"I wonder what Bear Island means to you people," he went on.

"Nothing, I suppose, why should it? It's just a name, Bear Island, just a name. Like the Isle of Wight or what's yon place in America, Coney Island: just a name. But for people like Mr. Stokes here and myself and thousands of others it's a wee bit more than that. It was a kind of turning point, a dividing point in our lives, what those geography or geology fellows would call a watershed: when -,We came to know the name we knew that no name had ever meant so much to us before-and no name would ever mean so much again. And we knew that nothing would ever be the same again.

Bear Island was the place where boys grew up, just over the night, as it were: Bear Island was the place where middle-aged men like myself grew old." This was a different Captain Imrie speaking now, quietly reminiscent, sad without bitterness, and the captive audience was now voluntarily so, no longer glancing longingly at the saloon exits.

'We called it "The Gate," he went on. "The gate to the Barents Sea and the White Sea and those places in Russia where we took those convoys through all the long years of the war, all those long years ago. If you passed the gate and came back again, you were a lucky man: if you did it half-a-dozen times you'd used up all your luck for a lifetime. How many times did we pass the gate, Mr. Stokes?"

"Twenty-two times." For once, Mr. Stokes had no need for deliberation.

'Twenty-two times. I am not saying it because I was there but people on those convoys to Murmansk suffered more terribly than people have ever suffered in war before or will ever suffer in war again, and it was here, in those waters, at the gate, that they suffered most of all for it was here that the enemy waited by night and by day and it was here that the enemy struck us down. The fine ships and the fine boys, our boys and the German boys, more of them lie in those waters than anywhere in the world, but the waters run clean now and the blood is washed away. But not in our minds, not in our minds: thirty years have passed now and I cannot hear the words "Bear Island," not even when I say them myself, but my blood runs cold. The graveyard of the Arctic and we hope they are at peace now, but still my blood runs cold." He shivered, as if he felt a physical chill, then smiled slightly. "The old talk too much, a blether talks too much, so you know now how terrible it is to have an old blether stand before you. All I'd really meant to say is that our shipmates are in good company." He raised his glass. "Bon voyage."

Bon voyage. But not the last goodbye, not the last time we would be saying goodbye, I felt it deep in my bones and I knew that Captain Imrie felt it also. I knew that it was some sort of foreknowledge or premonition that had made him talk as he had done, that had been responsible for a rambling reminiscence as uncalled for as it was irrelevant-or appeared to be. I wondered if Captain Imrie was even dimly aware of this thought transference process, of the substitution of the fearful things, the dreadful things of long ago for the unrealised awareness that such things were not confined to the actions of overt warfare, that violent death acknowledged no restrictions in time and space, that the bleak and barren waters of the Barents Sea were its habitat and its home. I wondered how many others of those present felt this atavistic fear, this oddly nameless dread so often encountered in the loneliest and most desolate places on earth, a dread that reaches back over the aeons to primitive man who as yet knew not fire, to those unthinkably distant ancestors who crouched in terror in their lightless caves while the forces of evil and darkness walked abroad in the night: a fear that, here and now, was all too readily reinforced and compounded by the sudden, violent, and inexplicable deaths of three of their company the previous night. It was hard to tell, I thought, just who was feeling affected by such primeval stirrings of foreboding for mankind does not readily acknowledge even to itself, far less show or discuss, the existence of such irrationally childlike superstitions. Captain Imrie and Mr. Stokes, without a doubt: they had gone into a corner by themselves and were staring down, unseeingly, I was sure, and certainly without speaking, at the glasses in their hands, and as the two of them rarely if ever sat together without discussing, at great length, matters of the gravest import, this was highly significant in itself. Neal Divine, more hollow-checked than ever but apparently slightly recovered from his very low state of the previous evening, sat by himself, continuously twirling the empty glass in his hand, his usual nervous preoccupied self, but whether he was preoccupied with mal de nter, the thought that he was about to begin his directorial duties and so consequently be exposed to the lash of Gerran's tongue or whether he, too, was feeling fingers from the dead past reach deep into him was impossible to say.

Comin" and Goin" was seated by Otto at the head of the table and they, too, were silent. I wondered just what the relationship between the two men was. They seemed to he on cordial enough terms but they only sought each other out, I had observed, when questions of business were to be discussed. It could well have been that, personally, they had little in common, but the fact that Comin" and Goin" had recently been made vice-president and heir-apparent to Olympus Productions seemed to speak highly enough of Otto's regard for him. And as they were together now and not talking I assumed that they were pondering over matters similar to those that were engaging the attention of Imrie and myself.

The Three Apostles weren't talking, but that meant nothing, when they were deprived of their instruments, their music magazines and their garishly primary-coloured comics, the presence of all of which they had probably deemed as being inappropriate in the present circumstances, they were habitually bereft of speech. Stryker, still in solicitously close attendance upon his wife, was talking quietly to the Count, while the Duke was conspicuously not talking to his cabin-mate Eddie, but as they were rarely on speaking terms anyway, this was hardly significant. I became aware that Lonnie Gilbert was at my elbow and I wondered what degree, if any, of the underlying significance of Captain Imrie's words had penetrated his befuddled mind. Lonnie was clutching a glass of Scotch, both container and contents of genuine family size, a marked contrast to the relatively small portions he'd been pouring himself in the lounge bar about midnight: I could only assume that somewhere in the remoter recesses of Lonnie's mind there lurked some vestigial traces of conscience which permitted him only modest amounts of hooch not honestly come by.

Trivy and calumny and hate and pain and that unrest which men miscall delight shall touch them not and torture not again," Lonnie intoned. He tilted his glass, lowered the liquid level by two fingers and smacked his lips. Trom the contagion-"

"Lonnie." I nodded at the glass. "When did you start this morning?"

"Start. My dear fellow, I never stopped. A sleepless night. From the contagion of the world's slow stain they are secure and now can never mourn the heart grown cold, the head grown grey-"

Aware that he had lost his audience, Lonnie broke off and followed my line of sight. Mary Darling and Allen, proprieties observed, were leaving. Mary hesitated, stopped in front of Judith Haynes's chair, smiled and said: "Good morning, Miss Haynes. I hope you're feeling better today?"

Judith Haynes smiled, a fractionally glimpsed set of perfect teeth, then looked away: a false smile meant to be seen and understood as a false smile, followed by a complete and contemptuous dismissal. I saw colour stain Mary Darling's cheeks and she made as if to speak but Allen, his lips tight, took her arm and urged her gently towards the lee door.