unfair. Anything like a first-ever weather ship in a small country like South Africa, and a great ocean like the Southern Ocean, requires a lot of things which don't strike the eye, especially the layman's eye. True, many organizations are involved, but there's been plenty of clear thinking too.'
'I thought you were a sort of floating weather station?'
'Correct. But the problem was to get that weather station floating-and to keep it floating.'
I wished she would hand over the chart. I hadn't a drink to offer her, and I had scheduled only an hour and a half for dismantling the radiosonde gear before sailing.
'Mr Hoskins says you are mainly responsible for that.’
I should have thanked her and let her go. Instead, I went on to explain.
'A couple of years ago, SANCOR — that's the South Africa National Committee for Oceanographic Research-got together with the Weather Bureau and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. .'
'Officialdom!'
I thought for a moment the interjection was mere frivolity, but she seemed too serious for that. She was staring at two big photographs screwed on to the steel bulkhead.
I went on, a little uncertainly. 'There are more: Fisheries Division, Oceanographic Department of the University of Cape Town. I don't know if you want to hear about. .'
She said, irrelevantly, still looking at the photographs, 'It takes courage.'
I didn't know her context then, so I said, 'And money. We — that is, the various bodies concerned who wanted a weather ship or some sort of automatic weather device stationed in the Southern Ocean. .'
She placed the chart on the glass face of the wind repeater, balancing it neatly.
‘I can't make out why you weather people must have your own special ship when there are plenty of other ordinary ships which can send you weather reports.'
I thought of my meetings in hot Pretoria committee-rooms. I had learned to fence, to explain, to argue, that same question while the fans hummed and a torpor of heat seemed to hang over my listeners, jacketless at the chairman's permission, or wearing cool 'safari suits' which are the civil service fashion in the capital.
'Surface and upper air observations from a weather ship stationed slightly south of the Gough Island meridian and between Gough and the Cape itself are especially valuable. This is a part of the South Atlantic bordering on Antarctica where even surface observations of current weather conditions are extremely rare. .'
She looked at me puzzled, disappointed even. Was I talking by rote, I asked myself, a bore addressing a group of unresponsive civil servants? Her glance went quickly to the two photographs and then to the wind repeater. I could see that in her mind something somewhere didn't tally.
She did not reply, but waited. She had a strange power of waiting, a way of building up forces to make things go her own way when they seemed to be taking a wrong channel. In the silence I heard the heavy boom of the Shell Mammoth's siren and the adolescent shrill of the tugs' sirens as they started to move her out of her berth.
For the first time, I responded to her quiet guide-lines.
'What I mean is, most ships stick pretty close to the South African coastline, and for our professional purposes they don't tell us much we don't know about the weather. They can give us only symptoms; we need a basic diagnosis, and that comes from regular, quick and reliable news of weather from deep down in the Southern Ocean. That is where the South African weather is really bora. The occasional ships which cross to South America don't go as far south as the areas from which we want reports. Understandably. The Roaring Forties aren't the place for pleasure cruises.'
She seemed easier, more relaxed at my colloquial explanation than my earlier jargon. I could see the rain droplets in her fine hair under the electric light and was about to say some politeness about them, but the clear, searching scrutiny of her eyes stopped me.
'How long have you been-out there?'
'Nearly a year. We radio back observations every three hours.'
'You haven't been out there a year! At sea!’
The puzzlement, the slight disappointment, were gone. She seemed satisfied at our rapport, and it brought the beginnings of a luminosity to her lovely face, like the first nimbus of light round a lighthouse seen in fog.
'No. I meant, I first took up station a year ago. I bring the Walvis Bay back to Cape Town once a month for bunkers and stores. It means being off station for a week at a time, but I'm afraid that can't be helped.'