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AT SEVEN-THIRTY THAT evening, we went to dinner with Mason. Everyone wore their best clothes again, the English way. As on the previous evening, the gloom of dusk was alleviated only by a dozen candles and the doors stayed open so we could listen to whispering of the sea.
We began with Mr Wiles’s toast to the Queen then sat down and ate avocado salads followed by a chicken chasseur. The man with the ponytail served us in silence. I couldn’t help noticing that Dr Tomlinson was missing and no one remarked on his absence. As soon as I’d finished the main course, I put my knife and fork together and folded my hands.
“Where’s Steven?” I said.
There was a pause. I looked at Ashanta. Everyone else looked at each other.
“Midshipman Collins suffered a seizure this morning,” Mr Endersby said. “I’m sorry. Someone should have told you. You’re one of us now.”
“No need for any more secrets,” Rita Patel said. She put her fingers over Endersby’s hand and looked warmly at me as if time had done nothing to alter her conclusion that I was a younger him.
“What sort of a seizure?” Ashanta said in a tone that suggested she already knew.
Mason looked at his empty plate. “He’s transforming.”
“What’s Dr Tomlinson’s role in that?” I asked.
There was another exchange of glances.
“I thought there was no need for any more secrets,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Mason replied. “It’s just a little bit sensitive, that’s all. Mostly, we live in a state of denial.” He said this in an accusatory tone, looking round the table. Only Celia Soper met his eyes.
Derek Goulding leant towards me. “It’s Tomlinson’s role to make it as smooth as possible. After the first two, we realised that, in the final day, after the seizure, you need to be near seawater. Not overly, or you’ll drown. It helps if someone’s talking to you. We built a ... ‘chamber’ deep inside the Aurora, near the keel. It opens onto the sea when the transition’s complete. Once you have a seizure, the change gathers pace exponentially. I don’t think it’s painful, but I’m fairly sure it’s distressing.”
“You actually built a door that leads into the sea?” I said. “How on earth did you do that?”
Goulding scowled and sucked a packet of air in.
Mason grinned and leaned back in his chair. “Maybe you should have looked a little more closely at The History of the Cruise Ship Aurora, Hugo.”
“I still haven’t had my memory restored,” I said, “so I’m not sure what difference that might make.”
“The door’s always been there,” Goulding said. “It’s been there since the start.”
“It was in the 1926 design,” Mason added. “The chamber too. We merely opened it up.”
“What was it originally used for?” Ashanta said.
Goulding shrugged. “No one knows.”
We listened to the ocean and registered the wind gathering pace while we digested the enormity of this.
“It’s never been used,” Mason said. “There was never any indication as to what it was meant for.”
“It’s as if whoever designed the ship knew all this was coming,” Goulding said, stating the obvious.
“What do you mean, ‘Whoever designed the ship’?” Ashanta said. “You wrote the book. You mean you don’t know?”
Goulding shifted his bottom. “I’ve written about lots of ships in my time. Mostly, limited edition prints, paid for by subscription. I was pointed in the direction of this one early in the nineties by a colleague, an old friend of mine with the proverbial ‘long grey beard and glittering eye’. He said he’d started work on it a decade before, but given up because there were too many cul-de-sacs. Yet that’s precisely the sort of thing that’s always interested me. Result: The History of the Cruise Ship Aurora, Compact Press, 1997.”
“But you didn’t find out what the chamber or the door were for,” I said.
“It’s an interesting book,” Mason said. “Every third page, ‘For reasons currently unknown but which future research may stand to reveal’.”
Goulding laughed. “I’d like to see anyone else do better.”
“C&B funded the research and paid sufficient subscriptions for a hundred copies,” Mason said.
“They wanted to control what I found out and how much I wrote about it, that’s all. I wish to God I’d never accepted their offer.”
Mason poured himself another half-glassful of wine. “Of course, the fact that they knew someone was working on it was sufficient to make them start burning documents.”
“Why would they do that?” Ashanta said.
“You’d have to know what was in them to answer that,” Mason replied. “Anyway, they wanted to veto the final draft. They withdrew the money they’d put up and Derek had to pay for publication himself.”
“So there’s something in there they don’t want anyone to know about,” I said.
“Apparently,” Mason said. “Yes.”
“What do you think it is?” Ashanta asked.
Goulding bit his lower lip as if he wasn’t sure whether he’d already said too much. Then he shrugged. “There’s a fascinating structural resemblance between the Aurora and certain ... mythical ships detailed by the Phoenician author Sanchuniathon, and also the Caleuche as described by natives of Southern Chile. But they’re easily dismissed. It’s not enough to scare C&B.”
“What, then?” Ashanta said.
“I believe precisely because of the clause, ‘For reasons currently unknown but which future research may stand to reveal’. As far as academics are concerned, that sort of thing’s like a red rag to a bull. The next thing you know, they’re citing it in applications for research grants, then what was once nowheresville is suddenly as busy as the Klondike. I’m convinced C&B hoped to keep an indifferent world indifferent by presenting my work as the final crushingly dull word on a dreary subject.”
“I don’t understand,” Ashanta said. “If I’d been you, I’d have told them to take a running jump. I certainly wouldn’t have come on their cruise, and put however many hundreds of pounds it costs to get here into their pockets.”
“Derek’s not a guest,” Mason said.
“Pardon?” I said.
“I’m a prisoner,” Goulding said.
Ashanta drew her head back.
He smiled. “After the History was published, C&B sedulously bought up every copy, except the one now in the library, and destroyed them. Then, bit by bit, they cut off my sources of income. I gradually lost everything. Work, family, friends, savings, even the possibility of state welfare. I was on the verge of starving to death when suddenly I ‘won’ a competition to live on the Aurora free of charge indefinitely.”
“Lucky indeed,” Mason said dryly, toasting him.
He sighed. “Hence I have a very decent standard of living aboard a ship I can never leave. Now I’ve nothing to lose, of course I can tell the truth to relative strangers.”
“Are you any closer to finding out what the door in the hull’s for?” I asked, at last.
“What it’s now being used for.”
This sent a perceptible chill through the table. I caught some of the others nodding their heads out of the corner of my eye, as if they’d thought long and hard about it and that was the only reasonable conclusion. We sat in silence for a few moments, as if the confession demanded such a thing, looking at our empty plates. Even our breathing felt subdued.
“Hugo and I won a competition to get on here,” Ashanta said softly, at last. “Do you think maybe we’re here for a reason?”
“C&B don’t do anything by accident,” Goulding replied. “And of course they own the company that makes Snooks.”
Everyone turned a sheepish look on us. They’d obviously known this all along, but hadn’t said anything.
“We never thought you were journalists,” Endersby said eventually. “We thought you were spies.”
“We’re very sorry,” Rita Patel said. She put a napkin to her face and her eyes watered.
The silence was broken by the squeaky wheels of the approaching desserts trolley. The man with the ponytail gave us each a bowlful of apple crumble and circumnavigated the table while we all said ‘cream, please’ or ‘custard, please’. Then he squeaked leisurely away like something out of a horror film.
We ate in silence, but not too much of an uncomfortable one any more. We were all too busy following our own trains of thought to notice or care that no one else was speaking. Afterwards, we stood up and went out onto the deck. It was almost dark now and a few bars of half-light lay on the horizon like sheaves of luminous paper in the process of fading. As usual, an otherwise flat line where the sky met the sea was marred by our C&B pursuers, poised like a spectre for some grim purpose.
“They don’t seem to be trying to catch us up,” Ashanta said.
“Nor will they,” Endersby said. “Apart from anything else, the episode with the Kenyan fishermen probably taught them that we’re protected.”
“Surely they could afford to come a little closer,” I said.
“They may not need to,” he replied. “For all we know, they could have the Aurora bugged in all sorts of sophisticated ways. It might be as well if we all proceed on the assumption that our tiniest, most intimate communications are being constantly monitored.”
Goulding turned to him. “Or it might be better to accept what we can’t change and carry on as normal.”
Endersby smiled. “Either way. And of course they know it’s only a matter of time before we run out of fuel, and food, and water.”
“Those of a more optimistic disposition among them probably think we’ll soon be begging them to send a boarding party,” Mason said.
I wondered how long this badinage was going to continue. Then Celia Soper wrapped her shawl more tightly round herself and took Ashanta’s arm.
“Captain Mason,” she said, “we all need to talk further. Preferably indoors with the doors closed since it’s getting decidedly chilly out here. Are we having coffee tonight?”
We shuffled back inside. It struck me as ironic that they all thought C&B were listening in on their conversations, given that that’s what Ashanta and I had previously thought about them. We sat down at the table and the ponytail – I wish I didn’t have to call him that, but to my shame, it was all I noticed - wheeled in a trolley with a percolator. He poured us each a cup, added cream, then put a fresh pot in the middle of the table and left.
I’ve always thought it odd that people see coffee as an after-dinner essential. Call me boring, but I tend to go to bed soon after I’ve eaten the last meal of the day, and coffee only makes me climb the walls. But I didn’t like to be the odd one out.
Ashanta watched the man with the ponytail go through the double doors into the kitchen. “Is he infected?” she whispered to Mason.
“I think he’d be a little less helpful if he wasn’t,” Mason replied.
“Have we enough fuel to reach the Mariana Trench?” Celia Soper said, in an obvious bid to cut through the irrelevancies.
“The instruments are beginning to fail,” Mason said, “and for reasons Dr Tomlinson has explained to me, but which till then I’d failed to register, the stars are fairly useless as a navigational aid. In short, I believe we’re travelling due west, but I can’t be entirely sure.”
“What even is the Mariana Trench?” Rita Patel said.
“It’s in the Western Pacific Ocean,” Mason said. “Eleven thousand metres below sea level. The lowest point on earth.”
“And – and you think it’s where the bright fish might live?” she said.
He directed his answer to Celia Soper. “I’m only taking us there because I haven’t any alternative plans.”
“I can’t believe that,” she said.
“Unless you call sailing until we run out of energy and sustenance a plan.”
“We’ll all have transformed by then.”
“That’s what I’m banking on,” he said. “But nothing’s certain. The bigger question is, what are we supposed to do when we get there?”
She smiled. “When I lay the cards, we’ll find out. How long do you think it’ll take?”
“With respect to Hugo,” Mason said, “I honestly can’t believe he’s the oracle.”
“As you just admitted, you haven’t any alternative. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
I noticed that Russell Bittacy hadn’t said anything much all evening. He looked drunk and once or twice he’d almost nodded off. I guess if you’re already partial to the odd bourbon or three, the realisation that something ghastly’s about to happen to you is more likely to increase your intake than put you on the wagon.
It turned out that Celia Soper’s words were the last anyone had to say that night. We all got up and made our way back to our cabins as if we’d been given a stay of execution we didn’t particularly want. As Ashanta and I linked arms, I saw Russell Bittacy stagger to the barrier railings and vomit into the sea. Rita Patel offered him a comforting arm, but he shrugged her off roughly.
The next day at breakfast, Dr Tomlinson informed us Bittacy had hanged himself.
