I thought then she was breaking off at a tangent, tactfully trying to end the overcharged conversation. 'You've told me about the Waratah and the Gemsbok, but can I ask you a question about yourself?'
'There's nothing much beyond what you already know.’
'Why do you live with a wind gauge repeater in your cabin?'
From anyone else it would have been prying impertinence. She was too deep for that.
'It's part of my job-an important part-to know the direction of the wind.’ 'Day and night? Where you sleep? Where you relax?’ I replied, 'You see, the big fronts which come up from Antarctica and affect the weather round the Cape and the oil rigs I told you about are from the south-west. .'
Suddenly I wanted to sail, to be at sea. Later, she was to tell me that my voice changed and the ice-blink blankness was back in my eyes. But she had the key she wanted — southwest!
She waited only a little, not pressing a reply, and said she must go when I paused on the word. Her voice was restrained; she did not look again at the two photographs.
I moved from the doorway and in doing so brushed off my oilskin from the chart where I had shed it. Her chart lay still unopened on the wind gauge repeater. She stared at the one the oilskin had laid bare.
'You have my chart already! ‘
It was impossible to explain to her, then.
'Yes, I have one chart of the Pondoland coast. But I wanted another.’
She frowned a little as she bent to read the superscription on mine. I noticed that her lips moved more towards their right-hand corner than the left. ' "East London to Bashee River, S.A. surveying ship Africana, 1934/35." It's marked full of lines and arrows which I don't understand.'
I was tired. I nearly said, I don't understand them either, but instead I covered up. "There are too many lines and markings on this chart of mine. I wanted a clean one for Walvis Bay's trip. That's why I asked Mr Hoskins for a new one.'
'I think he might be a little hurt if he knew you'd had one all along,' she said.
'He's never been in my cabin.'
'So he hasn't seen the Waratah?’
‘I think we should let it go at that, don't you?'
She went.
I did not leave the cabin. I did not know her name.
CHAPTER TWO
'Green Point light bears zero-six-three.' 'Distance?'
'One and a quarter miles, sir.'
'Ground haze or fog?'
'Not tonight, sir. Clear as a whistle.'
'Steady as she goes, then.'
'Aye, aye, sir. Steady as she goes.'
Young Smit, who held the imprecise status of second officer of the weather ship, was enjoying the formality. He, like me, was a yachtsman and knew the approaches to Table Bay like the back of his hand. This was a new course to him, for usually on taking Walvis Bay to her Southern Ocean station, I headed westwards into the open sea; now, Durban-bound, the weather ship would first have to make her way round the thirty-mile projection which is the Cape Peninsula and then follow an easterly course past the notorious Cape Agulhas, and then parallel to the country's southern shore. I was keeping a bright watch for fog on this winter's night, as it has an evil trick of hanging over a very limited area of low-lying ground which are Green and Mouille Points and ambushing any unwary shipmaster who sees the bright lights of the port all around him and heads for them. The fine ships whose bones lie on the reefs are proof of the folly of taking that final short-cut into the great port.
The peaks of the Twelve Apostles were misty to port, and I decided to keep closer inshore than the Shell Mammoth, ahead of me in the night, could do with her deep draught. I went over to the port side of the bridge and took a look at the receding land.
Chart-bringer!
Had I thought of that quiet but disquieting presence which still lingered below my Waratah photograph as someone to be sought out again, I should have chafed now at the thought of my long absence from Cape Town during my deep probe southwards beyond Bouvet and past those two seamounts which are more real on a chart than in the actuality of the wild sea-desert of the Southern Ocean and, departing, I would have wondered where she was among the blaze of lights abeam which was Sea Point. I might have even picked out a block of flats as her possible home and told her of it when next I met her. I might have rejected Sea Point and let my mind hover, helicopter-like, over the sprawling welter of suburban lights glistening in the rain under the great mountain and speculated again where she did live. With parents? From whom had she derived that strange withdrawn look, that quiet fervour at the back of those deep eyes, which had touched — me or the Waratah, Or both? I side-stepped that uncomfortable thought. I might have asked too, had the mood of pleasant fantasy been upon me as I watched the lighted land and the darker clefts and kloofs of the mountain slide away, whether she ever watched the ships come and go? Being a weekend, was she partying among the lights, forgetful of her encounter with an odd skipper who was making his way to sea in the darkness, maybe some unaccountable darkness of his own mind?
I might have had these thoughts, but I did not: it was not of herself, but of me, that she made me think that night. She held up a mirror to me, and it was at my own image, not hers, that I looked as the shoreline became progressively less illuminated until only an occasional light shone out to sea, or a car's headlights searchlighted the magnificent Marine Drive which swings again and again as it follows the shoreline the length of the Peninsula. I was twenty-eight. She was perhaps twenty-five. Command of the Walvis Bay was my first real job. I had been born in Cape Town, educated there, and had graduated from Cape Town University. Before university, as I had told her briefly, I had spent a season in a whaler in Antarctica as a youthful adventure. I think the influence of the head of the university's Oceanographic Department had something to do with my appointment to the command of the weather ship, plus my ocean-racing experience. I had raced Touleier (‘the one who leads the oxen') to South America-and won. That night off the Peninsula I had not yet heard the soft inflexion of her Welsh name, so unusual to South African ears. Tafline! Had I known it, and known something of the ancestry which had shaped that finely-moulded face, it might have given her more substance; there was nothing of her in my cabin but a presence and an oil-skinned chart. There was no lingering perfume, even. She had called the cabin a cell, her curiosity compounded with compassion; I handed over the bridge for a moment to Smit and went below and tried to look at the cabin with her own eyes and project the image of myself which had clearly intrigued her, but I found it uncomfortable, and I went back to the darkness and the disappearing land.
Mine had begun as a life much the same as thousands of others, but then came the acclaim and publicity over the ocean race. It was true what I had said, that it was boredom which killed on the weather-station islands; at sea, especially in a racing yacht, there is no time for it. Under the self-scrutiny which she had provoked, I realized that subconsciously I had made the weather ship into a substitute for the yacht: for the endless vigilance of sails, helm and wind I had replaced the regular three-hour readings, the barometric pressures, wind velocities, temperature charts and radiosonde balloon ascents, but the essential matrix of aloneness remained unchanged. Walvis Bay and Touleier were different, but the same. This I realized as the cold sea swished by and the land became more ill-defined. The long voyage ahead from Durban, the complex of scientific observations involved which, until she came, had occupied all my thoughts, were, I saw on the silent bridge that night, a further step towards isolating myself from human contacts.