East of Desolation

‘They must have made it in a very old zinc bath. Last time I tasted anything like it was during Prohibition.’

Not that he was going to let a little thing like that put him off and as I took the whaleboat out through the pack ice, he moved down to the prow. He sat there huddled in his blanket, the bottle clutched against his chest, staring up at the mountains and the ice-cap beyond as we skirted an iceberg that might have been carved from green glass. He spoke without turning round.

‘Ilana – she’s quite a girl, isn’t she?’

‘She has her points.’

‘And then some. I could tell you things about that baby that would make your hair stand up on end and dance. Miss Casting Couch of 1964.’ I was aware of a sudden vague resentment, the first stirrings of an anger that was as irrational as it was unexpected, but he carried straight on. ‘I gave her the first big break, you know.’

I nodded. ‘She was telling me about that on the flight in. Some war picture you made in Italy.’

He laughed out loud, lolling back against the bulwark as if he found the whole thing hilariously funny in retrospect. ‘The biggest mistake I ever made in my life, produced and directed by Jack Desforge. We live and learn.’

‘Was it that bad?’

He was unable to contain his laughter. ‘A crate of last year’s eggs couldn’t have smelled any higher.’

‘What about Ilana?’

‘Oh, she was fine.’ He shrugged. ‘No Bergman or anything like that, but she had other qualities. I knew that the first time I met her.’ He took another pull at the bottle. ‘I did everything for that girl. Clothes, grooming, even a new name – the whole bit.’

I frowned. ‘You mean Ilana Eytan isn’t her real name?’

‘Is it hell,’ he said. ‘She needed a gimmick like everyone else, didn’t she? I started out myself as Harry Wells of Tilman Falls, Wisconsin. When I first met Ilana she was plain Myra Grossman.’

‘And she isn’t Israeli?’

‘All part of the build-up. You know how it is. Israeli sounds better. It did to her anyway and that’s the important thing. She’s got a complex a mile wide. Her old man has a tailor’s shop in some place called the Mile End Road in London. You ever heard of it?’

I nodded, fighting back an impulse to laugh out loud. ‘It’s a funny old world, Jack, has that ever occurred to you?’

‘Roughly five times a day for the last fifty-three years.’ He grinned. ‘I’m only admitting to forty-five of those remember.’ And then his mood seemed to change completely and he moved restlessly, pulling the blanket more closely about his shoulders. ‘I’ve been thinking. Did Ilana have anything for me?’

‘Such as?’

‘A letter maybe – something like that.’

It was there in his voice quite suddenly, an anxiety he was unable to conceal and I shook my head. ‘Not that I know of, but why should she confide in me?’

He nodded and raised the bottle to his mouth again. It was cold now in spite of the sun and the perfect blue of the sky. A small wind lifted across the water and I noticed that the hands trembled slightly as they clutched the bottle. He sat there brooding for a while, looking his age for the first time since I’d known him and then quite unexpectedly, he laughed.

‘You know that was really something back there – with the bear I mean. What a way to go. Real B picture stuff. We don’t want it good, we want it by next Monday.’

He took another swallow from the bottle which was now half-empty and guffawed harshly. ‘I remember Ernie Hemingway saying something once about finishing like a man, standing up straight on your two hind legs and spitting right into the eye of the whole lousy universe.’ He swung round, half-drunk and more than a little aggressive. ‘And what do you think of that then, Joe, baby? What’s the old world viewpoint on the weighty matter of life and death, or have you no statement to make at this time?’

‘I’ve seen death if that’s what you mean,’ I said. ‘It was always painful and usually ugly. Any kind of life is preferable to that.’

‘Is that a fact now?’ He nodded gravely, a strange glazed expression in his eyes and said softly, ‘But what if there’s nothing left?’

And then he leaned forward, the eyes starting from his head, saliva streaking his beard and cried hoarsely, ‘What have you got to say to that, eh?’

There was nothing I could say, nothing that would help the terrible despair in those eyes. For a long moment he crouched there in the bottom of the boat staring at me and then he turned and hurled the bottle high into the air and back towards the green iceberg. It bounced on a lower slope, flashed once like fire in the sunlight and was swallowed up.

4 (#u51c2e289-5a22-5f0b-9f6d-75850883424f)

As we approached the Stella, Sørensen and Ilana Eytan came out of the wheelhouse and stood at the rail waiting for us. Desforge raised his arm in greeting and she waved.

‘Ilana baby, this is wonderful,’ he cried as we swung alongside and I tossed the end of the painter to Sørensen.

Desforge was up the ladder and over the rail in a matter of seconds and when I arrived she was tight in his arms looking smaller than ever in contrast to his great bulk.

And she had changed again. Her eyes sparkled and her cheeks were touched with fire. In some extraordinary manner she was alive in a way she simply had not been before. He lifted her in his two hands as easily as if she had been a child and kissed her.

‘Angel, you look good enough to eat,’ he said as he put her down. ‘Let’s you and me go below for a drink and you can tell me all the news from back home.’

For a moment I was forgotten as they disappeared down the companionway and Sørensen said, ‘So she is staying?’

‘Looks like it,’ I said.

‘When do you want to start back?’

‘There’s no great rush. I’ll refuel, then I’ll have a shower and something to eat.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll get you the evening weather report on the radio from Søndre tower.’

He went into the wheelhouse and I dropped back into the whaleboat, started the engine and turned towards the shore feeling slightly depressed as I remembered the expression in Ilana’s eyes when Desforge had kissed her. Perhaps it was because I’d seen it once already that day when Gudrid Rasmussen had looked at Arnie, offering herself completely without saying a word, and I didn’t like the implication.

God knows why. At the moment the only thing I could have said with any certainty was that in spite of her habitual aggressiveness, her harshness, I liked her. On the other hand if there was one thing I had learned from life up to and including that precise point in time, it was that nothing is ever quite as simple as it looks.

I thought about that for a while, rather grimly, and then the whaleboat grounded on the shingle and I got out and set to work.

I didn’t see any sign of Desforge or the girl when I returned to the Stella and I went straight below to the cabin I’d been in the habit of using on previous visits. It had been cold working out there on the exposed beach with the wind coming in off the sea and I soaked the chill from my bones in a hot shower for ten or fifteen minutes, then got dressed again and went along to the main saloon.

Desforge was sitting at the bar alone reading a letter, a slight, fixed frown on his face. He still hadn’t changed and the blanket he had wrapped around himself in the whaleboat lay at the foot of the high stool as if it had slipped from his shoulder.

I hesitated in the doorway and he glanced up and saw me in the mirror behind the bar and swung round on the stool. ‘Come on in, Joe.’

‘So you got your letter,’ I said.

‘Letter?’ He stared at me blankly for a moment.

‘The letter you were expecting from Milt Gold.’

‘Oh, this?’ He held up the letter, then folded it and replaced it in its envelope. ‘Yes, Ilana delivered it by hand.’

‘Not bad news I hope.’

‘Not really – there’s been a further delay in setting things up, that’s all.’ He put the letter in his pocket and reached over the bar for a bottle. ‘Tell me, Joe, how much longer have we got before the winter sets in and pack ice becomes a big problem and so on.’