The Black Tide

Now, here, staring me in the face, was the thing I had dreaded. I wondered how much of her cargo they had managed to pump out. Three small tankers festooned with fenders had been working in relays to lighten her all through the quiet weather period. Doubtless they’d tell us at the meeting tonight. But the glass had started to fall and now that the sky was visible I could see mares’ tails showing high up to the southwest. If it started to blow… I stopped and stared back along the coast to Cape Cornwall and beyond. In the stillness and the cold slanting sunlight it all looked green and fresh, everything washed clean as though waiting for the spring. But for us it wouldn’t be a spring like our first spring. If it were going to blow and she broke up, if the Petros Jupiter split open, spilling the rest of her oil, all that lovely shoreline would be polluted, the marine life killed off and birds that should be nesting coming ashore again as oil-sodden bundles. It would drive Karen out of her mind.

Bloody stupid, incompetent bastard! I was thinking of the master, risking a ship like that so close to Land’s End just for the sake of a few miles and a tiny saving in bunker fuel. Or had it been deliberate? First the boiler out of action, then the secondary reduction gear stripped. If it wasn’t an accident, then the chief engineer would have to be in on it — one of the engineers, anyway. Would any man in his senses deliberately

cause a tanker breakdown close off such a notorious headland? But then if the money was right…

I shrugged. No doubt the Enquiry would produce the answer and we’d probably be told tonight when it would be held.

I walked as far as Sennen, where I had a word with Andy Trevose, the lifeboat’s relief cox’n. One of the salvage boys had told him in the pub that if the weather held there was a chance they’d float the Petros Jupiter off on Monday’s tide. Apparently she’d been given enough buoyancy for’ard to lift most of her hull dear of the rocks. Only her stern remained fast on Kettle’s Bottom. He also told me there was a rumour die second engineer had jumped a foreign trawler off Porthcurno and disappeared.

The sun had set by the time I got back to Balkaer, night closing in and the mares’ tails gone, the sky clear again and beginning to turn that translucent green that indicates cold. The door was on the latch, but Karen wasn’t there. I thought at first she had gone up to see old Mrs Peever. She did that sometimes when she was upset about something. Or Jean Kerrison perhaps. Jean ras more her own age and they got on well enough, It would have been natural considering what had happened and the mood she was in.

It wasn’t until I went out to the stone cleit I’d built above the path to get peat to bank up the fire that I thought of looking down into the cove. I saw her then, out in the rubber dinghy. She was paddling it along the edge of the slick, not using the outboard, though she had it mounted. I called to her and she looked up,

but she didn’t wave. I thought she was out there to pick up any live birds caught in the slick and I went back into the cottage, banked up the fire and got my things. The meeting was at six in Penzance and Jimmy had said he would pick me up at the bottom of the lane at five-fifteen.

I called to her again as I left, but she didn’t answer. The light was fading as I went off up the path to the lane, but I wasn’t worried about her. She knew how to handle the inflatable and, like me, she enjoyed being on her own sometimes. It’s not easy when people are cooped up in a lonely little Cornish tin-miner’s cottage in winter. You tend to get on each other’s nerves, however much you’re in love. Even so, if it hadn’t been for that bloody tanker… But Karen would get over it. They’d get the tanker off and then, when the spring came — everything would look different in the spring.

So I comforted myself. I was really quite cheerful as I approached the lane, the black mood dissipated by the walk to Sennen. It would be the same for Karen, I thought. I didn’t realize how her emotions had been working on her imagination this past week, what depths of passion and desperation had been building up inside her.

Jimmy was already waiting for me in his battered blue van and I didn’t think any more about her as we drove across the moor to Penzance. He farmed a few acres, pigs and chickens mainly, but mostly he made his living out of the tourists, renting two cottages he owned in Sennen, so that he had a vested interest in the coastal environment.