‘It’s just plain murder, dad,’ said John Ericson at one point, when they touched on the happenings of the last few months, and the fearful total of sinkings. ‘You can’t call it anything else . . . The same thing happens to convoy after convoy, only a little worse each time. How long can they go on sending us to sea, when it’s an absolute certainty that half the ships won’t come back?’
‘Some convoys get through, John,’ said Ericson defensively.
‘Damn few . . . Oh, we’re not blaming the escorts – they do the best they can, and it’s pretty good all the time. It’s just that the convoy system doesn’t seem to be working. You ought to hear our old man on the subject! We can go fifteen knots, any time we like, and yet we have to jog along at seven and eight knots, stuck in a convoy for three weeks on end, a sitting target for the U-boats.’
‘You’re still better off in a convoy, instead of steaming independently. The figures prove it.’
‘It doesn’t feel like it, when those torpedoes are flying round, and the only signal you can get from the Commodore is “Maintain convoy speed” . . . And watching ships and people that you know, being blown up or sunk or bombed, every time you put to sea. Sometimes I feel as if—’ He paused.
‘What, John?’
‘Are you ever afraid, dad?’ The young face, an unformed version of his own, turned towards Ericson anxiously. ‘Really afraid – trembling, I mean – when you know there’s going to be an attack?’
‘I think we all are . . .’ Ericson lay on his back, staring at the blue and gold sky, speaking as casually as he could. ‘I know that I am, anyway. The only thing is to show it as little as you can – because it’s catching – and to try and do your job as well as you would if you weren’t afraid.’ He examined a sprig of heather with great attention. ‘There’s nothing much in being afraid, John: if a man tells you that he isn’t, on our job, he’s either a liar or such a cast-iron bloody fool that he’s not worth talking to.’
‘I get the needle pretty badly sometimes.’
‘Well, you’re not a liar, at least.’
They both laughed. There was between them now a closeness, a trusting confessional honesty, which they had never reached before.
‘I think of you a lot, dad, when I’m at sea,’ John went on after a pause. He too was staring at the sky, which with the approach of evening was losing colour swiftly. On the far horizon, the line of sea and sky began to blur as the sun dipped towards the water. ‘Particularly when I see those corvettes chasing round the convoy. They’re so incredibly small . . .’
‘There’s something to be said for being a small target.’
‘There’s something to be said for ten thousand tons of solid ship underneath you, in an Atlantic gale.’
‘I think of you, too, John.’ Ericson, cherishing the moment of intimacy, the first since childhood, hardly knew how to phrase what was in his mind. ‘We’re both doing the same job, and we know the sort of job it is, and I can’t help being anxious about you. Anxious and – proud of what you’re doing. When I was your age, I hadn’t got anything like as far. So just take care of yourself, won’t you? – I want to be able to celebrate the next Armistice properly . . . We must think about catching our train, John, or your grandmother will be on the warpath again.’
John grinned as he got to his feet. ‘She’s a terror, isn’t she?’
‘She certainly keeps us all in order, yes.’
‘Oh, it’s all right for me,’ said John, grinning again. ‘I’m not the captain of my ship.’
In the garden of the small house just outside Liverpool, Ferraby played with the baby. The baby, a girl, was now six months old: pretty, gurgling, crawling unsteadily, and answering her name – Ursula – with an ecstatic bubbling noise. Ferraby loved everything to do with being a father, from wheeling the pram out in the afternoons to preparing a bath at the exact temperature: even to be woken up in the middle of the night was an acceptable part of fatherhood, establishing his connexion firmly. But most of all he liked simply to be with the child, watching her, talking to her, feeling her minute fingers curling round his own. He felt no need for any more exciting kind of activity, these days: his whole leave was passing in this simple and tender fashion, and he would have chosen nothing else. But now, as he played in the sunshine, holding the warm body, touching the soft petal skin, his thoughts were far away: his thoughts were of steel and storm, the ugliest thoughts in the world.
Such moods and such thoughts came in waves, and he could not now control them. At any time of the day or night, his mind would go back to Compass Rose, and the way his leave was running out, and what would take the place of this respite, which must soon come to an end: sometimes, as now, the contrast between terror and tenderness, the extremes of his two lives, overwhelmed him with its futility. At one and the same time, he felt the sweetness of the present, here in the garden, and the threat of the future that lay out in the Atlantic: he felt that he could only face one of them, and it was not the future – the future was too hard and too evil, and he hated it with all his soul.
He no longer told Mavis anything of this, though sometimes he told the baby.
Now, as he sweated with his thoughts and his prophetic fear, the baby, gurgling again, crawled to the edge of the rug and fell gently on to her face in the grass. The swift wailing changed magically as Ferraby picked her up and held her close to him. Mavis, brought out of the house by the noise, checked her step and stood watching them, a smile on her face. Bless his heart . . . It was lovely to see Gordon so relaxed and so happy.
Young Baker said: ‘Yes, mother – I’d love to,’ and went upstairs to put on his collar and tie. It was the fourth time he’d been out to tea with his mother that week; but she enjoyed it so much, she got so much fun out of showing him off, that it was impossible to say ‘No’ to her. There was nothing else to do, anyway.
As usual, he was spending his leave at home, in his mother’s small house in a Birmingham suburb. For the first few days it had been fun to be fussed over, to enjoy the good cooking and the undoubted comfort of his mother’s housekeeping, to be the male centre of a soft feminine flutter. But soon this had begun to pall: he could not help realising that this was not the sort of flutter he wanted, nor quite the sort of softness either . . . Baker was nineteen years old, a shy, anxious-to-please young man whose normal instincts, as yet ungratified, were somewhat heated by his predilection for the more furtive brands of erotica: he collected the pin-up girls from Esquire and similar publications, he subscribed to ‘art’ magazines, he even possessed, hidden under a pile of shirts in his wardrobe, a series of postcards which recorded the athletic aspects of love in unusual variety. But so far, no one had appeared in support of these daydreams: the only girls he met at home were the approved daughters of his mother’s friends, selected, it seemed to him, for their inherent wholesomeness, and his only feminine contact at Liverpool was a Wren in the Pay Office, who was much too interested in her career to spare any attention for a sub-lieutenant, and met his tentative advances with a smile as thin as his single stripe . . . So he spent his time ashore, and his leave periods, balanced between hope and despair: hope that somewhere, just around the next corner, was the girl he so much wanted, and despair when the next corner proved inevitably bare. It was so unfair: other people had girls, and did all sorts of things with them: even in the cinemas there was a maddening activity in the back row: only he, it seemed, was still waiting for the right one to come along, to ease his futile longing.
From the foot of the stairs his mother called out: ‘Tom! It’s time we started,’ and he put on his coat and prepared to go down.
Another tea party . . . But you never knew: perhaps, this time, the girl would be there, and she would smile and they would recognise each other instantly, and somehow they would get away from the crowd and she’d start to do the most marvellous things to him, and it would happen at last.
There was a girl there, as it turned out, but she was terrible: awkward, sall
ow, flat-chested – no sort of help at all. He could not even imagine himself kissing her . . . They sat round in a formal circle, drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches: Mrs Keyes, Mrs Ockshott, Mrs Henson, his mother, an old chap who was somebody’s husband, the girl who was somebody’s daughter, and himself in the place of honour – the young naval officer snatching a brief hour of peace between fearful voyages. The conversation, indeed, ran on something like these lines: on such occasions, his mother made obvious efforts to draw him out, and the simplest course was to play up to her and lay it on as thick as possible. It was easy to expand in this uncritical atmosphere.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, munching, ‘it’s so rough that we can’t put anything on the table at all. We eat things straight out of the tin, or just go without.’
The ladies clicked their tongues sympathetically, and his mother said: ‘Fancy that!’ in fond horror. He caught the girl’s eye fixed on him admiringly. But she was so ugly . . . She was sitting with her knees apart, he observed, exposing the kind of safety knickers which you sometimes saw in advertisements, with elastic round the thighs. No good at all . . . He took another sandwich.
‘Yes,’ he went on recklessly, ‘I remember the steward bringing some corned beef up to the bridge for me. It was the first food I’d had for – for two days. The funny thing was, when it arrived I just couldn’t eat it. Exhaustion, I suppose.’
‘Fancy that!’ said his mother again. And then: ‘Tell us about that man who was drowning, Tom. You know – when you went overboard in the storm.’
‘Oh – that . . .’ The girl, though still looking at him, had now closed her legs. You’re welcome, he thought, and passed his cup for some more tea. ‘It’s nothing much,’ he began, marshalling his thoughts rapidly. ‘But one night, when the Captain called for volunteers . . .’
He made the story into a good one – almost too good, if the face of the only other man in the room was anything to go by. But the women lapped it up: and the ugly girl was positively hypnotized by everything he did and said. He enjoyed the admiration while it lasted, but on the way home he relapsed into boredom and frustration again. What did those old cows and that awful girl matter? He was just throwing the stuff away . . . He really wanted to tell these stories sitting by the fireside, with a different kind of girl – the girl – resting her head on his knees, and looking up at him, and not minding when his hand moved gradually down under the top of her dress.
How wonderful it would be, he thought, to be married, really married.
Morell, nursing a glass of brandy, sat in the warm, subtly feminine sitting room of the flat in Westminster, watching the clock and waiting till it was time to fetch his wife from the theatre. His uniform jacket lay on the chair opposite him, waiting also for the moment to move. But the moment, much as he wanted it, was not yet here.
The clock showed five past ten, which meant another half-hour before he could reasonably start: Elaine did not like him hanging round the theatre or her dressing room when she was on the stage, and she was rarely ready to leave – make-up off, clothes changed – before eleven o’clock each night. (At sea, he had pictured himself waiting in her dressing room, playing with the make-up box, talking to her dresser, until she came off stage: but it had not worked out like that.) Many times he had found himself wishing that the run of the play would come to an end, but it showed no sign of doing that: besides, the wish was purely selfish – she would have been so disappointed . . . But certainly the engagement meant that he had not seen much of her during his leave: six evening shows a week, and two matinees as well, left her with very little spare time, even leaving out of account the extra appointments – lunches, dinners, cocktail parties – that seemed to go naturally with being in a current West End play.
Morell sipped his brandy, while the clock crawled towards the half-hour. His mood was morose and uncertain, in spite of the fact that they would be meeting again very soon: the trouble was that he could not count on the meeting being a happy one.
At the beginning, Elaine had seemed genuinely regretful of the time they must spend apart. ‘Oh darling, what a shame!’ she had exclaimed, on the night of his arrival. ‘Just when you’ve got long leave, I’ve got a part in a play that’s actually going to run . . . But never mind,’ she had continued, rubbing her face against his shoulder, ‘fetch me at the theatre, and I’ll make it up to you afterwards.’ And later that night, when he had claimed her at the stage door and taken her home, she did make it up to him, with all the sensual tenderness he remembered from the past. Indeed, it had been like that for three or four nights, without a shadow of hesitation on her part, so that he was immensely, violently happy. And then, and then . . .
What did it amount to, exactly, the obvious deterioration? What had made her attention fade, and his happiness and confidence with it? To begin with, it had been the fault of living in a crowd: people ringing up all the time, engagements she would not cut, late parties after the play was over, parties from which he was excluded. ‘But darling,’ she would say, ‘it’s no good you coming along. It’s just theatre people, probably talking shop the whole time. You’d be bored to bits.’ And when he had remonstrated further: ‘Darling, I’ve got to go,’ she would insist, with an edge of irritation. ‘It’s important – it might mean more work when this play is finished.’ There was no getting past that argument: or none that she would recognise as valid.
It was no good asking questions, either. ‘Oh, just a party,’ she would say, when he wanted to know where she was going. ‘You don’t know the people – you probably wouldn’t like them, anyway.’ Question and answer, question and silence, question and angry protest. (But he could not help the questions: he was wretchedly jealous of every moment of their separation.) ‘Oh darling, don’t heckle!’ she would answer finally, when his probing reached a foolish level of persistence. ‘It’s driving me mad . . .’ And that would be that. He wanted to explain to her where it was driving him, but he had begun to be afraid of any sort of emotion, any groping beyond the normality of their life together, any experiment. He had so much to lose, and it seemed clear, for some reason, that he could afford it far less than she. Each time he tried to re-establish himself, the effort was feebler, the ground more surely lost, the abject surrender more obvious.
He really had no weapons, and he had already betrayed the fact, with fatal effect upon them both.
There was something else, too, worse than all this, something he noticed quite early on in his leave: a subtle lessening of her fervour, a certain automatic response, so that he could not decide, in cold blood, whether she were genuinely moved in love, or merely a competent performer . . . There had been one moment, a moment of ludicrous detachment when, close as they were, he had seemed to be observing her from an immense distance, and had suddenly found himself making up a speech in his head. This woman, as your Lordship will observe,’ the strange words formed just behind his tongue, ‘makes love with a degree of technical competence which—’ but he had not been able to complete the sentence. Indeed, suddenly cold and sick, it was all he could do to complete the act of love, so as not to betray himself, and her.
There was nothing definite to go on, and nothing definite to comfort him either. Worst of all, he was no longer able to talk to her about it, to ask for reassurance and to receive it. They shared a house and a bed, they shared an easy conversation and a range of jokes; but they shared nothing below the surface – the candour and the closeness were gone, and he was afraid to challenge their passing, for fear of what he might uncover.
The clock struck the half-hour, and with a thankful readiness he rose to put on his coat. As he moved, the telephone rang.
For a full minute he let it ring unanswered. Almost certainly it was one of her friends, her intolerable friends – the women with their quick malicious tongues, the fat men with wandering hands and contracts in their pockets, the juvenile leads who were very nearly homosexuals but were willing to try anything, the stage riff-raff swelled by home-
based officers on the make . . . But the ringing persisted, and finally he crossed to the side table and lifted the receiver.
It was Elaine.
‘Darling,’ she began, speaking quickly as if knowing that he was going to object, ‘I’ve been asked to a party, after the show tonight.’
‘Oh,’ he said, non-committally.
‘I must go, darling. Readman will be there. You know – the producer.’
‘All right,’ he said, after a pause. He had other words ready, but he knew they would not be effective. ‘Can I fetch you from anywhere?’
‘No. I’ll be so late, darling.’
‘You know it doesn’t matter. Where will you be?’
‘I don’t know, really.’ The edge of irritation was creeping into her voice again. ‘We’ll probably go on somewhere. Don’t you worry.’
But foolishly he persisted. ‘Ring me up, then. I can come along anywhere, any time.’ Oh darling, he thought, you’re my wife, and this is the last week of my leave, and I want you here, not at parties with other people. But these also were words which were not effective.
‘That’s so silly—’ she began – and then, treacherously, she disposed of the matter in a swift series of sentences, leaving him no time to answer. ‘Really it’ll be too late, darling. And don’t wait up for me. Get some sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning. Goodbye.’
The Cruel Sea Page 22