The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  In the face of so fierce a welcome, how difficult to refuse her anything; and if he did refuse her (though this was a thought for secrecy), how quickly that fervour might dry up . . . She was beautiful – not in a remote fashion, but with a face which beckoned, a mouth formed only for kissing, and a body so soft, so shapely, and so glowing that its only conceivable purpose was to fuse with the sinewed imprint of a man’s. She had, for Morell, a sensual pull which two years of marriage had never assuaged: her moving limbs induced in him an almost insane urgency, her body seemed to flicker for his delight. Even, as now, to watch her dressing, perfuming her neck and shoulders, adjusting a brassiere to encase her flawless breasts, was intolerably exciting . . . Whenever she wanted, she could promote this frenzy: whenever she did not want, the frenzy was there in a yet more desperate degree.

  Of course she demanded too much, of course she betrayed the cool man he had imagined himself to be. But a single glance of hers, a single movement, squared the account, making it natural and essential to please her, and boorish to do otherwise. And, once again, if he didn’t please her, if he failed to follow her lead in anything, it became dangerous, it was more than he dared. There were so many other people . . .

  One of these other people indeed had telephoned, on Morell’s first evening at home. From her bath Elaine had called: ‘Answer that, darling – I’m wet,’ and when he lifted the receiver a man’s voice, against a background of music and other voices, had broken in immediately: ‘Elaine? There’s a swell party here, but we need that beautiful body – how about coming over?’

  Morell said, rather foolishly: ‘Hallo?’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ said the voice. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Morell.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Morell.’

  ‘Oh – yes.’ An odd laugh. ‘Sorry, old boy, I didn’t know you were back.’

  ‘I’ll tell my wife you called,’ said Morell. ‘Who is it speaking?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter – forget it. G’bye.’ He sounded rather drunk, but not as drunk as all that.

  That evening, once again, they danced till very late, in a nightclub so hot, so noisy, and so uninhibited that it might have been part of a zoo. It was very crowded. Elaine seemed to know a great many people, among them half a dozen Air Force pilots who came up in a solid procession to ask her to dance. At one point, clinging to Morell in the twilight of the dance floor, she had stroked his sleeve and murmured: ‘Darling, how long before you get promoted?’ and he had ceased to be proud of her head on his shoulder, and felt rather foolish instead. But, as usual, she drove all that away, as soon as they were home: in bed at last, erotic with alcohol, she swamped and sucked him of fervour till the fatigue of love became an aching reality, and sleep the only drug to ease it.

  It was his leave, after all.

  With Mavis, Ferraby spent a wonderful and tender period. She was now living with her mother, and the circumstances – a cramped, suburban house at Purley, a lack of privacy at meals and in the evenings – were not ideal; but it was so lovely to see her again, so lovely to be somebody, to be considered and deferred to, after the brusque contempt of Compass Rose, that the drawbacks were forgotten. The freedom from constraint, and the fading out of the hatred at close quarters, were tangible blessings; and in their private times together, the return to tenderness proffered so startling a contrast that, to begin with, he could scarcely believe it.

  ‘He must be absolutely beastly!’ said Mavis indignantly, when Ferraby had told her something of Bennett’s manners and methods. ‘Why do they allow it?’

  ‘It’s discipline,’ said Ferraby vaguely. He did not really believe this, nor had he, for very shame, told her the full story; but he did not want the shadow to stay where it had fallen. ‘The First Lieutenant’s meant to run the ship really, and that means the officers as well.’

  ‘But he needn’t be so horrid about it.’

  ‘He’s like that.’

  ‘They oughtn’t to allow it,’ she said again. ‘I’d like to give him a piece of my mind.’

  Dear Mavis, so sweet and attractive in slacks and the blue Angora jersey, with her little face screwed up in anger and sadness . . . He kissed her, and said: ‘Let’s forget about it. How about going for a walk?’

  ‘If you’re not too tired.’

  He looked at her, and smiled. ‘Why should I be too tired?’

  She blushed, not meeting his eye. ‘Gordon Ferraby, you’re a disgrace . . . You know quite well what I meant.’

  He felt very masculine as he took her arm.

  But the mention of Bennett’s name must have started a train of thought which remained with him. That night he dreamed of Compass Rose in a storm, and of Bennett shouting at him and refusing to let him issue the right helm orders, so that they were in danger of running ashore: he woke up, yelling at the top of his voice and sweating with panic, just as the ship drove through smoking breakers towards a line of rocks . . . Mavis, putting her arms round him, was appalled at the feel of his wet trembling body and at the idea, which each shudder communicated, of an emotional turmoil greater than he could bear: when he apologised for the noise he had made, it was as if he were excusing some hopeless deformity for which he deserved all the pity in her heart.

  ‘I must have been dreaming,’ he muttered hoarsely. ‘I’m sorry, darling.’

  ‘What was the dream about, Gordon?’

  ‘The ship.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I’ve forgotten.’ But after a moment he did start to tell her, while she held him close and listened with misgiving and with a new understanding compassion flooding through her: for in the end he told her everything – his fears and failures, the guilty doubt of his fitness for the job, the true story of the last few months. It was easier in the dark, with her head on his shoulder, and, as usual with her, there was no shame in confession; indeed, it was she who was the more moved when he had finished, who suffered his own fear of returning after the leave was finished, and felt it as her own miserable dilemma. Above all, she was shaken by the revelation, which nothing in his cheerful letters to her had even hinted at. This was not the man she knew and had married: what had they done to him?

  They talked far into the night. There was little she could give him save the assurance of her own confidence: it sounded pathetically inadequate, against the wretched background he had sketched for her. She remembered for long afterwards a single stubborn sentence of his, which he repeated whenever she suggested that he might ask for a different job: ‘I can’t give up something I volunteered for.’ She could not persuade him either that the job was proving infinitely harder than he had imagined, and might thus be honourably abandoned, or that Bennett was so horrible a complication that the whole basis of his engagement was changed. Somewhere deep inside him, an obstinate self-destroying will was at work, forbidding him to surrender.

  For some reason, after that night, she hoped that she would have a child as soon as possible.

  Lockhart, having lost the toss, stayed aboard as duty officer. It would be his turn for leave next time, and in any case he found that he did not mind being left behind: it was the sort of rest he needed, and in his spare time he occupied himself much as he would have done on leave – reading, listening to the radio, unwinding the tight coil of the past few months. Compass Rose, with her boilers blown down and no fans working, was cool and silent: it was odd to feel the ship, hitherto so active and alive, sinking back into a suspended laziness which matched his own. There was very little to do, and nothing that demanded any sort of concentration on his part: he saw the hands fall in after breakfast, and told Leading-Seaman Phillips what had to be done in the way of sweeping and painting: he opened the mail, in case there was anything urgent: he despatched the liberty men ashore, clean and tidy, at four o’clock; and he went round the ship at nine in the evening, to see that all was secure for the night. Meals were something of a picnic: both the leading-cook and Carslake, the leading-steward, were on leave, and his
welfare was in the hands of the second steward, Tomlinson, who had once had a coffee stall in the Edgware Road and whose methods were better suited to a quick turnover in saveloys and hot pies, cash only and no back answers, than to the gentler world of the wardroom. But since, being alone, Lockhart had revived his peacetime habit of reading all the time he was eating, the slapdash service and the indifferent food did not greatly worry him.

  They were tied up alongside Viperous, which was also boiler cleaning: it was the first time he had been able to examine a destroyer in close detail, and he took advantage of their neighbouring position to go aboard several times. His opposite number, also left on board for the leave period, was a young R.N. sub-lieutenant who, though aware of his inferiority of rank, could hardly take an R.N.V.R. lieutenant seriously: Lockhart was amused to watch the struggle between his natural respect for a two-ringer and his natural contempt for an amateur. There was nothing amateur about Viperous, certainly: the rigid R.N. atmosphere, allied to the almost professional glamour of a destroyer, was a potent combination. Viperous and Compass Rose might be doing the same job, and they might share the same hardships; but there was no doubt which of them was the elder brother, with an elder brother’s unchallenged status. Their relative positions in the hierarchy, however, now seemed to matter less than they had done at the beginning. Lockhart was coming to believe in corvettes, as were many other people; they were the smallest ships regularly employed on Atlantic convoys – the trawlers and tugs had been withdrawn as unsuitable – and seagoing in corvettes was already appropriating a toughness and a glamour of its own.

  He had one or two visitors during the leave period. Among them was Lieut.-Commander Ramsay, the Captain of Sorrel, who came aboard one morning and put his head round the wardroom door.

  ‘Anyone in?’ he asked loudly. He was a cheerful individual, red-faced and stocky, with a rolling West Country accent: reputed to be a disciplinary terror in his own ship, he appeared to shed it as soon as he crossed the gangway.

  ‘Hallo, sir!’ Lockhart put aside his newspaper. ‘Come in.’

  ‘Is your Captain on board?’

  ‘No, he’s on leave still. Will you have a drink?’

  ‘Aye. Gin, please . . . I see you got that second stripe. How’s that First Lieutenant of yours?’

  Lockhart grinned. ‘Bearing up.’

  ‘Makes you hop about a bit, doesn’t he?’

  ‘—er—maintains a stiff discipline, yes.’

  Ramsay smiled in his turn. ‘One way of putting it . . . Here’s luck.’

  They gossiped for some little time, mostly about their own escort group and the job that corvettes were doing: they both betrayed the half-humorous resignation which seemed inevitable when those who sailed in corvettes were talking shop together. Ramsay related in detail a mishap to Sorrel which had occurred on the last convoy – a huge wave had broken right over her bridge, smashed two windows in the charthouse, and bent the rail nearly a foot out of the true. Compass Rose could not quite match that experience, Lockhart decided after rummaging in his memory, though there was a morbid interest in trying to do so on her behalf . . . Ramsay, when he rose to leave, said, out of the blue: ‘Maybe you’ll get a First Lieutenant’s job yourself, one of these days.’

  The remark made Lockhart both pleased and thoughtful for some time afterwards. It was an idea which had never even occurred to him; now that he examined it, it did not seem so fantastic as it might have, at the beginning of the year.

  His principal other visitor was Ericson himself, who slipped aboard one day towards the end of their leave, and walked round the ship with an air so suspicious and so proprietary that Lockhart found himself imagining half a dozen things he had either done wrong, or failed to do at all. But the Captain seemed to be satisfied that Compass Rose was coming to no harm: he stayed to have lunch on board and, as if to mark the difference between this occasion and the normal times when the ship was working, he dropped all formality and proved himself very good company on a new and level plane. He was especially interesting when he talked about his own apprenticeship in the Navy, and the quick learning which the war had now made necessary, compared with the wearisome year-to-year grind of peacetime seagoing and the desperately slow promotion which rewarded it. Lockhart had the impression that Ericson was now becoming convinced of something – perhaps the capability of amateurs like himself – which before he had rejected out of hand . . . Altogether, it was one of the most pleasant meals he had ever had in Compass Rose: it left him with a feeling of respect, almost of hero-worship, for Ericson, which a little earlier he would have dismissed as a surrender of individuality. Some of his peacetime convictions, it seemed, were being rubbed off: if the ones that took their place were as natural and as unforced as this new regard, it did not matter at all.

  6

  On the evening of their return from leave, Lockhart, Morell, and Ferraby were all in the wardroom when Bennett stumbled down the ladder and entered the room. He was undeniably drunk, and most of his trouser buttons were undone: the general effect was so unpleasant that it was difficult to include him in their company without exhibiting a strong reaction. For some moments he busied himself at the sideboard, while they watched him in silence; then he turned round, glass in hand, and focused his eyes on each of them in turn.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he said with foolish emphasis. ‘Good little boys, all back from leave at the proper time . . . How did you tear yourself away?’

  No one answered him.

  The full glass slopped over his coat as he gestured drunkenly. ‘Matey lot of bastards, aren’t you?’ He eyed Lockhart with confused belligerence. ‘What’s been happening while I’ve been away?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘I suppose you were slipping ashore the whole time.’ He took an enormous gulp of whisky, coughed, and only just held on to it. His eyes moved unsteadily round to Morell and Ferraby. ‘And as for you married men – married—’ he lost the thread of what he was going to say, but unfortunately started again. ‘You had a wonderful time. Don’t tell me.’

  ‘It was very pleasant,’ said Morell after a pause.

  ‘I bet you left a bun in the oven, both of you,’ said Bennett thickly. Then suddenly he turned a grey-green colour, and lurched out of the room. They heard him stumbling up the ladder, and the clang of the lavatory door behind him.

  ‘Now what on earth does that peculiar phrase mean?’ asked Morell, when he had gone.

  Lockhart, considerably embarrassed, said: ‘I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you.’

  ‘But what?’ Morell insisted.

  Lockhart explained, as delicately as he could, the reference to pregnancy. It could not be made to sound in the least delicate, and the reaction was what he had expected. Ferraby flushed vividly and looked at the floor: Morell lost his normal air of indifference and for a moment his face had a startling expression of disgust and anger.

  ‘What a monstrous man he is!’ he said in the uncomfortable pause that followed. ‘How can we get rid of him?’

  ‘I’ve an idea he might get rid of himself,’ answered Lockhart, glad of the change of subject. ‘He didn’t like that last convoy at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gave this job up.’

  ‘How could he do that?’ asked Ferraby, in a voice so subdued and spiritless that it was almost a whisper.

  Lockhart gestured vaguely. ‘Oh, there are ways . . . If I were he, I think I should get a duodenal ulcer. For some reason the Navy takes them very seriously – if they suspect anything like that they put you ashore straight away, in case something blows up while you’re at sea.’

  ‘One of us had better tell him,’ said Morell after reflection. ‘I wouldn’t like him to be in any doubt as to how to go about it, just for want of a word of advice.’

  ‘I should say he knows,’ remarked Lockhart.

  ‘How wonderful if he did go,’ said Ferraby, in the same small voice. ‘It would make such a terrific difference.’

  ‘Funni
er things have happened.’

  ‘But not nicer,’ said Morell. ‘Not in my experience, at least.’

  By one of those coincidences that occasionally sweeten the crudest circumstances, Lockhart’s forecast came exactly true. The very next day, at lunch, Bennett, who had been eating with his accustomed fervour, suddenly clapped his hands to his stomach and gave a realistic groan.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said, in a voice suppressed by tension and mashed potato. ‘That hurt!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Ericson, looking at him with non-committal interest.

  ‘Hell of a pain . . .’ Bennett gave another groan, yet more heartrending, and doubled up across the table. His hands were still clasped to his stomach, and his breath came heavily through clenched teeth. It was difficult, for a variety of reasons, not to applaud the occasion.

  ‘Better lie down,’ said Ericson. ‘Take it easy for a bit.’

  ‘Jesus, it’s agony!’

  ‘Perhaps you have a bun in the oven,’ said Morell suavely. He raised his eyebrows as he saw Lockhart struggling with laughter.

  Bennett levered himself upright, and tottered towards the door. ‘Reckon I’ll lie down,’ he mumbled. ‘It may pass off.’ He went through the doorway towards his cabin, moaning with great clarity.

  ‘Bad luck,’ observed the Captain.

  ‘Most moving,’ said Morell. ‘I imagine there’s nothing we can do to help him.’ The remark was so clearly a statement of non-intention that Lockhart could hardly stop laughing out loud.