We had eaten our evening meal and were sitting glumly around the fire when Curley Green came out of his hut. He had been drinking. He was falsely jovial and the reek of whisky was on his breath.
He stood there, looking at us, swaying slightly. The light of his boat lantern was at his back, but the flickering firelight played on the rather stupid grin on his bearded face. There was something gleaming in his right hand. I thought at first that it was the pistol, but it was not. It was a bottle.
He said, “I suppose that yer’ve worked reasonably well, all things considered. I can be generous, when I feel like it. An’ I feel like it. I’ve shown those fish-faced bastards what I can do, an’ I’ve got that Moby Dick eatin’ outa my muckin’ hand. As for that stupid old mucker Noah …” He spat. “He was out ter get me, after what I did to his psalm-singin’ pal. So I got him first — me an’ Moby Dick. Though at one time he had me worried. That blade shouda broken while he was cavortin’ around out there. Anyhow — now we get some real co-operation. An’ tonight — just fer ternight, mind yer — work is the curse of the drinkin’ classes. So we drink …”
Maintaining his balance with a certain amount of difficulty he put the whisky bottle carefully on the ground, backed away from it. I saw, then, that he had two more bottles with him — one in each pocket of his shorts.
He said, “There’s yer ration — one bottle atween four o’ yer. An’ that’s all yer gettin’. An’ you needn’t think o’ gettin’ more from the shed after I’m gone, ‘cause I’m lockin’ up, see?”
He suited the action to the words.
“Say somethin’,” he cried then. “Are you all muckin’ well dumb? Weren’t yer brought up ter say ‘thank you’?”
“Thank you,” I said.
“That’s the spirit, Petey boy. Always the little gent. An’ what about you, Lady Clara Vere-de-Vere?”
“Thank you,” she said coldly.
“I haven’t heard from the boongs yet,” he complained.
“We were taught,” said Mary, “to avoid the Demon Rum.”
“This ain’t rum. It’s whisky. Scotch at that. So you aren’t havin’ any?”
“No,” she said firmly, the contempt almost invariably felt by the wowser for the drunk in her voice.
For a long second Green looked sullen, and I saw that the gun was again in his hand. Then his face cleared. He announced, “I have ter take one o’ you two bitches down ter the beach with me just in case you others get any bright ideas — and it might as well be you. I’m havin’ a few drinks with me muckin’ friends — see? — an’ if yer off the bleedin’ turps it means all the more for those who like it …” He gestured with the pistol. “Up!”
She got up slowly.
“Shake the lead outa yer pants. Get goin’. Down the path.”
“Drinking with your friends?” I asked, frankly curious.
“Sure. Why not? Plenty o’ animals do drink, an’ like it. An’ since these animals is well on the way to bein’ civilised, I’m bringin’ ‘em one o’ the main blessings o’ civilisation.” He leered cunningly. “An’ they’ll know what ter look for in the wrecks now.”
I couldn’t help seeing the funny side of it. “If they acquire the taste,” I told him, “they’ll drink it all before bringing any to you.”
“Be yer muckin’ age, Petey boy,” he laughed, after a dubious, thoughtful pause. “They must have me ter open the bottles for ‘em …” He picked up the lantern, which he had brought out of the shed before he locked it. “An’ that’s the way of it. You have your party, I’ll have mine.”
We watched the yellow light bobbing along the path to the cliff top, reflected from Mary’s white bedsheet-cum-sari, throwing Green’s stocky form into silhouette. We watched the light and the two figures vanish over the cliff edge.
“He might fall and break his neck,” I said.
“There’s a Providence,” she said, “that looks after drunken men, &c. &c. And why didn’t you make this Providence work really hard for its living, Peter? Why didn’t you attack him while he was drunk? I seem to remember that you were airing that idea some time ago.”
“He’s not drunk enough,” I said. “Or he is drunk enough — drunk enough to have lost any inhibitions about using the gun …”
“It’s Mary that I’m worried about,” she said.
“She is sober,” said Mary’s husband. “He is drunk. She is safe. Besides …”
I realised that he was eying the whisky bottle thirstily.
“And what are your views on the Demon Rum, John?” I asked gently.
He grinned, his teeth startlingly white in his dark, bearded face. He said, “They are the same as Mary’s — when Mary is around.”
“I don’t suppose that a drink will kill us,” said Sally.
“I don’t suppose that a small one will,” I said, reaching for the bottle, using my thumbnail to break the metal foil around the screw cap. While I was so doing, Sally found three of the scoured food cans that we were using for drinking mugs, a fourth one to dip water from the bucket.
It occurred to me that we should be feeling some concern for the safety of Mary — but John, her husband, was obviously unconcerned, was concerned more with his chances of snatching a few drinks before her return. Too, I recalled earlier conversations on the subject of Curley Green and sex, and how it had been pointed out that a man making love to a woman is so very vulnerable, how we had come to the conclusion that Curley Green could never let himself be caught with his pants down.
I unscrewed the top of the bottle. Sally passed me the makeshift mugs. By the unsteady firelight it was hard to judge the amount of a decent tot; if anything I erred on the side of generosity. Sally and I topped our drinks up with water. The Samoan preferred to take his straight.
I looked at Sally over the rim of my drinking can, she looked at me over the rim of hers. I said, “I’ve been looking forward to the time when we could have a drink together. I never thought that it would be on this blasted island.”
She said, “We had drinks together aboard the poor little Sue Darling …”
I said, “But it wasn’t the same …”
She said, “But we weren’t the same …”
John was making impatient noises. He succeeded in catching Sally’s eye, said firmly, “Down the hatch.”
“Down the hatch,” we repeated.
It was excellent whisky, and it was criminal to treat it the way that we treated the first tot. (It was criminal, anyhow, to drink it from battered tins.) But we had been abstemious for a long time, for too long a time, and the first mug was taken more for effect than flavour.
“Here’s mud in your eye,” toasted Sally, when the mugs had been recharged.
“And in yourn,” I replied.
John eyed us rather resentfully as we sipped genteelly and then, remembering his party manners, followed suit. All of us were suddenly silent. The others were doubtless recalling, as I was recalling, other drinks in other places, at other times. From the beach drifted up a raucous voice raised in song. After a little while it was not a single voice, it was a chorus. The porpoises, I decided, were more tuneful (or less tuneless) than their mentor.
“Caviar comes from the virgin sturgeon,
The virgin sturgeon’s a very fine fish.
The virgin sturgeon needs no urgin’ —
That’s why caviar is my dish …”
“I wonder what he’s doing …” murmured Sally. And then, with a note of concern in her voice, “Don’t forget that he has Mary with him.”
“She can look after herself,” said Mary’s husband, slurring his words a little. He upended his empty mug, looked at it and then at me suggestively.
“I’ll go and see,” I told Sally. “If he spots me peering over the cliff edge he’s liable to sling a forty five slug at me, but I doubt that his night vision’s all that good …”
And neither was mine, I realised, as I made my cautious way to the head of the path. The drinks had taken effect, too much effect. But I got there without major mishap, subsided so that I lay comfortably prone and peered over the cliff edge. The lantern was on the beach, a foot or so above the waterline, and Mary was standing by it. Out in the water was Curley Green, a dimly seen figure but thrown into silhouette now and again by the phosphorescent spray flung up by the plunging porpoises. They were all around him, playing about him like huge dogs playing about their master. A trick of light showed me something gleaming in his hand, the bottle, showed me the white-harnessed brute into whose open mouth it was being up-ended. And Curley Green, I reflected, would be lucky if he escaped being spitted by one of the blades of his own manufacture, wading out in the near-darkness among a mob of drunken, armed porpoises …
I returned to the others.
“What the hell’s going on down there?” demanded Sally.
“He’s getting plastered,” I said. “With his cobbers.”
“And Mary?” she asked, a faint concern in her voice.
“Yesh, Mary,” said John. “Ish she getting plashtered too?”
“No,” I told him.
“Pity,” he said.
“There’s a fair chance,” I said to Sally, “that something unpleasant is going to happen to friend Curley. He’s out there in the water, with those drunken brutes cavorting all round him. And it’s the ones with the swords who seem to have been getting most of the whisky …”
“But if anything does happen to him,” she said regretfully, “where does that get us? If Noah were still in charge we could come to some sort of an understanding with him. But this Moby Dick …”
“A treacherous bastard,” I agreed. “But, damn it all, are we going to let ourselves be outmaneuvered by … by …” I remembered the term of abuse that Curley Green had once used. “By a hunk of peripatetic cats’ fodder?”
“For all we know,” said Sally cheerfully, “Moby Dick may be a military genius of such calibre as to make Napoleon seem like a little boy playing with lead soldiers.”
“Balls,” I said. “Don’t forget that Napoleon had cannon at his disposal — that’s how he made his name, by the first really intelligent use of artillery. All that Moby Dick has is such weapons as we can make him.”
“He can press the whales into service,” she said. “As well we know. What if he can conscript the giant squids and the electric rays and eels?”
“What an imagination,” I said admiringly. “Are you sure that you’re sober?
“Very unsure,” she admitted. “But this drink is doing us good, Peter. It’s good to be able to feel really relaxed at last, to talk the way we used to talk at a party back home, playing around with all sorts of wild ideas …”
I recharged the mugs.
John, as he took his, was singing softly:
“Our drink is water pure, water pure, water pure,
Our drink is water pure —
From the crystal stream …”
Like hell it is, I thought sardonically.
And then I heard Mary scream.