'You were fond of him, weren't you?' I persisted.
'Please,' she said. 'He's dead. Just leave it at that.'
'If you wanted it left at that,' I answered, 'why did you come along this morning, all packed and ready to go to Norway? Was it just a sentimental desire to see the grave?'
'I don't want to see the grave,' she said with sudden heat. 'I don't want ever to see his grave.'
'Then why did you come?' I insisted.
She was about to make some angry retort. But suddenly she changed her mind and looked away from me. 'I don't know,' she said. She spoke so softly that the wind whipped her words away into the night before I could be sure of what she said. Then she suddenly said, 'Will you take the wheel now, please. I'm going below for a moment.' And that was the end of our conversation. And when she came up on deck again she stood out in the wind by the port navigation light, a tall, graceful figure, even in a duffle coat, moving rhythmically to the dip and climb of the ship. And I sat on at the wheel, talking to Wilson who had sat himself down in the cockpit and wondering how much she knew and what Farnell had meant to her.
We were near the Sunk Lightship now. I altered course for Smith's Knoll Lightship. An hour later we called the starboard watch and I took the log reading and marked up our course on the chart. Since setting sail we'd made a steady eight and a half knots. 'Course is north thirty-six east,' I told Dick as I handed the wheel over to him.
He nodded vaguely. He was always like that first day out. In the six years he'd been in the Navy he'd never been able to conquer sea-sickness. Wright was feeling bad, too. His face looked green and sweaty and in contrast his hair flamed a brighter red in the glare of the chartroom light. Jorgensen, on the other hand, attired in borrowed sweaters and oilskins, was as unaffected by the movement of the ship as Carter, who'd acclimatised himself by many years in the stoke-holes and engine-rooms of aged freighters.
My watch was called again at four in the morning. The wind had strengthened to about Force 5, but the ship was riding easier. They had taken a tuck in the sails. Nevertheless, the movement was considerable. The sea had increased and Diviner was plunging her bowsprit like a matador's espada into the backs of the waves. All that day the wind held from the south-east, a strong, reaching wind that sent us plunging on our course across the North Sea at a steady seven to eight knots. By dusk we were 155 miles on our way to Norway. Watch and watch about, and with every bit of sail we could carry, it was like real ocean racing. I almost forgot about the reason for the trip to Norway in the sheer exhilaration of sailing. The weather forecasts were full of gale warnings and shortly before midnight we had to shorten sail again. But the next day the wind lessened slightly and backed to the north east. We shook out one of our reefs and, close hauled, were still able to steer our course.
During those two days I got to know Jill Somers pretty well. She was twenty-six — tall and active, and very calm in a crisis. She wasn't beautiful in the accepted sense of the word, but her boyish ease of movement and her zest for life gave her a beauty of her own. Her charm was in her manner and in the way her rather wide mouth spread into a smile that was slightly crooked. And when she smiled her eyes smiled too. She loved sailing and in the excitement of the wind's driving force we forgot about George Farnell. Only once was his name mentioned. She was telling me about how she and her father had got out of Norway just before the German invasion and how after some months in England she had got in touch with the Kompani Linge through the Norwegian military authorities in London and arranged to work for them. 'I just had to do something,' she said. 'I wanted to be in it with everybody else. Daddy wangled it. He was in the Norwegian Shipping and Trade Mission in London. I went up to Scotland and began work right away at their headquarters — I and five other girls kept a twenty-four-hour radio watch. That was how I met Bernt Olsen.'