‘Are they drowned dead, Uncle Keith?’
‘I’m afraid they are, both drowned,’ he replied. ‘Come and sit up on my knee.’
He had thought that she would burst into tears, but that did not happen. She came up on his knee and he held her close, and so they sat in silence for ten minutes. At last she asked, ‘Do you think my Mummy and Daddy were very frightened when the ship got wrecked?’
The adult quality of the question amazed him; children were so much older than you thought they were. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think that they’d ever have been frightened. They weren’t that sort of people. And you won’t be frightened of things either, I don’t think.’
She shook her head. He reached down beside his chair and brought up the paper bag. ‘I bought you a duck,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure if it’s a very good present, but I wanted to bring you something and this was all that I could think of.’
She pulled it out of the paper bag upon his knee. ‘It’s a lovely duck,’ she said. ‘Can I have it in the bath?’
‘Of course,’ he said.
She wriggled round upon his knee and kissed him. ‘It’s a lovely present,’ she said. ‘Thank you ever so much for it.’
He held her for a moment, and then said, ‘What about a cup of tea?’
She got down from his knee. There were still no tears. ‘Can I come and watch you make a bit in the workshop?’
‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll make a bit specially for you. What sort of a bit shall we make?’
Her eye fell on the duck, clutched close in her arms. ‘Can you make an egg for the duck to lay?’
His mind ran quickly over techniques and materials to hand. ‘I can make you all sorts of eggs,’ he said, ‘but none of them would be quite the right colour. A duck’s egg ought to be a sort of bluey-green.’ He thought rapidly. ‘We could do a silvery egg in steel, or a yellow egg if we heated a steel egg a bit, or a blue egg if we heated a steel egg quite a lot, or a grey egg if we case-hardened it. Or we could make a coppery-coloured egg if we made it out of copper. But I can’t just see how we could make a proper-coloured duck’s egg, unless we painted it.’
She smiled at him. ‘It isn’t a proper-coloured duck, so it wouldn’t have proper-coloured eggs, would it? But it’s a lovely duck.’ She stroked its plastic hide. ‘Can I have one egg of each sort, so that we can make a nest for her to sit on?’
‘I can’t make them all before your bedtime,’ he said. ‘We can make one now, and then I’ll make the rest after you’re in bed, and then I’ll put them on the table by your bed and you can have them in the morning.’ He paused. ‘Which one would you like me to make now?’
‘The blue one,’ she said.
He got up from his chair. ‘All right, we’ll go down and make a blue egg.’
He took her by the hand and they went together down the steep wooden stairs into the front basement room that was his clean workshop. He pulled out the high stool that he sometimes sat upon before the bench and sat her up upon it so that she could see everything that he was doing at the three-and-a-half-inch lathe, and began a running commentary on his operations. He picked a three-inch end of inch-diameter steel rod out of the scrap box, put it in the three-jaw chuck, started the lathe, and chamfered the end to forty-five degrees. A lifetime of such work had made him very quick; in a minute he was working with a hand-scraper on a rest turning the end of the steel to form the large end of the egg, talking to the little girl all the time. Three emery sticks of successive fineness followed the scraper, and the large end was finished. He brought forward the parting tool and parted off the piece one and a half inches long down to a diameter of about a quarter of an inch, and chamfered the small end shape roughly by the careful manipulation of a knife tool in the four-tool post. Then came careful work again with the hand-scraper, then the final parting off. He gave the warm, nearly finished egg to the little girl to hold while he found a one-inch-bore copper collar and put it in the chuck. Then he put the egg in it, small end outwards, and pinched it up, using the tailstock centre to set it roughly true, started the lathe again, and went to work very gently with the hand-scraper and the emery sticks till he had it finished to his satisfaction. Then he took it from the lathe, gave it a final burnish on a rouge polishing mop at the tool grinder, and gave it to her to hold, a new, silvery, shiny egg. It had taken him less than twenty minutes to make.
‘There’ll be another one like that in the morning,’ he said, ‘and a grey one and a yellow one and a copper one. But now we’ll make this one blue.’
He helped her down from the stool, still clutching the plastic duck and the new, shiny egg, and led her into his dirty workshop. He lit a bunsen burner and arranged a tin filled with about an inch of sand above the burner on a little metal stand and began to heat the sand. Presently he took the egg from her and dropped it on the sand and began to stir the sand expertly with a small pair of tongs, always keeping the egg on top of a good layer of the hot sand, turning it over and over. As the heat increased it took a yellow tint, which grew darker as they watched and began to turn to blue. He made the little girl stand back, turned out the bunsen, put on a thick leather glove ready on the bench beside him, picked the hot egg from the sand quickly and dropped it in a tin of oil upon the bench. It made a sizzling splash and a little spurt of hot oil; he waited a moment, took off the glove, and fished it out of the oil, and wiped it carefully on a clean rag. Then he gave it to Janice, a deep, brilliantly blue egg.
‘It’s a lovely egg,’ she said. ‘It’s such a pretty colour, just like Diana’s frock. Thank you ever so much, Uncle Keith.’
There was the sound of the front door upstairs, and Katie’s step in the hall. ‘Lord!’ he exclaimed. ‘There’s Katie, and we haven’t done anything about the tea!’
She scurried to the stairs, the duck held firmly in her arms, the egg clenched tight in one hand. ‘I’ll go and put the kettle on.’
He followed her more slowly, and arrived in the hall in time to hear her greet Katie. ‘Uncle Keith has bought me a duck and I can have it in the bath and he made me a blue egg for it to lay and he’s going to make me more eggs tonight, a silver one and a yellow one and a grey one and a copper one so she’ll have five eggs to sit on in a nest.’
He heard Katie say, a little dazed, ‘What a beautiful duck and what a lovely egg. Keith spoils you.’
Janice said, ‘He made the egg in the lathe and I watched and we forgot all about the tea. But I’ll run and put the kettle on now.’
She scurried off into the kitchenette, duck and egg held close. In the hall Keith said in a low tone, ‘It’s true enough, old girl. I went up and saw Carpenter again this morning. They were both drowned, and buried on the island.’ He paused. ‘I’ve told her.’
‘You’ve told Janice?’
He nodded.
‘How did she take it?’
‘She didn’t cry,’ he said. ‘She just sat quiet on my knee for a bit, and then we went down and made the egg.’
‘She didn’t cry at all?’
He shook his head.
‘Oh, that’s bad,’ she said in a low tone. ‘You’re sure she understood?’
‘She understood all right,’ he replied.
She stood in silence. ‘Well, I dunno,’ she said at last. ‘We’ll talk about it tonight after she’s in bed. In the meantime, don’t let’s say anything unless she brings the subject up. Let her take it her own way.’ She paused. ‘I think I’ll give her one of those phenobarbitone tablets tonight.’
She went into the kitchenette to run up a dish of scrambled eggs, and Keith went down into his clean workshop to sweep away the steel shavings from the lathe and to start work on another egg. He had it nearly finished by the time the meal was on the table, and was half way through a third one by the time the meal was washed up and he was called upstairs to see the duck swimming with Janice in the bath. He went downstairs and worked till he had finished the fifth, and brought them up to the parlour. He found Katie
sitting and darning a hole in one of Janice’s stockings.
He put the eggs down on the table by his chair. ‘Did she say anything?’
Katie shook her head. ‘Only about the duck and the eggs. It’s as if she’s kind of closed her mind to the other thing.’ She sat in silence for a moment, and then said. ‘I think I’ll put my coat on and run round and have a talk with Miss Pearson, so that if anything happens at the school tomorrow you could go round and fetch her home. You wouldn’t mind doing that, K, if she rang?’
‘Of course not. These eggs all ought to have a coat of lacquer before they get scratched. I might do that to- morrow, while she’s at school. You think it’s all right for her to go to school, Katie?’
‘I’m sure it is, the way she’s taking it. It’s just in case anything comes out in the newspapers, and the other children start asking her - that might set her off crying or something.’
‘You’d think there’d be a fair chance that the newspapers won’t get hold of it,’ he said. ‘It’s all in a French colony on the other side of the world.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘I’ve got that scooter I made for her. When do you think she ought to have that?’
‘Tomorrow’s Friday,’ she said. ‘Give it to her Saturday morning and she can play with it all morning if it’s fine. And then in the afternoon she can have Diana Soskice round to play. I’ll see Mrs Soskice, or else ring her up.’
‘There isn’t any money, Katie,’ he said. ‘If there was, they had it in the yacht with them.’
She darned on placidly. ‘Mr Carpenter couldn’t find the securities?’
‘They sold them,’ he told her. ‘Seems like they turned everything they had into cash, and then bought diamonds, and took them in the yacht. Kind of illegal it was, so he says. Seems like they meant to sell the diamonds in America or somewhere and buy a house.’
‘That doesn’t sound illegal to me,’ she said, her eyes fixed on the darn.
‘Well, it is,’ he told her. ‘It’s about the worst thing you can do, apart from murdering somebody.’
‘And now the diamonds are lost, so she’ll have nothing?’
‘That’s about the long and the short of it,’ he said. ‘He asked if he should ask the Dungannons to help with educating her and that, but I said, no.’
She shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t want that, and we can manage.’ She dropped her busy hands down to her lap, and they were still. ‘I know we can’t give her all that John and Jo would have wanted her to have,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m sort of sorry about that, in a way. But it does make it more as if she was our own child now, and maybe that’s for the best, things being like they are.’
He stirred uneasily in his chair, ‘Those diamonds are her diamonds now, and they must be somewhere,’ he said uneasily. ‘I mean, I’m the trustee.’
She picked up her darning again. ‘You can’t be a trustee for what’s at the bottom of the sea,’ she said.
‘The ship’s not at the bottom of the sea,’ he said stubbornly. ‘She got wrecked on a coral reef near an island.’
‘Same thing,’ she said, and went on darning.
She went out presently to see Miss Pearson, and he went down into the basement. He looked into the little bedroom off his dirty workshop and saw Janice sleeping deeply, the plastic duck clutched in her arms. He laid the other four eggs down beside the blue one on the table by her side, and pulled the bedclothes gently up around her shoulders, for the night was cold and the window open. He closed the door, and sat down at his desk. There was the morning mail, seven letters still unopened. Amongst them was one from the United States in an ornate airmail envelope, the back of which announced to him in neat print that it was from Solomon P. Hirzhorn, Box 6507, Tacoma, Washington. He sighed a little. Mr Hirzhorn was an enthusiast who was building the Congreve clock from Keith’s serial in the Miniature Mechanic, and Mr Hirzhorn couldn’t read a drawing very well, and Mr Hirzhorn evidently had a secretary with an electric typewriter to whom he could dictate, because each letter was about fifteen hundred words long; this was the third that Keith had answered patiently, though not at such length. He settled down to work, and worked till midnight.
The succeeding days passed anxiously, in a state of inarticulate tension. Janice never cried, so far as they could see, and she never once spoke of her father and mother, but she lost appetite and got very pale. Katie went to see Dr Simmonds about her, and he came round and stethoscoped her chest and put her on cod liver oil and malt, which she liked, and approved the phenobarbitone at night for the next week or so. Nothing happened at school because no parent of a child at Miss Pearson’s school happened to read The Times, the only paper which picked up and printed a short account of the yacht wreck in the Tuamotus. Janice played with her scooter in Somerset Road on Saturdays, and achieved some distinction amongst the other children in the road because her uncle had made every bit of it himself, instead of buying it in a shop. But she continued pale and peaky in appearance.
Katie said, ‘She’ll pick up as the spring comes on.’ But she took her down each Saturday morning to Mr Evans, the chemist, to weigh her on the machine in the shop, and kept a careful record of her weight.
The Christmas holidays came. It seemed better to Katie and to Keith to cancel the arrangements that had been made for Janice to go and stay with her Aunt Margaret at Tunbridge Wells and to keep her with them in Ealing, to the extent of disrupting their own routines a little for the period of the holidays. Mr Buckley agreed to let Katie go on half time, working mornings only till school started again, and Keith suffered an influx of children into his workshops at all hours, sometimes working on till one o’clock in the morning to keep abreast of his current jobs. They did their work in a welter of children’s parties, parties in their own flat, fetching Janice from parties in other people’s homes loaded with little presents, with paper caps and unpulled crackers.
In the middle of all this a letter arrived from Mr Carpenter enclosing the report from the Governor in Papeete, and suggesting that Keith might like to come up for another discussion when he had digested the contents.
It was a fairly long, typewritten report. It said that the vessel in question was undoubtedly the yacht Shearwater, and the two bodies were those of Commander and Mrs Dermott. The yacht had struck on a reef about two miles to the south-west of the island of Marokota, which was only intermittently inhabited by natives from Kautaiva Island according to the demands of the copra harvest. The yacht had struck at the height of the hurricane and at that time there were about ten natives on Marokota who had seen the vessel as she struck the reef, but could do nothing to help. She had apparently broken up in a few hours; all that now remained was the keel and some of the frames wedged firmly on the reef, from which most of the planking had been washed off. There was no question of salvaging the yacht. The engine had remained attached to its bearers and had been removed by the natives three days later and placed under cover on the island. Much of the remaining heavy articles which were within the hull had been recovered by the natives by diving, including the two Primus stoves and the binnacle, and had been taken for their own use. The same applied to lighter articles that had been washed ashore, such as bedding, spars, planking, sails, etc. The Governor did not consider it practicable to recover these things from the natives. He would, however, appreciate instructions whether any attempt should be made to salvage the engine or whether it should be disposed of at his own discretion. He also asked for instructions regarding the marking and the upkeep of the grave.
Keith showed this letter to Katie one evening when the turmoil of the current party was over. She read it carefully, and then said, ‘I should think the best thing would be to let him sell the engine for what he can get for it, and put the money towards the cost of the headstone for the grave. There’s nothing much else that we can do.’
Keith said, ‘There’s no hurry. It all wants a bit of thinking about.’ To his mind, it certainly did.
She said no more. To her the matter w
as perfectly clear and straightforward; put the money for the engine to the cost of the headstone and everything would be cleaned up, neat and tidy and done with. But Keith was handling all this with Mr Carpenter, and she knew her husband to be slow and vacillating in matters of business. Let the men settle it in their own way. It didn’t matter.
On New Year’s Eve, Keith went up to see Mr Carpenter. In the solicitor’s office they went through the report together. Finally Mr Carpenter said, as Katie had, ‘I think we should instruct the Governor to set the cost of the headstone against what he can get for the engine, and accept the balance either way. Would you like me to write to him in those terms?’
Keith sat in silence. Finally he said, ‘I think I’d rather leave it be, and think things over a bit longer.’
The solicitor glanced at him curiously. ‘There is no immediate hurry, of course.’
The engineer looked up. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘John and Jo, they’re buried and all decent, far as I can see. Suppose they had a headstone, well, there’s no one there to read it.’ He paused. ‘I’m not against a headstone,’ he said. ‘Don’t think that. But there’s a lot of things in this that want some thinking over.’
The solicitor sat in silence. ‘I’m here to help you, Mr Stewart,’ he said at last. ‘I know that you are keeping something from me, and you may have very good reasons for doing so. I’d just like you to remember that your brother-in-law was not only my client, but a friend. Just bear that in mind.’
Keith smiled, and said shrewdly, ‘Unless it came to telling you I might be going to do something illegal.’
‘There are degrees …’ said Mr Carpenter. And then he smiled, and said, ‘Are you trying to tell me that you see some chance of getting back those diamonds?’
‘I don’t know where they are,’ Keith said defensively. ‘I don’t know anything. I’d like to leave the whole thing rest a while until I think it out, what’s best to be done.’ He got to his feet.