on. ‘Or will I just throw it away?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours. I’ll try.’
It was worth the try. The soup was good, the stew better, the coffee excellent. The cook had made a miraculous recovery from the depths he’d plumbed that morning: or maybe they’d shot the old one. I’d more to think of. I drained my coffee and looked at Marie.
‘You can swim, I take it?’
‘Not very well,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I can float.’
‘Provided there are no iron bars tied to your feet.’ I nodded. ‘That’ll be enough. Would you like to do a little listening while I do a little work?’
‘Of course.’ She was getting round to forgiving me. We went for’ard and I pulled down a couple of boxes for her to stand on, just below the opening of the port ventilator.
‘You won’t miss much of what they say up top,’ I said. ‘Especially, you’ll hear everything that’s said in or by the radio room. Probably nothing much before seven, but you never know. I’m afraid you’re going to get a bit of a crick in the neck but I’ll relieve you as soon as I’m through.’
I left her there, went back to the after end of the hold, climbed three steps up the iron ladder and made a rough estimate of the distance between the top rung and the bottom of the hatch-cover above. Then I came down and started rummaging around in the metal boxes in the starboard corner until I found a bottle-screw that suited me, picked up a couple of hardboard battens and stowed them away, together with the bottle-screw, behind some boxes.
Back at the platform of wooden boxes where we’d spent the night I pushed aside the two loose battens in the outboard row, cautiously lifted down the boxes with the compasses and binoculars, shoved them to one side, took down the box with the aircraft-type lifebelts and emptied out the contents.
There were twelve of the belts altogether, rubber and reinforced canvas covers with leather harness instead of the more usual tapes. In addition to the CO2 bottle and shark-repellant cylinder, each belt had another waterproof cylinder with a wire leading up to a small red lamp fixed on the left shoulder strap. There would be a battery inside that cylinder. I pressed the little switch on one of them and the lamp at once glowed a deep bright red, indication that the equipment, though obsolete, was not old and good augury for the operating efficiency of the gas and water-tightness of the inflated belts. But it wasn’t a thing to be left to chance: I picked out four belts at random and struck the release knob on the first of them.
The immediate hiss of compressed gas wasn’t so terribly loud, I supposed, but inside that confined space it seemed as if everybody aboard the schooner must hear it. Certainly Marie heard it, for she jumped off her box and came quickly back into the pool of light cast by the suspended torch.
‘What’s that?’ she asked quickly. ‘What made the noise?’
‘No rats, no snakes, no fresh enemies,’ I assured her. The hissing had now stopped and I held up a round, stiff, fully inflated lifebelt for her inspection. ‘Just testing. Seems O.K. I’ll test one or two more, but I’ll try to keep it quiet. Heard anything yet?’
‘Nothing. Plenty of talk, that is, Fleck and that Australian man. But it’s mostly about charts, courses, islands, cargoes, things like that. And their girl friends in Suva.’
‘That must be interesting.’
‘Not the way they tell it,’ she snapped.
‘Dreadful,’ I agreed. ‘Just what you were saying last night. Men are all the same. Better get back before you miss anything.’
She gave me a long considering look but I was busy testing the other lifebelts, muffling the noise under the two blankets and the pillows. All four worked perfectly and when, after ten minutes, none showed any sign of deflation the chances seemed high that all the others were at least as good. I picked out another four, hid them behind some boxes, deflated the four I’d tested and replaced them in the box with the others. A minute later I’d all the battens and boxes back in place.
I looked at my watch. It lacked fifteen minutes to seven. There was little enough time left. I went aft again, inspected the water drums with my torch: heavy canvas carrying straps, the shell concave to fit the back, five-inch-diameter spring-loaded lid on top, a spigot with tap at the bottom. They looked sound enough. I dragged two of them out of the corner, snapped open the lids and saw that they were nearly full. I closed the lids again and shook the drums as vigorously as possible. No water escaped, they were completely tight. I turned both the taps on full, let the water come gushing out on the deck – it wasn’t my schooner – then, when they were as empty as I could get them, mopped their interiors dry with a shirt from my case and made my way for’ard to Marie.
‘Anything yet?’ I whispered.
‘Nothing.’
‘I’ll take over for a bit. Here’s the torch. I don’t know what things there are that go bump in the night in the Pacific Ocean, but it is possible that those lifebelts may get torn or just turn out to be perished through age. So I think we’ll take along a couple of empty water drums. They have a very high degree of buoyancy, far more than we require, so I thought we might as well use them to take along some clothes inside, whatever you think you’ll need. Don’t spend all night deciding what to take. Incidentally, I believe many women carry polythene bags in their cases for wrapping up this and that. Got any?’
‘One or two.’
‘Leave one out, please.’
‘Right.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t know much about boats but I think this one has changed once or twice in the past hour.’
‘How do you figure that out?’ Old sea-dog Bentall, very tolerant to the landlubbers.
‘We’re not rolling any more, are we? The waves are passing us from the stern. And it’s the second or third change I’ve noticed.’
She was right, the swell had died down considerably but what little was left was from aft. But I paid small attention to this, I knew the trades died away at night and local currents could set up all kinds of cross-motions in the water. It didn’t seem worth worrying about. She went away and I pressed close to the deckhead.
All I could hear at first was a violently loud tinny rattling against the radiator, a rattling that grew more violent and persistent with every second that passed. Rain, and very heavy rain at that: it sounded like rain that meant to keep going on for a long time. Both Fleck and I would be happy about that.
And then I heard Fleck’s voice. First the patter of hurrying footsteps, then his voice. I guessed that he was standing just inside the doorway of the wireless cabin.
‘Time you got your earphones on, Henry.’ The voice had a reverberating and queerly metallic timbre from its passage down the funnel-shaped ventilator, but was perfectly plain. ‘Just on schedule.’
‘Six minutes yet, boss.’ Henry, seated at the radio table, must have been five feet away from Fleck, yet his voice was hardly less distinct: the ventilator’s amplifying effects were as good as that.
‘Doesn’t matter. Tune in.’
I strained my ear against that ventilator until it seemed to me that I was about
