by Simon Mawer
He picks up the menu card. This is easy. The lettering across the top announces HMT EMPIRE BUDE, and the date is typed below: 17th May 1957. The meal is of passing interest, an elaborate confection of Frenchified names that come down to brown soup, meat and two veg, apple pie, cheese and coffee. But in a ragged frame around the typed words there are nine signatures, scrawled in a variety of pens and at a variety of angles. One he makes out immediately because it is his mother’s. Another, written in a looped, convent-school script, is naively readable: Araminta Paxton. Araminta, he knows, is Binty. And there is Douglas’ beside it. Douglas and Binty.
The other signatures mean little. Something that may be Jennifer, another that may be Roger. Nissey? Does such a surname exist? Another name begins with M and O. And there’s a DB.
Turning the menu over, he smiles to find that there is more writing on the back: To the Hidden Dreamer, from one who’s rude and able, DB. The same rabbit-eared B in the same handwriting as the signature. There is a quickening, the foetus of an idea stirring in the womb of his mind. He counts the possible letters in this signature and comes to something between eleven and fourteen. That will do. It is within the limits of historical probability, that malleable border that historians instinctively draw around their little islands of fact.
He grabs a piece of scrap paper and finds a ballpoint pen in one of the cubby-holes in the desk.
‘Let’s play anagrams,’ she used to say. ‘Try “Thomas Denham”.’
Me sad hot man.
‘Do you know what I am? I’m the Hidden Dreamer.’
The sad hot man considers the phrase on the back of the menu: ‘one who’s rude and able’. He finds it quickly enough, rude able transforming into Braudel beneath his pen, leaving only a superfluous E. A small tug of excitement. He scribbles down the remaining letters in a rough circle – ONE WHOS AND E – but he can’t make anything out of them. It’s like the final clue of the crossword, the one that won’t work out whatever you do with it, however you bend the meanings and the words.
But if ONE signifies “I”? I WHOS AND E.
Which gives him the letters for ‘Damien’, all except a missing M. And leaves him with SHOW. Is there some hidden message in that? Show what?
I’m.
Where do answers come from? How does the brain work, the hidden circuitry of memory and reason and association? I’m rude and able, that’s what the original anagram had been. He writes it out and it works exactly: Damien Braudel – I’m rude and able.
Thomas laughs. He can almost see them, in the wood-panelled main dining room of the Empire Bude, at the captain’s table perhaps, passing their menus round for signing – the last dinner of the voyage? – the women in cotton frocks with wide skirts and starched petticoats, the officers resplendent in mess kit, like peacocks. The band would be playing, and the major would be turning to Deirdre to say: ‘You may be a hidden dreamer, but I’m afraid I’m rude and able,’ and everyone would be laughing.
Or.
Or maybe it was just a secret between the two of them, the hidden dreamer and her rude and able swain.
He rings Paula. ‘I’m at the house. I saw the solicitor and everything seems to be more or less in order. Now I’m going through her papers.’
‘What for?’
‘Looking for bills, that kind of thing. Hey, what do you remember of the journey out to Cyprus?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Something I found. A ship’s menu, actually. The Empire Bude.’
‘I was little more than a baby. Five? Six? I just have impressions of the ship – wood and plastic and rather dark in the cabin. Like a railway sleeping compartment, I think. And being woken up when we went through the Straits of Gibraltar. And women crying.’
‘In the Straits of Gibraltar?’
‘No, you idiot, that must have been before. When we were leaving. I remember a crowd and the sound of the ship’s siren, and women crying. I’d never seen adults cry before.’
‘You don’t often see it now.’
‘In my line of work you do.’
‘And what about Damien Braudel? Do you remember him?’
She is silent for a moment. ‘What’s this all about, Tommo?’
‘I just asked if you remember him. He was there on board, you see. You remember Mum and Dad talking about him?’
‘Vaguely. Didn’t something happen to him?’
‘Right. You see, you do know. He was murdered by EOKA. But he was one of your fellow passengers on the Empire Bude. I’ve got his signature on a menu. And I’m rude and able—’
‘I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that, although you do tend to go after young women—’
‘—is an anagram. They played anagrams. Don’t you remember? Hidden dreamer? Don’t you remember her saying that? She was the hidden dreamer. Don’t you remember?’
‘No.’
‘Well, she used to. And this is where it came from, I guess. They were playing anagrams at dinner one evening.’
‘Sounds innocent enough.’
‘Who said anything about guilt?’
‘You did.’
A hot, dark room, ransacked by shadows. In the room there is a bed, strewn with sheets. Among the sheets, on the bed, two figures, naked, glazed with sweat, limbs locked together. Their movement is violent and staccato, with no beauty to it. There is sound, a rough grunting, neither male nor female, barely even human. And then abruptly all is over and the two figures part, and lie for a moment side by side among the ruin of the sheets. She sits up, running her fingers through her hair so that she is lifting it up in a cloud – an uncharacteristic gesture he has never seen before. Her breasts hang loose, each tipped with a dark disc. One of her legs hangs off the bed; the other is up, the knee bent. Her lap is a deep shadow that crawls part way up her belly.
She turns and speaks to the man, but the words are not distinct. Just the tone.
Then she looks towards the door.
Four
‘It’s all psychological,’ said Major Braudel.
They stood at the railings of the stern promenade deck, watching the wake and the gulls swooping down for garbage. They were somewhere in the Bay of Biscay and the weather was warmer although the sea was the same, long Atlantic rollers meeting the ship on the starboard quarter, rolling and pitching her at the same time, the very worst sort of motion. But somehow her body was beginning to accept it and she was starting to feel better. It was rather like recovering from a bout of flu: she felt weak and elated at the same time.
‘How does saying it’s psychological help?’
‘It doesn’t help at all, really. But it’s an interesting point.’
‘Not if you’re seasick, it isn’t.’
There was a squad of soldiers doing physical training on the deck below. The soldiers had undernourished figures and pale skin that looked as though it was being exposed to the sun for the first time ever. A drill sergeant shouted commands and the men made Xs and Ys of themselves, and bent to touch their toes.
‘What are those men doing?’ Paula asked.
‘They’re making themselves big and strong,’ Major Braudel told her.
‘They look weedy to me.’
‘That’s the problem.’
Braudel was an officer of one of the two battalions aboard. He was tall and slender, with pale hair. Perhaps his hair colour made him seem young, as well as his symmetrical features and smooth complexion. Certainly he seemed more youthful, more enthusiastic than Edward. The evening before, he had come over to their table and tried to persuade Dee to dance. The band had been playing and there were one or two couples attempting a wayward foxtrot. But she had claimed that she was still unsteady on her feet, and still a little queasy, so instead he had gone off to the bar and returned with a glass of some murky concoction that he presented to her with comic solemnity. ‘What you need is a brandy and milk. Does wonders for a hangover.’
‘But I haven’t got a hangover.’
> ‘You soon will have, if you drink all that brandy and milk.’
That had made her laugh. It had been the first laugh since leaving the Needles astern. He introduced himself to the others at the table. His Christian name, he confessed with some embarrassment, was Damien. ‘After the apostle to the lepers.’
They hadn’t understood the reference.
‘A Belgian priest who went to Hawaii to look after lepers. My father was Belgian, you see. And a devout Catholic. He came to England during the Great War, married my mother and never went back.’ He looked at Dee thoughtfully, almost embarrassingly. ‘Where’s the accent from?’
‘Can you hear it?’
He grinned. ‘Ee ba gum.’
‘Sheffield,’ she admitted; she admitted it. It annoyed her, that she should not be proud of the fact.
‘I know Sheffield well,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent hours lying in wet heather on the moors. Bang, bang, you’re dead, that kind of thing. The natives were quite friendly. They’d come out and bring us cups of hot tea. But they looked at us strangely when we didn’t drink it from the saucers.’
Somehow that conversation had signalled the end of her sickness. And now it was morning and they were approaching the Portuguese coast and she had woken up to a new world of possibility. For the first time she had felt genuine hunger, and on their way to breakfast she and Paula had encountered Braudel again. ‘You need a turn round the deck,’ he informed them. ‘You must get up an appetite before you eat.’
‘I’ve already got an appetite,’ Paula told him.
Braudel laughed, and took her hand. ‘We have to think of Mummy, don’t we?’ They walked together towards the dining room, with the land gleaming away to port and the waves sparkling in between, and the sun coming up, cool at first but on a trajectory that would take it high and hot. Damien had, he explained, been this way before.
‘What, on the promenade deck?’
‘No, you chump. This bit of sea. Last year, bound for the Canal Zone.’
Dee was amused by the way he called her ‘chump’, as though he was the brother she had never had. ‘Chump’ seemed the kind of term used between brothers and sisters.
‘You were at Suez?’
‘Just about. We’d just landed and deployed towards Port Fuad and then they pulled us out. Bloody farce. Betrayed by the Yanks. And after all we’ve done for them.’
‘Jolly good, I’d say.’
He looked at her in surprise and some amusement. ‘Jolly good what?’
‘The withdrawal.’
‘You think so?’
‘I think Suez was a terrible mistake. And Eden a fool.’
‘Good God, you’d better not say that kind of thing here. They’ll keelhaul you.’
‘Don’t you agree?’
‘I’m a soldier. It’s not my job to think.’ He smiled and looked away to the horizon and the smudge of land that was, so he told them, La Coruña. ‘“The burial of Sir John Moore”, you know? He played a big part in the history of our regiment. “Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note/As his corpse to the rampart we hurried.”’
‘Actually it’s “corse”.’
‘What?’
‘Corse, not corpse. Sort of poetic. Means the same thing.’
‘Is that so? Gosh, I bet you don’t saucer your tea. Where did you learn that?’
She made a face, an expression of regret. ‘I was at college for a while, studying English. Then I left to join the ATS and wasted two years, really. After the war all the places at college were taken up by men who had just been demobbed and there didn’t seem any room for me.’ It was sunny now. The sea had had the grey brushed out of it, to be replaced with a blue that you never saw in Britain. The waves seemed teasing rather than threatening. ‘And anyway I met my husband. He sort of swept me away from all that …’
Beneath the sun the British had undergone a metamorphosis, like imagos easing their way out of the grey chrysalis of life at home. There was colour, there was laughter, there was a subtle shedding of old clothes in favour of new – tropical drill for khaki battledress; white cotton for brown wool. Pallid flesh took on shades of pink and tan. They indulged in novel games – quoits and deck hockey, and a shooting competition off the stern of the ship with balloons as targets. Dee partnered Braudel in a deck-tennis mixed-doubles competition while Paula laughed and shrieked from the sidelines. They got through to the final before being beaten by Binty and Douglas, who took the whole thing very seriously and became quite cross when Braudel and Dee laughed at their own mistakes. ‘There’s no point in playing if you don’t take it seriously,’ was what Binty said. But away from competition she was very sweet and had become quite a friend. ‘I can see that fellow’s got quite a pash on you,’ she remarked as they went to shower and change. ‘Edward would be jealous.’
‘Well, he’s no reason to be.’
‘Of course not, my dear. Everyone knows that shipboard romances are just a game. And he is a bit of a dish.’
Did that mean that Binty gave her seal of approval to their mild flirtation? She and Douglas had promised Edward that they would look after Dee during the voyage. Did that, Dee wondered, extend to guarding her marital virtue?
That evening at dinner they played a ridiculous game of Damien’s invention. It was called anagrams. The object was to compose phrases out of the letters of each other’s names. He won comprehensively. ‘I’m rude and able’, he made out of his own name, and ‘hidden dreamer’ from Dee’s. ‘Are you?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she replied tartly.
The ship’s orchestra played songs from My Fair Lady, and she and Braudel danced together on the small apron of parquet that was the dance floor. It wasn’t milk and brandy in her glass now, but gin and it, a mixture that Damien persuaded her was rather superior to gin and tonic. ‘It’s stronger,’ she said, sipping it warily.
‘That’s why it’s superior.’ He had this mocking tone which amused her, as though he found everything faintly ridiculous – the ship, the reason for his journey, Dee herself. He was a soldier because he enjoyed soldiering, he told her. Nothing better. Certainly not working in some bloody office for a few pounds a year more than he was getting now. See the sand and flies of the world, he said. He was married, but his wife was staying in their house near Aldershot until it became clear how long his battalion was going to be abroad. He had two daughters, of nine and twelve.
‘I’d like to meet your family,’ Dee said. ‘What’s your wife’s name?’
He smiled. ‘Sarah. She’s not like you,’ he added.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Unspoiled.’
‘She is?’
‘You are.’
The band played ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ and they found themselves dancing rather close, his face against her hair, her own cheek against his chest. ‘Damien,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t think so.’
He moved perceptibly away. ‘No, I suppose not.’
Binty was watching, she knew that. Paula was in the cabin, being babysat by the ever-willing Marjorie, Tom was a thousand miles away at his boarding school and Edward was a thousand miles in the other direction, but Binty was watching. When the band finished, she and Damien went out on deck for a breath of fresh air. He held her hand. She felt bewildered and slightly light-headed. ‘I must go and relieve Marjorie,’ she told him. ‘Really, I must go.’
‘Of course,’ he agreed, and gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek before releasing her.
*
The next day the ship hove to in a flat calm. There was a church service on deck, with the chaplain of one of the battalions officiating. The headland away to port in the heat haze was Cape Trafalgar. Flags fluttered overhead, the famous signal that the Victory had flown on that October day in 1805 – England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty – while the band played ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’ and hundreds of voices, male voices, were raised up to the enamelled turquoise sky:
Eternal Father, stro
ng to save
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bids the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep
Wreaths were dropped overboard for the dead, and Dee felt ridiculously proud as she watched them float away on the gelatinous surface, proud that figures out of history – Lord Nelson pale and sensitive, Hardy tall and noble, hundreds of ordinary seamen with their tarred pigtails – could be real to men and women one hundred and fifty years later. This was the glory of the British, she felt. There were things that were disgraceful, things that her father quite rightly railed against; but not this. She saw Damien down on the lower deck with his men, looking fine in the uniform of his regiment, and she felt proud for him and a little guilty.
During the night they passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. Dee woke Paula so that they could look out across the black sea to the lights of Tangiers on one side and Algeciras on the other. By the next morning they were in the open sea once more, and memory of that narrow passage was no more than a half-remembered dream. While Paula squealed with delight they watched dolphins sliding through the water like knives and flying fish darting like thrown daggers. The soldiers had rifle practice down on their deck, firing at targets thrown astern of the ship. The sound of gunfire was flat and abrupt, puny against the huge space of sky and sea.