Bear Island. Alistair MacLean
perpetually afraid that the gods might hear him. It could have been a meaningless mannerism but I didn’t think so: no question, he walked in perpetual fear of Gerran, who was at no pains to conceal the fact that he despised him as a man just as much as he admired him as an artist. Why Gerran, a man of indisputably high intelligence, should behave in this way, I didn’t know. Perhaps he was one of that far from small group of people who harbour such an inexhaustible fund of ill-will towards mankind in general that they lose no opportunity to vent some of it on the weak, the pliant or those who are in no position to retaliate. Perhaps it was a personal matter. I didn’t know either man or their respective backgrounds well enough to form a valid judgement.
‘Ah,’ tis the good healer,’ a gravelly voice said behind me. I turned round without haste and looked at the pyjama-clad figure sitting up in his bunk, holding fast with his left hand to a bulkhead strap while with the other he clung equally firmly to the neck of a scotch bottle, three parts empty. ‘Up the ship comes and down the ship goes but naught will come between the kindly shepherd and his mission of mercy to his queasy flock. You will join me in a post-prandial snifter, my good man?’
‘Later, Lonnie, later.’ Lonnie Gilbert knew and I knew and we both knew that the other knew that later would be too late, three inches of scotch in Lonnie’s hands had as much hope as the last meringue at the vicar’s tea-party, but the conventions had been observed, honour satisfied. ‘You weren’t at dinner, so I thought—’
‘Dinner!’ He paused, examined the word he’d just said for inflexion and intonation, decided his delivery had been lacking in a proper contempt and repeated himself. ‘Dinner! Not the hogswash itself, which I suppose is palatable enough for those who lack my esoteric tastes. It’s the hour at which it’s served. Barbaric. Even Attila the Hun—’
‘You mean you no sooner pour your apéritif than the bell goes?’
‘Exactly. What does a man do?’
Coming from our elderly production manager, the question was purely rhetorical. Despite the baby-clear blue eyes and faultless enunciation, Lonnie hadn’t been sober since he’d stepped aboard the Morning Rose: it was widely questioned whether he’d been sober for years. Nobody—least of all Lonnie—seemed to care about this, but this was not because nobody cared about Lonnie. Nearly all people did, in greater or lesser degrees, dependent on their own natures. Lonnie, growing old now, with all his life in films, was possessed of a rare talent that had never bloomed and never would now, for he was cursed—or blessed—with insufficient drive and ruthlessness to take him to the top, and mankind, for a not always laudable diversity of reasons, tends to cherish its failures: and Lonnie, it was said, never spoke ill of others and this, too, deepened the affection in which he was held except by the minority who habitually spoke ill of everyone.
‘It’s not a problem I’d care to be faced with myself,’ I said. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Me?’ He inclined his bald pate 45 degrees backwards, tilted the bottle, lowered it and wiped a few drops of the elixir from his grey beard. ‘Never been ill in my life. Who ever heard of a pickled onion going sour?’ He cocked his head sideways. ‘Ah!’
‘Ah, what?’ He was listening, that I could see, but I couldn’t hear a damned thing except the crash of bows against seas and the metallic drumming vibration of the ancient steel hull which accompanied each downwards plunge.
‘“The horns of Elfland faintly blowing,”’ Lonnie said. ‘“Hark! The Herald Angels.”’
I harked and this time I heard. I’d heard it many times, and with steadily increasing horror, since boarding the Morning Rose, a screechingly cacophonous racket that was fit for heralding nothing short of Armageddon. The three perpetrators of this boiler-house bedlam of sound, Josh Hendriks’s young sound crew assistants, might not have been tone stone deaf but their classical musical education could hardly be regarded as complete, as not one of them could read a note of music. John, Luke and Mark were all cast in the same contemporary mould, with flowing shoulder-length hair and wearing clothes that gave rise to the suspicion that they must have broken into a gurus’ laundry. All their spare time was spent with recording equipment, guitar, drums and xylophone in the for’ard recreation room where they rehearsed, apparently night and day, against the moment of their big break-through into the pop-record world where they intended, appropriately enough, to bill themselves as ‘The Three Apostles’.
‘They might have spared the passengers on a night like this,’ I said.
‘You underestimate our immortal trio, my dear boy. The fact that you may be one of the most excruciating musicians in existence does not prevent you from having a heart of gold. They have invited the passengers along to hear them perform in the hope that this might alleviate their sufferings.’ He closed his eyes as a raucous bellow overlaid with a high-pitched scream as of some animal in pain echoed down the passageway outside. ‘The concert seems to have begun.’
‘You can’t fault their psychology,’ I said. ‘After that, an Arctic gale is going to seem like a summer afternoon on the Thames.’
‘You do them an injustice.’ Lonnie lowered the level in the bottle by another inch then slid down into his bunk to show that the audience was over. ‘Go and see for yourself.’
So I went and saw for myself and I had been doing them an injustice. The Three Apostles, surrounded by that plethora of microphones, amplifiers, speakers and arcane electronic equipment without which the latter-day troubadours will not—and, more importantly, cannot—operate, were performing on a low platform in one corner of the recreation room and maintaining their balance with remarkable ease largely, it seemed, because their bodily gyrations and contortions, as inseparable a part of their art as the electronic aids, seemed to synchronize rather well with the pitching and rolling of the Morning Rose. Rather conservatively, if oddly, clad in blue jeans and psychedelic caftans, and bent over their microphones in an attitude of almost acolytic fervour, the three young sound assistants were giving of their uninhibited best and from what little could be seen of the ecstatic expressions on faces eighty per cent concealed at any given moment by wildly swinging manes of hair, it was plain that they thought that their best approximated very closely to the sublime. I wondered, briefly, how angels would look with ear-plugs, then turned my attention to the audience.
There were fifteen in all, ten members of the production crew and five of the cast. A round dozen of them were very clearly the worse for wear, but their sufferings were being temporarily held in abeyance by the fascination, which stopped a long way short of rapture, induced by the Three Apostles who had now reached a musical crescendo accompanied by what seemed to be some advanced form of St Vitus’ Dance. A hand touched me on the shoulder and I looked sideways at Charles Conrad.
Conrad was thirty years old and was to be the male lead in the film, not yet a big-name star but building up an impressive international reputation. He was cheerful, ruggedly handsome, with a thatch of thick brown hair that kept falling over his eyes: he had eyes of the bluest blue and most gleamingly white perfect teeth—like his name, his own—that would have transported a dentist into ecstasies or the depths of despair, depending upon whether he was primarily interested in the aesthetic or economic aspects of his profession. He was invariably friendly, courteous and considerate, whether by instinct or calculated design it was impossible to say. He cupped his hand to my ear, nodded towards the performers.
‘Your contract specifies hairshirts?’
‘No. Why? Does yours?’
‘Solidarity of the working classes.’ He smiled, looking at me with an oddly speculative glint in his eyes. ‘Letting the opera buffs down, aren’t you?’
‘They’ll recover. Anyway, I always tell my patients that a change is as good as a rest.’ The music ceased abruptly and I lowered my voice about fifty decibels. ‘Mind you, this is carrying it too far. Fact is, I’m on duty. Mr Gerran is a bit concerned about you all.’
‘He wants his herd delivered to the cattle market in prime condition?’
‘Well, I suppose you all represent a pretty considerable