And that night, lying alone in the big untidy bed, my eyes wide and staring into the dark, the loneliness of it unbearable. Without Karen what was there to life? She was all I had, all I’d ever had. She was this cottage, Balkaer, the life we’d been leading. It was her idea — the way we lived, everything. Without her it had no meaning. I was back to the nothingness of my existence before we met. Ever since I’d stowed away on that dhow in Dubai, got myself across to Gwadar and up to Peshawar by way of Quetta, ever since then I’d been tramping the world, living out of suitcases, owning nothing, belonging nowhere — no one belonging to me. Only Karen had ever belonged…
The wind was rising. In the end I couldn’t stand it, lying there staring into the dark, listening to the wind and seeing her figure moving along the sloping deck of that tanker, the flickering flame held out in front of her, and then the flash of the explosion, the roaring holocaust that had followed. Poor darling! Poor wonderful, adorable, emotional darling! If only I’d gone down into the cove, instead of waving and climbing the path and leaving her there. She must have tried to ignite the slick with that garden flame-thrower right after I had left. And when she’d failed, she’d motored across the bay to Sennen to wait with Rose to hear the result of the meeting. I should have known. If I hadn’t been so angry… God! If — if — if… I flung off the bedclothes and got the bottle of Armagnac I kept for emergencies at the back of the kitchen cupboard. It was the last of the bottles I had brought with me when I had finally come ashore to become self-employed instead of a salaried ship’s officer. There wasn’t much of it left, but it was over the remains of that bottle, sitting in the rocking chair with two oiled-up cormorants and three razorbills in boxes under the table beside me, listening to the roar of the wind outside, the crash of the rollers in the cove below, sensing the movement of the stone walls round me in the gusts, that I began to come to terms with what had happened. Times like this we’d have had each other — talking together, working together, going to bed together, making love; one way and another we’d always kept the gales at bay, locking ourselves into our own little world and shutting out tbe wind.
But now there was only myself. And with Karen gone I was intensely conscious of every battering blast of wind, so that the cottage seemed no longer a protection, the wind entering it and the waves beating at its foundations. And my love out there by the Kettle’s Bottom. Tomorrow or the next day, a week, a fortnight maybe, somewhere along the coast they’d find the charred remains of her floating in the sea, or smashed up on the rocks — and I’d be expected to identify her. Or would that rounded, full-breasted form have been reduced to ashes? If it had been cremated beyond recognition… I could see her still, sitting in the wing chair on the opposite side of the chimney piece. We had bought that chair in a gale, junk from a nearby homestead that had gone for nothing, no dealers there, and she had laboriously re-covered it with material from an old Welsh cardden that had belonged to her mother.
I could see her now, sitting there like a ghost with one hand propping her chin, the other holding a book, or sitting staring intently at the fire as I read aloud to her what I had written during the day. She was doing the typing for me, of course — she was a trained typist — but I think it was my reading to her that developed her interest in books. She had never been much of a reader before, but then she started borrowing from the travelling library, always wildlife books or stories about animals. Sometimes she would borrow a book about Wales, but mostly it was wildlife, and because much of what I was writing was about the birds and seals that visited our coast, she became in a sense my sounding box, our relationship deeper, more intimate, so that now, for the moment, I could still see her, sitting there in that empty chair.
That was really the start of it, that was when I saw the pattern of my life, how it all added up — so that what had been without purpose before suddenly became purposeful.
It’s hard to explain, for in the hours I sat there, sleepless, with the noise of the front coming in out of the Atlantic steadily increasing, I went through several stages. I had already passed through shock and had reached the point of feeling sorry for myself when I came down seeking the comfort of the Armagnac. But then, as the fire of it gave me courage to face my loss and the loneliness that would follow, I came to feel that Karen wasn’t dead, that she still existed, not in her own body but in mine — that she had become part of me.
It was a strange feeling, for my thinking immedi-ately became different. It was as though death had opened the door for me so that life had a new meaning, a new dimension — all life, not just human life. I was beginning to think like her. I suddenly felt at one with the Greenpeace movement and all those people who had tried to stop the harp seal killers of Canada or to prevent the slaughter of the dolphins by the fishermen off Iki.
The world as I drank seemed to be shrieking aloud the cruelty of humans — not just to themselves, but to all living things. Greed, and a rage against nature. Karen was right. A rogue species. She’d read that somewhere. And about vested interests, too. There’d always be vested interests, always be reasons for not interfering, for allowing another species to be wiped out, for letting them cut down another rain forest, pollute another stretch of coast, another sea, an ocean even, with oil or nuclear waste. She’d seen it. Now I was seeing it. And I hadn’t reasoned it out — it was just suddenly there in my mind, as though she had put it there.
A gust shook the walls, the wind tugging at the door and a sheet of spray lashing at the windows. The peat fire glowed and I saw her face in it, the long black hair let down and burning like a torch. Slumped in the old rocker, I relived the moment, the holocaust, confusing the peat-glow and seeing her body shrivel in the heat of it, and with that hallucinatory sight the anger that was there, deep inside me, boiled over, vengeance then my only thought. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. Somebody had put that bloody ship on the rocks, somebody had been responsible — for the pollution, for Karen’s death.
Speridion? Another gust, the cottage trembling, and I spoke the name aloud. Aristides Speridion. And he’d got away in a boat. That’s what the marine consultant, an oil pollution specialist from Cardiff, had said at the meeting, that the second engineer of the Petros Jupiter was missing and they’d traced him through a Penzance fisherman to a stolen dinghy and a Breton fishing boat. I’d hunt him down. I’d kill the bastard. The wind howled and I emptied my glass, hugging that thought to me.
A bloody little Greek — they were always Greek. I’d find him and I’d get the truth out of him, and if he was responsible, if he’d deliberately caused that damned tanker to go on the rocks…
Dawn was breaking as I finished the. last of the bottle and began to dress. The razorbills were dead by then, only the cormorants still alive, and the room was very dark, a lot of noise. There always was a lot of noise with a gale blowing out of the west and a big sea running. Lloyd’s! That was what was in my mind now as I shaved and dressed. With an insurance claim in, Lloyd’s would know where the man had gone to earth if anybody did. Lloyd’s of London — I’d phone them as soon as I had banked up the fire and got myself some breakfast.