The Redeemed

by Tim Pears

  When they had a dozen balls, divided into two small boxes, Patrick fetched a bottle of sherry and two glasses from his office. He filled the glasses and gave one to Lottie, saying, ‘You did very well today. You did as well as any assistant I have taken gelding. You have the makings of a fine surgeon, I am convinced of it.’

  Lottie thanked him. She told him that she was confident when he was there, but if he went away she forgot everything he had explained or she had read.

  ‘There is much to take in,’ he said. ‘But it will stick eventually, do not worry.’

  Lottie drank the sherry. It was pleasantly dry. Patrick Jago was in his forties, but he was not old. It was only the fact of his invalid wife that made him sometimes appear so. He was still vigorous, though he’d dealt with the colts today as he did with all animals – with calm deliberation, using force seldom, as a last resort. It occurred to Lottie that perhaps he saw her as the child he and his wife could not have. Of course. It was so obvious. How could she not have considered that before?

  It was warm in the dispensary. Lottie removed her jacket. They made embrocation. The vet dissolved two drachms of gum camphor in two ounces of turpentine, to which Lottie added five ounces of colza oil, three drachms of strong liquid ammonia and three of liquor potassae. This mixture she shook well together then sealed the bottle and wrote upon labels, EMBROCATION: APPLY EXTERNALLY.

  They made up thirty bottles. Each time, the foul smell of the ammonia was subsumed by the other ingredients, leaving behind only its effect, upon inhalation, of a headiness, an aeration of the nostrils and sinuses.

  ‘Does your right arm pain you?’ Patrick asked after a while. ‘I fancy you are favouring your left.’

  Lottie raised her right arm in the air and rotated it. ‘My shoulder,’ she said.

  ‘Let me take a look,’ the vet suggested.

  Lottie unbuttoned her shirt far enough to slide it off her right shoulder. Patrick Jago moved his fingers across her skin, tapping here, prodding there. ‘I can see no bruising,’ he said. ‘But your muscles are extremely tight. Allow me to apply some of the embrocation we have freshly concocted.’ He chuckled, pleased with this coincidence.

  Lottie sat down and Patrick Jago stood behind her. He poured liniment into the palm of his left hand then rubbed his hands together and applied them to the girl’s right shoulder. His hands were warm. He rolled the palm of his right hand over her shoulder and rubbed her skin with his fingers. Lottie closed her eyes. The vet rested his left hand on her neck, either to keep her torso in position or to assist his own balance, she wasn’t sure. She understood that, though he was an animal doctor, human beings were mammals, after all, and he could surely picture her musculature and the underlying bones. She tried to do likewise, but the more relaxed she became the harder this was, and a drowsy image of upper parts of her own skeleton mingled with colours on the inside of her eyelids.

  She did not notice Patrick further unbutton her shirt, but she realised he was kneading her left shoulder now as well as her right, and her neck also. He invited her to lie face down upon the carpet so that he could massage further down her back. When she stood up from the chair, she found her shirt was loose. It was pulled gently off her from behind and she let go. Then she felt his fingers take hold of the bottom of her vest. She raised her arms and let him lift it up over her head. She lay down.

  The light was fading from the room. Patrick lit a single hurricane lamp. He knelt down beside the girl and poured more embrocation, rubbing it gently and deeply into her knotty back. Up and down the vertebrae of her spine. Across her shoulder blades. Down her sides, the skin rippling beneath his strong fingers.

  Although the massage was deeply relaxing, it was also uncomfortable lying on the carpet. Lottie could feel its pattern pressing into her left cheek. Fortunately just then Patrick asked her to turn over and Lottie was relieved to do so, and lie on her back. He applied embrocation to her arms, down to her hands and fingers, then up and across her shoulders. His ministrations were so pleasant, she could barely tell which precise part of her skin Patrick’s hands massaged. Waves of warmth pulsated and flowed through her body such as she had never felt before. Lottie sensed herself sinking into a delicious sleep. She did not want to, for insensibility would rob her of this pleasure. But it would be such a voluptuous slumber.

  Patrick paused, perhaps to rest. Then Lottie realised he had unlaced her boots, and was pulling them off. When he unbuttoned her trousers and slid them down her legs she raised her hips from the floor to make it easier. He massaged her feet, her ankles. She drifted back towards sleep. The muscles of her calves softened. Patrick kneaded her knees, then moved his hands up her thighs. She heard him murmur, ‘Oh, Lottie.’ His voice seemed to come from far away, and for a moment she wondered whether she had imagined it. But then all of a sudden Lottie was wide awake.

  She was no longer floating in a sensuous cocoon but lying almost naked on the carpet of the surgery. Patrick Jago’s fingers were now clumsier than they had been. Lottie felt a surge of embarrassment. She must not be here, but she could not move. The vet had lost his air of calm deliberation. He was undoing his own attire. He lay beside her, then on top, his weight upon her, and she struggled. She pushed his face away from hers so that he could not kiss her and she grabbed his wrists and punched his face and tried to bite him.

  Lottie Prideaux thought that she was strong. She thought she was equal to a man but she was not. She fought Patrick Jago but he overcame her. He twisted and throttled her in the throes of his ardour. She thought he might wring her neck like a goose or a swan, and so she yielded.

  Afterwards, Patrick was overcome. With remorse. With shame. With love. He said he was so sorry, he said that he had taken advantage of her, it was unforgivable, she would never forgive him, he could not forgive himself … but he could not help himself, did she not see that? Perhaps she had enjoyed it a little? After all, they were not beasts of the field. They were homo sapiens. He rambled, and raved. He would kill himself. He would leave his wife, he would kill his wife, would Lottie marry him? He was not so old, forty-four. He would send his sister away. Could Lottie see herself as the young wife of a country vet?

  She sat up and pulled on her clothes as the vet spoke. Then she rose and, carrying her boots, walked out of the dispensary and through to her lodging in his mother’s house.

  Part Three

  THE SCUTTLE 1916–1919

  1

  The naval eye surgeon said it was a miracle that the boy’s sight had recovered entirely.

  ‘I’ve already been told ’tis a miracle I’m alive at all,’ Leo said.

  ‘Do not be despondent.’

  ‘Two miracles do seem greedy.’

  ‘Cheer up, lad,’ the oculist told him, and sent him on his way.

  After the Battle of Jutland in 1916, Boy Seaman First Class Leopold Jonas Sercombe, once his miraculous recuperation had been completed, was assigned to the battleship HMS Benbow. This ship had led the 4th Division of the Grand Fleet at Jutland, and afterwards was based in Scapa Flow. Even after much of the Fleet removed south to the Firth of Forth, still it was like a city of ships anchored in the Flow, and each battleship was like a floating district or suburb of that aquatic settlement.

  Benbow had a crew of a thousand men. They were strangers to Leo Sercombe. Only a few became less so. She had her communities, of stokers, signalmen, engineers. A dozen football teams were put up from the wardroom and the gun room. Two teams would take a pinnace ashore to the Isle of Flotta for a game, the result of which was recorded for the ship’s league. Leo did not play but was coerced into accompanying them to run the line. He watched the Orkney gales suck and blow the ball with malevolent humour, making a mockery of players’ intentions, but men who had been cooped up in an ironclad with little distraction beyond cards and bingo for weeks at a time were glad of an escape.

  Officers played hockey on the decks, using a piece of wood provided by one of the carpenters. A bucket of these chuckers re
mained on hand, for many were lost over the side.

  Leo and the other boys knew themselves to be the hand-rags. Much of their time at anchor was spent on their knees, on decks that had been hosed with seawater and sprinkled with sand and coarse grit. From six in the morning the boys knelt, barefoot, trousers rolled up over the knees, with their holystone or bible, a block of sandstone, endlessly scrubbing and whitening the wooden boards.

  Compared with what civilians at home were getting, according to the men with families, the food they ate was good. Each man and boy received half a pound of meat and a pound of potatoes a day. They had cheese, butter, eggs, salt fish. Haricot and butter beans. There was pea soup at supper, after which the men in their hammocks on the mess-decks would break wind in untuneful concert. Bread, though often dry, was plentiful. There were occasional vegetables, rare deliveries of fruit.

  When a petty officer had the idea of seeing what might be done with seagulls, the commander told him that he couldn’t have men wandering around his ship firing rifles willy-nilly, but catapults might be used. These were made by the ship’s carpenters, and boys were tried out for their aptitude with them. Leo did well and became one of those sent up the mastheads. It was an envied job, preferable to holystoning the decks. It reminded him of being cartridge boy on shoots back home. He carved a monogram of his initials, LJS, on the handle of his catapult. The gulls he hit fell to the decks and were collected by a bag-boy. The cooks skinned and jointed the birds, and made a dish they called oosh, a stew that tasted like fishy chicken, firm-fleshed and not unpleasant.

  The boy did not make friends as he had on HMS Queen Mary. His mates Willy Burd and Jimmy White had perished in the North Sea, along with all the rest. Leo was one of fewer than twenty survivors. Other hands kept their distance from him. Or perhaps Leo was aloof, though it was not his intention. He knew how fortunate he was to have survived, and so did they. Lucky too that his eyesight seemed unaffected. Others who had been rescued from hours in the oily water were half-blinded for life. He’d reached his full height, too, over six feet, as tall as his father had been. This was no advantage on board ship, where he was forever bending and stooping through low doorways.

  Boys were not allowed alcohol. The daily ration of rum was not issued until a sailor was twenty-one. On his eighteenth birthday, in June 1917, Leo was rated, and was cajoled by other members of his mess to pay a visit to the wet canteen. The drifter picked them up, calling at ships on its way to Flotta. On that bare island stood a single one-roomed shack that sold beer and port wine. The men from Benbow drank until the canteen closed at 8.30. Then they stumbled back to the pier, half-carrying their young ordinary seaman, and with much cussing and laughter found their own drifter among the many tied up there. On the long trip back to Benbow they had to piss the beer they’d drunk over the side into the waters of the Flow, while leaning against a rail or getting a pal to keep hold of them. Some puked too, Leo among them.

  Clambering noisily back aboard, they had to pass the officer of the watch, who on learning the initiatory nature of the excursion let them go, and they lifted the quiet Devon lad into his hammock. In the morning he said nothing, and thereafter declined to repeat the experience.

  Leo did not resume his gunnery ambitions. When he entered a turret now his hands began to tremble and his teeth to chatter, and he could not control them. Yet despite his experience in the battle, he did not mind being back in the water. The first time he swam again it was with much trepidation, but as soon as he ducked his head beneath the surface he left the world behind, and any anxiety was washed away by a sense of calm.

  He pursued his application to be a ship’s diver and took the aptitude test. He was a strong swimmer, and was sent, on a ship bound for the south coast of England, to Portsmouth on a four-week course. The training consisted of physical fitness routines and compressed-air or open-circuit diving, going underwater in a diving suit with a tube delivering oxygen into the sealed helmet. He received instruction on searching ships’ bottoms for explosives, as well as practice in the more usual labour of inspecting and repairing of ships’ hulls.

  Leo returned to the Orkneys by rail, on one of the so-called Jellicoes out of Euston Station. The long double-engined train was packed with soldiers and sailors. It rumbled north for seven hundred miles. Leo found a seat in the corner of a carriage. After an hour he rose to stretch his legs, but the corridors were full of men and their packs, kitbags, rifles. Sailors carried their hammocks. Men who had made the trip before did not bother to attempt a trek to the toilet but went to the window of their carriage and opened it to relieve themselves.

  ‘Never stick your head out a Jellicoe train,’ someone said.

  The air in the carriage was dense with cigarette smoke. When night fell, men removed their boots and added to the fetid atmosphere the stink of their feet and socks.

  The train steamed slowly north, straight through some stations, halting without warning at others. In Crewe, Leo alighted to get a cup of tea, but the queue was long and before he could reach the serving hatch the train began to pull out again and he ran to reboard. In Carlisle, he managed to buy two meat pies from a stall on the platform. Those in the know said the stop in Perth would be longer, for they would wait there for carriages from King’s Cross to join the train. Sure enough, though they reached Perth in the early hours of the morning, there in a temporary wooden building was a Forces canteen run by a Church organisation. Volunteer ladies stood behind a long counter and offered the men tea, coffee or cocoa, sandwiches and cakes, sweets, cigarettes.

  Leo returned to the darkness of his carriage and slept. Dawn broke and he watched out of the window as the train rolled across a landscape of bare, undulating hills and moorland that hardly changed for hours.

  Eventually they arrived at Thurso, the end of the line. Outside the station was a line of horse-driven waggons. Shouldering his pack, Leo climbed into one. Others hauled their equipment aboard. The waggons took them to Scrabster Harbour, where they boarded a steamer. One of the men who’d been in the same carriage on the train as Leo told him that the Pentland Firth, the narrow body of water which lay between them and the Orkneys, was a confined channel where the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean met.

  ‘It’s like two hosepipes aimed at each other,’ he said. ‘Where they meet’s is where we’s crossin. Permanent turbulence. And the wind don’t help.’

  Leo thanked him for the warning. He said nothing more but did not believe that he would have a problem, for though so young he still had as sturdy a pair of sea legs as any old salt on Benbow. He noticed many of the soldiers and airmen crowded in the saloon to the fore of the main deck.

  No sooner had they left the harbour than the sea rose in huge billows that came broadside on. The ship rolled like a barrel, and the soldiers came staggering out of the saloon to vomit in the scuppers, and to wallow there. Leo, along with other sailors, had remained on deck, swaying with the movement of the little steamer. But the water roiled and churned and made the boat lurch and twist, buck and bounce. He thought it similar to riding a wild unbroken colt. And that was the last thought he had, before he stumbled to the rails and pushed his way between two men already there and emptied his stomach of what remained of those welcome refreshments they’d been given in Perth. He spent the rest of the brief voyage to Stromness at a boat davit, wedged between a post and the rails.

  To maintain his qualifications and his extra diver’s pay, Ordinary Seaman Leo Sercombe was required to take a dip each month for a minimum of half an hour. In Scapa Flow the ocean floor was sandy, which meant that visibility was good.

  Hermit crabs scuttled along the seabed. On the rocks were sea anemones of different colours, and kelp beds in which fish sheltered. Leo had never really looked at fish before, in their own habitat. Little lump suckers and flat flounders, fish considered to possess a wonderful ugliness, had their own alien beauty, he discovered. When the sun was out, it was amazing what could be seen down there. Langoustines, like small lobst
ers. Feather duster worms fluttering in the current. Leo caught occasional glimpses of shoals of pollock and saithe, of cod and ling, that turned shyly away when they saw him and darted off, silver bellies shimmering.

  Often he forgot the time, and was interrupted in his absorption when he felt a tug on the line above him, and rose slowly, regretfully, back to the surface.

  In spring the water warmed and an algal bloom spread across the Flow. If he dived then, Leo found his visibility reduced, but soon jellyfish appeared, comb jellies and moon jellies, neither of which stung humans but both of which fed avidly on the algae. The bloom dissipated. The comb jellies pulsated through the water, refracting light from their miniature swimming hairs or cilia.

  Leo took with him a net potato bag from the mess, and searched for periwinkles and scallops. The scallops propelled themselves along the bottom by opening and closing their shells, always moving backwards, so Leo positioned himself behind them, and collected them in the bag, which he afterwards presented to the ship’s cook.

  The Benbow joined the rest of the fleet in regular gunnery exercises and sweeps of the North Sea. Some ships were painted with dazzle camouflage, in the hope of making them more difficult to hit with torpedoes by the German U-boats. They looked like zebra ships. Otherwise the fleet stayed in Scapa Flow.

  Beyond organised betting at fleet regattas, gambling on board ship was strictly forbidden in the Royal Navy, yet it flourished. All ships’ crews shared certain surreptitious habits, but many also had their own particular vices. HMS Ajax, anchored nearby in the Flow in the spring of 1918, was known as a pugilists’ ship. Troublemakers were posted to her. Discipline was harsh. Breaches were dealt with by volunteering the wrongdoers in the boxing ring, and large wagers were laid on the outcomes by both officers and men.