‘Why are you, then?’
He looked contrite. ‘Well, you need a change, don’t you?’
Bull was unable to cut his steak. ‘It makes the grub at the Driftwood seem like Mrs Beeton’s best.’
‘The past always looks good,’ Rose drawled. ‘The old Driftwood reminded me of the Jetsome Inn, a hostelry near Guildford where they even ruin black market food.’
Bull’s eyes watered with nostalgia. ‘I wish I was there, all the same.’
‘I’m fed up with being duty cook,’ Appleyard said, though no one took any notice.
‘I think you-know-who’s been boozing,’ said Nash. ‘I can smell it.’
Armatage ate the steak with his side teeth. ‘When we get to Kerguelen, maybe a polar bear will make a meal out of you – though I expect the poor bugger’d sick its guts up if it did.’
‘Your eyes look like piss-holes in the snow already,’ said Nash. A scarf of cloud brushed by the porthole and turned the galley dim, with a grating sound under the hull, as if ropes that held us fast were being pulled loose. ‘Can you cook seal meat?’
Appleyard levered a tin of Players from his jacket. ‘We ate whale meat during the war.’
‘You wouldn’t cock a snook at anything,’ said Rose.
‘Or look a seahorse in the mouth.’ Wilcox fought off another bout of coughing. The joke that he should get an X-ray, or that the Kerguelen air would be as good a tonic as the best in Switzerland, had long been worn out, and we could only wonder how he managed to go on doing his job.
‘Better get a move on, or your dessert will get hot,’ said Appleyard as he dispensed bananas. Mine was too green, so I put it in my jacket pocket. He took each plate for washing up. ‘I’ll cook what you like, as long as I don’t have to kill it.’
Armatage joked that for half a bottle of grog he’d kill anything.
‘He’d cook his bloody firstborn for a swig of gut-rot,’ said Bull. A fist flashed, as if powered by the jet of an obscene word, in an arc towards Bull’s face, but collided with the palm of Nash’s open hand, which stopped it dead. ‘Wrap it up, the pair of you.’
A bump underfoot reminded us that we were moving on course to a place where none of us had been. Bull spat – nothing from a dry mouth, and reached for his mug of coffee. Wilcox coughed, his face pale and shining, a reddish spot in the middle of each cheek: ‘We’ll go hedge-hopping after seals, tally-bloody-hunting, like we did across Cambridgeshire when we chased a string of racehorses over the hill and down again. The skipper nearly lost his wings for that.’
Nash could hardly speak from laughter. ‘And then there was that time when the old Sparks let go his trailing aerial and cut a cow in half. They couldn’t decide which plane had done it, but the Air Ministry had to pay up – which was more than the cow could do!’
‘We were bloody hell-bent in those days,’ said Bull.
‘If we mow down a few seals from the rear turret we’ll live off the fat of the land, eh Nashie?’ Armatage chipped in.
‘There’s even coal to cook on,’ I said. ‘And you don’t have to get it from underground in a bucket. We’ll find a whaler’s hut for shelter. Stranded or not, we’ll be snug.’
‘I prefer civilization,’ said Rose, ‘on the whole.’
‘Why not speculate on all possibilities?’
‘Speculate, my arse,’ said Bull.
Rose rinsed his irons in the bowl, dried them on the teatowel hanging from its hook, and put them into the top pocket of his jacket. ‘I’ll say no to that one, if you don’t mind.’
I went back to the wireless with my mug of coffee, and wondered how we would survive if the flying boat couldn’t take off. I was not so appalled at the idea as I should have been.
10
The plane was a workshop. Shottermill had obviously left a few packs of gaudy banknotes in the right places, otherwise how could we have set off with such lethal goods? I turned to see people lifting and carrying, serpentine belts of ammo around their necks. Curses were frequently shaped on their lips because the interior frame of the flying boat was lined with sharp corners.
Nash levered an assembled gun towards the rear turret. The Aldebaran was being set for defence, and it did not matter against whom or what. ‘Something’ll turn up, you can be sure. And if it don’t, we ought to make it. Otherwise, what’s life for?’ But he was sweating and breathless, and put the gun down after a few feet. ‘We had armourers to do this in the war, and I’m not as young as I was.’
Bennett need not have left the flight deck to see that work was up to scratch, because Armatage was sufficiently competent as an armourer to forget toothache, overcome his disability from drink, and rig twin guns in the mid-upper. The crew had been chosen well, and in our pre-lunch talk the skipper had made sure of me. Bull went to assist Nash, and they managed the labour between them.
I could make no sense out of the distant twittering on eight megacycles but, thinking that contact might come from that quarter, scoured to either side of the band. There was nothing for us. The plane was losing height. Cloud melted away except for what seemed like a line of grey bushes to the south. Hard to think of the Pole as being a point from where any straight line away from it went north. The cobalt sea glowed in the sun. My ears popped, playing a tune. Taking off the headset, a deep breath brought engine noise roaring back.
I looked out in the hope of seeing a ship. So much water was a transparent envelope around the earth, waiting only to be pierced by a spike of land. Maybe ships had been visible while I listened at the radio, but the world had now gone back to water, and our contraption was a flimsy habitation that might crumble any moment into a tangle of wreckage from which none of us would swim.
I returned to the friendly embrace of atmospherics, from whose noise some message of support might come, an item of interest or mystery to rejuvenate the brain. After a while cataracts of static became a form of elemental life, like being in the stomach of an animal big enough to contain the universe. If I closed my eyes there were colours, cobalt and magenta stippled with pale orange, a complicated pattern battling against itself, unharmonious because no morse impinged. The noise of the atmosphere was channelled into my headset via the aerials and receiver. In order to miss no signal lurking among the noise, I kept the volume high, the din almost overpowering.
I began to hear signals that did not exist, perhaps the bleep of a transmitter tuning in, or a string of dots and dashes that made no sense, coming and going but only to tantalize. The next stream resembled bars of music, of no recognizable tune, and too fast to be intercepted. I was amused at how they could deceive an old hand like me. Rose glanced in my direction because he imagined I was listening to a broadcast of ITMA.
Figures and letters appeared on the notepad, my hand willing to write anything rather than be inactive; but all I produced was a dozen signs at most, and wondered what marcolin on the tailplane scratched signals into the atmospherics with webbed feet or clawed fingers. Perhaps a pair of stations on the Antarctic coast fifteen hundred miles south worked their two-way traffic, using callsigns in no handbook. Had they spotted us on a sophisticated form of long-distance radar? Only the continual brain-battering static could create such ludicrous ideas.
A garble of faint squawks resembled voices. I turned down the CW switch, but could not bring them clearer. My receiver, superheterodyned for wireless telegraphy, was not ideal for getting speech. Feedback and distortion made readability difficult. Given the static that deadened my eardrums and induced a kind of half sleep at my set, why did I think they were voices at all? And if I didn’t hear them, what put the idea into my head? Craving company, perhaps I had conjured them out of the ether, suggesting I was losing my attachment to reality after barely six hours out. Voices or not, they were too garbled to decipher. If they had been understandable, what effect would they have had on our flying boat? That was the crux of the matter, if there was a crux, and if any matter existed, which I was beginning to doubt. Perhaps they were too far off to read, and it was only a question of time before the words became plain.