The Black Tide

‘Please,’ he said, leaning forward again and gazing urgently up at me. ‘Don’t misunderstand me — I’m only trying to help. Our job as publishers is to produce books that authors like you write, and then to market them. Each book is a joint venture as it were, the author investing his time and his expertise, the publisher his money. It costs money to launch a book and my job is to see that the final product in each case is something people will want to buy.’ And he added, ‘Take my advice, Mr Rodin — I have some experience — write it the way I have suggested, from your wife’s point of view, building it up to the point where she is

so emotionally desperate she goes out to blow the ship up, and herself—’

‘It was an accident,’ I said angrily. I could see so clearly what he was driving at, and there was a part of me that was prepared to accept that he was right, that this was the way to handle it if it was to capture the imagination of the public. But it wasn’t the truth, it wasn’t the way it had happened. ‘She didn’t mean to kill herself.’

‘How do you know? You can’t be sure what was in her mind.’ And he added, ‘A little author’s licence… what difference does it make? Or can’t you do it? Is that the trouble, that you don’t feel you’re a good enough writer—’

‘I could do it,’ I said angrily. ‘But I won’t.’ I reached across his desk and picked up the typescript. If I stayed in that untidy office any longer I knew I’d be tempted. Everything seen through her eyes, using my imagination — I’d always wanted to be a writer and I needed the money. Of course I could do it, the scenes already flashing through my mind. But in the end my memory of Karen would be blurred, the reality of her and what she had tried to do lost in a ghost creature of my own imagination.

‘You won’t do it then?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He pushed his chair back and stood facing me. ‘If you change your mind—’

‘I shan’t.’

‘But if you do, don’t leave it too long. A few months and there’ll be another tanker on the rocks

spilling oil somewhere else.’ He held out his hand, limp and cold, and I left him, hurrying down the stairs and out into the street, clutching the typescript. The pavements were tight-packed ice and the ornate Victorian edifice of the Museum facing the Cromwell Road was picked out in thick white snowlines.

I was so angry I felt like flinging the typescript into the snow-clogged gutter. I had been sure they would take it, ever since I had received Jordan’s letter. I had been so certain I would come out of that meeting with a contract and a cheque for the advance that I hadn’t even checked the tramp rates or looked at the Shipping Index; I hadn’t the slightest idea what the chances of a berth were for anyone who had been ashore as long as I had.

My breath smoked in the cold air and I became conscious of the traffic building up, moving sluggishly through the snow as London headed for home early. It seemed to be getting colder by the minute, the wind north-westerly now, the snowflakes like glass flying in horizontal lines past my face. How disappointed Karen would have been, all those evenings spent listening to me as I had read passages aloud in the lamplight, all the typing! She had felt at times almost as involved with it as I was. And now… How long would it be before the Corsaire reached Karachi? Or had the ship already arrived? Perhaps she would be anchored outside with all the other freighters waiting for a berth… But then I remembered the new harbour. It would be finished now and once the Corsaire docked, Choffel could disappear into the labyrinth of the

bazaars. Or maybe he’d find a berth on some vessel headed for Japan, Australia, some distant part of the world beyond my reach.

The man’s escape and the book’s rejection became fused in my mind, the anger of despair gripping me as I tramped through the snow, the cold eating into me. And then suddenly there was a new thought in my head. Dramatize it, the man had said, so that’s what I’d do. I’d re-write it, the whole story, her death, everything. And the end of it would be my search for Aristides Speridion or Henri Choffel, or whatever he might be calling himself when I caught up with him. I’d find him somehow. I’d find the bastard, and when I’d done with him, then I’d write it all down, just as it happened — for Karen’s sake, for the sake of all those birds, for my own peace of mind. And reaching that decision, the emptiness, the hopeless feeling of depression was gone, determination taking hold.

I don’t know why, but I was suddenly remembering my mother, conscious of the same obstinate streak that had made her go it alone, bring up a child on a nurse’s pay in post-Mau Mau Nairobi, and later in the Gulf, in Dubai, where she had died of pulmonary pneumonia from overwork. I could hardly remember what she looked like, only that she was small and neat, and that she’d a lot of guts, a lot of nervous energy that had burned her up before she was forty. That and the climate, and the men she couldn’t resist.