The Cruel Sea

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  ‘Then God help me, twenty years from now!’

  ‘Now, George . . . What are you going to do this afternoon?’

  ‘Sleep.’ He caught her eye, and laughed. ‘I suppose you’d really like to dress up and go out calling.’

  ‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘You have your sleep. You’ve earned it. We’ll go calling when all this is over.’

  Tallow and Watts sat side by side in a Lime Street pub, drinking beer and watching the dart players. The two Chief Petty Officers’ caps lay peak-to-peak on the table in front of them: their two square cut uniforms, with the gold buttons and badges catching the light, seemed far too smart and businesslike for their surroundings. The place was crowded, dingy, and uncomfortable: a near-miss in one of the big raids had removed every square foot of glass, and the windows were permanently boarded up, so that even at high noon the lights had to be burning, the air stale. Every time the door swung open, loosing a vicious draught round their ankles, a rather drunk man at the end of the counter called out: ‘Mind the light – you’ll have us all blown to bits!’ He had been saying this virtually every night for the past year: it had involved him in arguments and fights a few times, but usually people grinned at him and said nothing. The door was on an automatic spring, and heavily curtained, in any case: it completed the pub’s air of makeshift inferiority.

  Tallow and Watts had spent every evening of their leave there: it was as good as any other pub in the district, and it was the one nearest to the Y.M.C.A. hostel where they were staying. Though they did not voice their thoughts, they were both in mourning for the past, and for the comforts and cheerfulness of the house in Dock Road. Then, there had been some point in going ashore, some sense in the way they spent their time: now there was just this sort of place, and a shakedown in a glorified dosshouse, and a cup of tea and a meat pie at the corner café. It was a break with the past which they still had not got used to.

  For Watts, there was another break which, after the first weeks, he had never mentioned again: the way that Gladys Bell had been killed, just when things seemed to be coming straight for them. He could not pretend, even to himself, that the bomb falling on 29 Dock Road had destroyed any wild and colourful romance; but it would have been a comfortable sort of marriage, it would have been what he wanted . . . He mourned her death in the same way that Tallow had mourned when Repulse, his old ship, had been sunk: it had destroyed a more promising, more significant past, it was a senseless waste, it left a blank where no blank should be.

  The pub door swung open, the draught stirred the sawdust on the floor, the man at the bar said: ‘Mind the light – you’ll have us all blown to bits!’

  ‘Bloody fool,’ said Tallow morosely.

  ‘Round the bend,’ said Watts.

  They returned to their silence: drinking, not talking, watching a small man in a cloth cap placing his darts wherever he pleased, with an easy skill which brought a murmur of appreciation from the other players. Presently Watts said: ‘He must have played before.’ Then he stood up, and collected their empty glasses for another pint.

  Ferraby played in the garden with the baby, but the baby was different, and Ferraby was different too.

  The little girl was now eighteen months old, and starting to talk: she was also starting to have an expressive will of her own, and the will seemed to be directed against himself. It was as if the tension and the jitters which he could not now shake off, communicated themselves to the child as soon as he touched her: it was to her mother she ran now, whenever she wanted comfort or companionship, never to him, and if he took her in his arms she would wriggle free within a few moments, and then keep a careful space between them. She would watch him, and in the small lively face would be the beginning of fear; and even as he grieved, he wondered at it. How could she sense his terrible unease? What could a shaking hand mean to a child? How was it that, as soon as they were close to each other, the small mind could feel the brush of his disquiet, the chaos of his thoughts?

  He admitted the chaos; he knew, though he could not control, the nightmare direction that his mind was taking, the total preoccupation with violent death. He kept seeing, in the child’s smooth and soft limbs, other bodies neither soft nor smooth – crushed bodies, burnt bodies, bodies that came apart as soon as they were lifted from the water. Under the brown curls he saw a bleached skull: under the pretty shoulders he saw a watery skeleton. He imagined death in his child, and he imagined things more terrible still in his wife.

  For many weeks now he had been unable to make love to Mavis, because of an insane fear of a happening which he saw in acute detail: the fear that he might do something terrible to her body, and it would prove to be rotten, and rip apart from the crutch upwards, and never come together again.

  Now, in the quiet garden, the little girl said: ‘Leaf,’ and pointed to the tree above their heads. Ferraby said: ‘Leaf – that’s right,’ and reached out and gently squeezed her leg. She said: ‘No,’ immediately, and drew away and then stood watching him – serious, withdrawn, on guard. He said: ‘I won’t hurt you, love,’ and she hesitated, and took a step – but it was a step backwards; and before he could help himself she had turned into a different picture altogether, and was lost to him.

  He saw, in the bare pointing foot, a bony splinter sticking out from under a blanket; and in the finger that went up to her mouth he saw the finger of a man trying to make himself vomit, to rid his stomach of the oil that was poisoning him.

  He turned away, and lay down, and felt his body tremble against the earth.

  Morell was washing his hands in the cloakroom of a nightclub when he overheard some RAF officers talking about his wife. As a result of this, when he finally took Elaine home they had a furious quarrel which lasted for several days and which was still unresolved – except in the fatal sense of surrender and defeat for himself – when his leave came to an end.

  The two RAF officers were moderately drunk: they had come into the cloakroom a few minutes after Morell, and had not seen him as he bent over the washbasin. But the thick speech was clear enough for him to hear every word.

  ‘That’s a lot better,’ said the first voice.

  ‘Mine’s pure gin, old boy,’ said the other.

  ‘Better tell the quack in the morning.’

  ‘He knows already . . . Who’s the tarty-looking number in the red dress?’

  ‘Actress type, old boy. Elaine Swainson.’

  ‘Oh, her . . . Know her?’

  ‘Used to. She aims a bit higher these days. The hat on the bedpost has to have a ton of brass on it.’

  ‘Nice take-off?’

  ‘They say . . . Try your luck if you want to. She might feel like slumming.’

  ‘Isn’t she married?’

  ‘Not all that amount. Got marital thrombosis.’

  ‘What’s that, old boy?’

  ‘Got a clot for a husband.’

  There was a sound of laughter. ‘That’s bloody good, old boy.’

  ‘Think I’ll write a book about it . . . Are you going to have a crack at her?’

  ‘Maybe.’ There was another laugh, of a different sort. ‘Lend me a quid, old boy.’

  ‘A quid?’ A snort of derision. ‘More like a tenner, and don’t expect any change.’

  ‘Commercial type, huh?’

  ‘There’s a safe-deposit box under the bed . . . Come on – let’s look over the stable again.’

  Morell carried that conversation back to sea with him. He could remember every word, every inflexion of it; he could remember the exact smell of the antiseptic, and the look of servile discontent on the attendant’s face as he slipped out without tipping him. But as well as the conversation, there was the quarrel with Elaine; and the quarrel was worst of all.

  It started in the taxi on the way home, it continued at the flat; it drove him to sleep alone, on the sofa, and to suffer the most fearful night of his life. In the morning, there was no truce, and no respite for his thoughts either: she would excuse n
othing, she would admit nothing, she would not even give a straightforward denial to his suspicions. It was clear that she did not give a damn either way; in the music hall phrase, he knew what he could do with it.

  The trouble was that he did not know at all. He could believe, or he could disbelieve, that she was faithful to him; but he could not say truly whether he wanted Elaine on any terms, or only on honest ones.

  She knew this: it gave her a whip in either hand.

  ‘You can think what you like,’ she said disdainfully, later next morning. ‘I’m sick of all this questioning, all this drama every time you come home.’

  ‘Darling, it isn’t drama.’ He looked at her as she stood by the window, in her green flowered dressing gown, with the edge of her nightdress showing above the patterned mules: after the night spent apart from her, she was specially lovely, specially desirable: her body beckoned to him, her set face overrode the beckoning. ‘But can’t you see how I feel? It’s natural for me to be jealous, when I hear people talking about you like that.’

  ‘You should give me the benefit of the doubt.’

  ‘There shouldn’t be any doubt.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ She gestured impatiently: he had seen her duplicate it a hundred times on the stage. ‘This is such tripe . . . Do you expect me to stay home every night, just to make you happy?’

  ‘You would if you loved me . . . Do you love me?’

  She said: ‘When you behave. But I won’t be told what I’m allowed to do. I won’t be taken for granted.’

  ‘You can take me for granted.’

  She nodded to that. At first she said nothing; it was as if he had produced some cliché which had hardly been fresh the first time she heard it. Then she said: ‘That may not be what I want.’

  He thought, in surprise: But darling, you married me . . .

  There was something here that no longer added up. He shut his mind to what it was: he had no weapons anyway, and he had to bring her back, he could not lose her . . . When he gave in, and asked for her forgiveness and appealed for her continuing love, she allowed him no more than a perfunctory acquiescence. It was clear to him – except when he blinded himself with emotion or sentiment or hope – that she did not give a damn about that either. She was in the strongest position in the world: the loved woman who need only love when she chose, and who, at the slightest crossing of her will, reverted to natural ice.

  He wanted to kiss her, he wanted to take her in his arms, and then back to bed. But he did not know what the answer would be – not now, not any more. He looked away from her, and round the softly furnished room with its overflow of cushions, its feminine accent and promise. He remembered suddenly the bridge of the bombed ship, adorned with blood and scraps of dead men. He thought: this is a slaughterhouse, just like that was.

  Baker, for the first time, did not spend his leave at home. He did not even tell his mother that leave was due again: he wrote that Compass Rose was in port for a bit, and then, when his fortnight’s spell of freedom arrived, he booked a room at a small downtown hotel, and settled in there. He had no clear idea of what he was going to do, except for one point, one action – the thing he had dreamt and thought about for so long.

  This leave, he must do it. The time for dreaming was past. Everyone else slept with women, and talked about it, and took it for granted. He had overheard a mess deck phrase which pricked his imagination: ‘She gave me a slice on the mat.’ He wanted a slice on the mat – not the next time they were in harbour, but this time.

  On the first night of his leave he stood by the tram stop outside Central Station, looking about him, and wondering. He realised that he knew nothing at all about what he meant to do: now that it had come to the point, he was in a panic of indecision. He ought to have asked someone, he ought to have listened properly when people were talking about it, instead of pursuing his own daydreams . . . How did you pick up a woman? What did you do? How did you tell a prostitute from an ordinary woman, anyway? And then, did you give them the money first, or did you say nothing, and leave it on the dressing table afterwards? Would it be expensive? Did they tell you how much it was, before you started? Did they understand how not to have babies? Could you be arrested if they found you doing it? What was it like, how did you begin, how long did it go on for?

  Confused with doubt, sweating a little, but desperately determined, he started to walk slowly along the street towards the Adelphi Hotel, looking at the women as they came towards him. He had twenty-five pounds in his pocket: he wanted to be on the safe side.

  When the members of the wardroom reassembled, on the last night of the refit leave, and were sharing a rather silent after-dinner drink, Lockhart said suddenly: ‘I’ve been looking at some figures.’

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ said Morell suavely, glancing up from his newspaper. ‘Please spare us the details.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ said Baker.

  ‘These are the other kind,’ said Lockhart, ‘and they’ve taken me the best part of a day to work out, from the old deck logs. Do you know that tomorrow’s convoy is the thirty-first that we’ve done, and that we’ve now put in four hundred and ninety days at sea – nearly a year and a half?’

  A glum silence greeted the intelligence. Then: ‘I didn’t know,’ said Morell. ‘Now I do. Tell me some more.’

  Lockhart looked at the piece of paper in his hand. ‘We’ve steamed 98,000 miles. We’ve picked up 640 survivors.’

  ‘How many have we buried?’ asked Ferraby.

  ‘I left that out . . . We’ve each kept about a thousand watches—’

  ‘And we’ve got one solitary U-boat, out of the whole thing,’ interrupted Morell. ‘Are you trying to break our hearts?’ He stood up, and stretched: his face was pale and rather drawn, as if he had either had a very good leave or a very bad one. ‘And tomorrow we start another convoy – and then another, and another . . . I wonder what we’ll die of, in the end.’

  ‘Excitement,’ said Baker.

  ‘Old age,’ said Ferraby.

  ‘Food poisoning,’ said Lockhart, who had overeaten.

  ‘None of those things . . .’ Morell yawned again. ‘One day someone will ring a bell and say the war’s over and we can go home, and we’ll all die of surprise.’

  Lockhart smiled. ‘In the circumstances, not a bad death.’

  Morell nodded to him. ‘Not a bad death at all. But I don’t think it will happen tomorrow.’

  4

  Waiting on the fo’c’sle, with the two lines of men on either side and the petty officers facing him, Lockhart wondered why Ericson had decided to have Sunday Divisions, when Compass Rose was due to sail at eleven that morning. Usually he skipped Divisions if they were sailing on a Sunday – there was too much to do, and it was a nuisance for the hands to dress up in their clean rig when they had to get back into working clothes immediately afterwards. But possibly he wanted to smarten the ship’s company up a bit, the day after their long leave ended: a formal parade, with a church service at the end, was a good way of taking a fresh tug at discipline, a method of pointing out, in simple terms, the difference between life ashore and life afloat. And perhaps, thought Lockhart, he might as well point a bit of it out himself.

  ‘Lieutenant Morell!’ he called out sharply.

  ‘Sir?’ said Morell.

  ‘Stop those men in your division talking.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  By agreement, Lockhart looked exceedingly bleak, and Morell unusually attentive, during this exchange, which was a purely formal expression of reproof within the naval hierarchy. His seniority over Morell was just under three weeks: enough to preserve the chain of command, not enough to make his position as First Lieutenant any sort of dividing line between them.

  He heard Morell administering a rocket to the offender, and he turned away towards the bows of the ship, glancing down the lines of men whom he had just inspected as he did so. Leave or no leave, they looked smart enough: clean, polished up, fundamentally tidy and
seamanlike. There was a breeze whipping across the dock, setting the signal halyards rattling, ruffling the men’s collars here and there: a cold breeze, a sharp breeze, promising a brisk start to their convoy. He wondered how many of the hands would be seasick tonight, after their spell ashore: it was going to be lively enough, as soon as they left the shelter of the river.

  Ericson’s head appeared at the top of the ladder. Lockhart called out: ‘Divisions! ‘Tenshun!’ and saluted, formally presenting the ship’s company for the Captain’s inspection.

  Ericson took his time as he walked up and down the lines: it was a smart turnout, he saw immediately, and he wanted, as usual, to make it seem worth while by giving it careful attention. (He remembered overhearing a rating off another ship complaining: ‘Divisions? Skipper runs past like a bloody ferret and then dives down to the gin again . . .’) Compass Rose had been lucky in the way she had kept her ship’s company together, for though it was getting on for three years since they commissioned, there had been remarkably few changes. As he walked slowly round, Ericson was reminded of this passage of time, and the movements up the scale which had taken place within the family: Wells, for instance, was now a yeoman of signals again, Leading-Seaman Phillips and Carslake, the leading-steward, were both petty officers, Wainwright a leading-torpedoman. God knows they’ve earned it, he thought as he reached Ferraby’s communications division, and the latter saluted: they had made of Compass Rose one of the best ships in the flotilla, the one that Viperous seemed to choose automatically when there was anything out of the ordinary to be done. (That cut both ways, of course: it was one thing to earn the limelight by sinking a U-boat, but quite another to qualify, on that account, for all the odd jobs, all the towing and rescuing and searching that were liable to keep a ship at sea for a couple of extra nights at the end of a convoy.) These were the men, anyway, who had made Compass Rose what she was; the process had meant, for them, nearly three years of training and practice and learning at first hand, three years of sweating it out in wretched surroundings, three years of cruel weather, cruel dangers, cruel sights to remember.