The Going Down of the Sun (3 page)

Between breaths I gasped, “Harry, we have to get him ashore. I can't help—if I leave him he'll die. Get the engine started. Never mind about weighing anchor, we haven't time—let the chain go, I'll buy them a new one. Take her out through the gap we came in by—slowly, you haven't much room.”

While he was doing this I was breathing, for myself and for the boy. His pulse was improving marginally. I was sorry to ditch the anchor, it's the sort of blot no sailor likes on her escutcheon, but lifting it would have taken minutes and this boy was already on borrowed time.

As he turned the
Rubber Lion
towards the channel, Harry looked back over his shoulder once more and said, “What about the woman?” His voice was low with shock.

I said, “What woman?” and he nodded and took us out into the loch.

We were making for Tayvallich a couple of miles down the coast. It wasn't, God knows, the sort of place you'd find an emergency unit—from what I could remember there was a pub and a shop or two—but there was a harbour and a road, and we could have travelled a lot further than two miles to find either.

It probably took us half an hour, and that with the engine at full revs. I might have sailed it faster, but Harry couldn't have managed alone under sail and if I'd sailed the boat my patient would have died. So Harry motored us down to Tayvallich and went ashore to summon help, and I stayed on my knees on the boards, bent like a succubus over the body of my victim.

And I stayed there, with my legs numb and my back breaking, breathing now for him and now for me, until a man in a helmet with an oxygen bottle took him from me, which was the first I knew that the sudden loud wind that had blown up was a helicopter landing.

As a doctor, I went with my patient. As a policeman, Harry stayed at the scene of the incident.

A wonderful thing is the helicopter. They took us to Glasgow, sixty miles away as the crow flies, and it took us half an hour. An ambulance with a good driver who knew the road might have got us halfway to Oban by then.

Actually, he'd have survived the drive to Oban. The oxygen finally flushed his lungs in a way my second-hand breath had not, and by the time we were in the air he was breathing for himself. The damage to his skull might or might not be serious, but the odds were that if he hadn't died of it by now he wasn't going to. He had superficial burns to the right side of his face and neck, his right forearm was broken, and he had acquired an interesting collection of cuts and bruises either in the explosion or in being hauled aboard the
Rubber Lion
by whatever parts of his anatomy to hand. Once he was breathing, none of it threatened his life.

Now I had a little time to think about it, that was the most amazing part of the whole thing. He had no business floating away from the cinders that remained of the
Skara Sun
with no more to show for the disaster than a bump on the head and a broken arm. After an explosion like that you'd hardly expect to find a body, let alone a comparatively undamaged body still with some life left in it. There was only one explanation: that he hadn't been on board when it happened.

We'd found him floating beside the upturned dinghy, which was knocked about like himself but also in better condition than you could reasonably expect. It might have been lying well astern on its painter and thus escaped the worst of the blast. But it seemed likely that the boy had been in the dinghy, rowing away from the big cruiser when the explosion occurred. Perhaps he meant to emulate the seals and catch breakfast for his lady. It was the best decision he'd ever make.

Thinking about them like that, as a couple enjoying their holiday, making a late start to the day just as Harry and I were doing a hundred yards ahead of them, and then him setting off in the dinghy to land some breakfast while she lit the stove, brought home the sheer human tragedy of it. By the arbitrary good fortune that they'd anchored in company last night instead of alone, and anchored moreover behind a qualified if somewhat out-of-practice doctor, the boy on the stretcher with the oxygen mask over his face seemed likely to escape with his life. But a moment's carelessness in connecting a gas cylinder or something equally basic had cost him the woman he loved and the boat he'd worked for.

Then I remembered the sparkling globe dancing on the shock-waves in the lagoon and my belly turned over. Dear God, he'd lost his baby as well.

He started coming round in Casualty, not enough to make sense but it was a hopeful sign as far as the head injury was concerned. When they took him to Radiography I phoned the pub at Tayvallich and, sure enough, Harry wasn't a million miles away.

I told him where I was, and that the boy had made it this far and the indications were hopeful, and asked what he'd found out at his end. “Who is he? Where had they come from? How many were on board?”

“Well,” Harry began slowly, and even down sixty-odd miles of Highland telegraph wire I could tell he was hedging, “the
Skara Sun
left Oban on Saturday afternoon, about three. It belongs—belonged—to Frazer McAllister, a Glasgow industrialist, and his wife. Mrs. Alison McAllister took the boat out on her own—she told the boat yard she was picking her husband up in Crinan.” A thirty-mile run: the
Sun
would have got her there in time for dinner.

“Did she often go out alone?”

“Quite often. The boat was hers, really, the husband wasn't that interested though he'd go along to keep her company. What's supercargo?”

I tried not to smile. Harry can hear me smiling across a major land mass. “It's a passenger. Someone who's less use than ornament on board a boat. Where did you hear that?”

“The yard in Oban. They reckoned Mrs. McAllister was the sailor, her husband was supercargo.”

For a moment I said nothing. Now the good sailor was with all the other good sailors on Fiddler's Green, and the supercargo was slowly waking up to the realisation of what he'd lost.

And just how much had he lost? “Did they say if she had a child with her?”

“A child?” His voice sharpened. “Was there a child too?”

“I don't know. There was a child's toy—a baby's, really—in the water. I was going to pick it up when you spotted the boy. The yard didn't mention a child, then?”

“No. She was alone when she left Oban.”

“Perhaps McAllister brought it aboard with him at Crinan.”

There was a fractional, significant pause on the line before Harry said, “I don't think so. I don't think McAllister was ever aboard—not this trip.”

I didn't understand, though perhaps I should have done: this may be the age of the Yuppie but the boy on the table down in Radiography just wasn't old enough to be an industrialist. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, the boat yard in Oban gave me a description of Frazer McAllister. I don't know who we pulled out of the water this morning, but it wasn't a fifty-year-old Glaswegian with half his face missing and an artificial leg.”

There was no arguing on that score. Happy with the results of the X-ray, they put him to bed in an observation ward and I watched while he slowly recovered his senses.

He was damn nearly thirty years too young to be Mrs. McAllister's husband, and when he finally got his wits marshalled all parts of him would be present and correct. Other than the minor burn on one cheek, his face was unmarked—curiously unmarked—until today neither time nor tragedy had laid their hands on him.

Long and slender in the big bed, he looked like a tall child. The dark hair had dried in a slightly tousled fringe over his high forehead, and the lashes beginning to flutter on his cheekbones were as long as a girl's. His broken arm was sandbagged at his side. An awareness of that, and the pain in his head, was getting through to him now. His face twisted anxiously and his head moved in little fretful arcs on the pillow. His good hand twitched and plucked without co-ordination at the sheet over him. He mumbled to himself. Once I thought he said a name, but it wasn't Alison. It might have been Peter.

A little time passed. The nurse brought me some coffee. While I was drinking it I became aware that the pattern of his breathing had altered, that the little febrile movements of his head and hand had stilled. I looked up quickly and met his eyes.

His eyes were brown, the deep peaty brown of trout pools, but that little silvery movement within them was not fish but fear. If he didn't yet know what had happened, he knew something had—something vast and terrible enough to reach down to him through the layers of unconsciousness to where he had hovered perilously close to oblivion.

His lips formed words, but his mouth was too dry to get them out. It didn't matter; I could read their shape on his lips, their meaning in his scared eyes. He said, “Who are you? Where's Alison?”

I answered the easy one first. “I'm Clio Marsh. My husband and I were anchored near you at the Fairy Isles. We pulled you out of the water.”

He knew what had happened; maybe not in the forefront of his mind, where his returning consciousness was struggling against acceptance, but in the heart and depths of him he knew. Still his lips framed the word: “Water?”

“There was an explosion. Your boat—the boat you were on. The
Skara Sun.
She blew up.”

“Where's Alison?”

It wasn't my job to tell him. I'd broken enough bad news in my time. His doctor could tell him—I'd ceased being responsible for him as soon as we'd landed here—or the police could, or he could wait until someone else whose job it was came along.

Wait while his returning strength fed the anxiety which would rip him up like claws. Wait while the memory came back by degrees, piecemeal, fragments of a horrid jigsaw falling slowly into place and presenting its picture at last with dreadful inevitability. Wait while memory and instinct and intuition and dread together built up a cohesive account of his loss that he could begin to grieve over if only someone would tell him it was true. Until then he was in a limbo-land full of monstrous shadows but no reality.

I couldn't make it easier for him, but I could avoid making it harder. “If she was on board the boat, she's dead. I'm sorry. You were the only survivor.”

I watched it fall into his eyes, and float there for a moment and then begin to sink. I was right—he had known, had only been waiting for confirmation. Tears welled and ran from the corners of his eyes into his hair. He raised his good arm with effort and laid it across his face, crying behind it. The rhythm of his sobbing vibrated through the bed. He was too weak for great paroxysms of grief, but I thought his heart was breaking.

A touch on my shoulder startled me. It was the casualty officer who had met the helicopter. “I see you've told him.”

I shrugged. “He asked. So I told him.”

He nodded. He was about six-foot-four in his trainers and hadn't shaved this morning. Of course, to a hospital casualty officer morning can be the end of a very long night. He wasn't criticising; I think he was relieved. “He might as well know—start his mourning while he's still close enough to what happened to value his own survival. It'll be worse when he forgets how close he came to dying too.”

I was surprised. Philosophy you don't expect from a hospital casualty doctor in the middle of a Monday morning. I asked his name.

“Neil Burns.” The accent was pure Glasgow; not Gorbals, but Glasgow. He looked at me with frank curiosity. “Are you really a doctor?”

I really am, but I don't really look it. I didn't really look it when I was practising, the whole medical ethos is basically antipathetic to doctors who can wear a gym-slip and travel half-fare on buses, but since I foresook medicine to make my living out of murder I have lost even that slight air of professional authority I once had.

This particular morning I was wearing damp shorts, with my forty-two-year-old knees turning blue beneath them, a dry sweater that Harry had pulled over my head after he pulled me out of the water and which I had not until that moment realised was back to front, and canvas shoes drying to a salty whiteness over no socks. I couldn't find it in me to resent that note of incredulity in his voice.

I smiled wearily. “Yes, really. Though I don't advertise the fact any more—I don't know how he knew whose boat to get himself blown up beside.”

Neil Burns's big angular face with its rugby player's nose turned disapproving. He didn't mind my knees, or the subtle pervasive aroma of wet deck-shoes, but he didn't like me wasting my degree. He scowled at my ring finger. “I suppose you gave it up when you got married.”

I bristled. “I gave it up years before I got married. I gave it up when I found I could make a living without being propositioned by drunks every Friday night, without having to wash other people's vomit out of my clothes; without being accused of incompetence, or worse, every time that all the skill and care and sheer hard work I put in didn't pay off; without spending my rare days off seeing my own doctor about the ulcers that wouldn't heal and the fact that the only nights I didn't cry myself to sleep were the ones when I was just too God-damned tired. I did your job for ten years, sonny, and I was bloody good at it, but I wouldn't do it again if the only alternative was sending my mother to the glue factory.”

I was entitled to answer his implied criticism, but my vehemence seemed out of all proportion, even to me. It sounded defensive, as if he had touched a raw nerve. I hadn't realised I felt guilty about it.

But the disapproval in Dr. Burns's face had faded into understanding, even respect. “Aye, ten years is a long time. So what do you do now?”

I could have told him. I could have told him that all the nightmares I had worked through, all the disasters human beings wreak on one another and then bring to doctors to cure, now peopled the pages of eight books on the shelves of his public library; that I spent my days writing about murder and mayhem, and by night slept soundly between pleasant dreams. I don't know why I didn't: owning up to being a novelist isn't like admitting you're the chucker-out at a brothel, it's a perfectly respectable occupation. But instead I said, “Now I just make the occasional boat-call. Don't you think we should find out who he is?”