The Black Tide

Back at South Kensington station, I went straight to a call box and rang Forthright. Saltley was back from his luncheon at the Savoy, but he was on the

phone. I hadn’t enough change to hang on, so I rang off and stood there, feeling very alone as I watched the milling crowd of office workers hurrying to get home before railway lines froze and roads became impassable. They were all so busy, so engrossed in their own worlds. I tried again a few minutes later and the girl said he was still talking. I had to ring twice more before she was finally able to put me through and a quiet, rather abrupt voice said, ‘Saltley here.’

Ferrers had clearly briefed him about me, and of course he had read the papers. He said he’d like to see me as soon as possible, but he had a rather urgent case on and would be tied up for a couple of hours at least. I suggested that perhaps I could see him at his office the following morning, but he said he would be preparing a brief and in court most of the day. He hesitated, then told me that, because of the weather, he had arranged to stay the night at his club. ‘You a sailing man, by any chance?’

‘I had the loan of a boat once in Karachi,’ I told him. ‘A dinghy really.’

He seemed relieved. ‘Then at least you won’t be entirely out of your depth.’ And he suggested I had supper with him at the Royal Ocean Racing Club in St James’s Place. ‘Seven-thirty suit you? And if the bar’s crowded, then we’ll go into the Fastnet Room and talk there.’

I had two and a half hours to kill. I went into the Science Museum, which being a government building was pleasantly warm, and stayed there until it closed, idling the time away activating all the working models,

the steam engines and looms and laser beams. There was hardly anybody left when they pushed us out into the night. The wind had dropped, the air still and deathly cold. I took the Underground to St James’s Park, bought an evening paper and read it over a cup of coffee in a cafeteria off Victoria Street. The City page carried the year’s results of the Norwegian subsidiary of a large British shipping company. They had half their ships laid up and had been operating at a loss throughout the second half of the year.

I wished to God I hadn’t seen it, for it did nothing to lift my morale as I went out into the frozen streets of London again. They had a dead look now, hardly any traffic. I walked up to St James’s Park. There wasn’t a soul there. It was as though I were the ghost of somebody who had returned after some terrible science fiction disaster. The water was a black pit under the bridge. The ducks and wild geese stood motionless on the ice, the flat white covering of snow scuffed with the imprint of their feet. The scene matched my mood. I could no longer conjure the soft Welsh lilt of Karen’s voice, or see her standing there beside me. I was alone now, intensely, intolerably alone, with only anger and hatred for company.

I stayed there, keeping a frozen vigil with the birds, until Big Ben boomed out the quarter after seven. Then I walked slowly across the Mall and up past the Palace to St James’s Street. I seemed to be the only human being left alive. A taxi crept past me as I turned into St James’s Place. The Royal Ocean Racing Club was right at the end, past the Stafford Hotel where the taxi

was now trying to turn. Somebody entered the Club ahead of me, the portholes of the inner doors momentarily revealed, two brass-rimmed eyes staring out at a dirty heap of snow piled against the railings.

Saltley was waiting for me in the bar, which was up the stairs past a nasty looking picture of the Fastnet Rock in a gale. It was a bright, cheerful place full of members locked into London by the state of the roads. He came forward to greet me, small, almost gnome-like, with pale, straw-coloured hair and thick glasses through which a pair of sharp, intensely blue eyes peered owlishly. He was younger than I had expected, mid-thirties, perhaps a little more, and as though to put me at my ease he said his odd appearance — those were the words he used, giving me a lopsided grin — was due to Swedish forebears, the name, too, originally Swedish, but bastardized to Saltley by dumb Anglo-Saxons who couldn’t get their tongues round it. The way he put it I thought he probably knew my father had been a Scot.

Even now I don’t know Saltley’s Christian name. Everybody seemed to call him by his surname, his friends shortening it to Salt or Salty, even Old Salt, but what his initials C. R. stood for I still don’t know. It didn’t take me long in the atmosphere of that club to realize why he had asked me if I were a sailing man. The conversation as we stood drinking at the bar was general, the talk all about sailing, ocean races mainly — last season’s and the Southern Cross series in Australia which had just finished with the Sydney-Hobart.

It was only when we went into the dining-room