The Scrap Run: Beyond the Seven Seas, There's Another Voyage — Roy Bainton

MacDonald Anderson is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. Despite an ostensibly happy marriage, his secret, hard-drinking, adulterous character is about to be revealed. His wife Helen is a devout Buddhist in the face of Mac's secular, world-weary cynicism, and the near-celibacy of his marriage leaves him out on a limb. Yet Helen dies in a car crash. Burnt out and consumed by guilt, he meets a bizarre shipping magnate, Thomas Lovelock, who offers him the ultimate sabbatical - a voyage across the Pacific in old cargo ship, the Nadi, bound for the breaker's yards in India. The arrival of two passengers en route, the beautiful French-Canadian oceanographer, Gabrielle Agnes, and the man-hungry novelist Oriel Lynton, presents Mac with the challenge of honouring Helen's memory and supressing his basic instincts. Yet what lies at the end of this odd voyage is a destination which even Mac's wild, cinematic imagination could never conjure up.