The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel

by Neal Ascherson

  28

  ‘My God!’ said Jackie. ‘Oh my God, see that!’

  She brought the car to a halt at the side of the road. They had turned the high corner before Faslane, and the length of the Gare Loch lay open below them.

  Down there, in line ahead, lay the empty battleships of the Royal Navy. Their greatness seemed to fill the fjord. Their black masts, encrusted with aerials and radar discs, reached up towards the pines on the slopes above them. No smoke blurred the craters of their funnels; no ensigns, white or signal-coloured, flew from their bare flagstaffs. The buoys to which the dead ships were chained were already bright with rust.

  Jackie turned the engine off. Mrs Melville said she’d stay in the car. But Jackie and Mike climbed out and walked to the edge of the road, to a bank where they could see out over the frost-yellowed grass, the red bracken, the green tips of the pines below.

  Mike said: ‘They are waiting for your father.’

  ‘Waiting for the breaker’s yard. Yes.’

  She shaded her eyes with a gloved hand. ‘I remember these ships in the war. Do you not remember them? We could see them from the windows.’

  ‘What were their names?’

  ‘That’s the Duke of York. How could I not know her, when I was looking each one up in Jane’s Fighting Ships? She sank the Scharnhorst, she took Churchill to America. And the next ahead, she’ll be Anson: the Arctic convoys to Russia, the Sicily landings. And the far one: hard to see, but I think it’ll be the Howe. Displacement forty-two thousand tons, ten fourteen-inch guns in three turrets – see, it’s all in my head yet.’

  ‘Poor Britain. No more Great. A quiet little island with no battleships.’

  ‘They were like the hills of home. And now they just sink down into wee piles of rust.’

  Jackie rubbed her hands together. Her lips moved, as if she were counting the fleet below. Then she said: ‘If that’s the Howe, she gave me a moment. We got a day off school. They took us in a coach up to Erskine; we were to watch her come down the Clyde after her launch at Govan. The biggest thing I ever saw in my life, towering up there with the earth shaking as she passed. Crowds lining both sides of the river; I mind them jumping back as the water came up over the bank. Our own big ship, going out to the war.’

  ‘Not death or glory. More like death of glory.’

  ‘Don’t you sneer, Mike. You’re like Malcolm, saying: “Navy scrapped, Empire on its way to the breakers, Queen and her United Kingdom next for the hammer”. He’s happy. I’m sorry for it.’

  The car tooted. ‘Grannie’s getting cold. C’mon, let’s get this dirty business done.’

  *

  ‘He’s saying he’ll only see his mother. He’s saying he’ll not come ashore till the other two of you have left. Oh dear, I’m awful sorry about this. But Mr Ketling is just absolutely definite.’

  The secretary in the quayside office chewed her pencil and glanced at one face after another.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s on board with the surveyors. No, where are you going, sir, no...’

  Mike went out of the hut, slamming its flimsy door, and crossed the quay. The black carcase of a cruiser rose above him, with a gangway leading into its innards.

  It was dark and chill in there. Mike stumbled down steel corridors until he saw the gleam of an inspection lamp, slung at the top of a hatchway stair. The noise of drilling and hammering was everywhere. He limped up the steps, now hearing voices, and pushed a door. In the captain’s cabin, warm and full of light, the group standing round a table looked up at him.

  How big this man had become, how small his features looked on the front of this red-fringed boulder of a head! As the surveyors rolled up their plans and backed out of the cabin, slight Maurycy Szczucki and massive Alexander Ketling, once Johnston Melville, stood facing one another across the table.

  ‘For fuck’s sake! Where did you spring from? You’re one guy I was hoping I’d never see again.’

  ‘Here’s something else you hoped you’d never see again.’

  Mr Ketling took the box, opened it, fingered but didn’t read the paper. He nodded and nodded and a small grin appeared.

  ‘Thank you. For the stolen property. You can go now, Mike.’

  ‘Not before we have a talk, Johnston. You, your mother, your daughter Jackie and me.’

  ‘Talk, who’s talking? The guy who hid a deserter in wartime? The guy who faked a man’s death so he could marry his wife? See, I could call the police and they’d be lifting you off your feet in twenty minutes from now. Or maybe a wee job for you? There’s a dozen Poles in the yard with no English and no papers, getting a few bob for digging holes and living in a Nissen hut. Aye, just right for you.’

  ‘Easy, Johnston. Nobody wants money. Just talk to us.’

  ‘Off this ship. Out my yard. Five minutes, and I’m counting.’

  ‘Johnston, you’re making this hard. The papers say you are after the Labour nomination for where? Glasgow something?’

  ‘Glasgow-Molendinar. Do I guess what you are saying next?’

  ‘You do so. Who’s next on the Molendinar list when you go on trial for treason and murder, Johnston?’

  ‘Stop calling me that, fuck’s sake, Mike. Next runner is a daft Fifer woman, raving Communist till two years ago. Why?’

  ‘Her name?’

  ‘What the hell’s it to you? Councillor Fowler. She sings at the selection meetings. Ach, she’s a joke.’

  ‘Well! A joke to you, but to me she’s a very old friend who might just get an interesting letter.’

  There was a silence. Mr Ketling sat down. He took a heavy silver propelling pencil out of his pocket and rolled it back and forth on the table. He frowned.

  ‘I saved your life, Johnston. I gave you your name. Talk to us.’

  He didn’t look up. Examining the silver pencil closely, he muttered: ‘Where’s Kellerman?’

  ‘Germany, so I’m told. When the French released him, he ran to West Germany where they don’t ask questions. We won’t hear of him again.’

  ‘Tell my mother and Jackie I’ll have a word with them. No with you.’

  ‘Not without me. I know much more than they do.’

  ‘There’s nothing to know. It’s all fuckan fairy tales, half a lifetime past.’

  ‘Nothing? Twenty-eight young men, Johnston. Some blown to pieces: that’s the lucky ones. Twenty-one trapped below in the mess deck. The fire came towards them. They could get heads or arms out of the portholes, no more. The fire kept coming. The naval surgeon was hanging over the side jagging morphine into those arms till the deck grew red-hot under him. The lads in the rescue boats were passing razor blades up to those clawing hands. The screaming went on a long time, Johnston, till the ship began to sink. Folk who were there still hear it. Nothing to know?’

  The silver pencil flew through the air, aimed like a big dart. Mike moved his head and it struck his neck, leaving a scratch. He let it lie where it had fallen on the floor.

  ‘Right then. Have your damned way. Bring them over.’

  The small metal box lay on the table top between them. When the grey-haired man reached out to take it back, the bald man’s shoulders jerked. But then he controlled his hands and sat back slowly in his chair.

  *

  Mike helped Mrs Melville across the chains and timbers scattered on the quayside. They waited for a boiler-suited man and a boy edging down the sloping gangway from the cruiser’s hull, bearing a handsome mahogany desk between them. There was a raw red split where it had been wrenched from a cabin wall.

  ‘I believe we’ve met,’ said Mabel Melville, more to Jackie than to the man. He gave her a vile glance, hitched the desk higher on his hands and lurched on, leaving a soaked-Woodbine reek behind him.

  ‘See the wee maggot beasties, in and out of a dead creature.’

  In the cabin, the two women found chairs and sat, while the two men stood. Mike held the box lightly in front of him.

  ‘Some family gathe
ring! What way have you not brought Helen too? Are we waiting on the photographer?’

  ‘Behave yourself, Johnston. I am your mother. I have spent all these years protecting you, hiding you, lying for you to my best friends, to say nothing of the police. And I have believed in you. When others did not. I told them that it was not possible that my son, my only child, would act against his own King and country in time of war. That he would kill Allied sailors for the sake of Adolf Hitler. But now...’

  ‘I am not taking this. Not from you, Mother, not from this lying wee tink of a Polack that’s sucking all our blood. What happened...’

  Mrs Melville surged out of her chair. She stood in front of her son for a moment, frowning. Then, suddenly, she slapped him hard across the mouth. The others were too astonished to move. In a hoarse voice, she said: ‘Strange, but I cannae hear a word you’re saying. That dinging hammer on the deck is stopping my ears.’

  He gaped at her, mouth sagging open. Then he went out. There was shouting, then silence. When he returned to the cabin, the look of bewilderment was still there. He blew his nose untidily.

  ‘A fool I was, an idiot right enough. Young folk join things. They aye will. But never a murderer. No. An accident, I mind telling Mike all the years ago it was an accident. That daft French sailor gave the safety switch a dunt, and who was to know...?’

  ‘You were to know. Yes, you.’ The Polish accent was suddenly stronger. ‘Not one switch but three. Somebody must have released all switches, one after the other, in correct order. And the launching charge: it should not have been in the tube while in harbour. But it was. And there was indicator light. To show you that charge was in tube. You knew, not possible you didn’t know.’

  Jackie had her hands clapped to her cheeks. The big man who was her father said in a new, quiet voice: ‘So, the new torpedo expert? Was that your fat friend in the French navy learning you? Or is that you filling jotters with notes at the Greenock Library?’

  ‘I have studied. Yes, I have read manuals.’

  ‘Then, my wee Polish pal, I’ll tell you what you didn’t find in the manuals. Fronsac had two launch systems, not one. In the French navy, only a pair of ships was fitted that way. The primary system was compressed air. And it was only if that didnae work that you went over to the explosive, the propellant charge. I’d call it a bauchly French contraption, just designed to misfire. And misfire by accident is what it did.’

  Jackie stood up suddenly. She had put on her spectacles and held herself very straight.

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong. The secondary system couldn’t override the primary system. See what that means? It means the charge couldn’t be fired unless the compressed air had already been tried and failed. So you must have tried, and you kept on trying. Till you found a system that did so fire.’

  Nobody spoke.

  Jackie said: ‘I’m right, am I no? No accident. No mistake, and it’s out of your own mouth, so it is.’

  There was a knocking sound. Jackie had turned very red; she was grasping her chair and hammering it on the floor as she began to shout: ‘Jesus Christ, Father, will ye say something to me? Will you tell me I’m wrong? Why did you, how could you? All those young French boys, the flames, what were you thinking of? Who are you?’

  Mabel went to hold her granddaughter. Jackie shook her off. The big man sat at the table gazing at her as she spoke.

  ‘I used to think it was my fault. When I was a wean, there I was thinking I had killed you and it was my punishment. And then when you ran away and hid and Grannie fed you like a hunted man, like Prince Charlie, I prayed for you. I dreamed of you. But now... all you do is destroy ships, and that poor French ship was just the first. I don’t know you. Get away from me!’

  He rose very slowly, even painfully, so that Mike was not prepared for the sudden hand which snatched the box. Ketling strode to the other end of the cabin, and when he turned to come back, they saw that he had used a lighter to ignite the faded paper. He dropped it across an ashtray. The flame spread round the letter’s fringes, jumped so that they all felt its heat for a moment, then crawled into the centre. The black ashes convulsed before they went to smoke.

  ‘I copied it out,’ said Jackie.

  ‘Is that so? My own wee girl, the one I missed so. And – right enough – I dreamed of you too all those years. Well, now that you’re such a big clever lassie, you can stick your copy up your fud.’

  He went to a scuttle, unscrewed the pane and pushed the little strongbox through it. They all heard the splash.

  ‘Away with you all! I’ve work to do. I’ve a survey to finish, a business to run for God’s sake. Will yees all just fuck off, pardon me, Mother. Away and die of cancer, the pack of ye.’

  Mabel and her son looked at one another. She said: ‘From now on, I’ll request you to keep away from me.’ Jackie, shaking and wiping silent tears off her face, helped her down the hatchway stair. That left one.

  ‘Ya pathetic auld fuck, ya troublemaker, naebody wants ye here. What for d’ye not get back to yer ain dirty wee home country?’

  ‘My home is any place where people tell the truth. Where’s yours?’

  29

  I am too old now to walk up the Lyle Hill on my own. Not just the leg, where a few seeds of American metal still hide. More the heart, a tightening hand around my chest when I tackle a slope.

  But Malcolm and Jackie came round last Sunday and took me up there in the car. I’m still at Union Street. It wasn’t what I had intended when the hydro closed at Kilmacolm. I had recognised that as a chance to escape, perhaps for the last time.

  In those days I feared turning into one more stone in this west Scotland landscape, with its reproachful streets and its red willow-herb deserts where fabrication halls and furnaces once stood. I thought of moving to Edinburgh, where there was a job as legal adviser to the Polish community. Or to Australia? Argentina? But I went back to Greenock, not meaning to stay, and I fell into the habit of caring for Mrs M.

  She was weaker than at first she seemed, and growing wandered. She couldn’t be trusted with the stove or the hot water in the kettle, and she often decided I was Eric. Yes, Eric Kent, who used to talk to her about Brahms and Shakespeare and – but I never heard this at the time – sing Lieder with her at the piano.

  When Mabel Melville died, the house passed to Jackie and she has allowed me to stay on. There’s a lodger upstairs, a young marine biologist fellow from the department in Glasgow where Jackie’s the professor. She’ll be coming up for retiral pretty soon.

  Last Sunday, on the Lyle Hill, it was a cold, clear afternoon. The Free French naval memorial on the brow of the hill has become a famous landmark: an anchor taller than a man, with its shank and stock forming a Cross of Lorraine. Below it, words of grief are cut in stone for the French seamen lost in the Atlantic war.

  I hope the words are cut for the men of the Fronsac, too. Did war kill them, or carelessness, or accident, or one man’s malignance? Sometimes, when I am on the hill, I see the anchor and the sky between its flukes forming the skull and tusks of a great boar’s head. A war-beast carved into the grey clouds.

  Jackie and Malcolm and I looked towards the Argyll hills across miles of empty estuary. The harbour where the destroyers whooped and thrashed up tawny foam, the Tail of the Bank where the battle fleets anchored, are quiet open water now. On the far shore, there’s no black, broken thing marking the tide.

  I was out on that water not long after the day at Faslane. Completing something. When I went back to the crematorium in Glasgow, they were kind but embarrassed. Did nobody explain to you? Well, it was wartime. Were you away in the army? They should have advised you that unclaimed ashes, after a certain interval...

  Anyhow, they said, there was a new, very nice and reverent procedure now. Disposal by boat. The next occasion would be in a month’s time. Be at Yorkhill Quay at such and such an hour.

  I still had Wisia’s letter. ‘Corpse to be buried in a free Poland... if possible in City of Lw�
�w after Bolsheviks removed...’ But she had no corpse to bury; Poland was not free; her city was now in a different, forbidden nation.

  The little rucksack with her possessions and the gold earring – I still had that. Helen brought it back with her from Poland while I was in prison, and before she went on to Canada with Hughie she left it with Jackie. ‘Ach, he’ll be along for it.’ I imagined her saying that.

  At Yorkhill Quay in the middle of Glasgow, a launch was waiting with its engine running. A ‘lone piper’ was trying to make his lament heard over the traffic, and a trim blonde lady in woolly gloves (it was a cold day) was lowering boxes of ashes into the launch with a pulley. Each little casket was individually wrapped in purple velvet and topped with a few rose petals.

  There were thirty-five of them. There was no way to tell which was Wisia’s. As the few spectators on the quay turned wordlessly away, I asked if I was allowed to go on board and ‘witness the disposal’.

  ‘That’s fine, son,’ said the blonde lady. ‘You’ll be getting a trip doon the watter with your loved one, for free.’

  I liked her. I was glad that she talked and joked with me on the long voyage, all the way down to where the Clyde broadens out into the Firth. Greenock and its shipyard cranes lay beside us when the launch slowed and two men in donkey jackets began to carry the caskets to the stern.

  The piper rose to his feet once more and blew. The men had their backs to me as they opened each box and, with a trowel, gently scooped the ashes into the river. At each cast of the trowel, a white mist spiralled up from the water and vanished downwind.

  I walked away to the bows and faced the high hills. This landscape, this water, was so familiar to me now – the smoky towns, the Firth between mountains, a car ferry ploughing across towards Dunoon. But nothing here reminded me of Wisia. What did she have to do with the gravelly grey powder dissolving in our wake?

  In my pocket I had brought the medallion of St Thérèse, the fountain pen and the single gold earring. I said some words, kissed them and slipped the medal and the pen over the side. But the earring stayed in my hand.