“52 degrees, 54 minutes north, 4 degrees 25 minutes west, sir.”
“Good. I do wish you wouldn’t look so confounded with wonder at Mr Owen’s genius, Mr Usherwood. We did go through all this last Tuesday.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now all we need is the course steered. Erratic, one might say. But let’s give Mr Grey the benefit of the doubt and take it that he consulted his charts and plotted a direct line from the original seat of King Arthur’s Round Table to Gimlet Rock. Any volunteers? Mr Farmer has the look of a man born with a compass rose in his head. Yes.”
“Three one five, sir.”
“Winchester to Pwllheli … three … one … five.” The chalk squealed on the board. “Now we have to face up to the matter of Mr Grey’s speed. We’re clearly not dealing with one of the fastest ships of the line.” He was whiffling again. George, looking up cautiously, saw that the curious noise made by the Commander to show he was happy was actually produced by loosening his false teeth and blowing through them. Prynne was now jigging his snappers up and down with the point of his tongue. The sight made George feel fractionally better about being ragged by the old man.
“Known point of departure. Course steered. Speed. Mmm. I don’t like the look of that speed at all. The duration of passage so far, from a bit outside Winchester to a bit outside Pwllheli, seems to have been somewhere in the region of eighteen years. Yes, Mr Grey?”
“And seven months, sir,” George said, determined to poker-face it out.
“And seven months.” Commander Prynne addressed himself in marvelling silence to the gollywogs on the walls, the squad of drilling cadets beyond the window, the flies that were buzzing against the ceiling and, finally, the navigation class. He whiffled contentedly for several seconds and said, “What, ah—kept you, Mr Grey?”
“I slept through the—”
But Prynne wasn’t going to be cheated of his endgame. “Ah. Foul tidal streams all the way, no doubt. Years spent becalmed in fog, hundreds of miles lost in leeway. How long, Mr Grey, I wonder, did you have to stand hove-to in storm conditions? Eighteen years and seven months. Hmm. Gentlemen, this is an occasion worth hoisting all our flags for. Here at last is Mr Grey, one of His Majesty’s bravest and most battered little corvettes, struggling into safe harbour under jury rig. (I rather think, Mr Grey, that if you try reaching up behind your starboard ear, you’ll find some spindrift there. Is it spindrift? Or just shaving soap?)”
George wasn’t late for Nav. class again. At the end of the course he passed out top in Navigation; streets ahead of Carver, who came second.
Calliope swayed a little on the invisible swell—just enough to remind George that he was afloat. The last grey shoulder of cliff had gone and the whole world was water now, with George its hub. He carried the circular horizon with him as he inched eastwards along his magnetic track at five and a quarter knots. The tide, such as it was, was with him too: the Channel, slowly filling up with green Atlantic water, was a sluggish river, its current easing the boat over the ground away from Cornwall to Plymouth and beyond. To his Dead Reckoning position, George added a mile and a half for the fair tide. How was it that old Prynne explained the term? “The ancients,” the Commander said, “always called an uncharted sea a ‘dead’ sea. Dead Reckoning is how you feel your way through an unknown world. It is exactly the same method that a blind man uses to make his way across a room. He counts his steps.” To prove the point, Ives had been blindfolded and despatched on a tricky voyage across the sandpit and the putting green to Admin, where he collided with Lieutenant Wates and sank.
George, following the drill, reported his course and position to Falmouth Coastguard over the radio telephone. “Destination not yet known,” he said. “I am a white, ketch-rigged trawler yacht. One person on board. Over.”
“Will you spell your vessel’s name please. Over.”
George said: “I spell: Charlie Alpha Lima Lima India Oscar Papa Echo. Over.” It was nice to find the jargon coming back pat on cue, like being able to speak Portuguese again.
“Thank you, Calliope. Have a pleasant voyage. Out, and listening on 16.”
George left the radio switched on, for company. He wasn’t alone: beyond the rim of haze, the Channel was full of ships. He listened to their captains calling.
“Par Pilots, Par Pilots, this is Vivacity, Vivacity, Vivacity. Over.”
No answer. Vivacity sounded fretful and down in the mouth as her captain repeated his appeal for his lost pilot. Far away on the starboard bow there was—not so much a ship as the shadow of a ship, suspended high in the sky. George saw her masts and deckworks faintly printed, like an over-exposed photo, on the air. Christ, but she wasn’t so far away at all! A moment later her wash came rolling in out of the haze. Calliope tipped and lurched. George heard a doggish scuffle going on down below. His books must be falling about over the saloon floor. When he looked for the ship again, she was gone.
“Benevolence, Benevolence, Benevolence. This is Fidelity, Fidelity. Do you read, please? Over …”
Lulled by the voices on the VHF, by the even rumble of the diesel and by the cradle motion of the water, George felt himself drifting off track. He checked the compass card as it swayed against the lubberline, but it was steady: 090, 092, 094, 093. Right on course. The autopilot was ticking as smoothly as a clock, and the spokes of the wheel shifted, a fraction of an inch at a time, back and forth, back and forth, as the boat felt for its heading. The merchant navy chaps all called the autopilot Lazy Mike: with Lazy Mike standing his watch at the wheel, George was free to get on with the serious business of navigation.
Known Point of Departure … A guillemot dived to port, making a clean hole in the water. George patted his pockets, searching for pipe and tobacco. The sea ahead was as uniform as the silvering on a mirror: the horizon swivelled round its edge as if the boat was turning in slow circles, while the compass stayed on 093, wedged there, apparently, by a piece of grit in the works. George wasn’t fooled by this old dodge. He sucked on his empty pipe and willed the horizon to stop moving. It steadied for a moment, like the compass card, and began to spin the other way. Dizzied, George sat at the chart table: with a pair of dividers he measured off six nautical miles and applied them to his speculative pencil line over the wreck-strewn sea floor.
Paddington Station. With Alex Maitland. Yes. January of ’44. The sea did funny things to one’s subconscious: it seemed as if the bright haze ahead was lifting, to disclose something that he thought he’d left far astern. Filling his pipe, watching out for flotsam, he headed for this unexpected seamark.
It was the sense of letdown he felt first. He hadn’t been to London since he was a child. He’d hoped for some dramatic pandemonium—searchlights, sirens, sandbags. But there was nothing like that. The city looked insomniac and dingy. No-one bothered even to carry his gasmask any more. On the cab ride to Alex’s house in Earls Court they saw bombsites already looking like ruins from some other, ancient war, fading behind a tangle of loosestrife and nettle. The people on the streets were pallid, fat and spotty, as if they’d spent the last few years doing nothing but guzzle porridge. In their rationbook clothes they looked turned out on the cheap, like so many pieces of utility furniture.
Alex said: “Don’t you love London’s dear old ugly mug?”
George didn’t, but said yes, he did, because he was still in awe of Alex, who’d been to Harrow and smoked Russian cigarettes through a holder. He was also rather hoping to fall in love with Alex’s sister, not yet met. It was Melissa (he’d already fallen in love with her name) who’d asked Alex to bring a friend to Mrs Holland’s dance.
“Lissa says there isn’t a man left in London. I think she’s expecting me to bring the entire Navy.”
George feared for his church hall quickstep, but phoned his father to say that his leave had been cancelled. In the cabin he shared with Alex on the corvette Larkspur he practised the slow-slow-quick-quick-slow routine, holding a cushion to his chest. The cushio
n was Melissa, whose picture was conveniently pinned up over Alex’s bunk between Mae West and Norma Shearer.
He didn’t fall in love with Melissa. Neither Alex nor her photo had revealed that she was built like a beanpole and talked non-stop through her nose. Apparently she’d been going around with a bunch of greyjobs, and her word of the moment was “wizard”. It was wizard that George had been able to show up, simply wizard; Alex was looking absolutely wizard, and the news of his impending second stripe and transfer to destroyers was too wizard for words. George, aghast at the thought of the way he’d held Melissa cheek to cheek, squarely blamed Melissa for leading him up the garden path.
The dance, at someone’s house in South Kensington, was a revelation. The blackout curtains, which were up on all the windows, weren’t there to hide the place from attack by the Germans. It was English eyes that these people must have been afraid of—the envious, prying eyes of the men and women out on the street. For, as you passed through the hallway with its marble pillars, you entered a world where there were no shortages, no rationing, no war … just pots and pots of gaiety and money. A Negro in a red tuxedo was conducting a jazz band. There was a man with champagne in an ice bucket. (Whoever managed to get champagne—or ice—in 1944? And how?)
“Tricia seems to have rustled up quite a decent crowd,” Alex said.
“Oh, wizard! Shampoo!” said the gregious Melissa.
George stared. He had never seen such people. London people. They shouted and pealed at each other over the noise of the music. Everybody knew everybody, and everybody had that expensive, freshly laundered smell of eau de cologne and special soap. George felt embarrassed in his new dress uniform: as far as he could see, he and Alex were the only men in the room who weren’t wearing d.j.’s. (Surely they couldn’t all be conchies?)
He danced once, stiffly, out of duty, with Melissa, then found himself alone on the edge of a particularly loud group. A fat man with thick lips and a bloated, bullfrog face was bawling like a baby: “Dull! Dull! Dull! Dull!” He glared shortsightedly at George for a moment and said, “I think I am quite possibly the dullest man on earth”, as if he expected George to contradict him. George didn’t. He gazed back at the man, involuntarily fascinated, like a rabbit in the headlights of a motor car. He stared at the very dead carnation which the man wore in the lapel of his overtight, grease-spotted dinner jacket and at the flecks of white rime at the corners of the man’s mouth. The man clicked his fingers at George as if he was summoning a waiter. “I mean, just look at Johnny here. Johnny’s not dull at all. Johnny’s making history, don’t you see!”
George backed away, but there was no visible escape route except out across the floor through the dancers. A dozen people at least now were looking at him as if he was some kind of lab specimen. They must have mistaken him for someone else.
The fat man said: “Doesn’t it make you utterly ashamed to meet a fighting man? It simply churns the guilt round and round in me whenever I see Johnny. Always so friendly, always so unpatronizing. And I think, but why—oh why?—can’t I fight this beastly war for myself?”
George couldn’t make it out at all. He wasn’t sure whether the fat man was about to burst into tears or if this was some clever, nasty, London game at his expense.
“It’s our friend Johnny here who makes me want to declare a moratorium on Art for the duration. When Johnny brings the smell of the battlefield into the drawing room, he makes the whole idea of Art seem perfectly ridiculous. No, honestly, look at him! Isn’t he quite simply more real than anyone else here? If you want the spirit of the age, my dears, don’t, for heaven’s sake, ask for it from Wystan Auden; ask for it from Johnny.”
A wandering man with a bottle of Scotch peered over the tops of the heads of the group. “Cyril talking balls again?” he inquired, moving on.
The fat man ignored the interruption. “And it’s all very well our letting Johnny fight for a world fit for us to live in; but what are we going to do to make a world fit for Johnny? I can’t bear it. All our rubbishy little poems and rubbishy little paintings. When I see Johnny, I feel worthless and fraudulent. How are we ever going to ask Johnny to forgive us?”
It was awful. George wanted to knock the man down. He was being made to look a bloody fool by this damned pansy drunk. But he felt boiled and wordless. He stood rigidly upright, the blood gone from his face, his hands fiercely clenched at his sides.
“But what will Johnny do and where will Johnny go? Whenever I hear the word ‘Peace’, I’m afraid that all I see is an ugly politicians’ world of barbed wire and passports. The thing that bothers me is that I simply can’t imagine Johnny ever again being able to listen to “The Ring” at Salzburg, or wandering freely from the Cote D’Azur to the Sistine Chapel. After this war, do you see Johnny sipping Calvados in Pamplona or tramping through the ruins of Mycenae? I have to confess I don’t myself. And that seems to me to be one of the questions that ought to be right at the top of our agenda now. Where will Johnny go?”
George saw that the man, smiling now, was reaching out to lay his pudgy hand on George’s shoulder. Ducking angrily away, George said, “Anywhere, so long as it’s a bloody long way away from people like you.”
As soon as he heard himself saying the words, he wished that he’d swallowed them. They sounded priggish and schoolboy. No sooner had he set foot in London than he’d publicly disgraced himself. It was dreadful. He felt ashamed and sick. He wondered if he ought to sneak quietly away into the dark street. The thought that he’d have to find his hostess and thank her first, and that he’d have to go home sometime to the Maitlands’, stopped him.
Then, suddenly, there was a woman, laughing. Laughing? “Well done, you,” she said, “it’s always nice to see someone squashing Cyril.”
“Is he always like that?”
“In his off moments, yes, pretty much so. I think he was rehearsing for an editorial.”
“Who is he?”
“Cyril? He does Horizon. You know.”
George found words in his mouth again. “I know a thing or two about horizons, actually. One has to. As a navigation officer. It’s almost the first thing you learn—how to tell a true one from a false one.”
“Oh, that’s rather good. Yes. Sonia—Michael—did you hear that? Johnny here has got a new name for Cyril’s rag. He calls it False Horizon. He’s in the Navy. He should know.”
“Actually … I’m not Johnny, in fact. Actually … I’m George.”
For some reason, everyone seemed to think that this was funny too. For the next few minutes, almost everything he said was met with peals of appreciative laughter. He’d never known success so easily come by.
It was during a break in the conversation, when George was basking in this sudden celebrity, that he realized. Horizon! It was the magazine that Alex was sent every month. “Even at sea one ought at least to try to keep up,” Alex said, and the two subs passed Horizon between them. Sometimes Alex read poems from it aloud. Only yesterday, George had been reading a long article in it by George Orwell, a writer whom George always kept an eye out for, and only partly because of Orwell’s first name. Why hadn’t someone told him that the fat man was Cyril Connolly? It was mortifying. To come back from London saying that he’d met Cyril Connolly was one thing; to admit what had actually happened was quite another. Going back over the scene in his head, he found himself biting his lip in remorse.
Yet still—he was swamped in the company of smiling girls. He danced. He fetched new glasses of punch for everyone. He was modest about the one, mercifully uneventful, Atlantic convoy on which he’d sailed. The Negro bandleader, stomping and grinning, put down his tenor sax and sang “Get that tiger! Get that tiger! Get that old tiger rag!” and the whole room, led by a party of Americans, did an athletic new dancestep called the Jive, in which girls’ dresses swirled round their waists and showed their rigging of suspender belts and nylon stocking tops.
Where, in that ocean of swimming, friendly faces, was Angela Haigh
? Did someone introduce them? Had he cut in on her during a dance? Had she been one of the people around Connolly? All George could see now was an intimate pool of gloom in a corner, and Angela’s face, huge-eyed under bangs of pale and fluffy hair. She was saying, “But don’t you simply dread torpedoes?”
No-one in his life had paid attention to George as Angela did in that corner. Her eyes and mouth were framed in the same rapt, astonished O. When he offered to go off and forage for more drinks for them both, she said, “Oh! Would you? Really?” as if she’d never been extended such an exquisite courtesy before. And when he returned with two glasses of punch, she sipped hers, paused for a moment, and said, “Bliss!” Being with Angela was not quite real, in quite the nicest way. It was a little like being in the pictures … Clark Gable and Merle Oberon. But then, George supposed, that was London for you. Being in London, with these London people, must be like living your whole life in the pictures. Feeling himself beginning to drown in Angela’s lovely gaze, he tried to focus on the tiny spray of blackheads that showed under the powder on her forehead, but found himself enchanted by the blackheads too.
“I had a friend,” Angela said, in a voice midway between a whisper and a sob. “Toby Carraway. He was on convoy duty. Lost at Sea.”
“Rotten luck,” George said.
“Tragic,” Angela said. “I can’t bear to think about it. Toby was such a darling. You’d have loved him.”
George felt an unworthy twinge of relief at the fact that Toby Carraway was dead, and spent the next sixty seconds feeling ashamed of himself for the thought.
“It makes one seem so pointless” Angela said, meaning that it made her seem pointless, but that this only enhanced the general, overwhelming pointfulness of George.
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