He descended to the galley, satisfied at our attempt to obfuscate. The legal situation intrigued me. We were crossgraining all the laws. The sending of false signals was strictly forbidden, and I had committed the first criminal act of my life.
In the kernel of such detachment, highlighting my lack of connection to whatever in the world had any meaning, I felt allied to something that was not good, almost to a sense of evil. I put my fingers on the morse key and thudded out the call sign of the flying boat so as to imprint our identifying letters on an unlistening void.
3
Bennett called for less chat on the intercom. As he got older he wanted more perfection from himself, and consequently only spoke to others when he could be sure of being obeyed. He wished for perfection from them too, so that what he demanded contributed to the standards he had set himself, and thus enhanced his perfection. But if he wanted obedience he had to be reasonable. He had to be right, and because it was getting harder to match the two demands, he gave the impression of being taciturn.
The price of such individualism was often at the expense of others’ conformity. No one knew it more. But he expected it nonetheless, not only because there was so little about but also because it was part of his nature to strive after perfection. He wanted it from others as well as from himself, as a defensive bastion against all comers. The cost to himself was nil because his value increased the more he acquired it. And as for the cost to others – it was no concern of his.
He faced the clear blue, getting bumped by upcurrents from cloud tops a few feet below. The boat trundled at 110, plus the push of an almost following wind. The more such windy knots the merrier, caught in the Roaring great-circle Forties, but any speed would have been too slow.
The furrows in his brow seemed to go into his soul, and cut it into fragments, which was better than merely cleaving it in two, because while many parts were manageable, two would be stalemate. Diplomacy could be brought to bear on many parts, while with two it was a fight to stop them destroying one another. All the same, he did not know which system he was most in the grip of, or in need of, nor even in the end which he preferred. He had long been a battle-ground, but the fight for stability always resulted in a strong and perfect balance in himself which he presented to the world.
The inner fight to stay firm did not allow for speculation. He was happy with the bargain. He had to be. Pragmatism was the way to survival. There was no point in allowing self-knowledge to destroy you. To keep a balance between knowing yourself and survival might be feasible during a holiday in the English countryside, but on this trip the difficulties could break you if steps weren’t taken to defeat them.
Sitting for hours at the controls, mulling on chances and pitfalls, it wasn’t easy to stop chaos coming with malicious intent from beyond the horizon. The furrows on his forehead had similarly sharpened as a schoolboy when he crept upstairs to his mother’s bedroom. She had gone, so he opened her Bible as if committing a sin. Thin paper flipped like a cloud of butterflies crossing a turbulent river. He had forgotten the name of that great river. The butterflies had a name from cigarette cards. He read some verses about Isaac and Abraham. They smelled of face powder from the dressing table. The book made him want to die. When he grew tired of opening and closing, he tore out the page and swallowed the pieces as he stood at the window.
No one walked on the garden path. Beyond rows of lettuces were redcurrant bushes. He could taste their fruit by looking at them. Dahlias and chrysanthemums coloured the fence. Instead of going to school he wanted to spread his arms and fly from the window, reach the bushes before it got dark, when they would leap even redder with their flame.
The clear and aching light of long summer evenings needed all day before stars came out. His father was up there, his mother told him, but he was under redcurrant bushes where she had buried him. If he flew, he would fall. You couldn’t fly without falling. Not even time to scream, your eyes would drop out before you could see the earth that hit you. You would be too dead to feel it, just as his father was too dead to know anything, whether he was in the sky or under the bushes, because how could he be in two places at once? Maybe he would die from the bits of paper. Either that, or they would make him better.
Captain Bennett smiled at the enormous hemisphere of the heavens.
4
Rose came on the intercom with a course correction for the thirty degree latitude south and forty degree longitude east position. He had released a smoke float to get drift. I swept the ether with a fine tooth comb, going up to eighteen megacycles, then dropping back to search on medium wave. I was tempted to click my callsign to the few audible ships, but radio silence was the order of the day. Everything went in the logbook nevertheless, in case it was useful later. Liking to keep busy during bumps through cloud, I took a gonio reading on a coast station for Rose.
‘It’s not much good,’ he said, ‘but they might help one of these days, though I hope I won’t be reduced to such ham-handed navigation. Be the end of us all, if so.’
‘Levity is coming back,’ said Nash. ‘He’s a young soldier, Nav, so don’t discourage him.’
‘Bound to, once we’re airborne,’ said Wilcox. ‘We get light-headed, don’t we, chaps?’
Two hours out, and I could relax my tight-fisted contact with the ether. ‘Permission granted,’ Bennett called.
‘Got dots and dashes before the eyes?’ said Appleyard as I walked over a heap of parachutes to get to the Elsan. The plane grumbled. ‘What do we need those for?’ I asked Armatage, as I buttoned my flies. It was like being in the cellar of a laundry, except for the smell of last night’s cooking instead of today’s washing.
‘You’ll see that hanging up soon enough,’ he said.
‘Do sailors like us need parachutes?’
Armatage hung them in some sort of order. ‘You never know. But I expect the only time we’ll bale out is when the dinghy starts to split after we’re in the drink – if we’re lucky enough to get that far on our way to salvation. Or bailed out of some foreign copshop. But while we’re in this flying bailiwick we’re more than safe, Tosh.’ He tapped one of several packing cases with his boot: ‘It’ll be the others we meet who’ll need bailing out, or to bale out, believe you me.’
The wood smelt fresh. ‘What’s in them?’
‘You’ll see when we open up.’
‘And when will that great day be?’
‘When, mate? When? When Bennett gives the verbal nod over the speak-tube, just beyond the third-way mark. That’s when we’ll do it. I’m a dab hand with a jemmy.’ Fingers at his left cheek rubbed the smile away. ‘This toothache’s giving me a bit of stick.’
I was ready to laugh at such a common malady, but it was clearly no joke. ‘You could have had it pulled before we left.’
‘I didn’t know, did I? Anyway, it comes and goes.’
‘On Antarctic expeditions some blokes have all their teeth taken out, good or not, and steel ones put in. Saves ’em suffering if they’re two years in the wild.’
His grey eyes turned watery. ‘If I’d told the skipper, he’d have left me behind rather than put the trip off for a day. That’s the skipper all over. One of the best – but no sentiment. Iron Jack, some of us used to call him. I heard that swine Shottermill talking about having too many in the crew and wondering whether they shouldn’t ditch a couple of bods. I can’t think he was genuine, because if the Antarctic ice sticks hard on this white elephant we’ll all be out on the wings melting it off with blow-lamps.’ He smiled when the pain went. ‘And if there’s a bit of a scrap over who gets the damaged goods, there won’t be too many of us on board to handle it.’