Liner

by James Barlow

  ‘Have you had a quarrel with her?’

  ‘It’s impossible not to quarrel with Pauline. It’s a kind of situation.’

  ‘Who are her relations?’

  ‘She has a husband somewhere.’

  ‘Do you think I should contact him?’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Reidy with certainly. ‘Waste of time. Purser’s job, anyway, isn’t it?’

  ‘You think she’ll do it again?’

  ‘If it pays off.’

  ‘That’s very cynical.’

  ‘It’s me she wants to hurt . . . I’m fond of Pauline. Very fond. You know? But I’m under no misapprehension.’

  He inquired carefully. ‘Where did she do her nursing?’

  ‘Somewhere in Surrey, England.’

  ‘The Middle Hospital?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ agreed Miss Reidy.

  Dempsey went back to his party, but it was breaking up anyway.

  He couldn’t leave it at that, just go to bed and sleep. He went to see if Pauline was conscious.

  She was. She was the only patient in the female ward. Pale, bruised, bloodshot-eyed, she grinned at him.

  ‘Hello, Daniel. Worried about me?’

  ‘I told you not be silly.’

  ‘It’s my permanent condition. Can I have a pill now?’

  ‘Perhaps, but only to send you to sleep.’

  He gave it to her. She grabbed the hand which contained it and bit it, so that he spilled the contents of the glass in his other fist. He made no comment on her action.

  ‘How long can I stay here?’ Pauline asked.

  ‘A day or two.’

  ‘See? I came back. And if I do it again?’

  ‘You’ll be too ill to feel sexy.’

  ‘I feel happy.’

  ‘That’s because you’re cared for.’

  ‘Loved? Or do you mean answerable to nothing?’ she asked. She was very alert to her situation.

  ‘More or less,’ Dempsey acknowledged. ‘Some people prefer to be in hospital. They can’t take the world. They even creep back to mental hospitals in preference.’

  ‘I sympathize with them. Daniel, do you think I’m crazy?’

  Dempsey said, ‘I just think there was little point in buying a ticket for a cruise!’

  She laughed, but coughed. ‘I was going to Canada. I’ll never get there. I don’t like that,’ she admitted in anxiety. She seemed genuinely frightened.

  ‘Has anyone examined you?’ he asked in misgiving.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’d better.’

  As he did so she said wearily, ‘Trust you to want to examine me when I’m too tired to care.’ But he paid no attention. She turned over when requested and it was impossible not to notice that she had fine buttocks. She lifted them slightly to clear the dull pyjamas the nurse had supplied. He heard nothing in her lungs.

  ‘You’re clear. Go to sleep, Pauline,’ he advised. ‘You’re probably suffering from some shock.’

  She actually looked alarmed.

  ‘Take the pill,’ he told her, ‘and go to sleep. A nurse will be around all night. Don’t be a nuisance Pauline.’

  ‘All right,’ she consented. ‘You can go now,’ she told him in sudden rage, and turned away from him. Then she asked, ‘Did Reidy come to see you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Was she shaken?’

  ‘No,’ Dempsey told her and began to walk away.

  ‘Daniel!’

  ‘What now?’

  She had turned again to see him, and her face was blank, sexless, without appetite, and it was almost childlike in apprehension.

  ‘I was scared.’

  ‘Not logical,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry I did it,’ she told him penitently.

  In his cabin Dempsey couldn’t sleep and was uncomfortable with an erection. It annoyed him that his flesh should be insolent simply because the weather had turned humid as they neared South Australia.

  He drank a large whiskey. The damned slut, he thought abruptly. The ridiculous fool. What did she do it for?

  Chapter Eight

  The Areopagus came alongside the tin hut which was Port Adelaide at seven in the morning. It had been over a hundred in South Australia the previous day, and the air still lay hot and moist on the land; already the thermometer had climbed to seventy-five degrees.

  Tomazos looked over the starboard wing of the bridge and saw that there were twenty-two shining new automobiles waiting on the quayside. Meaningless paragraphs in newspapers had achieved fruition: the strike was over. All sorts of people who had come out in ‘sympathy’ – cleaners, watchmen, elevator attendants, and port security men who had supported the twenty-four hour strike of the Port Emergency Service – were back at work. Five oil tankers were anchored outside Port Adelaide; the Waterside Workers Union had refused to handle them or work any hazardous cargoes. Tomazos wondered if they really cared and if it would make any difference. Australian ports were notoriously offhand about safety. It was part of the Australian posture of toughness that when films on port safety were shown in the wharfies’ canteen they did not move five yards to the lines of chairs, but went on playing cards . . .

  He was first man off the vessel. That care-hire firm official delayed him with forms, a superfluous explanation that the vehicle could not be hired for the six hours that the Areopagus would be here, but must be hired for the day. Tomazos paid him and relieved his frustration by driving fast along the straight narrow roads which had the appearance and texture of having been made during a war by the military and then abandoned.

  The suburbs on this side of Adelaide were not beautiful. They consisted of cubes of brick and stone pitched carelessly on dull coarse yellow grass, with scarcely a tree for miles and only a handful of flowers. Most of them were ugly and none were built of wood as is the custom in Australia; Elaine had told him that here the white ant ate timber.

  The city was just stirring itself. It was built on a hill and beyond its red brick banks and stone statues of George V and Colonel Light who had founded Adelaide, the Mount Lofty ranges scarred the horizon. On this morning of heat and humidity they were blue, like ribbons of cigarette smoke. Tomazos made toward them for a few more miles.

  There was a vehicle near the carport; one Tomazos hadn’t seen before, a metallic steel-gray sports. A little hefty for Elaine, he thought, although it looked very lively.

  He put the key in the door. It was the only key he owned. The suitcases and trunks in his cabin were old, their locks long since ineffective.

  It was all there for him to see, the evidence of plates, ashtrays, wineglasses, the position of chairs, but he was not looking, for he had arrived full of love, with gifts in both hands, from Southampton and Piraeus, for Elaine and the kids. The only thing conspicuously wrong was in terms of time. Where were the children? It was within half an hour of time for their departure to school.

  ‘Elaine!’ he called, full of laughter. ‘Where are you, you lazy girl?’

  He charged straight into it.

  She was in bed and there was a man with her.

  There was a half second when she was beautiful, so much more real than the photographs in the cabin.

  And then, the shock was so great it was as if Tomazos had been cut in half.

  It would have been more bearable, even understood, eventually forgivable, if it had been presented to him as a pattern of words in a letter, or in a telephone call, or if she could have been alone . . .

  But they were as surprised as he was, and hid nothing. He had it raw and flagrant. The most brutal thing of all was the movement in Elaine’s eyes – there was a light in them, the shock, not of guilt but the wish for him to simply not be there, to go away, so she could co
ntinue this. It passed with the speed of a high-speed shutter and was replaced with alarm, embarrassment and the fear of violence and quarrels.

  ‘Nikolaos!’ Elaine cried, and she lifted herself a little, to pat her hair as if to prepare belatedly to meet him, and the breasts revealed above the sheet were naked. ‘Why didn’t you phone?’ she asked with absurd logic.

  The man laughed at this. He was someone Tomazos recalled having seen before somewhere, at a party or dinner, an old school friend of hers perhaps? No, because Elaine had been to a very good school for girls only.

  ‘Where are the children?’ Tomazos asked in disgust. Were they going to run into the bedroom and see this?

  ‘At Aunt Elizabeth’s,’ Elaine told him.

  It was as if she was a little inexperienced in what to do next, and so limited herself to answering questions.

  The man said, braver now that he identified Tomazos’ misery: ‘Why don’t you go? Can’t you see you’re not wanted?’

  ‘Peter, shut up,’ said Elaine meaninglessly ‘What happened to the ship?’

  ‘We called in to collect some sedans. I thought –’ but Tomazos did not say what he thought.

  ‘I’m sorry. I wish you’d phoned,’ Elaine said, as if, just a little bit, this was his fault.

  It was as if the man wasn’t there. It was what was between Tomazos and Elaine that had been shattered. It was useless to try to repair it. Tomazos was too stunned by misery to experience the anger he might have expected. He could have smashed the place up. He had no fear of the man, who seemed to be a big fellow, and could have smashed him up too. But his desire was to get away from this, out of the curtained room with its air boiling hot from yesterday and the smell of staleness – their breath and laughter and the sweat rolling off their bodies as they pawed each other and then copulated greasily.

  ‘I’m going,’ Tomazos said with shake in his voice, and was hurt with brutal finality when Elaine’s eyes shone with relief.

  He was spared nothing even now.

  She stepped out of bed in a posture somehow crude and hairy, completely naked, so that he saw the marks on her thighs and stomach where she had stretched in pain to bear his children. And beyond her the man was seen briefly to be as raw, and having much hair along the thighs and buttocks and across the genitals.

  Tomazos went out of the room. He heard the man’s exhalation of shameless satisfaction and amusement, and a fierce conscience-inspired whisper from Elaine: ‘Don’t be so horrid.’ Later, the tone implied, later we can get back to it.

  She ran down the stairs behind Tomazos, a lightweight dressing gown trailing behind so that she was still an appalling reminder of what she had done. How often and with how many didn’t matter; that she had done it at all was what lacerated – and that shutter-speed admission in the eyes.

  She stood at the door, very tall and half sunburned, someone he had married, a foreigner; a lissome Australian girl who could, be remembered very vividly, make love with long legged frenzy . . . And now she pretended to be penitent, to say a few words to ease his pain. Did she want it both ways, the sexy fun with strangers while her husband was away and the marriage retained as well?

  Elaine pleaded, abject for a moment, ‘He kept bothering me. Being nice, polite, kind.’

  This didn’t fit the satisfied sniggers upstairs.

  ‘And he has this way – with everyone – of touching on the arm or shoulder, so that after a while you don’t notice . . . I’d been married so long,’ she excused herself, oddly but with some faint logic, ‘I’d forgotten there’s always a motive. I didn’t think I was – interesting – anymore.’

  Tomazos scarcely believed this when she stood there, even now very beautiful in his eyes. He told her coldly, with a mouth anesthetized by desolation: ‘People keep bothering me, too – on the bridge visits, at parties, in bars. They think it’s part of the entertainment. They’ve paid for it. The officer must be nice to them.’

  But her words had a tiny truth in them, a very small area which could be forgiven.

  ‘What do we do?’ Elaine asked, as if they were both caught in some situation, equally helpless.

  But this was too much for him. ‘Do what the hell you like,’ he said, and walked away from her.

  The sweat rolled off him in the hot automobile. He didn’t look back. He scarcely knew what he was doing. He wanted to cry out to God, but what was the use? It was her privilege as a human being to choose what to do, to inflict surfing . . .

  Every time he ever heard a dirty joke – and Mollon tended to relate the bawdy anecdote – some aspect of this morning would leap into the mind’s eye and hurt. Each time he saw – on shore or at sea – some ludicrous English or Swedish film in which the naked lovers stretched languidly on a bed in a dull room and complained that the world did not understand their beautiful love, Tomazos would be reminded of the reality of adultery. The gloomy stifling room, her scars of motherhood, now neglected; her rawness as she stepped out of bed, still soiled by another man; the fibrous legs and genitals of the man, and his snigger: not a snigger that the world would care for . . . They should, Tomazos reflected bitterly, make films with smell as well as vision and sound . . . He felt just a little anxiety for her, the victim of such a venal opportunist; for a man who could snigger at such a cruel moment would sooner or later regard her as expendable, a fool who had given him what he wanted.

  He drove back to Port Adelaide because there was nothing else to do. It was about nine in the morning. One of the tankers anchored outside and now moving in was Greek. A long time ago Tomazos had served on her. People aboard would see the Areopagus and come searching for him. He couldn’t face them and squirmed at the possibility. As well, there was a 9,000 ton Greek merchant ship, already anchored. She was very old, rusted, with wooden parts split with wear; her gangways were nearly vertical and he could see that her bridge was absurdly small. Oil drums were lashed on board. Australian wharfies were moving about on the working side. In the hot day the cargo in one of her open holds – thousands of sheep’s hides – stank. A line of cargo containers covered with tarpaulin waited on the dockside. Some wharfies uncovered a few while Tomazos approached, and the man using a fork-lift truck blasphemed as he failed, in his manoeuvring, to place the two prongs of the truck in the appropriate slot. The other man laughed.

  Tomazos asked a sailor, ‘Who’s her master?’

  ‘Captain Athanassiadis.’

  ‘Is he aboard?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It’s his birthday,’ the sailor said.

  Tomazos didn’t know this captain. He went aboard. He was startled by the decrepit appearance of the vessel. It had a distinct list to port, although that could be the result of the present position of the loading.

  The second officer was on the bridge, a tall humorous man, down at the heels. He saw Tomazos’ quick stare at the bridge – it was very old, older than the Areopagus, practically falling to pieces, and was about the size of a suburban kitchen. Its brass flinders and coloured spheres were like something in a nautical museum. The wheel was of brass and had many spokes, and there was an axe in a slot, ready for fire fighting ‘or anything else that might happen!’ as the second officer put it.

  ‘We had a rough trip,’ the second officer told Tomazos. ‘A seventy-five-knot wind caused some containers to break loose and caused a thirty-degree list. This forced her to be heeled for a long time because of the way the sea was running – and so a number of steel wires snapped. There was a fire and the automatic flooding damn near sank her . . . Come and meet the skipper. It’s his birthday.’

  Captain Athanassiadis was a very young man to be captain of a 9,000 ton ship; he was a slim man of calm disposition and had a very quiet voice.

  His cabin was old-fashioned but cosy, with a fridge, a bookcase full of books about navigation and ships, a cupboard loaded with bottles and p
ackets. From the adjoining cabin came the sound of small children’s voices and a woman scolding.

  ‘Morning, Mr. Second,’ he greeted. ‘Who have we here?’ There were introductions and handshakes. The third mate came in, a very young man with a beard; he wore a pullover and gray trousers.

  ‘Ready to sail, Mr. Third?’ asked Captain Athanassiadis.

  ‘About noon, Captain.’

  ‘Time for a drink, then,’ suggested the captain. ‘It’s my birthday.’

  ‘You’ve got your wife and kids here?’ asked Tomazos.

  ‘Couldn’t trust ‘em back in Piraeus!’ the captain said, and they all laughed.

  Other officers came in and they were all very young and a little shy of Tomazos, sitting in a padded L-shaped corner seat.

  The drinking began.

  No one asked Tomazos why he was here. A priest came and an hour later people from the harbour authority, then the agents, and half an hour after than an officer off a tanker. All were introduced, the explanation given that it was the captain’s birthday. All had drinks. The captain told each about the damage the storm had inflicted, about the pirated editions, purchased in Keelung, in the small bookcase, about his wife and children. And they in turn said where they were going or what they were doing . . . The wife and children did not make any appearance.

  All the time the voices of these good honest men and the alcohol down his throat diverted Tomazos’ mind from the permutations of humiliation and despair. But they were always ready to return into the mind’s eye and ear if the voices hesitated – that the man was cheap and had a ginger moustache; that his hands had pawed Elaine’s legs, her buttocks, had kneaded her breasts; that the two forests of pubic hairs had coupled and his body had pumped up and down . . . (And she, how had she writhed and panted? Had she wrapped a long leg around him, expressing the palpitating need for him to enter? Had her long cool fingers, so light on the steering wheel of her sports car and tennis racquet, ventured into the sweating heat between his legs?) It was unbearable and Tomazos’ hands tightened in aching tension. More. More drink. If there had been nothing to remember, that would have been different, bearable, an unpleasant experience but scarcely more. But there were so many things to recall – not simply amatorial moments or appetites satiated on that same bed, but humorous moments, enormous anxiety as he’d waited in hospital while she bore the babies. Picnics, barbecues, thousands of meals together, sailing, swimming, watching the stars and explaining them to her, bouncing babies on his knees . . . And yet the shutter-speed message of her eyes had been: Go away, don’t embarrass my pleasure with him. All those other things were nothing, time passing while I waited for this . . . And perhaps the sourest aspect of the signal was ‘I am like this, which is why I enjoy this other man. I am crude, hot, as vulgar as he is; I wasn’t a virgin when I married you; oh, how absurd, those tender fondlings of yours! Did you believe that a woman with my capacity for speed, excitement and risk to the body was waiting around for a fat little Greek ship’s officer?’