All through the Confession, the Te Deum and the Creed, George was wishing that he’d worn his uniform. On the far side of the aisle, Colin Mansell, a flight lieutenant in Bomber Command, was stealing all the thunder reserved for our boys on their home leaves. Girls who wouldn’t spare a second glance for George were favouring Mansell with shy stares. His boiled face still lumpy with acne, Mansell wore the pious smirk of the returning hero, squared his shoulders and joined in the singing of “Now Thank We All Our God” in a voice designed to carry to the most distant of his admirers.
Then the Rector was up in the pulpit, framed by the blue banner of the Women’s Institute, and George listened to him speaking with the odd feeling that this Sunday’s text had been chosen as a private code between father and son. It was—wasn’t it—the Navy that his father was talking about? When the Rector said “vocation”, George knew exactly what he meant—it was the North Atlantic, the nightwatch, the line of pencilled positions marching across the empty chart.
“Today,” his father said, his voice booming in the rafters, “that word vocation has a special meaning for us as we approach the end of yet another year of war, and come to terms once again this Advent with the unfamiliar callings of war. Many of us in this parish have loved ones fighting—some held as prisoners—in foreign lands; men, and women too, who are indeed walking worthy in ways that those of us who are left at home may find it hard to accept or comprehend …”
Was that what he had really meant when he had peered disdainfully at the Admiralty Sight Reduction Tables? And was he now using the pulpit to say all the fatherlike things that he somehow couldn’t say over the dining table? Hopefully, uncertainly, George searched his father’s face, willing his father to meet his own gaze. But the Rector refused to be drawn: he went on addressing the flaky duck-egg paint on the church ceiling, telling it old, over-rehearsed home truths about duty, honour, love and labour (which the Rector called “getting one’s nose down to the grindstone”). George had lost him. He was like the big trout that always got away the moment you thought you had him hooked.
In the pew in front, Vivienne Beale was leaning forward, her woollen coat stretched excitingly tight around the slender stalk of her back. George worked out exactly where the elastic yoke of her bra-straps was hidden under the wool. He thought he detected a tiny lump, just to the left of her spine, where the fiddly hooks and eyes joined up. After last year’s Harvest Supper & Dance, she’d let George slide his hand inside her blouse, but she’d wriggled away when his fingers found a wired and bolstered nipple. At Pwllheli, he’d got as far as Number 4 with a girl called Judith Pugh. Received wisdom had it that once you’d made 5, you were as good as home to 10; and Judith Pugh had the reputation of being a real goer. George reckoned that he stood a damned good chance of not being a virgin by the time he came back for his next leave. Everything would look different then.
“In Saint Paul’s words, we must forbear one another in love …” The Rector was beginning to wind down now. George, moving with extreme caution, crossed his legs to hide his hard-on.
“And now, to-Gahd-the-Father-Gahd-the-Son-and-Gahd-the-Holyghost …” His father, like a fat bride in his surplice, swung to face the altar as the congregation came to their feet and George rose, crippled; his knees bent, chest thrust forward, clasped hands shielding his delinquent pelvic section. “Beallhonourandglory, nowandevershallbe, worldwithoutendamen-hymnnumber …” By the time the organ started up on “Jerusalem My Happy Home”, George was able to stand upright.
His father drove him to the station in the car that his mother called Horace the Morris. On the windy platform, his father said, “Well … best of luck with the exam, then. Do hope you make the, ah, Navigation course.” George was surprised, and pleased too, that he’d remembered. When the train came in, though, they shook hands like strangers. “Try and remember to write to your mother, will you? It means a lot to her.” Did that mean it meant a lot to him as well, or did it mean that it was the sort of boring thing that was only of interest to women? George couldn’t tell.
The slow train to Crewe was unheated. To start with he had the compartment to himself, where he sat huddled by the window in his stiff blue greatcoat. He tried and failed to read the Lilliput that he’d bought at Wyman’s. He stared out of the window, fogging the glass, and watched the rolls of thick steam from the engine blot out the sodden countryside. There was steam in the compartment, too; cold, acrid, bowel-smelling. He made a list of all the things that he might have said to his parents but hadn’t. He saw himself as the life and soul of the Rectory; his father beaming with pride, his mother full of earnest questions. Then he thought that he would probably be killed at sea. He imagined Mrs Norris from the post office bringing the telegram up the Rectory drive on her bicycle. There’d be a memorial service at the church, and Vivienne Beale would be there, dressed in black lace (including suspenders), head bowed, weeping quietly behind her veil.
“We never knew how brave he was,” his father said.
“I did,” said Vivienne Beale quietly. Then she whispered—she had told no-one this, not even her own mother—“I am carrying his child.”
At Didcot, a man got into George’s compartment. He was, George thought, rather too well dressed to be travelling in Third. He settled himself on the seat opposite, looked across at George and said, “Going back to your ship?”
On one side of the compartment, below the sagging hammock of the luggage rack, was a gouache of Weymouth seafront before the war; on the other was a cartoon of a bullet-headed German snooper with the caption, “Remember—WALLS HAVE EARS”.
In his best officer-of-the-watch voice, George said: “Shouldn’t you know better than to ask a damnfool question like that?” It sounded good, said out loud; a pretty stiff reproof.
The man, who was old, forty at least, said, “Sorry I spoke,” and laughed. “You don’t mind if I light my pipe, do you?”
George stared pointedly at Oxfordshire and said, “Not in the least,” in a way that made it plain as daylight that he minded very much indeed. The man shrugged, smiled, lit up and read—or rather pretended to read—a book with a yellow cover. He looked a thoroughly slimy type. As the train pulled out of Stafford station he went off to the bog at the end of the carriage and George was able to take a close look at the chap’s reading matter. It was called The State in Theory and Practice, and it was published by the Left Book Club. The man was obviously a bolshie—a bloody fifth columnist for Uncle Joe.
Trundling up England alone with a spy, George felt humbled by the thought of his own heroic and secret destiny. Eyeing his reflection in the darkening train window, he was torn between pity and admiration for himself. He was going to sea. He was going to take command of men. And putting yourself in the path of trackless torpedos was no Sunday School picnic. If the torp had your name on it … His eyes stung from the smoke from the bolshevik’s pipe.
When Rowley was killed in France in 1940, it had been a thrilling event. The Head talked of Rowley’s Supreme Sacrifice and of how he had Laid Down His Life For etcetera. The school had been granted a special Free Half to mark the shell that had blown Rowley to bits at Gravelines. George, in the Lower Fifth then, had felt a connection with Rowley so close that it was the next best thing to seeing your own name go up on the painted Ave atque Vale board in chapel. He’d been Rowley’s fag. Indeed Rowley, an amiable and rather lazy house monitor, had given George his old brass fly box at the end of his last term, and George still fished with Rowley’s black gnats and Rowley’s Tup’s Indispensables. The day that Rowley was killed was a day of almost unbearable personal glory for George Grey. That night he wept over Rowley’s death and was proud of his tears, those outward and visible signs of a very proper manly grief within. Eight more Old Vigornians had been killed in action since then, but none of their deaths had been a patch on Rowley’s.
Three and a half years on, of course, with every chance of making the Supreme Sacrifice oneself, things looked a bit different. Geor
ge wasn’t afraid of dying, exactly (the face in the window, framed by a turned-up collar of heavy naval serge, looked not at all unlike that of David Niven in “The Charge of the Light Brigade”); the big question was what the hell one thought one was going to die for. Not “England”. Not “King and Country”. Maybe some chaps really had gone over the top in the First War with thoughts like that in their heads. It might have been possible before Dunkirk, even; perhaps Rowley (who liked poetry and had once declaimed “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion” to George, which was pretty bloody excruciating at the time) could have done it. But it wouldn’t wash in 1943. Suppose you did go down in the Western Approaches, who would you be thinking of as your legs went numb in the water, or you tried to struggle free of your burning uniform? The conchies? The bolshies? People like Mrs Atherton who’d pulled a wangle to keep her son out of the Army? The Altarwomen’s Guild? The Rector’s sermons? Commander Prynne? Judith Pugh? It was like having a five pound note and only being able to buy a packet of Woodbines with it. If you were going to lay down your life, your one and only, you ought to be able to spend it on something that was actually worth having. If the bolshevik hadn’t been sitting opposite, George could very easily have found himself crying at the thought of what a bloody miserable tragedy it would be, to go to sea and die a virgin.
By 2230, he was on the branch line from Macchynleth to Pwllheli, where the railway ran along the shore and the sea itself was suddenly there at his elbow; sleek, black, rippled like moleskin. He loved its mysterious, consoling breadth and emptiness. The sea was only really scarifying when you were inland. When you were on it, it was too absorbing for you to feel afraid of. Far out in the sky, there was the single white flash of a lighthouse. George timed it, counting off the seconds of darkness. A hundred-and-one, a hundred-and-two, a hundred-and-three … Twenty seconds. It was St Tudwal’s Island. Bardsey would be fifteen seconds, and there’d be five quick flashes. Even on a train, you could do some pretty useful navigation. He tried to find the Pole Star, but it was lost in the Welsh hills; so he guessed at where it probably was and used his watchdial to work out a rough bearing of about 296 on St Tudwal’s.
At Portmadoc, Ives joined the train. He’d come from Birkenhead by bus.
“How’s tricks?” George said.
“Shagged out,” Ives said. “And when I say shagged, mate, I mean shagged.”
“Did you have raids?”
“Her mother was away all weekend, wasn’t she? Staying with her aunt. In Southport. Oh, Southport, how I love you, how I love you, my dear old Southport!” Ives sang the words in his faulty baritone. The expression on his face was sickeningly smug. “Know how many frenchies I got through?” He held up the five fingers of one hand and three of the other. “I’m getting them wholesale now.”
George felt rotten. Admittedly Ives was twenty and had been a rating for eighteen months before getting on to the course at Pwllheli; but even so. He stared out of the train window at the wrinkled sea on which the unpatriotic lights of Criccieth were fretting. “Trust my luck,” he said in a drawl as broad as he could manage. “She’d got her monthlies.”
“It happens.” Ives sprawled on his seat, his short legs wide apart, his gas mask resting on his pelvis like a codpiece. “I knew I was all right. Know why? It was neap tides this weekend. She has hers at second springs. You could work out High Water Dover by her.” He took out a pack of cards from his greatcoat pocket and shuffled them. “Pennies up.”
For the rest of the way to Pwllheli, George was nagged by a single thought. Ives—even Ives, with his nasal accent and his fatty hands—had something worth dying for. That night, in the chalet which he shared with Pennington and Shuckburgh, he speculated for two long sleepless hours about his chances of doing it with Judith Pugh. Or Vivienne Beale.
Even in sleep George listened to the boat, feeling its creaks and grumbles as if they were happening somewhere in his own body. He wasn’t sure now if it was night or day, but he registered an uncomfortable series of taps on his tender ribcage. Damn it. One of the fenders must have come untied and a stray dinghy was bruising his paintwork. Muzzy-headed, his throat dry with sleep and old pipe smoke, he stumbled out on to the deck.
But there was no dinghy. The water on the port side of the boat was clear. George blinked at the wounding brightness of the ripples and searched for the log, or broken fishcrate, that had woken him. It seemed to be afternoon.
The log was … but it wasn’t a log, it was a body. Hanging half submerged in the sunny water, its knees and elbows were drawn up in front of it in the foetal position of a slumbering child. It rolled away on a wavelet, and came back. George heard it knock—a hesitant rap on the planks—before it turned slowly in the sea, so like a sleeper, and lay face down, a sodden mohair skirt ballooning round its plump, unnaturally white thighs.
George’s first impulse was to make it a blundering apology. Oh—I say—I’m most dreadfully sorry. It was like opening a lavatory door and finding a woman sitting there at stool. But there was no hasty slamming of the door on this one. The body was knocking again. Rat-a-tat-tat. May I come in?
Feeling stunned and nauseous, George unpacked his new braided mooring rope from the locker in the cockpit, and set out to lassoo the thing. Without success. The rope floated. Each time he tried to snare the body with it, the rope passed clean over the top, grazing the thing’s face. It was a horrible job. The face was so alive with astonishment that for a moment George wondered if it wasn’t a body at all, just a swimmer, bewildered to find herself being fished for like this by a strange man on a boat. But the eyes were very dead, wide open behind an opaque mauve glaze.
He had another go, reaching down over the boat’s side and looping the rope first under the head, then round the stiff crook of an elbow. He made a slip knot and tightened it. The body was far too heavy to pull out of the water. If he tied the rope to the end of the main halyard and wound it up on the winch … but that seemed an indignity too gross to inflict. At least for now. And he wasn’t sure that the bent arm would be stiff enough to stand the strain: he saw the body dropping from the shrouds with an incriminating splash. He looked at his watch. It was 4.50, and the fishermen would be in soon. If he left it here, it would be crushed against his beam when the scallop boats tied up alongside. As gently as he could, he towed it round to Calliope’s stern. Twice, he heard its head bump against the hull. “Oh, Christ, I’m sorry,” he said aloud, and made his awful visitor fast to the rail.
It was only when he was in the phone box at the end of the quay and dialling 999 that George realized that he and the body had been introduced. It was at the Walpoles’ Christmas party, and the body had been knowledgeable about the drought in the Sahel region. The body worked part-time for Oxfam.
“Emergency. Which service do you want?” the operator said.
“Police,” George said. “And ambulance.”
“Which do you want first?”
“Police.”
What was her name? Biddy something? No. It was … like Winny, or Binnie, or …
“St Cadix Police Station. PC Lofts.”
“It’s Connie Lisle,” George said.
At noon on Sunday in the Royal St Cadix Yacht Club, even old Freddie Corquordale was wearing the face that he kept in reserve for Test Match defeats and sudden bereavements. The only member who was out of step was Edgar Crosthwait, a rare visitor from Lostwithiel, who was deaf and hadn’t caught on.
“There’s no way around it as far as I can see,” Denis Wright said. “They’re going to have to call a spade a spade and bring in a straight suicide verdict. If only she hadn’t left that ruddy note.”
“You know where she’s supposed to have gone in?” said Rupert Walpole. “Off the end of Number 8 Dock. One of the girls in the office saw her standing there for about half an hour.”
“What’s the drop there? Fifty feet?” asked Freddie Corquordale.
“Oh no, more like fifteen. She went in at high water.”
“She must have been in the river for three days, just going up and down with the tide,” said Denis Wright.
“One just wishes that she’d said something,” said Betty Castle. The spring sunshine revealed how thinly her spiky hair grew on her pink skull. “I’m afraid the trouble with poor Connie was that she was a bottler-up. It never does any good, that. I know.”
“From what I’ve heard, she said a hell of a lot too much. In that note.” Brigadier Eliot glowered at Edgar Crosthwait, who chuckled, nodded and said Yes! three times.
The note which Connie Lisle had left on her dining-room table in a sealed white envelope under a candlestick had been passed by the police to the coroner’s office. It might just as well have been published in the Truro Times. Everyone knew what was in it. It was not, in any usual sense of the term, a note at all; it was a long essay. According to Mrs Downes, it ran to more than fifteen closely-typed pages. Connie Lisle had (in Mrs Downes’s word) “expatiated” on the emptiness of her retirement and her feelings of personal futility since she’d lost her job and moved to Cornwall. This was perfectly acceptable: Connie Lisle simply had never pulled her weight in St Cadix and, as you make the bed you lie on, so she had made herself a very hard and narrow bed. What wasn’t in the least acceptable was the second part of the so-called note, in which Connie Lisle had gone on to vilify (“That really is the only word for it”) St Cadix. Mrs Downes rattled off the phrase “topheavy, snobbish, inward and unreal” with an incredulous, dry smile; but she lowered her voice to an appalled whisper for “Dying can’t be so difficult when you spend every day in the company of the living dead.” It was Laura Nash, though, who put the kibosh on it. She was afraid that, tragically, certain names were named and some very ungrateful and very thoughtless things were said.
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