so that the meeting could take place – not having acted courageously and broken the barrier. Howard talked sociably enough to people in the pub whenever there for a pint – his maximum intake on a walk – because she had once met him as arranged, and even before pushing open the door heard his laughter and easy responses among the loud chatter.
Alone, he was king of his world, no territory of greater expanse than in his mind when assisted by varying and multiplying noises coming into the earphones. Aether sings, is never silent, indecipherable morse lost in vague ringing tones or a low roar as of the sea suddenly punctuated by a rogue whistle coming and going, the momentary growl of a button-message, arrowing from where to where? With such noises he could see, and the universe surrendered to him, at least that part between the earth’s crust and the heaviside layer, where no part of him was tied to the yoke of his blindness.
Mysterious morse signals, in plain language or in code, ragged beyond comprehension and impossible to grasp, suggested a ghost wireless operator somewhere, wild eyed and stricken with eternal panic, the shirt half flayed off his back by the wind, the only other man besides the captain still on the Flying Dutchman, sending messages on an ancient spark transmitter, the ship forever caught in savage gales south of the Cape of Good Hope.
Distress signals from the ship came and went into Howard’s earphones, mercilessly chopped by interference or atmospherics, weakened by distance, containing harrowing accounts of the Flying Dutchman’s plight but impossible to make sense of. Maybe lightning had shattered their eyes, but both captain and wireless operator thought they could see perfectly well, yet were unable to distinguish between dark and day in the howling torment of the waves. Signals from the ship turned up all over the spectrum, vague, hardly recognisable, trying to break through and make sense to someone with the superior knowledge, intuitive skill and power to release them from their spellbound circuits around the waters. Maybe they prayed for a Nimrod aircraft or a fast destroyer to rescue them from their plight. Masts gone, at times waterlogged, the ship struggled to stay afloat, and they couldn’t know that nothing would make it sink because the eternal powers of the universe would not allow it.
The captain in his travail had gone insane and, roped to the wheel, drove the ship on automatically with declining yet always-renewable strength, while the wireless operator in his cabin sat hour after hour tapping out his unreceivable messages of distress, hope and no hope fusing an addled brain that gave no rest.
At times Howard knew he was close to the wireless operator of the Flying Dutchman because nothing could be done for him either. His fate was settled. The vessel was adrift and could not make port, but the man persisted in his task, no thought of saving himself, because staying on was the only chance of survival, making life ordered even in damnation.
He never stayed long on one frequency, and in any case the Flying Dutchman’s signals always drifted away, impossible to follow, too painful to chase. Shrieks of static and dying whistles ate into the eardrums and conjured bad pictures, so he settled on the clear top-strength machine morse of the station giving the Mediterranean weather forecast, pulled over the typewriter and touch typed on his beloved elderly machine that, having only capital letters, made it easy to use for transcripts.
A seasonal low pressure area was what he noted, gales and thunderstorms at the beginning of September, southwesterly wind force four increasing locally, mainly clear but with increasing cloudiness, moderate visibility, generally changeable. The Adriatic was no better, or worse, the same with the Aegean and the Levantine Basin.
He took two pages, then changed band and swivelled the wheel onto a typhoon warning from Taiwan, said to be moving west at ten kilometres a minute, with sustained winds near the centre at 155 kilometres an hour. At least the Flying Dutchman wasn’t involved in that one, and nor was he, snug in his familiar listening post at what he could only think of as the hub of the world.
A change from the tinkling of morse, he went on to a telephone frequency, spun the wheel and heard a Donald Duck squawk, hard to know whether it would turn out male or female, till he tuned in sharply and with delicate fingers pulled a recognisable male voice out by the tail:
‘You’re not supposed to drink when you take that stuff, are you, Beryl?’
What stuff? Howard removed the earphones, plugged in the speaker, and flicked on the tape recorder, perhaps to amuse Laura later, an action utterly against the law, though he would obliterate such private talk afterwards. The Post Office regulations were severe: ‘Interception of communications is forbidden. If such communications are received involuntarily they must not be produced in writing, communicated to other persons, or used for any purpose whatever.’
Plain enough, but too much of a sacrifice to his existence to obey such rules. In any case his transcripts were used to make the morning fire, and all tapes rubbed out to leave space for other items. If he played them occasionally to Laura what matter? Weren’t man and wife supposed to be one person? He was sure there were villainous London thieves who used VHF scanners to keep track of police movements before doing a robbery, but he wasn’t in that league, and wouldn’t have been, even with normal sight.
He felt himself a snooper nevertheless when listening to personal telephone talk, though surely those who made calls from ship to shore must know someone might well be listening, no great feat these days, with technology coming on the market cheap, even for ordinary telephones to be tapped. Often he amused himself at midnight listening to two or three trawler skippers chatting at the fishing grounds, which he wouldn’t record for Laura because the dexterity of their bad language was astonishing to hear.
Poor husband, or boyfriend, stuck on shore. ‘You’re not going to remember this, are you?’
Howard could hear him but not the woman.
‘You all right?’
He was an American.
‘See you on Friday? Look, I think you’re loaded. Why are you crying? Phone you Thursday, at three o’clock.’
Perhaps he had sent her on a Caribbean cruise, when the last place she needed to be in was a vast floating boozer.
‘Honey, please don’t drink too much. I got a meeting at five o’clock. Listen, please don’t drink too much tonight. Damn, you’re really drunk.’
Howard wanted to hear the response, instead of filling in the details from his own heart.
‘What does that mean?’ the man said, a mixture of concern and exasperation.
How else to learn about life if you were blind?
‘All right, I’ll call you at five-thirty on Thursday. Can you write it down so you won’t forget? Why not? You’re drunk. It’s that stuff affecting you maybe. Please don’t drink anymore tonight. So you want to go, eh? OK. Love you. Bye.’
Operator’s voice: ‘It was twenty five minutes there.’
Such a long time for the poor chap to have been locked in a dead end debate with his wife or girlfriend. The catalogue of miseries was endless. Disasters also. A whistle went parabola through a blank frequency like an uncontrolled star across space – or a bomb making its way from a plane onto helpless people below. No knowing where it was coming from or heading for. Then the mixing warble of two oscillators made a noise like an angel drinking water.
The aerial blues were on him, which even the tom-tom telegraphist blasting through from a Soviet Black Sea tanker couldn’t penetrate. But you must never despair, he told himself, ever, and if he didn’t, no one should.
The man pleading
