Fifteen seconds later Marie and the two drums were on deck and I was lowering the hatch-cover back into position and placing the bolt in approximately the original position in case someone did venture out later on a tour of inspection.
With the darkness and blinding rain visibility didn’t exceed a few feet and we felt rather than saw our way to the stern of the schooner. I leaned far over the rail on the port counter to try to establish the position of the screw, for although the schooner was making hardly any more than three knots now-I supposed the lack of visibility must have forced Fleck to reduce speed-even so, that screw could still chop us up pretty badly. At least that.
At first I could see nothing, just a sea surface that was no longer that but a churned and hissing expanse of milky white froth, but my eyes were gradually becoming more adjusted to the darkness and after a minute or so I could clearly make out the smooth black water in the rain-free shelter under the long overhang of the schooner’s stern. Not quite black-it was black flecked with the sparkling iridescence of phosphorus, and it wasn’t long before I traced the area of maximum turbulence that gave rise to the phosphorescence. That was where the screw was-and it was far enough forward to let us drop off over the stern-post without any fear of being sucked into the vortex of the screw.
Marie went first. She held a water drum in one hand while I lowered her by the other until she was half-submerged in the water. Then I let go. Five seconds later I was in the water myself.
No one heard us go, no one saw us go. And we didn’t see Fleck and his schooner go. He wasn’t using his steaming lights that night. With the line of business he was in, he’d probably forgotten where the switch was.
CHAPTER THREE
Tuesday 7 P.M.-Wednesday 9 A.M.
After the numbing stinging cold of that torrential rain the water in the sea was almost blissfully warm. There were no waves, any that dared show their heads were beaten flat by that deluge, and what little swell there was was long enough to be no more than a gentle undulation on the surface of the sea. The wind still seemed to be from the east: that was if my assumption that the schooner had still been travelling south had been correct.
For the first thirty seconds or so I couldn’t see Marie. I knew she could be only yards away but the rain bouncing off the water raised so dense and impenetrable a curtain that nothing at sea level could be seen through its milky opacity. I shouted, twice, but there was no reply. I took half-a-dozen strokes, towing the can behind me, and literally bumped into her. She was coughing and spluttering as if she had swallowed some water, but she still retained hold of her water drum and seemed otherwise unharmed. She was high in the water so she must at least have remembered to operate the CO2 release switch on her lifebelt.
I put my head close to hers and said: “All right?”
“Yes.” She coughed some more and said: “My face and neck. That rain-they feel cut.”
It was too dark to see whether her face was, in fact, cut. But I could believe it, my own face felt as if it had blundered into a wasp’s nest. Black mark for Bentall. The first and most obvious thing that I should have done after opening that hatch and feeling the lash of that cannonading rain should have been to dig some of the left-over clothes out of our suitcases and wrap them round our heads, bandanna-fashion. But too late for tears now. I reached for the plastic bag attached to my drum, ripped it open and spread the blanket over our heads. We could still feel the impact of that rain like a shower of huge hailstones but at least our skins were no longer exposed. It was better than nothing.
When I’d finished arranging it Marie said: “What do we do now? Stay here in our tent or start swimming?”
I passed up all the obvious remarks about wondering whether we should swim for Australia or South America, they didn’t even begin to seem funny in the circumstances, and said: “I think we should try to move away from here. If this rain keeps up Fleck will never find us. But there’s no guarantee that it will last. We might as well swim west, that’s the way the wind and the swell are running, it’s roughly the direction in which the island would lie if Fleck hasn’t altered course too much, and it’s easiest for us.”
“Isn’t that the way Fleck would think, and move to the west looking for us?”
“If he thinks we’re only half as twisted as he is himself, he’ll probably figure we’ve gone in the other direction. Heads you win, tails you lose. Come on.”
We made poor speed. As she’d said, she was no shakes as a swimmer, and those two drums and the soggy heavy blanket didn’t help us much, but we did cover a fair bit of ground in the first hour, swimming for ten minutes, resting for five. If it hadn’t been for the thought that we could do this sort of thing for the next month and still not arrive anywhere, it would have been quite pleasant: the sea was still warm, the rain was beginning to ease and the sharks stayed to home.
After an hour and a half or what I guessed to be approximately that, during which Marie became very quiet, rarely speaking, not even answering when I spoke to her, I said: “Enough. This’ll do us. Any energy we have left we’ll use for survival. If Fleck swings this far off course it’s just bad luck and not much that we can do about it.”
I let my legs sink down into the sea, then let out an involuntary exclamation as if I had been bitten or stung. Something large and solid had brushed by my leg, and although there are a lot of large and solid things in the sea all I could think of was of something about fifteen feet long with a triangular fin and a mouth like an unsprung bear-trap. And then it came to me that I’d felt no swirl or disturbance in the water and I cautiously lowered my legs again just as Marie said: “What is it? What’s the matter?”
“I wish old Fleck would bring his schooner by here,” I said yearningly. “That would be the end of both of them.” It wasn’t that something large and solid had brushed by my leg, it had been my leg brushing by something large and solid, which was a different thing altogether. “I’m standing in about four feet of water.”
There was a momentary “pause, then she said: “Me, too.” It was the slow dazed answer of one who cannot believe something: more accurately, of one who can’t understand something, and I found it vaguely puzzling. “What do you think-”
“Land, dear girl,” I said expansively. I felt a bit lightheaded with relief, I hadn’t given tuppence for our chances of survival. “Must be that island we thought we saw. The way the sea-bed is sloping up it can be nothing else. Now’s our chance to see those dazzling sands and waving palms and the brown-skinned beauties we’ve heard so much about. Give me your hand.”
There was no answering levity or even gladness from her, she just took my hand in silence as I transferred the blanket to my other hand and started feeling my cautious way up the rapidly shelving sea-floor. In less than a minute we were standing on rock, and on any other night we would have been high and dry. In that rain, we were high and wet. But we were high. Nothing else mattered.
We lifted both water drums on to the shore and I draped the blanket over Marie’s head: the rain had slackened, but slackening on that night was a comparative thing only, it was still fierce enough to be hurtful. I said: “I’m just going to take a brief look round. Back in five minutes.”
“All right,” she said dully. It didn’t seem to matter whether I came or went.
I was back in two minutes; not five. I’d taken eight steps
and fallen into the sea on the other side and it didn’t take me long to discover that our tiny island was only about four times as long as it was broad and consisted of nothing but rock. I would have liked to see Robinson Crusoe making out on that little lot. Marie hadn’t moved from where I had left her.
“It’s just a little rock in the middle of the sea,” I reported. “But at least we’re safe. For the present anyway.”