Bear Island Read online

  The match I’d left jammed between the foot of my cabin door and the sill had no longer been in position when I’d returned to my cabin early in the morning. The coins I’d left in the linen pockets of the lids of my suitcases had shifted position from the front to the back of the pockets, sure evidence that my cases had been opened in my absence. It says much for my frame of mind that the discovery occasioned me no particular surprise—which was in itself surprising, for although someone aboard was aware that the good doctor had been boning up on aconitine and so had more than a fair idea that the poisoning had not been accidental, that in itself was hardly reason to start examining the doctor’s hand luggage. More than ever, it behooved me to watch my back.

  I heard a sound behind my back. My instinctive reaction was to take a couple of rapid steps forward, who knew what hard or sharp implement might be coming at my occiput or shoulder-blades, then whirl round, but a simultaneous reasoning told me that it was unlikely that anyone would propose to do me in on the upper deck in daylight under the interested gaze of watchers on the bridge, so I turned round leisurely and saw Charles Conrad moving into what little shelter was offered in the lee of the bulk deck cargo.

  ‘What’s this, then?’ I said. ‘The morning constitutional at all costs? Or don’t you fancy Captain Imrie’s scotch?’

  ‘Neither.’ He smiled. ‘Curiosity is all.’ He tapped the tarpaulin-covered bulk beside us. It was close on ten feet in height, semi-cylindrical—the base was flat—and was lashed in position by at least a dozen steel cables. ‘Do you know what this is?’

  ‘Is this a clever question?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Prefabricated Articized huts. Or so the word went in Wick. Six of them, designed to fit one inside the other for ease of transportation.’

  ‘That’s it. Made of bonded ply, kapok insulation, asbestos and aluminium.’ He pointed to another bulky item of deck cargo immediately for’ard of the one behind which we were sheltering. This peculiarly shaped object appeared to be roughly oval along its length, perhaps six feet high. ‘And this?’

  ‘Another clever question?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And my answer will be wrong? Again?’

  ‘If you still believe what you were told in Wick, yes. Those aren’t huts because we don’t need huts. We’re heading for an area called the Sor-hamna— the South Haven—where there already are huts, and perfectly usable ones. Bloke called Lerner came there seventy years ago, prospecting for coal—which he found, by the way: a bit of an odd-ball who painted the rocks on the shore in the German colours to indicate that this was private property. He built huts—he even built a road across the headland to the nearest bay, the Kvalross Bukta or Walrus Bay. After him a German fishing company based themselves here—and they built huts. More importantly, a Norwegian scientific expedition spent nine months here during the most recent International Geophysical Year—and they built huts. Whatever else is lacking at South Haven it’s not accommodation.’

  ‘You’re very well informed.’

  ‘I don’t forget something that I finished reading only half an hour ago. Comin’ and Goin’s been making the rounds this morning handing out copies of the prospectus of what’s going to be the greatest film ever made. Didn’t you get one from him?’

  ‘Yes. He forgot to give me a dictionary, though.’

  ‘A dictionary would have helped.’ He tapped the tarpaulin beside us. ‘This is a mock-up of the central section of a submarine—just a shell, nothing inside it. When I say it’s a mock-up, I don’t mean it’s made of cardboard—it’s made of steel and weighs ten tons, including four tons of cast-iron ballast. That other item in front is a conning-tower which is to be bolted on to this once it’s in the water.’

  ‘Ah!’ I said because I couldn’t think of any other comment. ‘And those alleged tractors and drums of fuel on the after deck—they’ll be tanks and anti-aircraft guns?’

  ‘Tractors and fuel, as stated.’ He paused. ‘Do you know there’s only one copy of the screen-play for this film and that’s locked up in the Bank of England or some such?’

  ‘I went to sleep about that bit.’

  ‘They haven’t even got a shooting script for the scenes to be shot on the island. Just a series of unrelated incidents which, taken together, make no sense at all. Sure, there must be connecting links to make sense of it all: but they’re all in the vaults in Threadneedle Street or whatever this damned bank is. No part of it makes sense.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not meant to make sense.’ I was conscious that my feet were slowly turning into blocks of ice. ‘Not at this stage. There may be excellent reasons for the secretiveness. Besides, don’t some producers encourage directors who play it off the cuff, who improvise as they go along and as the mood takes them?’

  ‘Not Neal Divine. He’s never shot an off-the-cuff scene in his life.’ Not much of Conrad’s forehead was to be seen beneath the thick brown hair that the snow and wind had brought down almost to eyebrow level, but what little was visible was very heavily corrugated indeed. ‘If a Divine shooting script calls for you to be wearing a bowler hat and doing the can-can in Scene 289, then you’re doing a bowler-hatted can-can in 289. As for Otto, he never moves until everything’s calculated out to the last matchstick and the last penny. Especially the last penny.’

  ‘He has the reputation for being careful.’

  ‘Careful!’ Conrad shivered. ‘Doesn’t the whole set-up strike you as being crazy.’

  ‘The entire film world,’ I said candidly, ‘strikes me as being crazy, but as an ordinary human being exposed to it for the first time I wouldn’t know whether this current particular brand of craziness differs from the norm or not. What do your fellow actors think of it?’

  ‘What fellow actors?’ Conrad said glumly. ‘Judith Haynes is still closeted with those two pooches of hers. Mary Stuart is writing letters in her cabin, at least she says it’s letters, it’s probably her last will and testament. And if Gunther Jungbeck and Jon Heyter have any opinion on everything they’re carefully keeping it to themselves. Anyway, they are a couple of odd-balls themselves.’

  ‘Even for actors?’

  ‘Touché.’ He smiled, but he wasn’t trying too hard. ‘Sea burials bring out the misanthrope in me. No, it’s just that they know so little about the film world, at least the British film world, understandable enough I suppose, Heyter’s done all his acting in California, Jungbeck in Germany. They’re not odd, really, it’s just that we have nothing in common to talk about, no points of reference.’

  ‘But you must know of them?’

  ‘Not even that, but that’s not surprising. I like acting but the film world bores me to tears and I don’t mix socially. That makes me an odd-ball too. But Otto vouches for them—in fact, he speaks pretty highly of them, and that’s good enough for me. They’ll both probably act me off the screen when it comes to the bit.’ He shivered again. ‘Conrad’s curiosity remains unsatisfied, but Conrad has had enough. As a doctor, wouldn’t you prescribe some of this scotch which old Imrie is supposed to be dispensing so liberally?’

  We found Captain Imrie dispensing the scotch with so heavy a hand that plainly it came from his own private supplies and not from Otto’s, for Otto, heavily wrapped in a coloured blanket and with his puce complexion still a pale shadow of its former self, was sitting in his accustomed dining chair and raising no objections that I could see. There must have been at least twenty people present, ship’s crew and passengers, and they were very far indeed from being a merry throng. I was surprised to see Judith Haynes there, with her husband, Michael Stryker, hovering attentively over her. I was surprised to see Mary darling there, her sense of duty or what was the done thing must have been greater than her aversion to alcohol, and was even more surprised to note that she had so abandoned all sense of the proprieties as to be holding young Allen by the arm in a positively proprietorial fashion: I was not surprised to see that Mary Stuart was absent. So were Heissman and Sandy. The
two actors with whom Conrad claimed to have so little in common, Jungbeck and Heyter, were together in one corner and for the first time I looked at them with some degree of real interest. They looked like actors, no question of that, or, more accurately, they looked like what I thought actors ought to look like. Heyter was tall, fair, good-looking, young and twenty years ago would have been referred to as clean-cut: he had a mobile, expressive, animated face. Jungbeck was at least fifteen years his senior, a thick-set man with heavy shoulders, a five o’clock shadow and dark, curling hair just beginning to grey: he had a ready, engaging smile. He was cast, I knew, as the villain in the forthcoming production and despite the appropriate build and blue jowls didn’t look the least bit like one.

  The almost complete silence in the saloon, I soon realized, didn’t stem entirely from the solemnity of the occasion, although that element must have been there: Captain Imrie had been holding the floor and had only broken off to acknowledge our entrance and to take the opportunity of dispensing some more liquor, which I refused. And now, it was clear, Captain Imrie was taking up where he had left off.

  ‘Aye,’ he said heavily, ‘’tis fitting,’ tis fitting. They have gone today, sadly, tragically gone, three of Britain’s sons—’ I was almost glad, for the moment, that Antonio was no longer around— ’but it comes to us all, sooner or later the hour strikes, and if they must rest where better to lie than in those honoured waters of Bear Island where ten thousand of their countrymen sleep?’ I wondered, uncharitably, what hour struck when Captain Imrie poured himself his first restorative of the morning but then recalled that as he had been up since 4 a.m. he was no doubt now rightly regarding the day as being pretty far advanced, a supposition which he proceeded to prove correct by replenishing his glass without, however, interrupting the smooth flow of his monologue. His audience, I noted with regret, had about them the look of men and women who wished themselves elsewhere.

  ‘I wonder what Bear Island means to you people,’ he went on. ‘Nothing, I suppose, why should it? It’s just a name, Bear Island, just a name. Like the Isle of Wight or what’s yon place in America, Coney Island: just a name. But for people like Mr Stokes here and myself and thousands of others it’s a wee bit more than that. It was a kind of turning-point, a dividing point in our lives, what those geography or geology fellows would call a watershed: when we came to know the name we knew that no name had ever meant so much to us before—and no name would ever mean so much again. And we knew that nothing would ever be the same again. Bear Island was the place where boys grew up, just over the night, as it were: Bear Island was the place where middle-aged men like myself grew old.’ This was a different Captain Imrie speaking now, quietly reminiscent, sad without bitterness, and the captive audience was now voluntarily so, no longer glancing longingly at the saloon exits.

  ‘We called it “the Gate”,’ he went on. ‘The gate to the Barents Sea and the White Sea and those places in Russia where we took those convoys through all the long years of the war, all those long years ago. If you passed the Gate and came back again, you were a lucky man: if you did it half-a-dozen times you’d used up all your luck for a lifetime. How many times did we pass the Gate, Mr Stokes?’

  ‘Twenty-two times.’ For once, Mr Stokes had no need for deliberation.

  ‘Twenty-two times. I am not saying it because I was there but people on those convoys to Murmansk suffered more terribly than people have ever suffered in war before or will ever suffer in war again, and it was here, in those waters, at the Gate, that they suffered most of all, for it was here that the enemy waited by night and by day and it was here that the enemy struck us down. The fine ships and the fine boys, our boys and the German boys, more of them lie in those waters than anywhere in the world, but the waters run clean now and the blood is washed away. But not in our minds, not in our minds: thirty years have passed now and I cannot hear the words “Bear Island”, not even when I say them myself, but my blood runs cold. The graveyard of the Arctic and we hope they are at peace now, but still my blood runs cold.’ He shivered, as if he felt a physical chill, then smiled slightly. ‘The old talk too much, a blether talks too much, so you know now how terrible it is to have an old blether stand before you. All I’d really meant to say is that our shipmates are in good company.’ He raised his glass. ‘Bon voyage.’

  Bon voyage. But not the last goodbye, not the last time we would be saying goodbye, I felt it deep in my bones and I knew that Captain Imrie felt it also. I knew that it was some sort of foreknowledge or premonition that had made him talk as he had done, that had been responsible for a rambling reminiscence as uncalled for as it was irrelevant—or appeared to be. I wondered if Captain Imrie was even dimly aware of this thought transference process, of the substitution of the fearful things, the dreadful things of long ago for the unrealized awareness that such things were not confined to the actions of overt warfare, that violent death acknowledged no restrictions in time and space, that the bleak and barren waters of the Barents Sea were its habitat and its home.

  I wondered how many others of those present felt this atavistic fear, this oddly nameless dread so often encountered in the loneliest and most desolate places on earth, a dread that reaches back over the aeons to primitive man who as yet knew not fire, to those unthinkably distant ancestors who crouched in terror in their lightless caves while the forces of evil and darkness walked abroad in the night: a fear that, here and now, was all too readily reinforced and compounded by the sudden, violent and inexplicable deaths of three of their company the previous night.

  It was hard to tell, I thought, just who was feeling affected by such primeval stirrings of foreboding, for mankind does not readily acknowledge even to itself, far less show or discuss, the existence of such irrationally childlike superstitions. Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes, without a doubt: they had gone into a corner by themselves and were staring down, unseeingly, I was sure, and certainly without speaking, at the glasses in their hands, and as the two of them rarely if ever sat together without discussing, at great length, matters of the gravest import, this was highly significant in itself. Neal Divine, more hollow-cheeked than ever but apparently slightly recovered from his very low state of the previous evening, sat by himself, continuously twirling the empty glass in his hand, his usual nervous preoccupied self, but whether he was preoccupied with mal de mer, the thought that he was about to begin his directorial duties and so consequently be exposed to the lash of Gerran’s tongue or whether he, too, was feeling fingers from the dead past reach deep into him was impossible to say.

  Comin’ and Goin’ was seated by Otto at the head of the table and they, too, were silent. I wondered just what the relationship between the two men was. They seemed to be on cordial enough terms but they only sought each other out, I had observed, when questions of business were to be discussed. It could well have been that, personally, they had little in common, but the fact that Comin’ and Goin’ had recently been made Vice-President and heir-apparent to Olympus Productions seemed to speak highly enough of Otto’s regard for him. And as they were together now and not talking I assumed that they were pondering over matters similar to those that were engaging the attention of Imrie and myself.

  The Three Apostles weren’t talking, but that meant nothing, when they were deprived of their instruments, their music magazines and their garishly primary-coloured comics, the presence of all of which they had probably deemed as being inappropriate in the present circumstances, they were habitually bereft of speech. Stryker, still in solicitously close attendance upon his wife, was talking quietly to the Count, while the Duke was conspicuously not talking to his cabin-mate Eddie, but as they were rarely on speaking terms anyway, this was hardly significant. I became aware that Lonnie Gilbert was at my elbow and I wondered what degree, if any, of the underlying significance of Captain Imrie’s words had penetrated his befuddled mind. Lonnie was clutching a glass of scotch, both container and contents of genuine family size, a marked contrast to the relatively sma
ll portions he’d been pouring himself in the lounge bar about midnight: I could only assume that somewhere in the remoter recesses of Lonnie’s mind there lurked some vestigial traces of conscience which permitted him only modest amounts of hooch not honestly come by.

  ‘“Envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight shall touch them not and torture not again,”’ Lonnie intoned. He tilted his glass, lowered the liquid level by two fingers and smacked his lips. ‘“From the contagion—”’

  ‘Lonnie.’ I nodded at the glass. ‘When did you start this morning?’

  ‘Start? My dear fellow, I never stopped. A sleepless night. “From the contagion of the world’s slow stain they are secure, and now can never mourn the heart grown cold, the head grown grey—”’

  Aware that he had lost his audience, Lonnie broke off and followed my line of sight. Mary darling and Allen, proprieties observed, were leaving. Mary hesitated, stopped in front of Judith Haynes’s chair, smiled and said: ‘Good morning. Miss Haynes. I hope you’re feeling better today?’