The Black Tide

He stopped at the sight of me and got to his feet, asking me if I would like a beer. They were all of them drinkng beer, except Fraser, who had got hold of a bottle of whisky. For a moment I just stood there, staring at him. He looked so ordinary and I didn’t know what to say. In the end I simply told him my name, watching his face to see the reaction, thinking that would be enough. But all he said was, ‘David Price, Chief Engineer.’ And he held out his hand so that I had to take it. ‘Welcome aboard.’ He turned then and emptied the remains of a can of beer into a glass, handing it to me and pulling up a chair, his dark eyes giving me no more than a casual glance.

My name meant nothing to him. Either he hadn’t taken it in, or else he didn’t realize what had happened to the Petros Jupiter. ‘You’re Welsh, are you?’ I asked. “Somebody told me the Chief was a Greek.’

He looked at me sharply. ‘Who? Who told you that, man?’ And when I shrugged and said I couldn’t remember, he gave a quick little laugh. ‘With a name like Price, of course I’m Welsh.’

I nodded. ‘My wife was Welsh,’ I said and sat down, knocking back half the beer he had given me, very conscious of his proximity, the dark eyes and the black wavy hair streaked with grey, the stubble thick on his jaw and throat.

‘Your wife, where was she from then?’ His voice displayed no more than polite interest and I knew he

hadn’t a clue who I was or why I was here, didn’t even I know how she had died.

‘From Swansea,’ I said. And I told him her maiden name had been Davies. ‘Karen Davies.’ I remembered the way she had looked, leaning against her bicycle and speaking her name to me for the first time. ‘Karen,’ I said again and his only comment was that it didn’t sound very Welsh.

‘Well, what about your own name?’ I said. ‘Price doesn’t sound exactly Welsh.’

‘No?’ He laughed. ‘Well, let me tell you then. Price is a bastardized form of ap-Rhys or Rees. Ap meant son of, you see. Like ap-Richard — Pritchard.’

I asked him then if he’d been born in Wales and he said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Where?’

‘I was born near Caio,’ he said, ‘In an old stone cottage about a mile from Ogofau, where my father worked.’ And he added, ‘That’s hill-farming country, the real heart of Plaid Cymru where the old shires of Cardigan and Carmarthen met before they re-named them Dyfed. After me, you know.’ And he smiled, a humorous little smile that creased the corners of his mouth and tucked a small hollow into each cheek. ‘My father was a miner, you see. Started in the anthracite pits down in the valleys beyond Merthyr. It was there he got the silicosis that finally killed him.’

He got up and went over to the cold box, coming back with a fresh beer for each of us. And then he was talking about the Ogofau gold mine, how it was an open-cast mine in the days of the Romans, who had

built a guard post at Pumpsaint and seven miles of sluices. He said there were historians who believed it was because of Ogofau that the Romans invaded Britain. ‘All through the occupation they were exporting something like 400 tons of gold a year to Rome. That’s what my father said.’

Sitting there, staring at that Welsh face, listening to that Welsh voice telling about his childhood and about going down into the mine with his father after it had closed in the thirties — it wasn’t a bit as I had expected, this meeting between myself and the Petros Jupiter’s engineer. He was describing what his father had told him about working underground in a mine that had been producing gold for more than two thousand years — the rock face caving in as they struck one of the old shafts, the roar of the dammed-up water engulfing them, rising chest-high as they fled and stinking of two millennia of stagnation. And then one of the crew came in, a Pakistani who said something to him about the tiller flat, and he nodded. ‘All right then,’ he said, gulping down the rest of his beer and excusing himself. ‘You Mates, you come off watch and that’s that, but a Chief Engineer now …’ And he smiled at us as he hurried out.

I stared after him unbelievingly. God knows how many ships he’d sent to the bottom, how many men he’d drowned, and he was so ordinary, so very Welsh, so pleasant even. I could see his daughter, standing there in that extraordinary house built into the cliffs above the Loire, her voice rising in anger as she

defended him — such a kindly, generous, loving father. God Almighty!

Behind me I heard Varsac saying, ‘I don’t think he know anyzing. If he do, why don’t he tell us.’ And Lebois insisting that an officer who had been on board over a week must have learned something. ‘But all he talks about is the Pays de Galles.’