Bear Island Read Online Free

of course. Who, when the banks are foreclosing on him and the insurance companies drafting their ultimatums, is throwing the party of the year at the Savoy? Our friend the big-time producer. It's kind of like the law of nature. You'd better stick to ships, Mr. Smith," I added kindly.
        "Smithy," he said absently. "So who's bankrolling your friend?"
        "My employer. I've no idea. Very secretive about money matters is Otto.”
        “But someone is. Backing him, I mean."
        "Must be." I put down my glass and stood up. "Thanks for the hospitality."
        "Even after he's produced a string of losers? Seems balmy to me. Fishy, at least."
        "The film world, Smithy, is full of balmy and fishy people." I didn't, in fact, know whether it was or not but if this shipload was in any way representative of the cinema industry it seemed a pretty fair extrapolation.
        "Or perhaps he's just got hold of the story to end all stories."
        "The screenplay. There, now, you may have a point-but it's one you would have to raise with Mr. Gerran personally. Apart from Heissman, who wrote it, Gerran is the only one who's seen it."
        #
        It hadn't been a factor of the height of the bridge. As I stepped out on to the starboard ladder on the lee side-there were no internal communications between bridge and deck level on those elderly steam trawlers I was left in no doubt that the weather had indeed deteriorated and deteriorated sharply, a fact that should have probably been readily apparent to anyone whose concern for the prevailing meteorological conditions hadn't been confronted with the unfair challenge of Otard-Dupuy. Even on this, what should have been the sheltered side of the ship, the power of the wind, bitter cold, was such that I had to cling with both hands to the handrails: and with the Morning Rose now rolling, erratically and violently, through almost fifty degrees of arc-which was wicked enough but I'd once been on a cruiser that had gone through a hundred degrees of arc and still survived-I could have used another pair of arms.
        Even on the blackest night, and this was incontestably one of the blackest, it is never wholly dark at sea: it may never be possible precisely to delineate the horizon line where sea and sky meet, but one can usually look several vertical degrees above or below the horizon line and say with certainty that here is sky or here is sea: for the sea is always darker than the sky. Tonight, it was impossible to say any such thing and this was not because of the violently rolling Morning Rose made for a very unstable observation platform nor because the big uneven seas bearing down from the cast made for a tumbling amorphous horizon: because tonight, for the first time, not yet dense but enough to obscure vision beyond two miles, smoke frost lay on the surface of the sea, that peculiar phenomenon which one finds in Norway where the glacial land winds pass over the warm fiord waters or, as here, where the warm Atlantic air passed over the Arctic waters. All I could see, and it was enough to see, was that the tops were now being torn off the waves, white-veined on their leeward sides, and that the seas were breaking clear across the foredeck of the Morning Rose, the white and icy spume hissing into the sea on the starboard. A night for carpet slippers and the fireside.
        I turned foreword towards the accommodation door and bumped into someone who was standing behind the ladder and holding on to it for support. I couldn't see the person's face for it was totally obscured by windblown hair but I didn't have to, there was only one person aboard with those long straw-coloured tresses and that was Mary dear: given my choice of people to bump into on the Morning Rose I'd have picked Mary dear any time. "Mary dear', not "Mary Dear': I'd given her that name to distinguish her from Gerran's continuity girl whose given name was Mary Darling. Mary dear was really Mary