The more poignant the regrets the better. Walking along tree-lined London crescents of shabby houses, he noted each passing face. Even the flattest and ugliest seemed to have more life than his own, a fact which didn’t strike him as remarkable, merely a point to observe. Perhaps no one felt life’s heavy imprint on their own face, though he imagined that his sea experiences during five years of war had marked his features in some way or other. Yet when he passed a man of about fifty, who might also have served on a Murmansk convoy, his face seemed only to show the ordinary marks of those who hadn’t been in the war at all. Faces were divided into those that showed the spirit within, and those that concealed it, he thought, unwilling to decide which case he fitted into.
The fact that he would not stay at sea had taken long enough to enter his heart, though in the making of such decisions time – and wisdom – had no meaning. Twenty or thirty years seemed little more than a few days. A day on an Arctic convoy could pass, if that was the word, like a decade without leaving any wisdom in its wake. What remained in the soul after a fortnight of such days was a further emphasis of those characteristics which had allowed him to survive without going off his head.
It was no time for the imbibing of sagacity when ships were sinking into the icy sea and their crews had no chance of being saved before the pitiless cold drew them under, and knowing that without warning your ship could be next from either subs or bombers. You battened down the hatches of your spirit and zig-zagged through turmoil. Any notion of becoming wise through such experience would have added to the dangers by spoiling your set purpose of wanting to be alive at the end of the voyage while in every way performing your duty. Whether you got hit by machine-guns or shrapnel, or somersaulted under into the cold-dark without warning, was decided by something too far off for you ever to comprehend or take advantage of. Otherwise, you were kept going by the practical considerations of your trade, and that was that.
When solacing himself in Murmansk with a bottle of vodka he recalled telling his Aunt Clara as a boy that he didn’t want to go into the Royal Navy because such a fleet fought battles. There was no other word for what he had just come through except a massacre, because only a few broken and damaged ships came into port of the dozens that set out.
As he walked by the stalls of an East End market such recollections did not make him glad to be alive. They’d happened too long ago, and connected him to a shadowy self he had once been and wanted to forget.
The lack of such punctuating experiences in life would have made his progress seem like walking through a mist without landmarks. There had been too few, in any case, to prove that he wasn’t. Nothing much had occurred since then. Every event that promised to be memorable had turned out to be no more than routine. If he hadn’t been fifty years of age he would have hoped that something vital though in no way perilous might still happen for him to believe himself as fully alive as most people passing on the street.
When on shore he walked through whatever town he happened to be in. A rickshaw man who followed him in Penang, hoping for a fare, had refused to take no for an answer. Tom made his way to the Botanical Gardens in his own peculiar half-swaying naval stride, the rickshaw man continually pestering him to get in and be towed there. Tom hardly noticed him, nor even his own sweat from the steam-kettle heat, but finally, still unwilling to ride, he gave the man a few dollars and sent him away.
The monkeys looped their tails over a branch and swung towards him. He bought pink bananas and fed them. One claw came too close to his shirt and he was quick enough to land a blow at the head without being bitten. He laughed at his luck, as the monkey ran to the top of the tree. Then he made his way to the City Lights dance hall in town for a few drinks and a hugger-mugger embrace with a taxi-dancer, before walking as upright as was possible back to his rust-sided ship.
There was no such thing as rest. There was only sleep and work, otherwise you walked, and refreshed yourself by food and booze before going back on board. He was not shy with women but could never see himself on shore with job, wife and children. A few affairs had lasted a voyage or two, but after the third call lack of interest had been mutual, and there were no more letters. He was thankful that the one or two women he had imagined himself in love with at the time of getting his third mate’s ticket had not taken him seriously.
Work, duty and the ability to endure were no self-sacrifice, since he gained as much by, them as he gave. There was no fairer bargain. Work meant a mind emptied of all possible problems, scooped clean except for those connected with the job in hand. Even on a calm day, crossing the Arabian Sea in good visibility and heading for Colombo, there was enough to observe from the bridge to prevent any of life’s considerations getting a firm hold.
Towards dawn, on the surface of a lacquered sea, he could look from the stars down to the horizon for a first sight of the sun. Peace spanned his life, and surrounded him with a tranquillity that held off the forces of battle not yet unleashed. When they threatened on shore he endeavoured to walk them into the ground, to exhaust his body and stave off the night about to overwhelm him – going eventually into the nearest bar to drink his mind into such chaos that sense had no chance of alarming him.
The blue, dark sea turned choppy in the Malacca Passage. The mountains of island and mainland were covered with forest and barely ten miles apart. The ship had steamed into a zone of jellyfish whose grey shield-tops lay close together and covered the whole area from shore to shore. He had seen miles of them down the Malacca Straits, but never as many as in this narrow place. He looked through binoculars at the steep dense woods, then slowly back towards the ship across the living masses of jellyfish.
Fresh from sleep and a shower, in his laundered white uniform, he had the sensation of falling and hitting the sea in their midst, his body dissolving by the force of their electricity and poison.
He was drowning, the thrust of salt water up the nostrils and into the mouth as he corkscrewed slowly with closed eyes into the darkness. Tentacles of jellyfish wrapped around him so thickly they became a shroud he could not get out of, and he saw himself as an infant taken to the orphanage accompanied by the photographed face of his mother.
Memories struggled to get into his consciousness before vanishing with him for ever. He smelled the walls and tiles, sinks and toilets and blankets, the soap and the food, as well as the perfume and perspiration of whoever had carried him. He relived her clean clothes and salt tears so elaborately that he was threatened by a greater extinction than that of dropping overboard: a fear of the unstoppable reversal of life back to what was too painful to know about.
He perceived as many long-buried revelations from his past as he dared, part of him willing to go deeper providing the mysteries of his life would be explained; but a tighter grip on his binoculars brought him back to thoughts of duty and work, and the impossibility of making a choice which might cost so much that he would not survive to enjoy the results.
The wooden rail was sticky with his sweat and the salt sea air. He brought the binoculars to his side, and turned his gaze towards the mainland of Sumatra. A Dutch passenger ship passed close from the opposite direction. People on deck waved greetings. A white point of signal light flashed its name from the bridge telling where it had come from and its destination: ‘ORANJE – BATAVIA – AMSTERDAM’. He read the message aloud so as to keep control of himself, each dot and dash a thumb-tack stabbing the brain to reality. The sight of the morsed light and the voice of the man on his own ship reading the words like an echo brought him back to the fringes of his ordered life. He began to sway. He fought, but his legs were weak. He was watched by Sedgemoor at the wheel.
‘All right, sir?’
He walked a few paces without falling.
‘Touch of the sun,’ he called, loud and clear.
Sedgemoor knew what he was talking about. ‘Singapore will cure it, sir!’
‘Think so?’
He laughed, a belly-laugh from somewhere in Kent. ‘Cure
s everything, sir, me and the lads say, if you know where to go.’
He once asked Sedgemoor where he did roam on his shore leave there, and with a ferocious wink that could have boded no one any benefit, he replied that he was ‘off with the others to get fixed up with a nice orgy’.
He laughed. ‘But what about curing the cure, Sedgemoor?’
‘Don’t know about that, sir. But it ain’t been necessary yet, touch wood.’
5
He went up on the lift. Trolleys were pushed along the corridor by shouting orderlies who seemed to be clattering the lids of dinner-wagons or linen-tins with deliberate relish. He wondered how anyone could die peacefully in such a bedlam. Though it was day outside, the lights within were not bright enough, and the noise offended him.
A nurse saw him standing, cap in hand and holding a bunch of neatly petalled roses. ‘Can I help you?’
‘You mean to sort this lot out?’
‘More than anybody dare do.’
A sheen of dark hair showed under her cap. She had bright eyes and well-rounded cheeks. ‘I’m to see my aunt,’ he told her. ‘Name of Miss Phillips.’
A little circular watch was pinned at her breast. ‘Have you come far?’
He wanted to hold her arm, or take her by the waist. The impulse was so strong that he had to step back. ‘West Indies this time. I got in this morning.’
‘Lucky you!’
He glimpsed into a ward and saw patients in dressing-gowns sitting by beds or strolling about. ‘It was work.’
‘You see all those exotic places, though.’
‘From the bridge. Or through a porthole.’ He had nothing to lose, and perhaps something to gain from a state of mind which said it was immaterial whether or not he was old enough to be her father; a mood which came more frequently as he got older. A pace or two behind, he eyed her waist and shoulders, thinking how delectable she was. He caught her up. ‘The islands make wonderful scenery, especially from a distance, at dawn or sunset, say.’
‘You make me envious.’
‘That’s the idea!’
A ticket on the door of a private room displayed his aunt’s typed name. Clara was never a woman to be denied a place of her own. ‘How is she?’
‘Comfortable.’
They never told you anything. The hierarchy was as rigid as on a ship, beneath all the clatter. ‘Is that all?’
‘See the doctor afterwards. He’ll be in the ward by then.’
They faced each other, and he wondered whether Clara, in spite of her illness, could hear them talking. ‘Would you like to have dinner with me this evening?’
‘That’s rather quick!’
‘Quick enough, for a girl from a good family?’
‘And that’s rather sharp. But I could have said yes.’
‘Only what?’
‘I have to see my boy-friend.’
He laughed. ‘I’m consoled. Matter of having to be.’
‘You’re sweet,’ she said. ‘It might have been nice.’
‘Thank you. I’ll go back to sea a sadder and wiser man.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s the truth. I always do.’
‘You’re making me feel disappointed.’
The purpose of his errand told him it was time to cut the banter. He looked through the little square window. Clara was sleeping, and seemed at peace. He went in and placed his cap on the table, the door closing soundlessly behind. No ship’s officer could fault the white counterpane, polished floor, clean windows, and flowers by the bed.
Stimulated by his recent closeness to the nurse, he could only stand and look, in spite of the vacant chair, conscious of altitude and not wanting to lose it. Air grated through thin vibrating lips. He could neither sit nor get too close to the breath of this ancient person who did not seem to be the same imposing Aunt Clara he had met at fourteen. He remembered her smelling of scent and sherry, and holding his hand at the pierhead concert, and laughing at coarse jokes while he was aware of her trying not to. If he laughed, she’d stay quiet, but when she laughed out loud and shook her head he was crushed into a silence which he now realized was fear.
The accuracy of a recollection is always distorted by the powerful anchor of the present. Compared to the strength of the present the past was surely dead. Every statement is a damned lie. Sentences ran through his mind, and left him hoping that the young nurse would come in and set his roses by the spinney of carnations.
Her feet twitched. He wanted to smooth them free of irritation and pain. It would be a small service to do for her. She had been the only person to help him, but why was he the most hated member of that family? She had loathed him out of loyalty to the others, but had made him aware that he belonged to them nevertheless. He had been a call on her sense of duty, so she’d had no option but to do what she could. He understood. It had been sufficient.
Even those who in other circumstances might have deserved more, often ended by getting far less. Complaints should never be made. Injustice was not a disadvantage providing you could work, eat, breathe freely and say what you pleased – enough to make any man or woman happy if they had it in them.
One eye open stopped his thoughts. She shook her head, as if to deny whatever was going through his mind. ‘You were flirting with that nurse.’
He nodded. The chair scraped as he drew it close. Her fingers were so cold he thought they were wet, and he folded his hands over them, leaning to hear what she said.
‘I don’t blame you. I would, if I could.’
The light was dim. She was the last remnant of his mother, apart from himself. Standing in the open with his sextant, and taking a sight on a star before there was no more horizon, he felt afterwards while he worked out his calculations that the star was now lost among millions and of no further use. The heavens swallowed everything, and though they might sooner or later give something back to redress the balance, they would take his aunt like those stars he had sighted on in order to get his position before darkness intervened.
The stars denied any purpose in life except when you were close to the flesh and blood of someone you loved, or near to the person who hated you most. It was all the same, whichever way you defined the contact. He believed, and he didn’t. The truth, which he could never get hold of with sufficient firmness to find his exact emotional position on the earth, caused a pain at his midriff, which he supposed came from the grief of seeing someone die who had wept at his mother’s death, and as someone might see him one day slip out of sight like an elusive star. It was a matter of time. That inexorable eater of human bodies was already hovering. The chronometer in its plush box set to Greenwich, and the deckwatch fixed on local time to record each precise micrometer sighting of morning or evening star, ticked away so many unseen deaths a second, but here in a smallish hospital room he watched the demise of someone whom it had never entered his mind that, because he had lived an existence far from proper human contact, he would one day have to see die. For the sea was only a part of reality. On a ship you belonged to a machine for moving people and goods from one place to another. He had always thought that at sea you were also closer to God than when ashore, but in this room it came to him as a revelation that you were only near to God when you were in the proximity of other people.
The nurse placed the roses on the table. She walked out and made no signals. Clara’s fragile lids fluttered as if intense life still went on under them. Her hand moved in his, but the flame of life would not return to her arctic limbs. His own burning fingers made no difference.
His watch ticked until its sound was blotted out by her breathing. She withdrew her hand and put it under the clothes as if to find some weight there and hurl it away. He walked from the window to the door, and then back again. Her eyes opened and made him afraid, but he looked at her calmly: ‘You’ll be all right.’
She neither saw nor heard. The noise she made sounded like an anchor chain rattling over the side of a ship at the end of a lo
ng voyage.
6
In the nurse’s office he was given tea and biscuits. She leaned against the table and looked at him. ‘I think you’re tired.’
He made an effort not to stare at her shapely legs in dark stockings. He had two weeks ashore, but if he were due back on board tomorrow she wouldn’t have noticed any exhaustion. ‘Tell me your name,’ he said, ‘if it’s not a state registered secret.’
‘Beryl.’
‘I like that.’
‘That’s awfully nice of you.’ She smiled at her sarcasm, and brushed both hands against her hips. ‘My boy-friend phoned. He won’t be able to meet me tonight, after all.’
He wasn’t interested. A decade had passed since his suggestion. In every grain in his body he felt emptiness at the prospect of an evening out with this vibrant young woman.
‘Don’t worry about your mother.’
‘Aunt,’ he told her.
‘Aunt, then. She’ll be comfortable. Come and see her tomorrow.’
It was settled. ‘Let’s go, then.’
She came close. Girls today thought nothing of making the first move. She put an arm on his shoulder. ‘Will you spin me sailor’s yarns?’
He kissed her. Or maybe she kissed him. It was hard to say how it happened. ‘And more,’ he said.
Her body-heat was intense, and before they moved apart he knew she couldn’t have missed the stiffness at his trousers. ‘I go off duty in half an hour,’ she said, ‘but there’ll be no strings attached. All right?’
Across the restaurant table he told her what tales came into his mind. She expected it of an older man, listened with a hand at her face as he poured wine and yarned in such a way that she stopped saying how tired he looked. Wine and food charged the veins. She distorted her lips when he smoked between courses. He put the cigarette down. She moved the ashtray to the next table. Clara in the hospital seemed as far away as if he were in Port-au-Prince or Santa Cruz.
They went arm in arm to pick up his bag from the station, then came downhill and walked along the front. Breakers tore against the shingle, an occasional overcharged heave sending spray over their heads. She squeezed his arm as they leaned against the rail. ‘Looks murky. Do you want to be out there?’
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