Endangered Species by Richard Woodman Page A

as some, he thought reasonably, but luckier than most; luckier than many men he had sailed with,
was
sailing with at the moment, and a damned sight luckier than those poor devils of boat people that had been towed pathetically past them three or four hours earlier.
    Lucky he might be, but happy he was not.
    It was foolish to imagine the world would ever be free from strife and injustice, poverty and hunger. There were so many people, more than the earth could support, even if the hugely rich and, perhaps, the not so hugely rich, relinquished some of their excess wealth.
    Was he, a self-acknowledged lucky man, too greedy? The thought troubled him. He did not acknowledge what some had embarrassingly called heroism when he had brought the lifeboat ashore, but he reckoned he had paid the tariff by fighting in a war and skirting the edges of other conflicts. His uneasy feeling of not having paid enough, or not having kept his payments up, worried him. He felt touched by disappointment and uncertainty.
    He experienced a surge of self-justification, falling back on a fierce, defensive pride in that to which he belonged. The Merchant Navy had fought the longest, most vital battle of the Second World War, the Battle of the Atlantic. He had read somewhere that proportionally more of its men had died than in any of the so-called ‘fighting-services’, but they were mere sailors, scarcely men of the pipe-and-slippers/ missus-and-the-nippers variety, and few wept over theircopious drownings. Now, Mackinnon bitterly reflected, they were going down the tube, redundant, too expensive (though God knew they cost little enough, now as then). Only merchant seamen could be treated with the cavalier dismissal which stopped their pay the moment their ships were sunk. He remembered Bird railing about the outrage in the YMCA in Belfast . . .
    But it was in the past now. The world had turned; their fates were governed by the accountants and even the old oligarchs, like Mrs Dent, were
outré
. It was bad luck on Sparks and Stevenson, of course, and even on that square peg Taylor who, Mackinnon considered, would never have survived in an open boat and had never been asked to, but it was not as bad as being aboard that rotting junk with the detention camp looming.
    For himself, Mackinnon concluded, compromising an old man’s selfishness with a due appreciation of good fortune, he could acknowledge his luck, deserved or not. There was no doubt about that. He had only to keep his nose clean for a week or two more, then Shelagh, and Rome and Florence, and the thing would come full circle . . .
    His eyes fell on the big art book Shelagh had insisted he bring with him. He had trouble focussing on the gilt title, printed in Times Roman on its dark spine, but he had no need to read it. He knew it and its new, unopened state reproached him:
The Uffizi
.
    He wondered why he had not opened it, aware that he had been moved to do so several times but had drawn back and postponed the moment. For pleasure? No, for wholly superstitious reasons, as if the physical act of opening the book and feasting his eyes upon the illustrations would be a direct challenge to providence, inviting its malice in thwarting his desire. So he had left the book, promising to look at it the moment he came down from the bridge for the last time, an act of finality which marked his passing from active employment to retirement, an act marking histransition from operating as John Mackinnon, Master under God of the motor vessel
Matthew Flinders
, to pensioned status under the direction of his wife. He laughed at himself, then thought again of Shelagh, of her handing him the book and he asking, laughingly, ‘What the hell’s the Uffizi?’ And she had given him one of her silent go-on-with-you looks so he was still not quite certain.
    He had not much noticed the girl in the Antrim farmhouse. It was only after they had reached Belfast and were kicking