The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  He had already opened his mouth to start another pleading sentence when he heard the telephone click. Presently the dialling tone began.

  He sat down again, and took up the glass of brandy, conscious only of a shattering disappointment. Then, before he had time to control the direction of his mind, he thought suddenly of two things, in swift and horrible succession. He did not know what wretched instinct presented them so vividly, but once they were there he could not drive them out again. He remembered, first, the huge bruise which he had found on Elaine’s thigh, the first night of his leave. She bruised very easily; it had been rather a joke on their honeymoon, and on their first night it was still a joke. ‘I knocked it getting out of a taxi,’ she had answered when he asked her. ‘Fine story!’ he had grumbled, and then, in a different mood: ‘May I bring you another taxi – pretty soon?’ and she, in answer: ‘The meter’s ticking up already . . .’ A charming scene, melting into frenzy – but now he remembered only the readiness of her first answer.

  The second thing he thought of made him get up and, with a clear sense of shame, go into the bathroom. Hanging behind the bathroom door was a sponge bag, a special sponge bag in which Elaine kept her ‘things’. He leant against the wall, unwilling to put, even secretly to himself, so disgusting a question. Then he reached out his hand, and took the sponge bag from its hook, and opened it, loathing himself, and looked inside.

  What he was looking for was not there.

  Of course, it was not conclusive. Once – rather a long time ago – she had said: ‘Oh, I always want to be ready for you.’ It could have, even now, a simple and tender explanation.

  But as soon as he was back in the sitting room, and had sat down, he began to imagine, in very terrible detail, Elaine making love with someone else.

  Lockhart also spent his leave in London, though on a less emotional plane. Indeed, there were times when, if he had been offered some kind of overflow from Morell’s situation, he might have taken it on just to keep his hand in. At sea, he was aware in himself of a celibate dedication to the work he was doing: a long leave ashore was inclined to probe the chinks in that armour, reminding him of a different sort of past and exposing a human weakness for sensual indulgence which he had imagined was stowed away with his civilian clothes. But, in the event, the occasion never offered, and his leave passed as a tranquil extension of the male world which the past two years had made normal for him.

  He stayed in a borrowed flat in Kensington, the owner of which was absent on some mysterious mission to America; after living for so long in a crowd, he might well have been lonely. But on his doorstep was London, his own fine town, shabby and bomb-damaged but with all her offerings unimpaired: the people, the bars, the theatres, the concerts, the simple slow walks down streets that ended at the river or the green open parks – these were all here under his hand, and he made the most of them, with a thankful appetite for variety.

  He met a great many people – by chance, by coincidence, by arrangement, by misfortune: of them all, he best remembered two. They were not good examples of wartime London, and they were not the pleasantest people he met; but they stuck in his memory, just as, at a children’s birthday party, it is the child who is sick or who loses its temper who makes the most lasting impression – particularly on the adults.

  He met, in the Café Royal, a man who had been, for a brief and inglorious period, his employer in an advertising agency in London. Lockhart had taken on the job, some time in the middle thirties, when he was broke – indeed, he would scarcely have considered it in any other circumstances, so foolish and irksome was it from the very beginning. His work consisted of writing advertising copy in praise of food: in outlining the style to be aimed at, his employer, a large fat man by the name of Hamshaw, tried to communicate his own sense of mission, and was clearly taken aback by Lockhart’s somewhat frivolous approach. Matters proceeded uneasily for some months: more and more of Lockhart’s stuff was returned to him, marked ‘too harsh’, ‘too stiff’, ‘a softer approach, please’, once even ‘the reference to saliva is indelicate’. There came a day when Lockhart’s projected phrase to round off a dog biscuit advertisement: ‘Dogs Like ‘Em’, was rejected in favour of ‘No more toothsome morsel has ever been offered to the canine world’, and he knew that, broke or not, his patience was exhausted.

  He waited for the chance of a parting gesture, and the chance came. On his desk one morning was a note from Hamshaw: ‘Please let me have a suitable slogan for Bolger’s Treacle Butterscotch’. Lockhart considered for a moment, scribbled a line at the bottom of the page, picked up his hat, and walked out. Not till some hours later did Hamshaw, nosing round the copy room, light upon the farewell effort: ‘Bolger’s Butterscotch – Rich and Dark like the Aga Khan’.

  Even in those days, Hamshaw had been sufficiently pompous; now, appointed to control the thought of entire subcontinents on behalf of the Ministry of Information, he was positively Olympian. He greeted Lockhart with a detached bow, and said: ‘Ah, Lockhart – come and share my table’ as if he were offering Holy Communion to a dubious backslider. When they had chatted warily for some time: ‘A fine service, yours,’ said Hamshaw with deliberation, gently massaging a ponderous chin. ‘But I must confess that at the Ministry we find you – shall we say? – a little backward.’

  ‘Backward,’ repeated Lockhart non-committally.

  Hamshaw nodded, popped a sandwich into his mouth, and nodded again. ‘Yes. We’d like to see a little more readiness to release material – about the Atlantic, and so forth. It’s very difficult to get the Admiralty to cooperate, very difficult indeed.’

  ‘I think they take security fairly seriously.’

  ‘My dear Lockhart, you can’t teach me anything about security!’ said Hamshaw, as if it were his own personal conception. ‘I can assure you we have that very much at heart. What we want is more willingness to publicise what’s going on, once the demands of security are met. These successes – if successes they are – are no good unless people hear about them, no good at all.’

  Lockhart frowned, not seeing why he should accept this nonsense, even as a matter of social convenience. ‘A sunk U-boat is sunk,’ he said shortly, ‘whether it’s on the front page in two colours or not. The advertising afterwards doesn’t affect it at all.’

  ‘The advertising, as you call it,’ – Hamshaw looked at him portentously, alert for any disrespect, ‘is valuable from the morale point of view. The national morale, which is one of our prime concerns, needs a continual supply of favourable news items to sustain it. Indeed, I think it is safe to say that the war could not be fought for one single day without the constant public inspiration which we supply. However,’ he went on, perhaps aware of Lockhart’s wandering attention, ‘I mustn’t ride off on my hobby horse, absorbing though it is. Tell me about your own work. You find it personally satisfying?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Lockhart.

  ‘In many ways,’ said Hamshaw, staring into the middle distance, ‘it is a great pity you did not stay with us. I was able to take some of my staff with me to the Ministry – those I particularly trusted – and they have all done well. You might have had a junior controllership by now – possibly even a sectional directorship.’

  ‘God bless my soul!’ said Lockhart.

  ‘Oh yes, there is great scope for advancement – very great scope indeed. But perhaps you are happy enough where you are.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lockhart, ‘I think I am.’

  ‘Well, that is all that matters. It is all one war,’ went on Hamshaw with frightful condescension, ‘all one great cause. We realise that very fully, I assure you. We cannot all be charged with supplying the driving force for the battle – the services play an honourable part in the field itself.’

  ‘How vulgar you make it sound,’ said Lockhart evenly, as for the second time in their joint lives he picked up his hat, preparatory to flight. ‘But bear with us a little longer. We are trying to get integrated in your war
machine.’

  ‘Now I’ve angered you, somehow,’ said Hamshaw reproachfully.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lockhart, ‘somehow you have,’ and left him to work it out. It would doubtless be dismissed as some regrettable form of war psychosis.

  Later that evening, in the bar of a Fleet Street pub, he met a fellow journalist, by the name of Keys, whom he had not seen since the beginning of the war. Keys was considerably older than himself, a tough and seasoned senior reporter on the staff of one of the popular dailies: like Hamshaw, his natural inclinations seemed to have been stimulated and intensified by war, and where he had once been something of a sceptic about human nature in general, he was now crudely cynical about every aspect of the war, and the motives of anyone who had the remotest connexion with it. With no prompting at all, save the whisky at his elbow, he treated Lockhart to a diatribe of extraordinary violence, embracing the whole of Britain: indeed, not one of his fellow countrymen escaped the lash. The politicians were feathering their nests without regard to the common good, the industrialists were selling shoddy war material at fantastic profits, all the newspapers without exception were lying their way through the struggle, ignoring Allied setbacks and inventing successes to put in their place. The working class were loafers to a man; and servicemen, of course, were the dupes of a huge national confidence trick, if no worse . . .

  ‘There’s nothing to choose between us and the Germans, anyway,’ concluded Keys savagely, staring at Lockhart’s uniform as if it were some kind of prison garb, shameful to anyone who wore it. ‘We’re both after the same thing – the domination of Europe, and the markets that go with it. The Germans are just a bit more honest about it, that’s all.’

  ‘Um,’ said Lockhart non-committally. The bar was crowded, and he did not want to attract attention by an argument which was bound to be futile, and might become unpleasant. Just above their heads was a large sign, in Gothic characters, which read:

  ‘There is no depression in this house’.

  It might be better to take his cue from that.

  ‘By God!’ exclaimed Keys, seeming to lash himself into a sudden fury, ‘I’ve had to write more claptrap about the great Allied war effort, the last few months, than I would have thought possible. It’s enough to turn your stomach.’

  ‘Why do it, then?’

  Keys shrugged. ‘For the same reason you’re wearing that uniform,’ he answered, with a bitter inflection.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Lockhart shortly.

  ‘Don’t fool yourself . . . There’s a war, and you join up like a good little boy, because everyone else is doing it. There’s a war, and my paper has to plug the patriotic angle because it would be unsaleable otherwise, and I have to turn the stuff out because I’d lose my job if I didn’t. It’s the same reason – the fear of not toeing the line, and of being unpopular if you don’t follow the crowd like a lot of bloody sheep.’

  ‘There are other reasons,’ said Lockhart.

  Keys snorted derisively. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me the whole Navy’s fighting for God, King and country.’

  ‘It’s an idea that lies behind a lot of what we feel,’ said Lockhart without heat. ‘It isn’t just a war for right and justice, with all the merit on one side, I know, and there’s enough truth in that “domination of Europe” thesis to make one think twice before accepting patriotic speeches at their face value. But if we lost, or if we hadn’t declared war in the first place, we wouldn’t have a chance of establishing any of the things we believe in. What do you suppose England would be like, if the Germans were running it?’

  ‘More efficient,’ said Keys.

  Lockhart smiled. ‘I see I’m not likely to make much headway,’ he said good-humouredly. He found it, for some reason, impossible to be annoyed with Keys, who had lived so long with the-news-behind-the-news that he could hardly distinguish a genuine emotion from a counterfeit one, and was quite unaffected by either. ‘I’ll just have to carry on in my patriotic daydream . . . It’s a real feeling, sometimes, you know,’ he went on quietly, ‘and a lot of people have died for it already.’

  ‘More fools they,’ said Keys contemptuously.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Lockhart, ‘but they couldn’t know that, could they? They’ve only got the newspapers to go by, and you people do such a good job.’

  Lockhart got slightly drunk that night, possibly as an antidote, and it was in a mood of detached intoxication, weaving his way down the long slope of Piccadilly towards Knightsbridge and home, that he tried to sort out his impression of the day’s encounters. Of the two men, Hamshaw and Keys, he infinitely preferred the latter’s approach to the war: he might be bitter and cynical about it, but at least he was not deluding himself, at least he was free of the pompous haze of grandeur with which Hamshaw had surrounded himself and the war and his role in it. War was not like that: no sacred cause, served exclusively by pledged knights, was involved; on the other hand, war was not Keys’ brand of shoddy commercial dogfight, either. There had been something in what he said, some slender basis for the idea that the fight was between equally guilty contestants, each determined on European ascendancy; but not enough to resolve it finally into a simple and selfish struggle, with nothing to choose between the eventual winners. Keys had rationalised his own bitterness, which might spring from a dozen different causes; it might even be grounded, deep down, in the fact that he was too old to be of any practical use in the war and, being excluded for what perhaps seemed an ignoble reason, was determined to shrug off the whole business.

  ‘We can’t all be born at the same time,’ said Lockhart aloud, addressing the facade of a big block of flats at Rutland Gate. But perhaps Keys wasn’t as logical, as infinitely wise, as he himself was at this moment. Keys was too old for fighting: therefore, to him, fighting was a worthless preoccupation, and the war a cut-throat extension of commercial travelling.

  Of course there must be something more . . . Lockhart had never been a professed patriot: even now, closely involved in the fight, he could feel no dedication save to the necessity of winning – and then seeing about a fair and equitable settlement. But the winning was paramount: the alternative meant disaster, for everything he stood and felt for, and subjection to a cruel, impersonal, and loathsome tyranny which would bring the curtain down on human hope.

  There must be Germans, too, who felt like that: good ones, deluded, but sincere and equally concerned with the humanities: good soldiers, good sailors, good airmen who felt they were destroying a perverted English attempt at conquest. It was a pity that they had to be killed as well . . .

  ‘I’m a German, really,’ he said out loud again, pausing to rest against a convenient lamp post. ‘Nothing to choose between us . . . But my part of Germany’s got to win, and then we’ll start parcelling the whole thing out again.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the policeman who suddenly appeared at his side. ‘Have you got far to go home?’

  Lockhart blinked, and focused his eyes with an effort. The figure which was now before him seemed enormous in the lamplight. ‘Why are policemen always taller than I am?’ he asked, complaining. ‘Now, in Germany . . .’

  ‘How about a taxi?’ asked the policeman, with the usual all-embracing patience. ‘You’ll get one a little way back, in Knightsbridge.’

  ‘A fine night for walking,’ said Lockhart.

  ‘A fine night for sleeping,’ said the policeman, reprovingly. ‘They’re all asleep round here. We don’t want to wake them up, do we?’

  ‘Were you ever in the Navy?’ asked Lockhart, with a vague idea of establishing a friendly contact.

  ‘No, sir,’ said the policeman, ‘I’ve had no luck at all.’ A taxi, coasting slowly past on its way back to town, turned neatly at a wave of his hand, and ground to a standstill beside them. ‘What’s the address, then?’

  Lockhart gave it, and stood wavering as the policeman opened the taxi door. The annoying part about being drunk was that everyone was so much more efficient than oneself . . . H
e paused, with one foot on the step of the cab.

  ‘I was walking home quite quietly,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the policeman.

  ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ said the taxi driver, an oldish man in a thick green overcoat. ‘Navy or no navy.’

  ‘This is all right,’ said the policeman, slamming the door as Lockhart subsided on the seat. Through the open window he added: ‘You sure of that address?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lockhart. ‘Engraved on my heart.’

  ‘All right,’ said the policeman. He nodded to the taxi driver. ‘Off you go.’

  ‘We’ve got to win,’ said Lockhart, by way of valediction.

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ said the policeman. ‘But not all in one night. Leave something for tomorrow.’

  ‘What’s it like in them battleships?’ asked the taxi driver over his shoulder, about a mile farther on.

  ‘I should think it’s absolutely terrible,’ answered Lockhart, who was trying to light a cigarette and disentangle his gas mask at the same time.

  ‘I only asked,’ said the taxi driver sourly. ‘They can sink, for all I care.’

  ‘Don’t you want to win the war?’ asked Lockhart, astounded.

  ‘There’s a lot of things I want,’ said the taxi driver. He gave a swift and meaning glance at his meter. ‘Double fare after twelve o’clock, you know.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Lockhart.

  The taxi driver clapped on his brakes, and brought the cab to a standstill. ‘What did you say?’ he asked grimly.

  ‘I was born in this town,’ Lockhart began, with a clarity of thought which astounded even himself. ‘You know perfectly well—’

  It was not a satisfactory evening.

  But this was not the note on which his leave ended: neither this, nor Hamshaw, nor Keys. He carried away with him a very different sort of memory. For on his last night in London he went to the theatre, to a non-cerebral musical comedy which was the only thing he could get a seat for; and there, when the lights went up for the interval, he saw a sight which stayed with him afterwards for very many months.