Taking a long intake of breath, she pulled herself up and went on: ‘And seeing Billy’s name there in the paper, it made me think again of something that he told me. When I went to see him. Something that I meant to ask you about when I saw you in that café. But then, well – what you told me… it was so shattering. I could see nothing else beyond it for a while. I could not even think…’
My face, my neck and ears, flushed hot and I looked away. I did not want to have to look at it, to even think of it, of the hideous, searing memory of that image, of a distraught young woman crushed. For one sliver of a second, a flash of anger overtook me, anger that she could have brought me here to make me look again at what I had fought so long and so hard to forget. The defensive anger of shame laid bare. It took me every single scrap left of my strength, of my reason, to turn from my instinct that screamed at me to kick back my chair and beat an unqualified retreat. As I gazed across at her though, my anger dissolved as instantly as it had arisen, for I saw that there was no recrimination in her face. She was not even looking at me. Lost in the moment of her own painful recollections, she hardly seemed to be aware that I was there at all.
‘I remembered what he’d said to me only after. When I could afford to think. It has always made me wonder. He told me, almost in passing, that you’d attacked a man who tried to trade off Joe’s compass for some water. For water. When he was dead already and you were dying of thirst.’
Putting her elbows on the table, she brought her hands forward to rest together out in front of her and leaning towards me, she bowed her head. Her question came not much above a whisper, ‘Why would you have done that? When you were dying of thirst?’ And the answer, already on her lips, was out before I would have had the chance, had I been able, to summon one.
‘Unless you knew what it had meant to him. Unless perhaps you knew that it was mine,’ she breathed.
Unprepared and incapable of knowing how I might ever possibly begin to find the words to explain, unsure as to whether she even wanted me to try, the only reply that I could muster seemed obtusely so irrelevant.
‘Mac,’ I said. ‘His name was Mac.’
‘What?’
‘The man I hit. His name was Mac.’
‘Oh.’
Nodding slowly, she turned this piece of information over carefully, as though determined to consider the possibility of its importance. It was at least something. But then I felt her hesitate as, having dismissed my confession of any consequence, she struggled to come up with some kind of appropriate response.
‘Well,’ she offered eventually. She lifted her head and, sitting up straight, pulled her hands back across the tablecloth towards her body.
‘I began to think that there must be something more, something more than just what I had been so desperate to deny. I never wanted to believe you. What you told me. Though I did. For a long time, I did. I thought of nothing else. I was just a girl. I was twenty-five but I was still just a girl who had been thrown over. And I did not understand. I could not have understood. I hated him and I hated you. I was bitter and I thought I would never, never get over it. I was so angry with you: somehow it was your fault. And I thought that I would die with sorrow.’
A smile hovered about her lips again and there was indulgence in her voice as she recalled the tender-hearted girl she had once been.
‘But I did not die. I married, a bit later than the others, but I did not die. And I married a man who loved me, who was loving enough to let me find my way.’ The smile about her mouth did not fade as the memory of herself was replaced in her mind’s eye by another, one which, if not regarded with the same kind of sympathy, was remembered with an equal affection.
‘He was a patient man, my husband. Too patient really. And I found that after all, I was able to love him too. Though I don’t think that either of us ever quite knew how much until it was too late.’
She stopped briefly as if slightly startled by her readiness to share this unrelated sorrow, a sorrow which, though privately long acknowledged, she had not before been tempted to express.
‘Anyway,’ she said, coming back. ‘That was a different life. Every thing was different after… I was different. Then, all those years ago, when I walked into that café, I knew what love felt like – I felt it more desperately than I ever would again. I felt it. But I did not understand what it meant. It has taken me a lifetime to understand. My husband. My own children. What I would not do for them. Grandchildren. The loss of my parents. People I have loved. A lifetime of learning.
‘And all it taught me was what I had begun to think Joe already knew. So I stopped believing it. That he hadn’t loved me. You cannot feel like that, be loved like that and just stop believing it was ever there at all. I wondered why you would have fought so desperately for his compass and why I’d seen such pained betrayal written on your face. It was so much more than having to relay a difficult and unpleasant truth. You struggled so. It wasn’t only my betrayal that caused you such a lot of pain then, was it? It was the betrayal of the truth.’
She paused and though it had all the implications of a question, she did not appear to be expecting any answer and so, still, I did not speak.
‘I think, in the end, it was your face that gave you… that gave Joe away. At least, it was that that gave me hope, permission even, to believe that there might have been some other explanation. And I chose the one that I wanted most to be the truth. You see, he had always been so generous, so big-hearted somehow: I had loved that in him. And so it was not so very difficult to believe that he should have tried to extend that generosity to me. Oh, he meant only to be generous, I’m sure of that. It was a sacrifice of sorts. He tried to sacrifice his memory for my happiness. It was love. He truly loved me and he wanted only to spare me a lifetime of disappointment. No one, for me, would have lived up to him and he knew it. He wanted, didn’t he, just to finish it for me.’
She regarded me silently for one moment longer, not quite as though she hoped that I would answer but more as if she were waiting for a particular expression to take possession of my face. Then she tutted softly and, wrinkling up her nose, added wryly, ‘My children would no doubt have it that he simply had been trying to ensure that I moved on.’
I did not reply but instead, jerked my head up once briefly and exhaled, acknowledging our common disaffection for a language that we both had learned to understand but which would never be our own. I did not look up.
‘And you,’ she went on softly, ‘You loved him. You had been through hell together. What else was there for you to do? You were loyal and you were brave. But you were young. And he had asked you, hadn’t he? And you thought… he thought that you’d be letting me go.’
She smiled then, a little ruefully, looking up at me from under her lowered lids and then suddenly, she lifted them and looked at me with eyes that in more than half a century, had not changed in either purity or potency. They were as breathtaking as the day that I had first encountered them. They were the eyes of the girl I had met back then, the same girl who lived on the inside of this small old lady. There was something further, more deeply scarred within them now. They had acquired a wisdom, an inviolability, suffered for and learned from, beyond the reach of most of us.
‘I cannot, even now, quite thank you for it but I came here because I wanted to make sure. I wanted, I think, to know only if I have understood.’
I opened my mouth to speak but found that the words, so long and closely guarded, so painfully protected but which I recognised now should finally be heard, could not come. I must have made some sound though for, putting out a hand, she stopped me quickly.
‘No, no. It’s all right,’ she said. She reached out across the table and her hand came down to rest just a little short of mine. ‘It’s all right. You don’t have to say it. You don’t, in the end, have to say anything at all. Your face has always been enough.’
The light of her eyes, affectionate now, exonerating, danced across the table into mi
ne, conveying her forgiveness. She had never looked more beautiful.
‘I have something for you,’ was all that I could manage. Taking out the brown paper bag I had been carrying in my trouser pocket, I pushed it across the table towards her.
‘Oh,’ she said and she opened it slowly, intent. ‘Oh!’ she gasped, looking up at me, pleasure shining from her eyes that filled as I watched. ‘My gloves.’
She picked one up and stroked her fingers along the soft, dark suede. ‘Joe,’ she said simply. ‘Joe Green.’ There was a catch of joy in her voice, as though Joe himself had just walked in and presented himself at our table. Joy and acceptance.
We sat for a while in companionable silence: separate in our reveries, connected by Joe’s love.
‘Thank you,’ she said, suddenly matter of fact, as if coming back to the present. ‘I missed them.’ She got up and, bustling, gathered up her things. Her hat and coat from the back of her chair. The gloves. And then looking down at me, she added, as if an afterthought, ‘You have been very kind.’
AFTERWORD BY BRIAN CLARKE
A LIFETIME OF LUCK
My whole life has been attended by good fortune. I spent my formative years, from five to fourteen, in what I remember fondly as a permanent summertime in sleepy Norfolk. Lady Luck was always on my side during my schooldays. I mugged up exactly the right questions the night before exams, and I landed the plum part in the school play when the far more talented lead actor contracted measles just before opening night.
My lucky star shone brightly when my family moved to busy, bustling Preston, just as I was hankering for more excitement in life. My new hometown boasted twenty-seven cinemas, a first-division football team and – glory of glories – docks! Docks with ships tying up alongside the harbour walls: small ships, middling ships and deep-sea cargo ships – all in all, a sea-mad schoolboy’s dream! The thrill of stepping from solid ground onto a gently swaying ship’s deck is a feeling that still stirs the pit of my stomach. I spent countless hours on the docks, eagerly quizzing the cabin boys, sailors and other crew, sitting on their bunks in cramped cabins that seemed brimful of adventure. And before long I knew: this was the life for me!
My father, who had wanted me to follow him into engineering, indulged my ambitions to go to sea, but only on the condition that I study for a specialised qualification. Serendipity again: Preston was home to the best radio-telegraph school in the north of England! So I signed up for a course, and in what seemed no time at all I was assigned to a ship by the Marconi company. A happy-go-lucky eighteen-year-old, I was already away to sea.
My luck didn’t run out then either. How blessed was I to survive the destruction of the Sithonia, the perilous lifeboat days, the onset of malaria, and, as a prisoner of war and weakened to the very brink of death, the harsh desert. And my cup was running over when I was later assigned not to one, but two ‘cushy numbers’: hospital ships, which were effectively inviolable, never attacked either by U-boat or enemy aircraft.
After six action-packed years at sea with my guardian angel constantly at my side, civilian life offered me a blank canvas. Guided by forces unknown, I was drawn into a splendid career in office equipment. I was introduced, too, to the hilariously funny gem of a young woman who would soon become my totally supportive wife. She has now been at my side – and often ahead of me – for almost sixty years. What stunning luck! And incredibly, we have raised four remarkable sons who have done us nothing but credit. Unbelievable!
Thus it was that when I decided to tell my story of my years as a merchant seaman, fortune came to my aid again. Mired as I was in dilemmas about contradictory and patchy memories and about which parts of my wartime story might be best left alone – for the sake of my sanity, of decency, and of the families of my fellow crew members who did not make it home – my efforts to write a memoir ended up as a kind of mishmash, with flashes of the extraordinary buried within reams of the mundane. I found myself unable to fathom which details belonged more in a family journal than in a narrative of interest to a wider public. With all these worries bringing writer’s block, I could not fashion a coherent tale from the banal ramblings of my by-now barren brain. As far as I was concerned, my miserable attempts would languish in some drawer.
But it was just at this point that a chance encounter prompted me to turn for advice to a publisher, Sara Hunt. She found elements of my journal riveting, but my gifts with the pen and recall of what she regarded as the crucial details – What was it really like on the lifeboat? – sadly not up to the task. So she encouraged me to relate my memories to someone who could envision an entire cast of characters and their passions (including my own!), to bring the ‘interesting bits’ of my long, dry sequence of events vividly to life. I needed someone with a rare gift for storytelling; someone unencumbered by my reluctance to revisit the raw terror, the descent into near-madness or the endless tedium of my days on the doomed ship’s lifeboat and in prison camp. When Sara Allerton came upon my tale, to my astonishment, she was immediately inspired. She fell upon the mission with unbridled enthusiasm, posing searching questions, researching the background, and then setting her boundless imagination to work. Eventually, she came up with Making Shore – in my opinion, a masterly novel.
Now how is all that for a tale of good luck? How could I have enjoyed such splendid fortune? If it continues, perhaps I will have just finished a delicious dinner and be sipping a post-prandial brandy when the Grim Reaper taps me on the shoulder. It could happen, you know!
Brian Clarke, 2010
(Below: in a 1942 photo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank: Brian Clarke for asking. For providing the impetus for and the historical backdrop to this novel. For his unqualified confidence in me, for his generosity and for his marvellous letters.
Sara Hunt, editor, publisher and now my friend. For her time, her energy, her constant encouragement and her tremendous goodwill. For never flinching to raise the bar to get, every time, a little bit more.
My father, John Willcox, for his boundless enthusiasm and for all his hard work; for his delight in discussion, for his persistent attention to detail and for his critical opinion. For his laughter but most of all, for making me believe.
Liz Richards and John Suddes for their expertise.
I would like to thank Toby for his endless patience and Katharine, Charlie and Meggie who put up with burnt suppers and very fast bedtime stories for a long time.
Special thanks also go to my mother, Pauline; to Mandy, James, Tom and Ed for their love, help and unconditional support; to Fiona S-J for her faith; and to Bridge and Martin who read, Alison who listened and Sarah, Fiona and Sandra who made me stop for lunch.
And finally, thanks to the following people at Saraband for their editorial, design and production contributions: Deborah White, Sara Myers, Jo Morley and Chloe van Grieken.
Copyright
Suite 202, 98 Woodlands Road
Glasgow, G3 6HB, Scotland
www.saraband.net
Copyright © Sara Allerton 2010
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained
from the British Library on request.
The right of Sara Allerton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Copyright under international copyright conventions. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage-and-retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Brief passages (not to exceed 500 words) may be quoted for reviews.
ISBN 13: 978–1–887354–81–3
with friends
Making Shore Page 29