The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  ‘Stand over,’ repeated Tallow, with the tiniest edge of doubt in his voice. And then, with more force: ‘On caps!’ he continued automatically. ‘About turn! Quick march!’

  When Gregg was out of earshot, Ericson turned to Morell.

  ‘I’ll see him again tomorrow,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, you’d better have a talk with him and try and find out what it’s all about. I don’t want to send him up without knowing what’s behind it.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Morell.

  ‘Is he married?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Ask him if there’s anything wrong there . . . Coxswain!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Stand Gregg over till tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  ‘Next case.’

  But when Morell saw Gregg later that day, down in his cabin, he took a different line. There was less need for formality here, and less occasion for care in what one said: he could treat Gregg as he would have treated a witness in court, a witness who knew something but might have to be wheedled or bullied or tricked into revealing it. With no one listening, and no record to keep, the relationship of officer to rating could be stretched a long way outside the normal pattern.

  ‘The Captain’s doing his best for you,’ Morell said shortly, when Gregg once more repeated his stubborn, ‘nothing-to-say’ formula. ‘Probably a damned sight more than you deserve, but that’s nothing to do with me. What he’s trying to get at is, what made you suddenly walk ashore and miss the ship. Why won’t you tell him?’

  ‘I don’t want to say, sir,’ said Gregg, with the same finality as before.

  ‘You’d rather have a month’s detention?’

  Gregg’s expression changed to a sulky frown, but he said nothing.

  ‘That’s what it would mean, you know,’ Morell went on. ‘It’ll be a black mark against you for the rest of your time in the Navy, it’ll always be there, on your Conduct Sheet.’

  ‘I’m only in for the war, sir.’

  ‘Well, how long do you think that’s going to last? You want to get on, don’t you? You don’t want to stay an able-seaman for two or three years more? How can you be recommended for leading-seaman if you do this sort of thing, and then refuse to say anything about it?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘You’d better talk, Gregg.’ Morell changed his tone. ‘What’s it all about? Where did you go to? Did you go home?’

  After a pause: ‘Yes, sir,’ said Gregg, swallowing. ‘I went to London.’

  ‘Well, that’s something . . . Is there anything wrong there?’

  ‘Not now, sir.’

  ‘Was there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What?’

  The obstinate, blank look returned. ‘I don’t want to say.’

  ‘You know I won’t repeat it to anyone.’

  ‘You’ll repeat it to the Captain,’ said Gregg shrewdly.

  ‘I don’t have to. And that’s only two people, anyway: it won’t go any further.’

  Gregg shook his head. He was wavering, but he still could not face whatever it was that filled his mind. ‘It will, if I say it up at the table. It’ll be all over the ship then.’

  Morell frowned. ‘What you say at Defaulters doesn’t go all over the ship. You know that perfectly well . . . Now let’s get this straight. There was some trouble at home?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘With your wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’

  Gregg gestured, rather pathetically. ‘The usual.’

  ‘How did you hear about it?’

  ‘Someone wrote – a pal at home.’

  ‘And you went off home to try to fix it up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  No answer.

  ‘You see what it’s got you into,’ said Morell hardly. ‘What the hell do you think your officers are for, if not to help you when this sort of thing happens?’

  ‘I didn’t know, sir . . . I wanted it kept a secret.’

  ‘How can it be a secret, when you’re absent without leave for seventeen days?’

  ‘But no one knows about it still, sir – only you.’

  ‘But you’re going to tell the Captain,’ said Morell.

  ‘I don’t want to do that. I’d rather go to cells, and have done with it.’

  ‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ said Morell. ‘I don’t say you’ll get off, but it might make a lot of difference. He’s a human being, you know.’

  ‘But I can’t tell it all up at the table,’ said Gregg desperately. ‘Not with all of you listening.’

  ‘We don’t have to be listening. You know you can see the Captain privately, if it’s a family matter, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well?’

  Gregg came to a sudden decision. ‘I’d like to do that, sir.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so this morning?’

  ‘I didn’t think of it.’

  ‘You’d have saved yourself a lot of trouble. And been a lot more popular.’ Morell stood up. ‘All right – I’ll arrange for you to see him this afternoon.’

  Gregg looked scared. ‘What do I say, sir?’

  ‘You tell him exactly why you went home, and what happened when you got there.’

  ‘And it won’t go any further?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And I’ll maybe get off?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably not altogether. But it’ll give you a better chance than simply refusing to speak. That can only have one end, can’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Gregg smiled suddenly. ‘Thanks a lot, sir.’

  ‘There’s nothing to thank me for.’ It was time to return to normal, time to drop the curtain again. ‘You’re not clear yet, not by a long chalk. Now get back to work. I’ll send for you when the Captain wants to see you. And this time, tell him the truth – everything – and don’t waste any more time.’

  It was doubtful if Gregg could have brought himself to tell his story, even now, if he had not been coaxed and persuaded up to the very last moment. But Ericson, forewarned by Morell of what was at the heart of the trouble, was at special pains to make it easy for him. With Gregg in his cabin he gave ostentatious orders that he was not to be disturbed: he made him sit down, he gave him a cigarette, and he led off his questions as if taking it for granted that Gregg would have no embarrassment about telling him everything. And when the man still hesitated, sitting on the edge of his chair, stiff and sweating in his number one suit with the gold badges, Ericson suddenly leant forward and said: ‘You’re married, Gregg, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did you go home to see your wife?’

  Gregg’s eyes flickered upwards once, and then down again. His voice was not much above a whisper. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You’d better tell me about it,’ said Ericson. ‘You want to tell somebody, don’t you? – apart from the trouble you’re in over it?’

  He looked away as the other man struggled to answer. But the lead was enough, the balance was tipped: now at last, up in the quiet cabin, with the sun filtering through the porthole and the muted sound of water running against the hull, Gregg told his appalling story.

  It had begun with a letter, waiting for him when Compass Rose got back from her last trip; a letter from a pal:

  Dear Tom [it said], Of course it’s none of my business, but I’ve been up and down the old street once or twice, thinking of calling on Edith and asking how you’re getting along, and then I haven’t liked to go in because she’s got company already. Dear Tom, there’s a lot of talk about it, a car outside the house at all hours, they say he’s a traveller for one of the big firms. I seen him once saying goodbye, they were laughing. I didn’t like it, Tom, I thought I’d write and tell you. If I done wrong I’m sorry, you know me, always putting my foot in it. Keep cheerful, you better ask for a bit of leave and straighten it up, it a
ll comes of these chaps being in a reserved bloody occupation, shooting’s too good for some, yours till the cows come home.

  ‘I had to go, sir,’ said Gregg, twisting his hands together. At that moment there was more than certainty in his voice: something like defiance. ‘I had to go, straight away. When you get a letter like that . . . I wasn’t due for leave even next time it came round, and that was three weeks ahead. I had to see what was going on. We’ve only been married six months.’

  And so he had gone, without a word to anyone, that same afternoon: slipping ashore with the liberty men, catching the last London train from Lime Street station, arriving about eleven at night, getting the bus out to Highgate.

  ‘What happened then?’ asked Ericson, when the pause had stretched to unbearable limits.

  ‘It’s a little house, sir,’ said Gregg, ‘a nice little house. It used to be my mother’s – she left it to me. When I walked up from the bus stop, it was just like the letter said.’ The defiance was gone now, swallowed up in misery: he was reliving the horrible moment. ‘When I got to the house, the car was outside the door, and – and there was a light on upstairs.’

  Gregg paused, and frowned: the imprint of emotion on the smooth round face was very moving. ‘See what I mean, sir? Downstairs, it was dark.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ericson, ‘yes, I see.’

  For a moment Gregg hadn’t known what to do, he’d been so taken aback, so horrified, so sick with it. He had stood in the dark street, looking from the car up to the light, the terrible bedroom light. ‘I didn’t need telling any more, sir: there was enough to bet on, there . . . I waited a long time, thinking what to do, and then I thought, well, give her a chance, she’s only a kid really, and lonely by herself, so I walked up the path whistling a bit, and I made a lot of noise opening the door and going inside . . . You see, I love her, sir,’ he said, with simple determination, as if only he knew about love. ‘We’ve been married just the six months.’

  But now there was a long silence which Ericson could not break, so clearly pitiful was the feeling behind it: the word ‘love’ must have struck a hopeless note of memory. When Gregg started again, it was as if the key had now changed to something darker, more horrible still: as if this part of the story, which he had not yet shared with anyone, had a special forbidden quality which made them both guilty, teller and hearer alike.

  Gregg’s wife had called out when she heard the door go: scared, she sounded, and there was a lot of moving about . . . She said: ‘Who is it?’ and he answered ‘Tom’, and there was whispering which made him feel angry and sick at the same time. He had switched on the light in the hall and waited, knowing quite well what they were doing and what the whispering meant; they were wondering if it could be bluffed out, what the evidence was, how much he had seen and guessed. But evidently they soon decided that it was hopeless, for now a man’s voice spoke quite loud, and when Edith called out ‘I’m coming down,’ it had a sulky note of defiance.

  ‘I still didn’t know what to do, sir – I couldn’t make sense of it at all. She’d always been so different, there’d never been anything like this. We were only married a couple of leaves back – you read the banns for us, here on board.’ Ericson suddenly remembered that this was so: he could even recall, with a queer distaste, having read: ‘Edith Tappett, spinster, of the Parish of Highgate, London’, and wondering what a girl with so unromantic a name could be like. Now he knew: now they both knew . . . ‘Pretty soon she came down,’ Gregg went on, speaking rather fast and looking at the floor. ‘She hadn’t got dressed, even then: she was all anyhow, in her dressing gown. There was stuff on it, sir – I could see.’

  Ericson thought: that’s something he’ll never forget: what a horrible thing to have in one’s mind, for ever and ever . . . But Gregg was hurrying on, leaving one scene for another yet more terrible, as if his choice were so rich and so wide that he need not stay long over one aspect of it.

  ‘She’d had a bit to drink, sir – I could tell that. But that wasn’t enough for her to talk the way she did. You’d have thought it was my fault. “I’ve got a friend”, she said, “I wasn’t expecting you” – just like that. And when I said: “Friend? – what do you mean, friend?” she said: “There’s no need to shout, Tom, you don’t want any trouble, surely?” And then she called out: “Walter”, and after a minute the man came down the stairs. He didn’t care,’ said Gregg, with fury and misery in his voice, ‘he walked down the stairs doing up his coat . . . A big flashy chap, well-dressed, full of himself – you could tell he did this sort of thing every day of the week.’ Gregg looked up and then down again, flushing remembering a deep humiliation. ‘He was twice the size of me, sir. I couldn’t even – I couldn’t—’ His voice tailed off into an empty realm of cowardice and despair, where only his defeat, his still-raw shame, was real.

  ‘Never mind that,’ said Ericson quickly, as if there were no significance in the pause, the moment of abasement. ‘Tell me what happened next. What did your wife say?’

  ‘You should have let me know, Tom,’ was what his wife had said. ‘How was I to tell you’d be back?’ And then she had actually introduced them, and the man had said: ‘Ah, the sailor home from the sea,’ and Gregg had told him to get out, and the man had answered: ‘We don’t want any unpleasantness, thank you.’ It was all part of a topsy-turvy nightmare in which Gregg could not get his bearings at all. ‘After he’d gone, we had it out properly, but I couldn’t get her to see it straight at all.’ Gregg’s voice still held some of the astonishment of that moment. ‘She said she’d got used to – to love, sir, with me, and she couldn’t do without it. She said it had been going on for two months. She said that this chap had talked her into it, but she wasn’t really sorry, only on my account. She said it was the war, and lots of people did it . . . She acted like a different person. In the end we just went off to bed. She was with me that night, sir, though – though I could hardly touch her at first.’

  There was now a much longer pause, almost as if Gregg had finished putting his side of the affair and were waiting for the verdict. But that could not be the end of the story, thought Ericson, looking down at his desk: it was horrible enough, and it excused a good deal as far as Gregg’s behaviour went, but it only accounted for two days – three at the outside – and he had been away for seventeen . . . He waited, wanting to prompt the other man but unable to find a way which would not sound brutal or indifferent: he had been moved by the recital – horrified, even – and he did not want it to seem as if he considered it of no account, or was brushing it aside in favour of a strict, immovable justice. But presently Gregg took up the story again, without any reminder: perhaps he had merely been collecting his thoughts, perhaps there was worse to come.

  ‘That was the first day, sir,’ he said, ‘and I stayed two more, just to make sure – I’d still be back in time to catch the ship, and that way it didn’t seem it would be so bad.’ He looked swiftly at the Captain, aware that he was taking a lot for granted, but the latter made no sign: the verdict, the judgement was to come at the very end . . . ‘She was just like she used to be in the old days,’ Gregg went on: ‘she stopped talking about the other chap, she didn’t say anything more about these funny ideas, she seemed to have forgotten all about it, except when I spoke about it at the end. But before I left I asked her what was going to happen, and she promised faithfully to give it another try. So I went off to catch the early train’ – Ericson could tell there was yet another climax coming, another stroke of pain, from Gregg’s swifter, shorter breathing, and the way his words came faster and faster, ‘and I missed it because of the traffic, and I came back, thinking I’d spend the day with her and catch the train in the evening, and she wasn’t there – the house was empty, and she’d taken her case as well.’

  This time Ericson was afraid that Gregg was going to break down altogether: his voice came to a sudden stop, and his mouth, working and trembling uncontrollably, seemed on the point of puckering into tears. It was
a moment of surrender: he looked young and capable and smart in his uniform, and then, above the neatly-rolled collar and the clean white flannel, his defeated face destroyed the picture utterly. Without a word Ericson went to his cupboard, poured out some whisky, and handed the glass to Gregg: because it was so unusual a thing to do, so far outside the normal, it was capable of being a failure and a mistake. For a moment Ericson wondered if, at a later date when Gregg had forgotten the worst of this matter, he might translate the occasion into different terms: perhaps boasting cheekily in the mess decks: ‘Trouble? Not me! The skipper gave me a tot of whisky and told me to come back any time . . .’ But no, it would not be like that. The giving of the whisky seemed to surprise Gregg into an effort of control: as he sipped it, looking round the cabin and out through the sunlit porthole, his mouth and face firmed again, and he prepared to go on. What he had said, and what he had still to say, was desolate, but not too desolate for ordered speech.

  It was possible, he had thought, that his wife might be at her mother’s, over at Edgware; even though she had said nothing about going, she was in the mood for impulsive action. So to Edgware he went, by bus, only to draw another blank. ‘She wasn’t there, and she hadn’t been there for weeks. I could see her mother thought it was funny, but I wasn’t answering any questions. Then I went to see my pal, the one that wrote the letter, but he’d gone back after his leave and they didn’t know anything. So I left it, and went home again.’

  He had been alone in the empty, silent house for a week. As he dismissed it thus, in a single sentence, Ericson tried to visualise what it must have been like: the waiting, the loneliness, the suspicion, the knowledge of betrayal. ‘I had to stay, sir, in case she came back,’ he said, and Ericson could not, for pity, deny the claim. ‘I’d have gone looking for her, but I didn’t know where to look – there was the whole of London. And then I got an idea, I should have thought of it before. There was a married friend of hers, woman I never cared for, over the other side of London, down White City way. I thought she might be staying there, so I went over, and asked at the house. She said the wife had been there, a few days back, but had gone away again, she didn’t know where.’ The story was pouring out now, unchecked by any reserve: in the silent cabin the words and sentences, clumsy and ill-formed, yet flowed with an eloquent readiness towards their cruel end. ‘I thought she was telling lies, there was something in the way she looked, so I hung about a bit, watching for the car, and then I turned into the first pub I came to, for a pint and something to eat, and there they were, the two of them, sitting down and drinking port.’ He swallowed. ‘She was laughing, and then she looked up and said: “Look who’s here”.’