‘Let me know as soon as you can.’
I said something about the ungodly behaviour of skip-distance, to which he responded that, if we did but know it, skip-distance, like everything else, was anything but ungodly, though I was no doubt correct in assuming there was no method by which such phenomena could be tamed.
He left the controls, and stood close, the angles of his face emphasizing a funereal determination to push on at all costs, though it was plain that he wasn’t as fit to pilot a flying boat on an exploratory haul over the ocean as he had seemed before setting out. I had never seen anyone with a deadly illness, which fact may have suggested that I was doing so now, but the glare of his right eye made it appear dead, as if struck by blow after blow from the inside. He’s for the sick bay, I thought, but since we were still flying I supposed I must be wrong. My news of a ship somewhere ahead may have been a shock, but he kept the composure that was expected of a skipper: ‘Nail him with a bearing if you can. I’m going to the galley to see who’s working on breakfast.’
Fully determined to do as I was told, I fell asleep.
14
I lay by a stream with no clothes on. Neither had Anne, and we laughed on the grass in the sunshine as she tried to pull a rusty blade out of my stomach. The water made a hissing sound, and tree branches crackled in the wind. The knife would not come loose, but I felt no pain. When the jaunty trilling of a bird said: ‘Who is calling me?’ she stopped tugging at the knife-handle. Why should a bird ask such a question?
Neither body nor spirit, half gone and half not, I was cushioned by dreams, shorn of care or will. But I awoke instantly to hear morse singing CQ CQ CQ DE ABCD ABCD = QRZ? QTH? QRA? QRK? QSA? QRU? = + K K K and got enough of a bearing out of his garrulousness to tell that he was east-north-east, though without knowing the distance.
Perhaps I had inadvertently pressed the key while dozing, and he was trying to discover whether I had been calling him. Rose was working out star shots for our position, locking us in a box of airspace among broken bars of cloud. By the time he knew where it was we’d be some miles further on – as if we had never been there. But from that vital fix an alteration of course would make for an accurate landfall, and leave a reserve of fuel so that we could search for our alighting place. We had been airborne seventeen hours, and Wilcox had long since got the pumps working to bring the second instalment from tanks in the hull.
A bluebottle-green in the sky came and went. Nash bumped me on the back. ‘It’s downhill from now on, Sparks.’
‘I hope it’s not too steep.’ I felt grime at the eyes that only proper sleep would cure. With daylight beaming in at half past four, the hole we made in the sky moved as we moved, leaving a vacuum tadpole tail behind, a warm envelope refilled by sub-zero cold. A welcome smell of coffee spread from the galley. Appleyard was at the stoves preparing breakfast. A healthy hunger prevailed, but the skipper sent back his platter of chops and beans, and Bull who played the waiter stood by the ladder eating it with his fingers, mess-irons sticking out of his pocket. He wiped his mouth on Bennett’s linen napkin. ‘Two dinners are always better than one!’
The sky was empty, blue overhead but almost white to port where the sun stood on the horizon like the yolk of an egg looking cold enough to begrudge what warmth we might get when we landed. Morse rippled on every note of the musical scale, and there was nothing to do except let it settle, and wait for the nearby ship to ask again who was calling and why.
I had no will to track my tracker, if such he was, because the easy life was here, and for a few minutes, while breakfast was eaten, the duty I was paid to do lost its influence. If Bennett gave me a call to make I would sweat out a few pokes at the tapper, and the person I was supposed to find would no doubt come back loud and clear, wondering why the hell I had been sleeping my head off when we could have been playing an exciting game of wireless-telegraphic noughts-and-crosses.
The hollow-sounding signal began to bleed over my frequency, so I changed to the higher daytime band and reset the transmitter should I be asked to bleed back at him. I wanted to find out whether the other operator knew the day frequency. If he did, and called me, he was homing in and no mistake.
I listened, laughing to myself. The longer I waited, the more it was certain that he was exploring a few other frequencies first. We were sharpening our wits on each other.
Appleyard came up with breakfast, and a huge jug of coffee to fill our mugs. ‘We’ll soon be at Kerguelen,’ I said.
‘Where’s that?’
‘I never know where a place is when we fly there,’ I told him. Nash bustled up the monkey climber to join the queue: ‘Pull your finger out. I’m croaking.’
I winked. ‘Do you know where Kerguelen is?’
He cleared his throat, and paused before drinking. ‘I did ask the navigator, but he didn’t know. When he asked somebody in Blighty, they told him all he had to do was to go to fifty degrees south latitude, then turn left for a couple of thousand miles, being sure to cut all meridians at the same angle. I expect he’ll get us there.’
‘Sounds like something from Alice in Wonderland,’ I said.
Armatage looked up. ‘I was born in Sunderland.’
‘Didn’t know there was such a place,’ said Nash. ‘Did you, Sparks?’
‘Thought it was blown up in the war.’
‘I left when I was eight,’ said Armatage. ‘The old man died, so we went south. My mother lived with her brother, and so did I. He was a real bastard.’ His lower lip trembled as he reached for the plate of toast and eggs that came as a second course for those still hungry. ‘Sunderland was a lovely place, all the same.’
Nash lifted his coffee mug. ‘I’ll drink to it, then.’
‘So will I. It’s near Cullercoats, isn’t it? GCC, if I remember.’
After some talk, Nash set his empty mug on the tray and gave Armatage a nudge. ‘Come on, then, get your nose out of that trough and let’s give the guns another lookover.’
When the clandestine sender again trespassed on my beat, I jumped as if 250 volts had shocked up my spine, made worse by expecting him. He couldn’t know that he had made contact, but he had, though he seemed too wily not to realize. His morse was off-whistle, clicks like the rattle of a cup and saucer carried upstairs by a man who did not want to wake his wife until she could see his wonderful surprise. I brought him on frequency and back to the usual bird-whistle. He called every five minutes, cued in to the second, but he was fishing blind. When I passed an account of his antics to the flight deck, Bennett said: ‘Don’t answer,’ telling me that the ship certainly wasn’t that which carried our fuel for the return journey.
15
Oil pressure on the starboard inner had gone down. Wilcox wiped a red inkblot from his mouth. The engine was healthy enough. Must be the gauges. Nothing to worry about on that score. He would check oil and all contacts when we were moored. You do your job, I’ll do mine, he said. We were touchy on that point.
Bennett came up the ladder, after resting in his stateroom, but with hardly the energy to mount each step. I turned in time to hear the same ship calling for an answer. His hand shook, holding a message sheet before me. ‘Next time he fishes, send this.’
I was to use the callsign GZZZ, and make my position known as QTH 49 50 SOUTH 69 10 EAST. Bennett laughed, the dim light emphasizing his pallor. ‘They’ll search for a ship, not a flying boat: on the south side of the island instead of the north.’