‘You know where Captain Holland is, please?’
I turned to find Shelvankar behind me, a message pad in his hand. ‘Isn’t he in his cabin?’
‘No, not in his cabin or the saloon. Maybe in the engine-room.’ He smiled. ‘It’s about the two extra vehicles we take on tomorrow night. It can wait.’ He put his thick-lensed glasses firmly into place, peering at the charts. ‘I have entered you as acting first officer now. On Captain Holland’s instructions. You are a good navigator?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘He is damn nearly asleep on his feet when we come south to Sydney.’ His English was very precise, spoken with a high-pitched lilt that reminded me of a Welsh friend of mine who lived on an old Thames sailing barge up the Blackwater. ‘The sea is not my natural home, and when the Captain is tired and his mind is on other things-’ He gave a little shrug expressive of an unwilling fatalism. ‘I am relieved to see you checking the charts so conscientiously.’ He said it on a note of uncertainty, and I realised that he knew nothing about navigation and was afraid I might be trying to pretend I knew more than I did.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I can navigate all right. It’s just that I don’t know these waters.’
‘So you find out from the chart and the Pilot.’ He nodded, smiling his relief. ‘That’s fine. That’s very fine, very sensible.’
‘What’s this about loading two extra vehicles?’ I asked, glancing down at the tank deck, where the four Haulpaks had been loaded aft in a tight huddle that left a clear space between the lead vehicle and the storm door.
He didn’t reply, and when I asked him what the message was, he said, ‘It’s nothing important. Just a change in the time the vehicles will be at the beach.’
‘At the beach? Are we loading direct off an open beach?’
He nodded, a shade reluctantly.
‘What about Customs?’
‘No Customs.’
I stared at him, conscious of his reluctance to talk, remembering Holland’s strange behaviour two nights back when I had walked unexpectedly into his wardroom. ‘Where is this beach?’ I pushed the chart towards him. ‘Show me.’
But he shook his head. ‘You ask Captain Holland. I do not know where it is.’ And he scurried out like a small spider that has weaved a bit of a web and then been frightened off it. He could have kept his mouth shut. But I realised that wasn’t in his nature. As a source of information he would always be unreliable, but at least he was a source, somebody I could talk to, and I guessed he had been with Holland quite a time, knew the family’s history.
Luke arrived in the wheelhouse a little before four, which was a good sign. He seemed to know nothing about the beach. And when I raised it with Holland in the saloon over tea, he refused to discuss it, his face blank. ‘Two trucks, that’s all. Nothing to do with you.’ And he began discussing navigation, confirming that we’d leave the Queensland coast at Sandy Cape, steering 05° Magnetic to pass between Saumarez Reef and Frederick Reef, both lit. I had already pencilled this probable course on the chart. ‘Where’s the beach?’ I asked him.
He hesitated, then said, ‘In the vicinity of Tin Can Bay, just south of Fraser Island.’ It was at the northern end of Fraser Island that Sandy Cape marked our point of departure for the Coral Sea.
He wouldn’t tell me anything more, sitting there sucking on an empty pipe, the creases in his forehead deepening and his mind far away. He was so tense, so uncommunicative that I was certain this was what had started him drinking that night. I went to my cabin and lay on the bunk, but I couldn’t sleep. There were some dog-eared paperbacks on the shelf above my head, including Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus, but I couldn’t concentrate, which was probably just as well, since it wasn’t the ideal book to read in the circumstances.
I was on watch again at eight, and as Holland was handing over to me, Shelvankar came in. It was dark now, and I was concentrating on locating the stern light of the coaster ahead of us. I heard a muttered curse and turned to find Holland staring down at a message in his hands, his face gone pale and looking as though he couldn’t believe it. He was staring at it so long he could have read it through half a dozen times, and the little Indian standing close beside him as though enthralled by its dramatic potential.
Suddenly Holland turned to me. ‘Didn’t you tell me you’d met my sister?’
I nodded.
‘When was that? How long ago?’
‘About a month.’ And guessing what the message must be, I said, ‘She’s on her way to Sydney, is she?’
He didn’t answer that, staring at me, very tense. ‘How did you come to meet her? Was it about the house?’
‘Yes.’ And when I started to explain, he said, ‘I know all about the sale. But that was to provide for Tim, and she’d taken a job as a stewardess. I didn’t expect her out here for at least another month. Somebody must have given her money.’
He sounded so suspicious that instead of asking him about his brother, I found myself having to explain the value of the stamps. And all the time I was speaking he was staring at me, very pale, and still with that tenseness. ‘So you arranged for two thousand pounds to be put to her credit in a bank at Southampton. And you didn’t tell me.’ His voice was harsh, a little out of control. ‘Why are you here? Did she ask you to contact me?’ And without waiting for a reply, suddenly aware of the little Indian standing close beside him, avidly taking it all in, he said, ‘We can’t talk here. Hand the bridge over to Luke; then come to my cabin.’ And he left abruptly, the flimsy still clutched in his hand.
His cabin was next to the wheelhouse, and as soon as the second officer had taken over, I joined him. He was sitting on his bunk, staring fixedly at nothing. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he muttered again, almost petulantly. ‘If I’d known she was going to fly out … ’ He looked up at me. ‘That night when you came on board, if I’d known then … you should have told me.’
‘I didn’t think it was the moment,’ I said.
He stared at me, finally nodding his head. ‘No, perhaps not. And you seem to have done the best you could for her. I’m grateful.’ He said it as a matter of form, nothing more. And then he was silent for a long time, lost in his own thoughts. The odd thing was he didn’t seem at all happy at her imminent arrival, his reaction one of alarm rather than pleasure.
‘When did you last see her?’ I asked.
‘What? Oh, let me see, it must be about five years ago now. I went over to England, to discuss things with my father.’ Remembering Mrs Clegg’s description of the father, I thought he probably took after him, and wondered what the mother had been like, the two of them, brother and sister, so completely different. ‘She shouldn’t have come,’ he muttered to himself.
‘What did you expect her to do?’
He shook his head vaguely. ‘It’s no place for her,’ he mumbled, but I knew it wasn’t that. For some reason he was afraid of her. ‘I never thought she’d come, not suddenly like this. She talked about it, of course. She was always writing to me. Once a week, regularly.’
‘She’ll have told you then — about your brother. She says it’s sorcery.’
But he didn’t seem to take that seriously. ‘Ever since Mother was killed … ’ He shook his head, his mind on something else. ‘It’s Hans,’ he murmured. ‘It must be Hans.’ He looked up at me. ‘Hans Holland,’ he said. ‘We have a partnership arrangement. Perenna doesn’t approve.’
‘He’s a relative, is he?’
He nodded. ‘A bit removed, you might say.’
‘Was he in England two or three months ago?’