‘No,’ said Lockhart after a pause. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever needed that.’
‘That’s what it’s been like for me. For both of us, I think. That’s why it’s so rotten to be separated.’
‘Well, see if you can get her up here.’ Lockhart closed his book, and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘There’s no harm in asking, anyway. After all, the Captain’s wife is here.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Not necessarily. Try it and see what happens.’ Lockhart switched out the light, and lay back. ‘Oh, God why do we have to get up so early?’
‘There’s a terrific lot to do.’
‘Yes, I suppose so . . . Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
‘And don’t let it get you down.’
‘It’s all so different from what I expected.’
‘It’d be damned funny if it weren’t.’
Downstairs, in the lounge of the same hotel, Bennett was withholding his custom from a grim-looking tart he had picked up at the bar. He couldn’t quite make up his mind – and, in the meantime, he felt like a nice chat . . . The room was crowded, noisy, and very hot. Above Bennett’s sweaty red face, his cap still maintained its informal angle.
For the fifth or sixth time the woman tipped her glass and said: ‘Here’s fun, dear!’ She had a face like a ruined skull, white and lined: her tight black skirt strained at its seams, overdoing the candour of the flesh, repellent in its allure.
‘Cheerio!’ said Bennett, as before. He drank, and stared at his glass. ‘Ever been in Australia?’
‘No,’ said the woman. ‘Can’t say I have. Long way from here, you know.’
‘Too right, it’s a long way! Might be the other side of hell for all the chance I have of seeing it.’
‘You’ll get back all right. Soon as the war’s over.’
‘Can’t be too soon for me.’ He sipped his beer moodily.
‘Don’t you like Scotland? . . . Bonny Scotland,’ she added as an afterthought. She was clearly a Cockney, and the Scottish inflection, borrowed from the music halls, had a grotesque unreality. ‘”Glasgie belongs to me” – you know what the song says.’ She drank elegantly, finger crooked, and set down her glass as if ashamed of using so crude an instrument.
‘Oh, Scotland’s all right,’ said Bennett after a pause. ‘But you know how it is—’ he waved his hand round the bar, knocked over a tankard, and drenched his coat and trousers with beer. ‘Oh, — it!’ he exclaimed loudly.
‘Naughty!’ said the woman mechanically.
Bennett mopped himself vigorously. ‘Waste of a good drink,’ he said. And then: ‘Scotland’s all right. But it’s not Sydney, by a long way.’
‘I suppose not,’ said the woman. She crossed her legs delicately. ‘Have you got a girl, back in Australia?’
‘Sure,’ said Bennett, ‘rafts of them.’
‘The girls I left behind me, eh?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Well,’ said the woman, a trifle edgily, ‘tonight’s my busy night.’ She picked up her bag from the counter.
‘Don’t go,’ said Bennett, making up his mind. ‘Have another drink.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘I’ll see you home, then.’
‘It’s a long way,’ said the woman. ‘Fourpence in the trams.’
‘We’ll get a taxi.’
‘My! – Going the pace, aren’t you?’ She got down from her stool at the bar and stood looking at him, judging his mood. ‘What happens when we get there?’
‘I’ll see you’re all right.’
‘I’ve met sailors before,’ said the woman.
‘Not Australians.’
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘You’re the first Australian I’ve met, socially speaking.’
‘It’ll be a treat for you.’ Bennett heaved himself off his stool, and took her arm. ‘Well, here we go.’
The woman nodded to the barman. ‘So long, Fred.’
‘See you again,’ said the barman. ‘Goodnight.’
‘I’ll see to the goodnight myself,’ said Bennett. ‘That’s my little bit of the job.’ He crammed his cap over one eye at a jauntier angle still, and added, with a singular leer: ‘It’s not so little either, I can guarantee.’
‘Are you really an officer?’ asked the woman on the way out.
The Captain sat reading a bad thriller picked up from the bookshelf in the lounge of the stuffy hotel on Kelvinside: opposite him, Mrs Ericson was knitting. She was a plump, placid-faced woman of about forty: she always knitted during the evening – pullovers and mufflers for her husband, cardigans for herself, odd garments for odd relatives and their new babies. It sometimes seemed to Ericson that she had been sitting opposite him and knitting, without a break, for nineteen years on end. This was the picture of her he always visualised, when he thought of her at sea or when he was coming home on leave: he warmed to it readily, but its reality often made him impatient and irritated by the time his leave was up and he was due to go to sea again.
They were quietly happy together: they never quarrelled. He was, he supposed, a good husband and father, and she was the female counterpart: certainly he had never looked more than twice at any other woman. But now, as so often before, he was conscious of the familiar impatience as they sat in silence together. He must have been long enough ashore . . . Grace was a dear girl, but this time his leave had lasted over two months, and the ship and the sea were beginning, as always, to pull him away from her and everything she stood for. It was not unfaithfulness to her: it was faithfulness to the other love, the tough professional one which was stronger than any human tie.
They had never talked of this, save laughingly when they were newly married. She had come to accept the order of priority, and, being a sensible woman, she had ceased to worry about its deeper implications. For a few days of each leave she gave him all that he wanted – the warm welcome, the tenderness, the occasional shaft of passion, the softness after hard ordeal; then, matching his mood, she faded into the placid background of their lives and, perhaps symbolically, picked up her knitting again. She counted herself happy, and, as a sailor’s daughter herself, she was proud of her husband’s professional skill and standing. Seagoing was indeed a family matter. Their only son, now seventeen, was apprenticed to the Holt Line of Liverpool and was at sea, somewhere in the Atlantic, at that moment.
It was of their son that she presently spoke, while the clock ticked towards eleven and the shoddy lounge gradually emptied of visitors.
‘George,’ she began.
Ericson laid down his book, without regret. ‘Yes, dear?’
‘I’ve been thinking about John.’
‘He’ll be all right,’ said the Captain after a moment.
‘Oh, I don’t mean that.’ Rarely did they talk of the chances of life and death at sea, and since the beginning of the war they had not mentioned the subject at all. They knew that they both had much to lose, and Grace Ericson most of all. ‘But,’ she went on, ‘with both of you away nearly all the time, the house is going to seem lonely.’
‘He’ll get his leave, the same as I do, dear.’
‘That may be a long time coming, and in the meantime I’ll be all alone.’
‘Well . . .’ The Captain shifted in his chair, to cover a faint embarrassment. He had a picture of Grace knitting, alone in an empty house, for weeks on end, and it did not worry him as much as it should have done. To make up for this lack of feeling, he added with special warmth: ‘You really ought to get someone to live with you. Some sort of companion.’
‘There’s mother,’ said Grace thoughtfully.
The Captain paused. There certainly was mother, and mother was a different matter altogether: a grim quarrelsome old lady who, on her infrequent visits to the little house on the outskirts of Birkenhead, had done nothing but complain the whole time and had spoilt her only grandson outrageously into the bargain. The nearest he had ever come to a clash with Grace was when her mother h
ad taken it on herself to rearrange all the furniture in their sitting room, and he had called it ‘Damned cheek’ and put it all back again. That had been a wonderful scene. But he did not want it repeated. And certainly he did not want Grace’s mother as a permanent part of the household when he came home on leave.
He temporised. ‘It’s an idea,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know whether it would really suit you. Two women living together all the time . . . It’s your house, you know,’ he concluded rather lamely, feeling her eye on him. ‘You don’t want to forget that.’
‘Why should I forget it?’
‘Your mother likes her own way a bit, doesn’t she?’
‘She’s the same as most of us,’ said Grace equably. ‘She’d be company for me, I do know, own way or not. But of course if you don’t want me to have her, I’ll say no more about it.’
‘You must please yourself,’ he said, without enthusiasm. He realised that, compared with her, it would affect him very little – perhaps for a week or so every three or four months: he still could not bring himself to welcome the idea. ‘It’s likely to be a long time till I see Birkenhead again, and John the same, I shouldn’t wonder. You know I don’t want you to be alone all that time.’
‘I’ll see about it,’ she answered vaguely. She was gathering up her knitting preparatory to going to bed: it was a serious business – patterns, spare needles, wool, spectacles, and the square of silk in which she wrapped the current piece of work. ‘We don’t want to decide in a hurry. You’ve plenty to think about already, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said the Captain.
‘Are you pleased with the ship, George?’ she asked as they rose.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The ship’ll be all right.’
6
They were a fortnight camping out in the crowded dockside hut before they moved into the ship, and another three weeks before she was ready to sail; altogether, five weeks of concentrated work and preparation. It sometimes seemed to Ericson that there would never be any end to the new problems and questions which cropped up every day. He had to handle them all himself, or at least to decide how they were to be handled: the two subs were willing enough, but green as grass, and Bennett, he found, had less experience than his manner led one to expect, as well as a great deal less energy . . . Everything connected with the ship seemed to be the Captain’s province: ordering stores and ammunition, interviewing dockyard and Admiralty officials, settling the last of the alterations and additions with the contractors, mastering technical details about the hull and the machinery, arranging the accommodation on board, answering signals, checking lists, reporting the progress and state of the ship. He had to make two or three trips to the Naval Headquarters in Glasgow before he found that Ferraby, quiet and conscientious, could be counted on to relay any message accurately and to come back with the right answer. But this did little to dispose of the work that piled up, day after day, in the hut alongside Compass Rose.
Gradually, however, he had his reward: gradually there came to be less noise on board, less space cluttered up with tools and dockyard equipment, less untidiness, less oil and dirt. The workmen thinned out, until only a thin trickle of them mounted the gangway every morning: stores were stowed, cabins carpeted, the mess decks fitted with their cots and lockers. Compass Rose took on, at last, the shape and feeling of a ship; it was time to transfer aboard her, and they were all glad to do it.
But when the main draft of the crew – sixty-odd men – arrived from Devonport Barracks, they lost little time in echoing, with choice variations, Petty Officer Tallow’s strictures on their accommodation. The mess decks were small, and intolerably crowded: the hands were all lumped together – seamen, stokers, signalmen, telegraphists: they had to take their meals in the sleeping spaces, and read or write letters with other men jammed up against them on either side. And if it was like this in harbour, what was it going to be like at sea, with the ship rolling her guts out and everything wet through as well . . . Lower deck wit, which flourishes (in the true English tradition) on discomfort and adversity, had plenty to play with; the first few days in Compass Rose, before the hands were acclimatised, produced as crisp a crop of invective and blasphemy as was ever crammed into a space two hundred feet long and thirty-three broad.
Ericson was conscious of this feeling of discontent, as he surveyed the muster of hands at the commissioning ceremony. It was not that they looked sullen or mutinous: simply disinterested and perhaps a little cynical, not seeing the point of dressing up so smartly (and being ticked off for wearing a dirty jumper) just to commission a funny little sod of a ship like this. It must be his first care, he realised, to alleviate the discomfort on board: he had thought of improvements in ventilation, and in the cooking arrangements, already, and an energetic captain could do a lot with a new ship at the experimental stage, as long as the shoreside cooperated. And the job itself, with its prospect of a tough ordeal, might do much more than alleviate, by giving the crew a conscious pride in hard living and fighting. That was the thought that struck him most strongly, as the bosun’s pipes sounded the ‘Still’, and the spotless ensign and the commissioning pendant were broken out. Compass Rose, with a new coat of paint, looked clean and workmanlike: she had her numbers painted on her bows, she was nearly ready to move . . . As he started to read the Articles of War a moment later, his firm clear voice matched the first stirring of his pride in the ship. She might be ‘only a corvette’, not much better than a deep-sea trawler, but she could make a reputation at any level, and that was going to be his target from now on.
Meals in the cramped wardroom never seemed to progress beyond the sort of constrained artificiality which marks a public banquet attended by people who are complete strangers to one another. The Captain was usually preoccupied with the last job or the next one; he sat in silence at the head of the table, staring straight ahead or occasionally jotting down a note. Ferraby, naturally shy, was still finding his way and never volunteered either a direct statement or a direct question: and Lockhart, who was the most articulate of the four, struggled through successive monologues which only rarely inspired any kind of answer. Bennett’s contribution lay in the realm of eating . . . He had formed an attachment for the crudest item in the wardroom store cupboard, tinned sausages, which he knew colloquially as ‘snorkers’: they made an almost daily appearance on the menu, either at lunch or dinner, and the recurrent exclamation – ‘Snorkers! Good-oh!’ – with which he greeted them, sounded the knell of appetite. Then he would sit down, rub his hands, help himself liberally to Worcester sauce, and go to with a will. In fishing circles he would have been described as a coarse feeder.
The leading-steward, a morose man named Carslake, watched this performance with a sardonic eye. Clearly he had been used to better things. He was not alone in that.
If Bennett talked at all, it was in a bombastic, contradictory whine which disposed of a subject almost before it had been introduced. One mealtime encounter which he had with Lockhart had an unusual sequel. The latter, talking about the ship’s lifesaving equipment, had remarked that in very cold weather one might have a better chance of survival swimming in the water, supported by a life jacket, than sitting wet through in an open boat exposed to the wind. Bennett, his mouth full, interrupted roughly: ‘Rot! Wait till the first time you’re fished. You’ll change your mind bloody quickly.’
‘But,’ said Lockhart mildly, ‘how do you know that? You can hardly have been torpedoed yet.’
Bennett glared, but did not answer. Later, when the Captain had left the wardroom, he said to Lockhart: ‘You talk to me like that again, and I’ll crown you.’
After a pause Lockhart said levelly: ‘That would get you into a great deal of trouble.’
‘Just watch it, that’s all!’ Baulked of an easy surrender, Bennett’s tone changed. He rubbed his hands together. ‘Now – who’s going to stand me a drink? Ferrabee!’
‘Yes,’ said Ferraby. ‘Of course. Er—please help yourself.’<
br />
‘Do we have to stand him drinks?’ asked Ferraby later, when Bennett had gone to his cabin. ‘He never stands them to us.’
‘We don’t have to stand him anything,’ answered Lockhart with decision. ‘It’s just a racket. Next time, pour him a drink and give him the chit book to sign at the same time. That’ll hold him.’
Ferraby shook his head. ‘He’ll make it up somehow. You know what he’s like.’
Ferraby spoke with some bitterness: he had indeed found out what Bennett was like, to his cost. A few days earlier, since it seemed likely that Compass Rose would not be sailing for at least a fortnight, he had asked permission to send for his wife: she could stay at a hotel in Glasgow and he could see her on alternate evenings, when he was not Officer-of-the-Day. It would involve no sort of complication and he would not be dodging his fair share of the work. Bennett, however, had turned the request down, in a particularly offensive exchange.
‘Wife?’ he said, when Ferraby approached him in his cabin. ‘Didn’t know you had one. How long have you been married?’
‘Six weeks,’ said Ferraby.
Bennett smirked. ‘Time you gave it a rest, then.’
Ferraby said nothing. Bennett affected to consider the matter, frowning down at his desk. Then he shook his head. ‘No, sub,’ he said, ‘I don’t like the idea. There’s too much work to do.’
‘But when the work’s over—’ began Ferraby.
‘You’ve got to concentrate,’ said Bennett crisply. ‘What’s the good of you slipping off for a honeymoon every time the bell strikes? It’ll take your mind off the ship.’
Ferraby swallowed. He hated the conversation, but he persisted bravely. ‘All I want to do—’ he began again.
‘I know bloody well what you want to do.’ The crude leer on Bennett’s face was sufficient commentary, but he clinched it more crudely still. ‘You’ve quite enough to do without sleeping ashore every other night, and coming back clapped out. You’d better forget it.’
The Cruel Sea Page 3