HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947)

by Monsarrat, Nicholas

  I nodded. ‘Yes, it’s for good. I wish I could tell you more, sweet, but I can’t.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I’ll just have to disappear some time tomorrow morning. There’ll be a rather vague forwarding address, and that’s the best I can do.’

  ‘How soon could I hear from you?’

  ‘I don’t even know that.’ All I did know was that it might be several weeks. ‘I’ve had three highballs already, by the way,’ I added. ‘You’d better catch up.’

  You nodded. ‘That might cure this immediate moment. It certainly needs something.’

  ‘It will help anyway.’ I got up. ‘If I give the impression that I’m not as sad as you, put it down to that.’

  You smiled, not altogether successfully. ‘I know what you’re feeling, sweet. I know all that you’re feeling.’

  There was no waiter nearby, so I strolled across to the bar to order the drinks; and then, resisting easily the allure of the glittering young thing who was sitting up at the nearest bar stool combing her hair into the potato chips, I turned to watch you while I waited. You took out your mirror (as I knew you would) and tucked one strand of hair into place; but it was clear that you didn’t really give a damn how you looked, and presently you dropped your hand and sat staring in front of you. I don’t suppose you saw much there, either. You were a picture of unmoving sadness at that moment: I wanted tremendously to help you, to take some of the weight myself, but out of my own weakness I could not see any obvious way. It was impossible to forget what this meeting was to have been – the start of three weeks’ leisurely bliss – and what it had actually become, before we had even caught a glimpse of it. Our goodbye should have been far ahead, almost out of sight and hardly to be thought of, and now we were already starting to cross its threshold.

  Yes, you were sad, as I was; and only when I was close to you again did your chin come up.

  ‘I hope this drink is strong,’ you said, as you took the glass. ‘It has a lot of work to do.’

  It did do a lot of work: it, and the two that followed it and the plain fact of being together again. It wasn’t really surprising: we had between us such a lot of things to cure depression – shared ideas, an easy and adult idiom, the certainty of love and fun and sensual pleasure. Our talk was jerky to begin with, as it often was before we had kissed each other and taken the edge off our shyness; but it improved gradually, it finally beat our circumstances and took on an agreeable fluency as well as a rising temperature. I must say that you looked quite entrancing as you sat there, your leg still bent under you, your skirt a generous way above your knee, your shining head now inclined towards me so that I could smell your hair, now lying back against the cushions as if to be at ease with me was all you had ever wished for. Now and again it was difficult not to lean over and kiss you. I don’t know what the public reaction would have been, but it seemed that yours might have been favourable.

  We returned, once only but importantly, to the fact of my departure.

  ‘What sort of a honeymoon is this going to be, sweet?’ you asked suddenly. ‘We have so little time to spend. How are we going to play it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ I began, though at the moment of speaking I really had no idea of the answer. ‘We only have tonight, true, but if we start thinking about that we’ll never make anything of it at all. We’ll just sit about, matching sad thoughts like – like rival military commentators, and wasting even the tiny amount of time we have together. The thing to do–’ I searched for words, looking at the bottom of my glass, ‘is to try not to hurry. We know that parts of it are going to be swell, and it’s lovely to be together again anyway. If we can hold on to that idea, treat it as one day among a lot of other days and not try to pack two hundred per cent into it, it should be all right.’ I smiled. ‘Chalk me up for one feeble understatement, will you? The next twenty-four hours will be not only all right, but the most perfect day of the lot so far.’

  ‘Then it’s certainly going to be a winner … You know, I was ready to be horribly depressed a little while ago, but now I’m not: not yet, anyway. You’re a remarkable man, in your own particular way.’

  ‘Please don’t commit yourself too far.’ We were staring at each other, as usual. In your eyes I saw nearly all that I wanted to see – laughter and love and happiness: the rest would have to wait, but you were already promising me that it was mine when I wished it.

  ‘What’s our room like?’ you asked suddenly. ‘Have you been up yet?’

  ‘Yes. It’s very bridal, very bridal indeed. And also very expensive.’

  ‘How many beds?’

  ‘Just the one.’

  ‘Ah ...’

  ‘Quite so.’ I smiled directly into your eyes, feeling very much your husband. ‘Perhaps I’m getting blasé, but it’s odd to think that there was a time when we weren’t married and I’d never slept with you.’

  You bit your lips suddenly, on the verge of laughter, and looking round me I became aware that I had spoken rather loudly, and that a fair number of people at neighbouring tables were in on the conversation. The reflective silence which followed my last remark indicated that they had found it more interesting than their own.

  You stood up, with a certain alacrity. ‘I’m going to unpack,’ you said. ‘Are you coming up?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, glad to be let off so lightly. ‘Yes, I’ll help you.’

  But I might have guessed that you would try to equalize the score, with perhaps a little to spare, and the return volley was not long delayed. As we walked between the tables towards the door you remarked, over your shoulder: ‘I must register at the desk before I go up,’ and added, in a high clear voice: ‘How do you spell your name?’

  I am not easily embarrassed, but that was one time when I was.

  3

  In the bedroom I sat back and relaxed in a deep armchair, while you were busy unpacking and arranging things. There were mirrors all round us, and it was fun to watch your reflection moving about, to admire the way you walked, and to note, by the odd shyness in your face, that you knew you were being watched in circumstances that were still new and exciting to you. I expect my own face had something of that shyness too. We had kissed once, quickly, when the door closed behind us, and then you had moved out of my arms and not approached me again. Or had that movement, that withdrawal, been mutual? – a joint acknowledgement of the fact that we were very new to each other, and on edge because of it: that we were simply not used to being in a bedroom together, and did not quite know how to play it. Downstairs had been easy, smoothed out by the drinks and the crowds and the movement all round us: here, in this secure, anonymous isolated corner, with the silence and the thick carpet and the outsize quilted bed catching our eye the whole time, it would not have been normal for anyone save the most practised and familiar lovers.

  We were many things together, but we were not that: that was something in the precious future.

  From one point of view the room was just what we wanted – luxurious, private, impregnable. Indeed, it was almost too insistent on the point, it made things almost too easy … Clearly it had been designed, with professional competence, for two people to ‘make love’ in: I dare say it had been extensively used for that purpose: and perhaps it was that which grated – the idea of installing you, a virginal, barely awakened and adored you, in a place which had enclosed and accommodated scores of sophisticated lovers, and witnessed their embraces. Nothing could be more incongruous, nothing could be more sheerly distasteful, than to bring you into contact with that atmosphere of mass-produced, repetitive passion.

  Don’t let me picture you as the ignorant bride of fiction (and fact, for all I know), with a frown of disgust and a copy of What Every Girl Should Know concealed in your bouquet. You were never anything like that, thank God: your own brand of competent awareness, your candid acceptance of instinct, are as far from that tradition as they could be. But you came to me a virgin, after all (and how indignant you we
re when I asked you about it, the second time I met you: I had to spill my drink, simply to distract your attention): a virgin by cool choice, reserving with a charming determination your right of bestowal, but (when it came to the point) as shy and untutored as anyone could be.

  For the moment, alone in this room, we seemed to have gone back to that stage. Perhaps we should have had one more drink … I became aware that you were dawdling, doing nothing with a good deal of concentration: it was amusing, and moving, that you should pretend that you had not finished unpacking, solely in order to avoid coming nearer, but it had really gone far enough. At this rate the day would soon be running backwards instead of forwards, I sat up in my chair, and said: ‘I’m here too. Remember me?’

  Your face, startled at first, broke into a slow and loving smile, an acknowledgement of discovery and guilt. You stood still in the middle of the room, holding a hairbrush which you had twice carried from the dressing table to the bathroom and back again, and looked at me and answered: ‘I think I’m shy, darling. Isn’t it silly?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes. Let’s find a cure. Come over here and be shy in good company.’

  You walked over and sat down, first on the arm of my chair, then on my knee, then lying relaxed in my arms. We kissed and felt better, kissed again and knew that it was really all right after all, kissed a third time and began to drown … You were rather breathless, and very warm and soft against me, and I wanted of course to undress you: it would only be the second time, and I knew you wanted it too. But for some reason the urge did not persist: I seemed to be having another idea at the same time, the idea that we ought really to delay this until the evening, that by hurrying we were trying to put too much into the day. I had said, earlier, that we should try to treat it as an ordinary, unhurried meeting: after all the urgent wish to have you close in my arms, I wanted us to prove that this wasn’t all there was between us, and to leave, when I went away, a whole range of memories of this twenty-four hours, instead of one specialized impression … The feeling was so strong that I knew I had to act on it straight away: in a film or a book I would doubtless have suddenly turned cold and got up and stared out of the window, my shoulders twitching and God knows what besides. But since it was us, I leant a little away from you, and got my breath back, and then explained to you as simply as I could.

  ‘Darling,’ I said, ‘can I say something rather odd?’

  I felt you smile. ‘If I’m any good at guessing–’ you began.

  ‘No, it’s the opposite … I think I want to wait for this, though it may not seem like it, just at the moment. I know we’ve only got a few hours, but there’s no need for us to hurry, is there? We’ve got everything else, besides sex … We don’t have to rush, just because it’s the last time we’ll be together. It needn’t be that sort of day.’

  You were silent, and I lay back listening to your breathing and wondering if I had said it clumsily or brought you up too sharply. It was the sort of chance I had never taken before: where the strength of your urges was concerned I hardly knew anything about you. But it turned out that you had accepted the idea in the way I had hoped, and to it, after a moment, you made your own contributions.

  ‘I don’t mind, sweet. If you want me in a – an obvious way, I won’t worry. I won’t feel that I’m being rated cheaply because of it. I can want you like that, too. In fact I do now.’

  ‘I know. But, somehow – somehow the emphasis will be wrong. I don’t really know how to put it without sounding complex and rather cold-blooded too, but I do want this day to be in the right order. And with just the normal amount of everything in it too. This is only the late afternoon, after all. I don’t want us to try to break any records, just because we keep remembering that it’s the last time I’ll see you.’

  You laughed, for which I was glad. ‘Aren’t men awful? I truly never thought of that, darling, though I suppose it is a consideration.’

  ‘It’s a temptation, too.’ I kissed you. ‘Let’s try it, some other time.’

  ‘All right. What now?’

  I still wasn’t sure. ‘Have I disappointed you?’

  You shook your head. ‘Part of being married – one of the best parts – is being able to tell each other that sort of thing without the roof blowing off. How shall we spend the time, sweet? I’ve got some shopping to do, if you’re feeling energetic enough for a walk.’

  I laughed in my turn. ‘That should cool the blood.’

  ‘Then we’d better apply it, here and now.’ For a moment you lay quiet in my arms, your beating heart seeming to be still playing the scene of a few moments ago, unable to leave what it really wanted; then you sat up and smoothed your hair. ‘I’ll get ready, darling.’

  I stared up at you. ‘Don’t fade out too completely, sweet. It will keep, won’t it?’

  You winked, and said: ‘That I can guarantee.’ The wink itself was a flawless tag-line, exactly what we wanted to close the scene and carry over to our exit.

  4

  Wartime London is not gay, except for those running in rose-coloured blinkers. It is shabby and nostalgic: it needs cleaning, painting, doing over: much of it is laid waste, and the bare lots and tangled ruins of the old blitz days are never handsome, though they may beget a handsome sort of pride.

  Pride is perhaps a London keynote nowadays – the excusable pride of endurance: and to walk slowly through a few London streets, as you and I did on that sunny afternoon, is to have that pride stirred and gently awakened again, without bombast but without shyness either. Odd things serve to do it, things that Londoners take for granted: a bare level space where a friend’s house used to be: kids swimming in a firetank: a staircase still clinging to a flower-patterned wall and leading drunkenly nowhere: a foolish heart-warming sign over a wrecked shop – ‘YES, WE ARE BLASTED WELL OPEN!’ … They are part of this fine city, whose recent history has probably been her finest.

  I myself have a special feeling about London: I was born there: I have lived there all my life, and I cannot really live anywhere else. I was there for some of the worse blitzes, and on the night that the City was in flames. It might well have been the end of the world, that night: it was in any case a pretty good imitation of hell; but somehow we knew that it wasn’t the end of London. That would take more than a German frenzy of destruction, however competently executed. And hell or not, I would rather have been there to share the ordeal, than have read about it afterwards and mourned the destruction at a distance. What one might call the St Crispin’s Day complex did not finish with Agincourt.

  I think Londoners, by reason of that long-continued ordeal, have much to be proud of – collectively proud, that is, not just complacent and self-satisfied. Little people, fighting above ground or sweating it out in cellars, made London a big place in those days: individually, they drop back into littleness again, but the proud city that was in their charge remains – loved and laughed at, cried for and cherished.

  I lost my own flat then – that was before I met you, when I was on leave after Dunkirk. It was one of the lesser blitzes, one that hardly made the headlines: but one building only needs one bomb for its disposal, and I returned from the country to find the house in the roadway and what was left of my clothes being collected into a heap by a tired and grim air-raid warden. I had not known, till then, how private were some of my possessions … I lost everything I had – furniture, books, pictures, gramophone records, letters – and I didn’t give a damn. I thought I would mind tremendously, but that thought had been tied to a vanished tradition, and somehow it seemed the most natural thing in the world to start afresh, owning virtually nothing at all, while the country was under the threat of invasion, the Home Guard pretended valiantly that they were armed, and the massed air raids began.

  It was part of being an Englishman: the current price of nationality. A lot of people, myself included, think it is no price at all.

  We went shopping at a leisurely pace. You wanted (of all things) a christening mug. I wanted a spong
e: both of them were hard to come by and both, when we found them, ridiculously expensive. (I really don’t know who buys small shrivelled sponges at two pounds sixteen shillings and sixpence a time: only bloody fools like me, probably.) But it was fun to be your escort, and to watch you while you talked to people and tried to charm them into producing what they manifestly had not got: fun also to feel that I was the proprietor of an exceptionally lovely person whom a lot of people were staring at. I know you don’t dislike my feeling like that about you, or I would not mention such a quintessence of masculine conceit. But it is a fact that when I am with you I have that sense of proprietorship very strongly all the time: it seems to me to be one of the more precious facets of marriage, that loving awareness that you belong to me absolutely, and are content to do so.

  There was no doubt, by the way, that people stared at you: indeed, there seemed at times to be nothing but eyes all round us, admiring or speculative or purely covetous. I suppose you are used to it by now, as all beautiful women must be, and that it needs no effort of composure to meet or ignore these glances, and that the sort of physical shyness which makes a young girl, for instance, fold her arms across her bosom when she is standing among strangers, is in the dim past, as far as you are concerned. But it still must be odd to know that you are watched and commented on for nearly all your waking hours; it must be difficult also not to develop a tough or defensive manner, both unattractive, in order to counter it.