HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947)

by Monsarrat, Nicholas

  Except for the friendly waiters and a man who had been an advertising copy-writer before the war and was now some kind of arbiter of destiny at the Ministry of Information, there was no one there we knew: happily isolated, we took time out from everything, enjoying a kind of suspended animation which we could only afford if we did not think of the swiftly passing moments. At the back of my mind I knew that time was already running, running, running against us; but better not to count the hours, when they were so few and so dear … Memories of the play returned to us, like messages from an odd spirit-world which thoroughly approved of all we were doing: it was impossible not to feel much in love, when the mood of the evening had been pointed out to us with such wit and such elegant authority.

  At one point you referred to this, interrupting some choice and authoritarian comments of mine in a way which showed that you were not attending as closely as you might have been. I did not mind.

  ‘Darling,’ you began.

  ‘M’m?’ I was sitting close beside you: your leg was touching mine, by no accidental contact, and the sleeve of your red dress made a vivid contrast with my drab khaki uniform. I was utterly content: for all the brush of the crowds round us we might have been on a desert island together.

  ‘Seeing Love for Love, and enjoying it so much – has it made a difference to what we feel for each other?’

  ‘Do you mean in the long run?’

  ‘No; just this evening – in fact, just this moment. Watching it so attentively – living it, in fact – was exciting in an obvious way, wasn’t it, apart from the more subtle enjoyment we had from it?’

  ‘Yes, it was.’ I turned towards you. ‘I think it affected us both in the same way – a sort of prompting of desire. Does that worry you?’

  ‘Not really. It just seems to be an odd sort of message to get from the seventeenth century. Was it meant to have that sort of effect, do you suppose?’

  ‘Possibly. It must have been written to attract the customers in the first place, and that brand of excitement was just as saleable then as it is today. But in any case it was an accurate account of lover-like tactics in those days, and so it was bound to affect us like that.’

  You frowned. ‘I feel that somehow we ought to be beyond the range of that.’

  ‘More cold-blooded?’

  ‘No – more self-sufficient. We don’t need it, do we? We ought to be – we ought to want each other just as strongly, no matter how we’ve passed the evening or what sort of things we’ve seen. All that kind of outside stimulus – a lush tune, a lot to drink, a thin-ice novel – shouldn’t really be so potent – in fact it shouldn’t make an atom of difference one way or another, to people who are closely in love.’

  ‘But, sweet, we can’t live in a vacuum. These things are bound to have an effect. And we would be wanting each other now, this moment, whether we’d seen the play or not. Isn’t that true? You know what’s happening to us just now. My leg touching yours is exciting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘But I’d rather you didn’t get the same excitement from anything else. You do, don’t you? It isn’t a private affair at all. A picture of one of those little sweater-girls would do just as well as my leg.’

  ‘Up to a point, yes.’

  ‘What point?’

  ‘A picture is – just a picture.’

  ‘And the best kind of love is three-dimensional, with central heating, huh? That’s a little hard on my morale, you know – taking up where the pin-up girls leave off. It makes it seem rather a detached sort of operation. And in any case you mightn’t be touching my leg if we hadn’t seen that play.’

  I decided that this had gone far enough. ‘As God is my witness,’ I said in a loud voice, ‘I swear I should be touching your leg now, even if we’d spent the evening in two cold baths a hundred yards apart. In fact, if there weren’t so many people round me I should be – ’ I stopped, deciding that this also had gone far enough, even for the Café Royal.

  You laughed. ‘No – really?’ Then you put your hand on my thigh, in a way I found hard to bear with composure. ‘All right, I believe you, without any further evidence. It’s just that I didn’t want to feel that Congreve had helped too much. After all, we are on our honeymoon.’

  I stood up and pushed back the table. ‘Not right here, we’re not. But follow me.’

  ‘Where are you taking me now?’

  ‘Famous last words … We still have a substantial dinner to eat, precious.’

  ‘Sorry,’ you said. ‘I misunderstood you … I hope the whole thing isn’t bluff on your part.’

  You looked sweeter than life itself as you walked with me to the door.

  As soon as we had crossed the threshold, groping our way a foot at a time into a pitch-black Regent Street, the air-raid sirens sounded.

  I began to tremble, I always do: it’s been like that ever since Dunkirk: nothing can cure it. My company was thirty hours on the beach before it was taken off, standing in water much of the time and enduring a continuous slaughter by bombing, which drove a number of men mad and, as far as I was concerned, ensured that an air-raid warning transformed me automatically into a helpless and spiritless wreck. The first note of the siren was like an injection of cowardice, which reached the heart instantly … Oddly enough it always got better when the raid itself was on and the bombs began to fall; but the subsequent waiting put me into a sweat of fear, which I had absolutely no means of controlling. It was as final as a leprosy: as final, as indecent, and as incurable. You knew all about it, of course, because I had told you – and anyway you had once or twice been with me when it happened, and it isn’t a thing I can disguise.

  It isn’t a thing you can help me with, either; it just had to be sweated out, endured as a spasm of cancerous pain must be endured when there are no drugs to hand. I have never seen my face during the process (and thank God it was dark at the moment): I have heard the rattle of glass against my teeth and gripped my two hands together in a furious effort to stop them trembling, but I have never seen my face, and I never want to.

  You squeezed my arm tightly. ‘Hold on, dearest. I’m still with you.’

  ‘Yes, darling, yes.’

  I went on trembling. All around us was an unseen, foreboding activity: the darkened street was full of voices – voices thoughtful or foolish or maddeningly confident. Quickening footsteps, police whistles, ambulance bells, flashes of gunfire in the far-off sky – all the horrible accompaniment of the waiting period was there, pressing round me, getting the better of my nerves, making the skin of my scalp prickle and run with sweat. Even with your arm tightly held in mine, I felt quite alone: sweet and loving though you were, close though our two hearts and bodies, this other thing was going to be enough to destroy our time together. Even if it stopped now, this instant, we were already the losers, out of our precious day … Another girl might have been disappointed that she could not distract my attention, might even have made an issue of it: but not you, not you. You knew the right answer and there is love and there is fear, and the two cannot always cancel out.

  Picking up my thoughts: ‘If this keeps on,’ you said, ‘we shall just have to try to concentrate. They mustn’t take our time away from us like this.’

  ‘Oh, Lord, sweet, I’m sorry.’ My lips were so dry, and trembling so much, that I could hardly articulate. ‘Sweet, you should get yourself a man ...’ That was how it always affected me: I felt that I wanted to abandon everything, even you, and go away and hide or cut my throat.

  You pressed even closer to my side. ‘I have the man I chose. What do you imagine I want – a block of heroic asbestos? If you weren’t the sort of man who can’t be afraid, you wouldn’t be sensitive and understanding as a lover. It all goes together … And what do you think I’m here for? What do you think these two arms–’ You suddenly swung round, in the darkness, and put your face against mine. ‘Oh, darling, I love you so much, whether you’re laughing or whether you’r
e afraid.’

  Someone, forging along in the darkness, bumped against us as we blocked the pavement, and said, ‘Break it up, for God’s sake!’ in an irritable voice. We did laugh at that, both of us, and then there was the sound of distant aircraft, and an almighty bomb explosion on the south bank of the river, and I knew I would be better in a minute and would slowly come out again on the other side. I might be a few pounds lighter, but I’d still be sane. I gripped your shoulder with that slight downward pressure which privately means a lot to us, both as a signal and as an effective kind of embrace, and I said: ‘Not long now. They’ve started properly. You know it’s only the waiting.’

  ‘I know.’

  We began to walk once more, pacing slowly arm-in-arm towards the hotel: there were the same bustle and the same menacing sounds all round us, but now there were other things too – the continuous pinpoint sparkle of ack-ack shells, the solid thud of bombs, the criss-cross sound of aircraft engines. It was no terror in the blood now, it was just an air raid, after all … The fresh air cooled my scalp again, the trembling died away: you felt me easing off, but subtly aware that I might now be feeling ashamed of myself, you forbore to comment on the fact. Instead you looked up at the southern sky, now glowing with a pretty pattern of murder, and you said: ‘It’s down at the docks again. The third time this week. Those poor people ...’

  Though aware that your pity was really for me, I did not mind.

  7

  Dinner … There was one bad moment just before we went into the hotel, a sudden realization that time was slipping by and that our single evening, lovingly partitioned into successive episodes, was now well on its course. I had an especial fear that the rest of the time might be all like this, until the end, and that this preoccupation (which you had remarked before) with ‘last things’ – last meal together, last drink, last kiss, last naked embrace – might hold sway from now onwards, and give the evening a grisly and morbid tone from which it would never recover. Once we settled down to that train of thought, peace of mind would vanish forever – we might contrive a smile, but our eyes would never leave the clock.

  I guessed that you felt this pressing of time, in some measure: I myself had it in full strength; indeed, for one fleeting second-rate moment it overtopped everything else, making all that we had done so far that day seem childish and worthless compared with what we should have been doing. It seemed inconceivably foolish that on the very last occasion when I would have the use of your body, your sensual and active co-operation in love, we were throwing away the chance of exploiting it. Why, in God’s name, had we ‘wasted time’ in the theatre, when we might have been together in bed? Were we married, or weren’t we? What was I, after all? – a eunuch? A bloodless fish? A little boy? Why hadn’t we dived in straight away? Two heads on a pillow was the life, not two spaced seats in the fourth row of the stalls ...

  That foolish moment did not last long: sense and taste asserted themselves, the knowledge that you were not thinking or feeling on these lines at all, that what we shared was not simply the sexual interplay of two bodies, but a more precious exhilaration altogether – a thought coupled with the rueful acknowledgement, somewhere in the background of my mind, that I was now thirty-five, not nineteen, and that however long one spent in bed, the number of times one could ‘make love’, with any degree of intensity or effectiveness, was strictly finite. Boastful daydreaming was all very well; performance was what counted. At that and the foolish picture of frustration it brought with it, I laughed out loud; and when you asked me why (and refused to be side-tracked), I told you as politely as I could – which was not, in point of fact, particularly polite.

  ‘Women don’t really think like that,’ you answered slowly. We were nearing the hotel now, moving through the darkness towards the warmth and promise of shelter. The gunfire and the noise of bombs was receding again, as the ‘run’ part of the tip-and-run raid got under way. ‘They haven’t that masculine idea, that every minute available for lovemaking must be used to the utmost, even – even if it entails a physical effort. That’s what men feel, isn’t it?’

  I nodded. ‘Most of them, I suppose. There’s always an inclination that way. If they’ve made love several times, and there’s still, say, an hour to go before the time of parting, there’s always the thought that it shouldn’t be wasted, and they will make a tremendous effort of concentration and fervour, sometimes quite artificial to begin with, in order to achieve what they want.’

  ‘Artificial?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s in a good cause, you see, and the ending is the same anyway, however it started. Vanity has something to do with it, I suppose – the most personal and potent of all masculine vanities. And there’s another idea behind it, the idea that they should do their very best to give the woman the utmost pleasure she is capable of experiencing. It’s not all selfish, or showing off: not selfish at all, sometimes. Women are – greedy in the same way, aren’t they?’

  ‘Not to that extent, no: not to the point of stimulating or inducing desire.’

  ‘They do that sometimes.’

  ‘Maybe. But they really do prefer it to be a natural happening, without an effort, without consciously thinking, “If I can somehow manufacture the initial urge which I don’t at the moment feel, the rest will follow.”’

  ‘But the other thing, darling: the idea of not wasting time, when time is short.’

  ‘Do you think we’ve been wasting time?’

  ‘I had a stray thought … It’s tied up with what you yourself want, too. Now, at the honeymoon stage, you are almost always ready for it, aren’t you.’

  ‘Yes, sweet, in a way. If you wanted to go to bed at an odd time of the day, of course I’d come with you; and when we got there I’d enjoy it as much as you would. If you wanted to make love in a funny place – such as here and now’ – and you suddenly leant the length of your body, from breast to thigh, against mine, so that the words ‘here and now’ took on a quick, startling lasciviousness – ‘then I should be ready. But somehow – it isn’t something I should volunteer, out of its turn: I should always wait for you. It’s so much more natural that way.’

  I bent to kiss you. ‘If you lean against me like that, dearest, you won’t have long to wait.’

  After a pause: ‘You know, I like you to want me. It’s such a lovely compliment: it’s like a white gardenia in your hair – something you can look at in the mirror and say: “That means he adores me.”’

  ‘And beyond the compliment?’

  ‘Beyond the compliment,’ you paused again, ‘is the natural reaction of being wanted, the desire that matches your own. It’s here, sweet: it always will be, strong and lasting and very ready. If you really think we’ve wasted the day so far, then I agree. And if you can’t wait, neither can I.’

  ‘I can wait.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes, certain. I said it was only a stray thought. Whatever we do is lovely. It always is. It doesn’t have to be in bed.’

  You squeezed my arm again, gently. ‘We haven’t wasted any time at all, have we? Time is slipping by, I know: but it’s going just the way we want it to go.’

  Except that it was going tremendously, ruinously fast, I agreed with all my heart.

  Dinner … Our hotel had an international reputation, faithfully mirrored in the prices, for superb food. I am not rich, but tonight the fact was irrelevant – almost frivolously so: where I was going to money would have less significance and less effective value than a handful of poker chips, and a certain Parthian extravagance seemed excusable in the circumstances. At any rate we made that a memorable meal, as far as the Minister of Food and his curiously Spartan taste would allow: cold consommé, lobster Newburg, a cheese soufflé, which was cooked at the table-side with immense ceremony and considerable fire risk: and a bottle of champagne so fabulously expensive that after drinking it one felt one had probably contracted a mouthful of gold teeth. Around us were many other couples and parties enjoying themselves
in the same uncaring fashion: innocently young RAF fighter pilots, enraptured lovelies, American soldiers so good-looking and so clearly irresistible that hearts must have been cracking like chipped ice all around them. It was a familiar wartime scene, the scene one carried back into the dirt and drabness of combat. It wasn’t exactly what one wanted, true – it had too much of the Cinderella story about it; but it was the current brand of civilization, a reasonable substitute for sanity.

  ‘You know, some women can enjoy the war,’ you said, looking round you pensively and then back to me. ‘I don’t mean that in any cruel sense but obviously if your heart is not tied, if you’re not married or engaged to a man who has to leave you and go off into danger, you can have a lovely time nowadays. Everything is there for you, everything you dreamed about as a debutante, or read in the shiny magazines, fun, love, laughter, without any strings to them.’ You nodded your head towards a beautiful girl, with a bright flower in her hair, who was looking over the rim of her glass as she drank to her two escorts, both American army flyers. ‘That one, for instance.’

  ‘I noticed her.’

  ‘I noticed you … She’s sweet and lovely, and damned lucky. She must be having the time of her life: unlimited dates, unlimited admiration, glamour and excitement without a break as much as she likes. And the uniforms give it the final kick, somehow. If she sleeps with men it doesn’t really signify: it’s part of her war effort – she can do a ninety-six-hour week on it and people will only stand and cheer. And when the party’s over and it’s time to say goodbye, there is her heart, intact and ready for the next one.’