Sea Fury (1971)

by Pattinson, James

  “We will start a new life,” they said. “Things will be better now.”

  But it was not so easy to start again. Menstein did not know whether it would have been possible to return to Poland; he did not even know that he wished to do so. It was not the Poland of the old days; it was under Communist rule now. He had had no great love for the former régime, but he detested Communism. He discussed the matter with Sara and they decided to try to get to England.

  “There are many Poles in England now. We shall be among friends.”

  There were, however, difficulties in the way. It was not merely enough to put in an application; there were so many displaced persons trying to get to England; only a proportion could be accepted, and that proportion was distressingly small. The years of waiting began.

  Menstein understood that his name had been put on a list. He did not know how long the list was. At first he was hopeful that in a very short while he and Sara would be out of the camp and on their way to England. Later he became less hopeful; life in the camp began to take on the awful appearance of permanence. It was so many years since he had practised medicine that he had fears that all his knowledge, all his skill, might be slipping away.

  “We are the forgotten people,” Sara said.

  And indeed it seemed so. They were like flotsam that had drifted into a backwater while the great tides of progress rolled on and left them untouched, rotting. In such circumstances it was difficult to keep hope alive. In the early days, in the belief that they would soon go to England, they had learnt to speak English with the help of a Hungarian who had been a teacher of languages. Later these efforts were to seem a mockery.

  It was this Hungarian who suggested that they might try to get to Palestine. “You are Jewish. The Jews are going to make a national home there.”

  “But the British allow only a few to enter.”

  “There are ways of getting in. Palestine has a sea coast.”

  The idea had not occurred to him before, but now it took root in his mind. Yes, that was what they must do; that was surely the answer.

  It was not easy; there were many obstacles to overcome, not the least of which was the lack of money: the people who ferried Jews from Europe to the coast of Palestine did not do so for love; they were in it strictly for the profit. Menstein was never quite sure where the money had eventually come from, but he suspected that it had originated as dollars; there were many wealthy Jews in America sympathetic to the cause of Zionism, and there were organisations doing all they could to step up the pace of illegal immigration.

  There came a day when the Mensteins found themselves with two or three hundred other Jews of both sexes and all ages from the very young to the very old, herded like cattle in the holds of an ancient steamship of about eight hundred tons. It was a wretched voyage. When the ship approached the coast of Palestine they were not allowed on deck. There were, it was explained, British warships on the lookout for this kind of human smuggling, and a crowd of people lining the bulwarks would have been conspicuous.

  The conditions in the holds were unspeakable; sanitary facilities were almost non-existent and the only bedding consisted of a few straw-filled mattresses. The provisions they had had to provide for themselves; many of the people were frail and in poor health; others suffered terribly from seasickness; but all were buoyed up by the prospect of a new life in the land that Jehovah had promised to their forefathers.

  They were put ashore from the ship’s boats in the early hours of a July morning. The captain of the ship, a bearded and villainous-looking Portuguese, was nervous and anxious to get away out of territorial waters. His nervousness communicated itself to his officers and the motley crew, and they hurried their human cargo into the boats with brutal haste. The immigrants had to wade the last few yards of the way up the beach, but there were men there to help them; they were among friends.

  Many of the newcomers wept unashamedly; others knelt down and kissed the sand. All of them felt that they had come home at last.

  The Mensteins were soon to discover that it was not exactly a land flowing with milk and honey. They were destitute; their very presence in the country was illegal; and since, in those circumstances, it was impossible for Saul to practise as a doctor, they were dependent on the charity of others.

  Moreover, they who had seen so much violence were appalled by the atrocities committed almost daily in the name of Zion by such terrorists as the Stern Gang and others. They desired certainly a country of their own, but not at the cost of so much bloodshed; surely the object could have been achieved by less brutal methods.

  But it could not be denied that the brutality paid. The British, sick at last of striving to keep the peace between Arab and Jew, and of being shot in the back by both sides, finally decided to pull out. The new Israel became a fact.

  In this young, vigorous state Saul Menstein, after so many years, was again able to practise his profession. Sara bore him a child, a son, and it seemed that at last God was being good to them. They called the child Mark and idolised him. In him lay all their hopes for the future; he would grow up in this new land among his own people, without persecution, without fear.

  When the boy was six years old they moved to a village near the Jordanian border. One night a band of guerrillas attacked the village. They threw a bomb into the room where Mark Menstein was sleeping. When Saul and Sara rushed in their adored son was an unrecognisable mass of bloody, mangled flesh.

  It was after that that they decided to leave Israel. There was too much violence even now. The country was surrounded by enemies, and every border incident, every bomb outrage, every Israeli counter-blow, served only to remind them of the tragedy that had taken the light out of their lives. An opportunity occurred to Menstein to take up a post in a hospital in Singapore. He discussed the matter with his wife and it seemed good to both of them to get as far as possible from the land that had promised so much but in the end had failed them.

  “Very well then,” Menstein said. “I will accept the appointment.”

  He had been working in Singapore for five years when the blow fell. Suddenly, without warning, he was dismissed. It was not because of any fault in his work; the reason was a change of policy in the staffing of the hospital, a decision no longer to employ foreign doctors in that particular capacity. Menstein could perhaps have found another post in Singapore, but, again after consultation with Sara, he decided to move on, to try his fortune in yet another land: Australia.

  “Australia needs immigrants. It is a big country. There will be room for us there.”

  They were not rich. They took the cheapest means of travel: the s.s. Chetwynd.

  The cabin which the Mensteins occupied measured approximately nine feet by eight. There were two bunks on one side, one above the other, a porthole opposite the door, a discoloured washbasin with two taps marked, a shade optimistically H and C, a scarred mirror above the basin, and two plywood wardrobes.

  The rest of the furniture consisted of a single hard wooden chair and a table that was in fact little more than a narrow shelf hinged to the bulkhead and supported by two collapsible legs.

  The paint had originally been white, but it had yellowed with age and there were streaks of reddish rust that seemed to have leaked out from under the heads of the rivets. But to the Mensteins, who had known much worse quarters, this temporary accommodation seemed perfectly acceptable. Even the temperature scarcely affected them; they were both so thin, so desiccated as it were, that no amount of heat could draw another drop of moisture from them.

  Sara was brushing her hair, making short, nervous strokes with the brush. The hair was quite grey now and Saul knew that it was not for reasons of vanity that she brushed it; it was a need she felt to be doing something, to find some occupation for her hands.

  “You think in Australia we shall be accepted, Saul?”

  He stood looking out through the open porthole at the sea and the sky, at the distant, dimly discernible line where the two met.
He could detect the faint note of apprehension in her voice, the uncertainty. He hastened to reassure her.

  “It is a country that needs people. It cannot do without them.”

  “Young people. Perhaps not such as we.”

  “Doctors are needed everywhere. And we are not old, Sara, my love.”

  “Not old? Not old?”

  Something in her voice made him turn. He saw that she had stopped the nervous motions of the brush and was quite still, rigid, staring at the reflection in the glass, the scarred glass that did not flatter, but rather, by its own imperfections, added to those of the person gazing into it.

  “Not old?”

  He moved away from the porthole and put his hands upon her shoulders. He could feel her shaking slightly; and then in the reflection he could see the tears welling in her eyes. He stroked her hair; he bent and kissed her neck, her cheek, whispering softly to her.

  “Do not weep, my dear one. Do not weep, Sara, my heart, my love. I am with you—always.”

  He put his arms round her. He held her until the crisis passed.

  “Sometimes,” she whispered, “I am so afraid.”

  “You must not be, Sara. Fear is a thing of the past. You must never be afraid again, for there is nothing more to fear.”

  And yet he knew that in his own heart he was afraid also. And would always be.

  Moira Lycett stood under the shower, naked except for a polythene cap to protect her hair, and let the salt water trickle down her body. The water was almost tepid, only slightly cooling to the skin; but she felt refreshed by it. The cubicle in which she was standing had iron sides, painted white, and a canvas curtain with rings sliding along a metal rod. She had not bothered to pull the curtains across and she could see the wash-basin on the opposite side of the bathroom and one end of the bath with its heavy, old-fashioned taps and the yellow streaks of rust under them.

  She turned off the shower and began to rub her arms with soap. Because of the salt it did not lather easily, but she persevered, soaping herself all over from head to foot, taking a sensuous pleasure in the task. She could still regard her figure with pride. She had always taken a deep interest in her own body, spending much time gazing at the naked reflection of it in mirrors, turning this way and that, bending, stretching, twisting. Like Narcissus, she was to some extent in love with her own image, but unlike Narcissus, she had never shown any inclination to pine away in contemplation of its loveliness. She was fully aware of the attraction it exerted on men; that was the whole point of possessing such a body; if there had been no men to be drawn to it she would no longer have derived the same satisfaction from gazing on its undoubted charms.

  When she had finished soaping she turned the shower on again. The sole result was a loud banging in the pipes, a momentary trickle of water, then nothing. Moira Lycett stood with the soap gradually drying on her body and swore at the inanimate shower. It was like everything else in the damned ship; good for nothing, overdue for the scrap-heap. She felt a sudden burning resentment against a fate that had condemned her to a tenth-rate style of living, of which this old rattle-trap of a ship was only the latest and most disgusting example. It was not the kind of life she should have been living; if anyone had been born with a taste for luxury it was undoubtedly she; and the biggest mistake she had ever made had been in believing that Morton Lycett could provide it for her.

  Morton! What a swindle he had turned out to be. With his smooth tongue and his polished manner, he had promised so much; and she had been taken in; she had fallen for it all. God, if she could have her time over again things would be different; you bet they would.

  She began to wrestle furiously with the obdurate shower. “Damn you! Work, damn you!”

  The wrestling was in vain; there was not even a hammering in the pipes now, not the least trickle of water. Moira Lycett gave up the struggle; she would have to sponge herself down with water from the tap on the wash-basin; there was nothing else for it.

  She stepped out from the cubicle and walked across to the basin, the floor of the bathroom feeling gritty under her bare feet. The taps on the wash-basin were of the spring-up type, so that no one could waste fresh water by leaving them turned on. She pressed both of them. There was a gurgling sound like a man being throttled, and that was all. No water.

  She tried the taps on the bath. She was no longer expecting any success and she was not surprised. No water there either.

  Moira Lycett was furious. She wanted to throw things. There was only the soap. She threw it at the mirror above the wash-basin. It missed and hit the iron bulkhead with a dull thud, then fell to the floor, one corner slightly flattened.

  The drying lather gave a sensation of stiffness to Moira Lycett’s skin. She picked up a towel and began to rub the soap off, but the operation was not highly successful. When she had finished she felt hotter and dirtier than she had been when she had entered the bathroom. She put on a nylon dressing-gown and slippers, opened the door and stepped out into the alleyway.

  As she did so a small, wiry man with ears much too large for his head and dark, greasy hair almost cannoned into her. He was wearing white overalls with black smears of oil on them, and there was a wad of cotton-waste in his right hand, with which he wiped the sweat from his neck as he regarded her with a smirk that she found intensely irritating. It was as though he had some secret, inward joke, known only to himself. His entire expression and manner were sly and insinuating.

  “Why, Mrs. Lycett. I beg your pardon, I’m sure. Wasn’t expecting anyone to pop out of there. Not just at that moment. Least of all you.

  She recognised him as one of the engineers, a man named Perkins. She had never cared much for the look of him, and now here he was standing squarely in her way, leaving no room to pass in the narrow alleyway.

  She answered curtly, “There is no need to apologise. If you will be good enough to allow me to pass.”

  He did not move. He continued to rub his stringy neck with the cotton-waste and to stare at her with that infuriating smirk. He had little beady eyes under practically naked brows, and these eyes flickered upward, as though attracted by something at the top of her head, something amusing, perhaps even ludicrous.

  She realised suddenly that she was still wearing the polythene cap, and with a gesture of annoyance she raised her left hand and pulled it off. The dressing-gown was only loosely fastened and the action of removing the bath-cap caused it to fall half open, revealing one richly curved breast and puckered nipple.

  Perkins was allowed only a momentary vision of the breast; then Moira Lycett had drawn the dressing-gown over it like a veil and had brushed angrily past him. She did not look back, but above the ceaseless thumping of the ship’s engines she believed she could hear Perkins softly chuckling. Moreover, though she could not be certain, she believed also that she heard something remarkably like the smacking of lips.

  She felt hot with fury, not simply because a man had seen her in disarray, but because it had been that man; that sly; smirking creature whose mere proximity disgusted her; that man who on more than one occasion had shown unmistakably that he was not indifferent to her; indeed, admired her.

  Admiration from such a worm as that she felt was an insult rather than a compliment. And that he of all people had seen more than he had any right to see was the limit.

  That ridiculous polythene cap too. He had been amused by it; he had even dared to show his amusement. She was so furious that if it had been within her power to strike Perkins dead on the instant she would almost certainly have done so without a qualm.

  Perkins, oblivious of the burning anger that he had provoked, went on his way, smiling his secret, inward smile and turning over certain delectable possibilities in his sordid little mind.

  Moira Lycett went into the cabin and slammed the door behind her. Morton was lying on the lower bunk wearing nothing but a pair of cotton underpants. The sight of him did nothing to cool her anger; he looked repulsive in his semi-nudity, his stomach hea
ving upward like a small, pale hill, a flabby obscenity. And he was lying on her bunk. The upper one was his, but it had been too much bother for him to climb up to it and he had simply flopped down on the other. She could see the sweat trickling down his skin; it would soak into the sheets and she would be nauseated by the smell of it when she wished to sleep.

  He noticed her anger. It would have been a very unobservant man who could have failed to do so. “Something upset you, old girl?”

  She hated being called “old girl”. He was very well aware of the fact but persisted in using the term, perhaps purposely to annoy her.

  She looked at him murderously. “This damned boat.”

  “This damned boat?” Lycett reached for a cigarette, lit it, exhaled smoke. “Any particular grouse this time?”

  She took off the dressing-gown and hung it on the hook on the door. “The shower isn’t working. My God, you’d think in this heat they’d at least keep that going.”

  “Perhaps they’re conserving the water.”

  “Salt water! You thing there’s a shortage of that? We’re floating in the stuff, aren’t we?”

  “At present.”

  “At present? Oh, yes, even that might not be permanent. There’s probably rust eating holes in the bottom at this very moment.”

  “As long as the plates hold together until we reach Fremantle, I’m not worried.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.” She pressed the cold tap on the cabin wash-basin. Water gushed out noisily. “Miracles, miracles.” She filled the basin, dipped a flannel in the water and began to wash the remains of the soap from her skin.

  Lycett rolled over on his side in order to watch her, the cigarette held negligently in his small, pouting mouth. The movements of her body as she used the flannel could still excite him after so many years. A professional stripper could not have wriggled and twisted more erotically than she was unconsciously doing in the process of washing herself clean of the soap.