Her Victory

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘I’m happier seeing it from here.’ He was at ease on a ship. It was home. Even on watch in a gale he was familiar with all procedures and, unless some malevolent flick of the heavens or waves brought a catastrophe, knew what to do.

  ‘As long as you don’t go back tonight.’

  ‘No chance of that.’ Having done most of the talking, he wondered who she was, and what she was really like. If he went mad and proposed marriage and she said yes and they settled down in a little suburban house what would he find out? She was such a mixture of deliberate gaiety and nervous anonymity that when neither spoke he felt as if he were vividly day-dreaming during a monotonous watch in the middle of an ocean. Marriage, he thought, might well be like that.

  A touch on the arm brought him back. ‘You’ve had enough of the sea for a while,’ she said, as if trying to tell him something he might not believe.

  His half-formed thoughts could only be of use to him after stewing around for a while. ‘I think I’d had enough of the sea when I first clapped eyes on it, but I was fed up even more with something else. Every move you make is an escape from something or other, but I believe I went to sea as a boy because when I first saw such a vast amount of water I was afraid of it.’

  They walked across the promenade, back to the shelter of buildings. ‘That’s how people often get into things,’ she said.

  It wasn’t, he supposed, that young people these days were especially wise, as that someone of fifty like himself had forgotten the wise or clever things he most likely said at that age. The self-assurance of the young often sounded like wisdom.

  She took off her clothes in the hotel room. He was tardy, she said, helping him out of his, not even giving him, he told her, time to read the fire-escape instructions on the back of the door. She laughed, and they kissed before moving to the bed. A sidelight was left on, and she pushed him gently to straddle from above, resting on both palms to draw herself back and forth. It was difficult to lean up and kiss her, but he could touch her breasts which bowed warmly down. She kept her eyes closed, making it impossible to say how far away she was in her mind – or even where he was himself. No star sight could decide their positions in the world, and one could hardly expect both body and horizon to be perfectly joined after so little time together.

  Her face was a mask. The run of her velvet movements increased, hair and skin opening, hair swaying across her mouth. She stifled herself on him, breathed noises of separation till the distance between both was immeasurable. He felt her contractions, and his own roots loosened. His existence was divested of meaning, and without regret he let himself go to her vigorous sounds of pleasure.

  She was too far away to hear the noise from the mouth of his Aunt Clara which had sounded to him like the chain of an anchor going pell-mell down into the water.

  No longer able to support herself, she lay on him and opened her eyes. ‘That was good. I must have needed it.’

  He kissed her. ‘You did it by yourself.’

  ‘The other system doesn’t work for me.’

  ‘I thought you were taking pity on me.’

  ‘Funny bloke!’

  ‘That makes two of us.’

  She lessened her reliance on him, and transferred some weight to her elbow. ‘Sorry I’ve got a boy-friend, in some ways.’

  ‘A beautiful girl like you can’t be unattached.’

  ‘I’m not glued to him, though,’ she said firmly. ‘He has his piece of action now and again, and so do I. As long as neither of us knows.’

  When she lay under him, he went into her.

  ‘You must have been a long time at sea,’ she said.

  There was no way of keeping the talk going. She held him, and moved her hips, and even though her eyes stayed open it was as if neither had any connection with her body. She wanted it to be finished. He went on till he knew she wasn’t able to respond in the same way as before, then felt an ejaculation of pure fire that seemed to have no liquid in it.

  She washed herself at the sink.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  She came back to kiss him. ‘Gives you cancer. Or heart disease. You should stop.’

  He embraced her. ‘I’m scared to, in case I get cancer.’

  He watched her dress, then he washed and put his own clothes on. ‘Don’t come out with me,’ she said.

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  ‘I have to be on duty at six, to look after your poor old aunt. And a few others. Stay here and sleep, then you can eat your cornflakes – or whatever they give you in a place like this – read your newspaper, and have a pleasant stroll to the hospital. All right?’

  It would have to be. He loved her and let her go, thanking God for such lovely kids. Sleep was a beneficial oblivion.

  Almost too late for breakfast, he was grudgingly served. He lifted the lid to see one pale teabag floating in hot water. A cook once served the captain with such vile things, and the pot was thrown off the table. He drank the tasteless tea because he was choking with thirst. The sausages were as soft as putty, and even the trimmings were on the blink, he thought, cracking a piece of cold toast that was sharp enough to cut his throat, and smearing butter that looked suspiciously like margarine. The only genuine article was the bill of twenty pounds.

  But he left his tip, and sat out his time while he smoked at the table, unaware that they were waiting for him to move. It was impossible to do so. There was no eagerness to go out and find that his life had changed. He already knew it, felt a relaxation so complete that for the moment it paralysed him. He suddenly did not know how to move, waited to do so, unwilling to give himself an order which he sensed would not be obeyed.

  7

  As a deck officer it was often necessary to pull back into the protection of his own shiftless and brooding mind, solitary contemplation teaching him how to stay sane when he felt as meaningless as the heaving sea outside the cabin. The ability to discipline his threatened mind into quiescence had come slowly, in tune with the growing power of the years to crush him into an uncontrollable blackness. The conscious effort to build a defensive system left no emotional energy for friends, or for the kind of prolonged relationship which might turn him into a tolerable human being. He considered people in the mass to be as threatening in their ever-changing unknowingness as the sea, which often turned wild by some force over which no agency in the universe seemed to have influence, and flew up against him like an enormous and mindless grey wolf intending to take his life away.

  The sea at that moment regarded him as nothing, as no one, as a spark to be extinguished on an impulse of fiendishness. Because he knew that the body was fragile, life brief, and existence finally meaningless, he was always wary, continually on the alert to repel danger from any quarter, cultivating a readiness of mind which created a loneliness that over the years made him appear like a man fighting to keep his grip on a deadly secret which was eating his soul away.

  Someone might try to get friendly, but he was incapable of taking any steps in that direction. A man of the sea, he was blocked off at all points from the land, and now looked with misgiving on so many years spent in the condition of a prisoner who had clung to the shreds of his soul only by withdrawing into an uncertain peace at the centre of himself. Unless he had done this he would have gone down into unfeeling oblivion. The dread of losing what little he knew about himself gnawed at the tenuous connection he had with the rest of the world, or with that small part which might be concerned as to whether or not he knew of its existence. His mathematical sharpness was continually in tune with the fair conduct of the moving ship between taking departure and landfall, and at times he felt that such faculties would be overwhelmed unless he murdered either another or himself in an attempt to retain the clarity that was necessary for his work. Unwilling to take alcohol, he would long for the trip to be over, but now craved an end of all voyages that tested him to such limits.

  Others who were threatened by the same malaise defeated solitude on long trips b
y an obsessive ingenuity, which for self-respect they called a hobby. A man’s need to be absorbed often came to him like the rediscovery of the power of love, and might involve an attachment to some musical instrument, or to a collection of objects which, when laid out, created a design or picture that the heart viewed as a unique accomplishment. Outlandish schemes kept a man sane in what might otherwise have been his darkest moments. A project, no matter how futile, was necessary to keep within bounds that person who felt chaos press too close, and who knew that something effective to fix his mind on was the only solution.

  Once on a tedious great circular haul across the northern Pacific, the third mate drew an outline of the world on Mercator’s Projection in faint pencil on a large sheet of plywood, but then emphasized the coastlines by sticking live match heads, almost touching, to bring out the shapes of the various land masses. The map included both Polar regions, and took weeks to draw, and longer still to cut off thousands of match heads with a razor and glue them firmly so as to demarcate every gulf, peninsula and large island. The operation went on through several voyages, and Tom wondered where the man found so many matches on a single ship, till he saw him walking up the gangplank at one port of call with two huge parcels.

  A closer inspection of the near-finished masterpiece showed that the colour of the match heads varied from dark brown through crimson and scarlet almost to grey, but it was pointed out that when seen from a distance they appeared to match well enough. It was impossible to guess what he intended to do with this impressive portrayal of the world, though he did hint that, because he considered it the finest artefact ever devised – and he claimed to have made some really unusual objects in his time – he might give it as a wedding present to his best friend who, in one of his absences, had latched himself to his girl-friend.

  In blue match heads the third mate had yet to chart those trips he had made while this treacherous love affair progressed to its final stage. The happy couple, he said, with a dangerous flash of the eyes, would accept it as an unusual gift from a loser who had no hard feelings. They would put it proudly on their living-room wall, together with the cheaply framed pictures and flying plaster birds, and one day, as they didn’t know what the map was made of, it would ignite in their overheated love nest while they were in bed upstairs doing what he himself should have been at if there had been any justice in the world, which there clearly was not – or at least wouldn’t be until his unique map took fire.

  He was one of the looniest, though Tom had known some not too far removed, but whose pastimes, no less absorbing, ended almost as spectacularly. On the other hand, not everyone, either on the upper or lower deck, needed a hobby. Those who did were more interesting because they became garrulous with their new interest in life. But those others who scorned the idea of taking up some hobby often did their everyday jobs without complaint. Space did not frighten them, nor time intimidate. They were the salt of the sea, as it were, and also of the earth who were born with a gyroscope of placidity inside, and a self-correcting rudder that kept them on an even keel, so to speak. They did not fight against the monotony, nor were they unaware of it. For days the sky did not unroll its grey pall of cotton wool. The ship pitched with the same unvarying motion, till their faces took on the pallor of disappointment, though what they were hoping for no one could say. Their curses went little beyond their everyday ingenuity. The ship laboured, and work was done. Every man was different. Those who had no hobby considered that there was enough to do, and barely sufficient time in which to do it.

  Nevertheless, the days went at a different rate for those who had a pastime. Tom had noticed that time had no meaning to a man fighting boredom and madness, but that as soon as he took up an occupation apart from his duty, having followed a sudden life-saving instinct, time slowed, and every spare minute spent with his absorbing hobby became an hour, a day, a week, a month of salvation. While it lasted he was a new man, and those who before kept as much out of his way as possible on the narrow spaces of a ship, would nod, smile, or pass an occasional remark. He had become safe. His obsession had rendered him harmless, hemmed him in by bars stronger than steel.

  He was a believer who had no thought of making others take up the same occupation. He had no wish to convert anyone to his all-devouring view of a tiny part of the world. In fact total mayhem might have ensued, making an amok appear as a friendly gavotte, if someone had shown competing interest. But there had never been such a case, for which Tom as first officer could only be thankful, and the nouveau-hobbyist was a peaceful man, a menace to no one while he carved, played, scooped, sorted, painted, fluked or fiddled. All was well because it was only the beginning.

  From stalking the decks unable to sit still, Sedgemoor filled in a few more numbers of different colours on a canvas which, when finished, would become a passable reproduction of the ‘Mona Lisa’ fit to hang in anyone’s furnished room. Or he arranged his collection of exotic Taiwan bottle-tops on a tray with a sufficiently high rim to prevent them slewing over the floor from the motion of the boat.

  The Sparks on one ship rigged up his own amateur radio kit and, when not duty-bound and listening out on 500 kilocycles, tap-chatted to other hams as far off as Chile and Australia, Israel and Japan, thus adding to his wall of colourful QSL cards. Another seaman collected matchboxes and called himself a phillumenist. Someone gathered complete sets of coins from even the smallest of countries, and fixed them into the natty pockets of a large album, while others did the same with cigar bands or stamps, or paper money when their pay ran to it.

  An electrician packed his leisure time by adding together all the numbers of the complete London telephone directory, so that he could work out the average digits for the millions of subscribers. He did this even before the days of electronic calculators. After finishing his eight-year task he gave a slip of paper to everyone on board with the mystical telephone number inscribed as if it contained the directions for finding the buried loot of Treasure Island.

  Every merchant seaman has come across such people. To an outsider there might seem to be no spare time available, but to a sailor even half an hour can be onerous when the black dog is, as they say, sitting pretty on your left shoulder. Tom had only thought of these varied occupations, a spectrum running through his mind in idle hours, but he had seen others, to their pleasure and their cost, take them up.

  A carpenter on one leaky tramp analysed all names on his home sheet of the one-inch ordnance survey map, counting the numbers of farms, villages, towns and rivers that began with any particular letter of the alphabet. He worked out how many names there were to a square mile, added up trigonometrical points and arrived at the average height, calculated the total length of roads, streets, lanes and watercourses. During the whole voyage he hadn’t a minute to spare. In his dedicated fashion he knew that sheet of map better than anyone else in the world – an accomplishment which made him a proud man while his passion lasted.

  There was a deckhand who learned navigation, and when the time coincided with his off-duty period he shot the sun at midday or took star sights at dawn and dusk so as to work out his own position of the ship – as if, while he believed God Almighty, he was not so sure about the captain. He had his deckwatch and secondhand sextant, and all paraphernalia necessary for his conclusions. When the captain asked why he didn’t sit for his third mate’s ticket, the man remarked that navigation was his hobby, implying that to be deprived of it would leave him with no further interest in life.

  The search for skill and perfection was satisfyingly endless, but a hiatus was sooner or later reached. The attraction of the hobby vanished from one watch to the next. Disillusionment was sudden, final, impossible to explain. Emptiness returned and was more devastating than before. Work and duty were not enough, and with vacuity of purpose came danger. Matchboxes were crushed underfoot, bottle-tops slung into the litter bin, and stamps torn. Paper money stuffed into pockets for spending in bar or brothel would hardly deaden the pain of the hobby�
�s absence. The coins thrown overboard looked like the tail-end of the Milky Way disappearing into a Black Hole.

  The captain of one ship devised an intricate game of naval tactics. His rule book took a hundred pages of typescript, and there was an accompanying packet of charts twice as thick. The captain considered his game suitable for commercial reproduction, saying that at the time of retirement, when he had collated every amendment, he would take it to a firm that was certain to be interested. The only thing, he said, with not a glint of humour in his grey eyes, was to finish before someone stole it from his cabin.

  Tom, then second mate, did not want to remind him that similar toys were already on the market, but supposed he already knew. The captain mentioned his game on the bridge one night, and Tom asked how many points one would score for landing a shell on the flight deck of an aircraft-carrier as opposed, for example, to sinking it. Or if half a squadron of Seafires were put out of action, would more points be gained than if the aircraft were old Swordfish biplanes that had plopped into the drink?

  The captain, pleased at this seemingly serious response, invited him to play a game. Tom found the book of rules complicated and contradictory, but bluffed his way through a few rounds. The captain, however, paused in the course of slaughterous engagements to alter rules which did not seem to work, and in this way Tom lost the Battle of the Coral Sea twice, and the Battle of Midway once, though he came close to preventing the disaster of Pearl Harbor. The captain cast dice, enthusiastically spun funny little tops, and moved his pieces, while Tom played with caution and perhaps, he thought later, too intently.

  The game was laid on a table in the chart room, illuminated by a special light, beyond which radius all seemed dark as the ship laboured through the night. Leaning over the table, the captain placed one of his tokens off the Falkland Islands. He stood straight, and stared at the wall. The unlit pipe fell from his teeth, and scattered ash across the Arabian Peninsula. He trembled wildly, then swayed into the darker area. When he screamed and fell, Tom ran to him. The captain’s limbs were stiff, but he fought to move them. Pained to see him helpless, Tom attempted to lift him into a chair.