by John Winton
“Of course,” said Mrs Vincent. “I’d forgotten you knew each other.”
“Know him,” said The Bodger, “I brought him up! How are you, Hobbes? How are you, Mary? I remember you from some time ago. Julia, you haven’t met these two young people. This is Mary and this is Lieutenant Michael Hobbes. My wife, Julia.”
“How do you do, Michael,” Julia said. “You must be one of the cadets who gave Robert his grey hairs! “
“I hope not, ma’am.”
Michael may have been rather naive for his age, he may still have been shy and awkward when meeting a woman for the first time, but he had the true naval officer’s instinct for a beautiful woman. He recognized a superb specimen when he saw one and Julia, The Bodger’s wife, was the kind of woman at whom Michael would have unabashedly goggled in the street. She was almost as tall as her husband with jet black hair swept up to a coronet of curls. Her figure inside her black dress, her white shoulders, full red lips and black eyes with long lashes made Michael feel vaguely yearning. She looked perfectly composed; Michael could not imagine her ever being put out by anything. She would entertain midshipmen and admirals; cope with the water supply and the servants in a Maltese flat; and be hostess to the Royal Family without raising her voice.
The Bodger noticed Michael’s face and the circle of men who were beginning to converge upon his wife, and grinned widely.
“You look surprised to see me, Hobbes,” he said.
Michael recollected himself. “I am a little, sir. I thought you were in the South Pacific.”
“The what?”
Michael blushed. “I must have made a mistake, sir. I thought you were R.N.O. in Nassau.”
The Bodger let out a roar of Rabelaisian laughter which reminded Michael vividly of many occasions at Dartmouth and in Barsetshire.
“Did you really think I was off to be a beachcomber, Hobbes? Actually, you’re partly right, I did get a draft chit to the South Seas and it gave me furiously to think for a while. However, there was one very simple way out of that. Julia and I went into this question of the South Seas in a big way. We drew up piles of graphs about copra and pearls and black men generally. We had statistics about the rainfall in Fiji and the number of red-headed men in Tonga and so on. It took the little Wren in my office some time to type it all. Then I sat down and wrote an official letter to the Admiralty recommending that an N.O. be appointed to look after this hive of industry. I damn soon got an answer saying that Their Lordships did not see any operational requirement for an N.O. in Nassau. After that, I went to see Jerry Leanover, an old chum of mine at the Admiralty, and that was that. It’s just another case of what I was always telling you blokes about. There’s always a way of making the other chap do what you want him to do without realizing it, if you’ll only take the trouble to sit down and think about it!“
“Where are you going now, then, sir?”
“Carousel, as First Lieutenant and Defence Officer.”
“Good heavens, Vincent and I are going to Carousel as well, sir.”
“I’ve no doubt we shall meet a lot of friends there,” the Bodger said. “I know the Commander, Jimmy Forster-Jones, very well indeed, and there’s Ginger Piggant, as Senior Engineer and of course, Dickie Gilpin as Captain. The chap I’m supposed to be relieving was carted away in a strait-jacket a fortnight ago I hear. He had a nervous breakdown trying to sort out the messdecks. There’s been so much special gear fitted in that ship, all of it in messdeck space, and none of it ever taken out. One of these days, probably in about two hundred years time, the boffins will get around to designing a special type of human being to live in warships. They’ll all be about two feet high with arms six feet long. They’ll never need anything to eat or drink. They won’t even need air to breathe. They won’t have families to give trouble, nor will they need mail, nor leave. They’ll have about one hour’s sleep a night when they’ll put out a long prehensile tail and hook up on rails where they’ll hang like bats until it’s time for them to go to work again. They won’t want women or alcohol or tobacco. They’ll be a mixture of bat, Mormon, Puritan, and duck-billed platypussesses. . .
Julia turned to Mary. “I’m afraid Robert is well and truly on one of his hobby-horses now,” she said. “We might as well stay here quietly until they remember that we’re here. I like your brooch.”
It was a silver pin carrying a naval crown in silver and small diamonds.
“Michael gave it to me last Christmas. He says it’s my uniform. All naval wives and girl friends have one.”
“It’s certainly your uniform. Robert gave me one before we were married. He said he won it in a poker game! When are you going to get married?”
“I don’t know. You weren’t supposed to know about it.”
“I guessed. And Cedric told us.”
“He did?”
“He came to dinner with us last summer. I can hear him now. ‘Julia, my girl,’ he said, ‘I’m very much afraid there’s another good man gone there. If I know anything about such things, I fear those two are going to get married’! “
“Oh, he would!”
“I should get Michael to marry you as soon as possible. Robert and I were married when he was a junior sub-lieutenant. We hadn’t any money so his father lent us a lodge in Scotland for our honeymoon. We only had four days and it rained the whole time. Robert always tells everyone that it was a splendid place for a honeymoon because we used to look out of the window, see that it was still raining, and go straight back to bed again!”
The Bodger looked over his shoulder. “Name of a name,” he said, “they’re giggling again! “
Cedric joined them. “Jolly hockey-sticks, Julia,” he said.
“Hello, Cedric. We were just talking about you.”
Cedric rolled his eyes and sighed. “That’s just it. We’ve always got to remember that we’re encompassed about by a great cloud of witnesses. D’you know, last week I went into Spry’s to buy myself a buttonhole and within half an hour people were ringing me up asking me who I was engaged to! Oh dear, that poor B.B.C. man. Bodger’s giving him the treatment. Shall we go and help him? I think not.”
The Bodger had the round man from the B.B.C. hemmed in between the wall and a cabinet containing a huge samovar. The B.B.C. man’s eyes were glassy; he stared, hypnotized, at The Bodger like a bird before a snake.
“The trouble with you people,” The Bodger was saying, “is that you will exaggerate everything. You’re not quite as bad as some of the newspapers but all of you listen to some matelot dripping about the Navy in some low pub or other and quote it next day as ‘An Admiralty spokesman stated that. . . I’m just waiting for the day when I’m an Admiralty spokesman. . . .”
The Bodger drained his glass and beetled his eyebrows at the cringing B.B.C. man.
“Mind you,” he went on, “we’ve got to be fair. The average N.O. meets a press representative in the wardroom and says to himself, ‘Christ, who’s this funny-looking cove with the scruffy shirt?’ and gives him a splendid line of hot cock about the Navy. And yet he’s the first to blow his top when he sees more or less what he told the wretched bloke printed in the paper next morning.”
“Wherever two or three naval officers are gathered together,” said Cedric, “they will talk shop.”
“This is not quite the same as a wardroom, Cedric.” Michael said. “There, you never get a reasoned argument. You get flat statements, followed by flat contradictions, followed by personal abuse.”
Cedric’s party began to settle down into its component parts. Julia was surrounded by a group of men including an elderly author who wrote novels about the upper classes for money in advance, a very drunk Lloyds underwriter, a man who shot rare jungle animals for Universal Aunts, and two acrobats who were third on the bill at the Palladium. Mrs Vincent was resuscitating with pleasant conversation the palsied limbs of the B.B.C. man. The Bodger had found a small unobtrusive man who had spent the Great War selling guns to the Serbo-Croats, who now ran a casino in Smyrna an
d held the monopoly for ouzo everywhere from Trieste to Damascus. The Bodger was charmed with him. Michael and Paul had joined each other again.
“I don’t like the sound of Dickie Gilpin being in the chair when we get there,” Paul said.
“Oh, he’ll never remember us out of all those faces in Barsetshire.”
“Don’t you believe it. That man’s got a memory like an elephant. You mark my words, he’ll remember all about us when we get there. By the way, it’s getting a bit late. I don’t want to break up the happy party but I think we ought to be going. My mother is going to dinner with Cedric, The Bodger and Julia.”
“It’s extraordinary to hear The Bodger referred to as Robert, isn’t it? Where shall we go?”
“I thought of trying a place George Dewberry recommended. . . .”
“God.”
“No, it’s quite legitimate. He gave me his membership card before he went to the Far East.”
“Who is George Dewberry?” Anne asked.
“He’s a mad pusser who was in our term at Dartmouth whose two interests in life were liquor and classical music. . . .”
“He was the boy who brought a bongo drum to one of Sonia’s parties,” Mary said.
“The man himself. He used to come back late at night tight as an owl and wake me up and ask me when did I think Sibelius was going to publish his eighth symphony. He became what’s called a cool cat before he left. He asked me to get them to play ‘Potato-head Blues’ just for him. Imagine it! “
George Dewberry’s club was in a street behind Maple’s furniture store. A flight of grimy steps covered with scraps of newspaper and dirty milk bottles led down to the entrance. A young man sat at a window just inside. He did not bother to look at Paul’s extended card but mouthed through the cigarette in his lips.
“Half a dollar. And another half a dollar for the cool quails.”
Paul paid and they passed on to the door of the club itself.
“Remember,” Paul said to Anne, “you’re a cool quail. I’ve just paid for you.”
“Man, that’s real crazy,” Anne said. Paul stared at her.
When they opened the door of the club a noise like the combination of tyres screaming at the limits of adhesion, mad dogs baying, and helpless human beings shrieking under some nameless torture, howled at their astounded eardrums.
“Siddown!” a voice yelled in Michael’s ear.
They felt their way over to a table and sat down. Their eyes became accustomed to the atmosphere.
The room was crowded and filled with tobacco smoke. It was impossible to see the colour of the walls but pictures could just be distinguished through the haze. They were all photographs of negroes blowing, holding or sitting at musical instruments. Those negroes not actually blowing through an instrument bared their teeth in smiles of ferocious satisfaction. The band were sitting on a platform in one corner of the room; they were the photographs in the flesh. The dance floor was small and filled with gyrating couples who twisted and thrust each other and swung and dipped without disturbing the calm, almost monolithic, blankness of their faces.
“Paul!” Michael shouted above the music. “Did you say George Dewberry recommended this place?”
The band stopped suddenly while Michael was shouting and his last words rang round the room.
“Oh crikey,” Michael said.
Two of the dancers came back to their table. The young man was wearing a blue and white sweater and black gaberdine slacks. His hair was crewcut except for a quiff in front. The girl wore her hair in a long pony tail, a pink sweater and electric blue trousers stretched tightly over her buttocks.
“Man, man, that was endsville,” the young man moaned in an American accent.
“That was very nice,” the girl said dreamily.
“Excuse me,” Paul put in.
They turned and focused their eyes unwillingly on him, as though he had dragged them back from the delights of Arcadia.
“Yeah?”
“This is our first time here. I wonder if you could tell me the name of the tune they’ve just been playing, please?” The young man looked at the girl.
“That was ‘When I’m walking My Baby along South Basin Street Blues’.”
“Oh. Thank you very much.”
“The Armstrong version.”
“I see.”
“The number before that was ‘Baby, Doncha Hear me Talkin’ To Ya Blues’.”
“Oh, thank you very much.”
“And can you tell us the name of the band?” Michael asked. “Who’s playing?”
The young man grimaced expressively at the girl, who grimaced back.
“Where ya bin all your life?”
“We’re new here,” Michael said, defensively.
“Ya want me to give ya the line-up?”
“Yes, please, if you would.
”Man, that’s King Dirndl sitting in on trumpet and the guy in the sax chair he’s Duke De Moinas an’ that’s Earl Easton with the liquorice stick, you wanta dig him when he breathes on that reed and Lord Lugrimace sitting by the keyboard. They’re a bunch of cools.”
“And the chap with the xylophone?”
“The vibes. That’s Baron Bolo. The coolest.”
“The chap on the drums. He seems pretty cool too.”
“That’s the Cardinal. Ya he’s a cool heeler.”
A negro waiter, in full evening dress with a white tie and tails, appeared beside the table.
“Two cokes, Pope,” the young man said.
“Coke or coffee?” the Pope asked Paul.
“Is the coke cool? I mean, is the coke cold?”
“Nope.”
“We’ll have four cups of coffee then, please.”
An upheaval was taking place on the stand. The band whose names read like an ecclesiastical and secular New Orleans Debrett were being replaced by four young men whom they all instantly recognized as friends of Sonia’s. The four young men prepared to play the guitar, washboard, bass and piano. Two of them had been to Eton, one to Harrow, and the fourth to Winchester.
The first chords awoke a faint response in Michael’s memory. He had surely heard that song before; when the chorus came he was certain. It was the song Lieutenant Chipperd had sung on the Beattys’ last night at Dartmouth.
“And the pig got up and slowly walked away,” sang the Old Harrovian, strumming the guitar.
“Walked away?” enquired the Old Wykehamist, from the piano.
“Walked away,” answered the Old Etonians, on bass and washboard.
“And the pig got up and slowly walked away,” sang all four.
“What’s the name of this band?” Michael asked the young man.
“It ain’t a band,” the young man said scornfully. “It’s a skiffle group. Piffle group, more like,” he added, his American accent temporarily breaking down.
The Skiffle Group played and sang three more songs and the Debrett Band came back, this time accompanying a small boy of about twelve years of age whose singing excited the young man and the girl like a powerful drug, transporting them into a glassy-eyed state of trance. Meanwhile, the tobacco smoke drifted thicker, the Pope sidled between the tables, the band gave out short staccato yelps between chords, and the empty coke bottles stood like forests on the tables.
At half-past one in the morning, Paul rubbed his eyes with his hand and led the way outside.
“Let’s get a taxi for goodness sake,” said Michael. “This wind is cutting me in half.”
Michael and Mary lay back in the taxi and watched the remote impersonal lights of London pass by. They saw a man’s head and shoulders, the roof of a car, the top half of shop windows and the steady progression of buildings swinging past overhead. The buildings stopped and there were trees and then again more buildings. The taxi suddenly stopped.
“We’re there,” Michael whispered.
“Um?”
“We’re there.”
“Oh? Oh yes. Are you going to come in?”
/> “Yes, please.”
Mary’s flat was cold and quiet. Mary switched on lights, took off her coat and started to make coffee.
“Never mind about the coffee,” Michael said.
Mary stopped, surprised at the authority in his voice.
“What do you mean? We’ve got to have something. You must be starving.”
Michael went round the room and switched off the lights. He came close to Mary where she stood in the centre of the room, pale in the light from the window.
“No. Let’s sit down. I want to talk to you.”
They sat on the edge of the bed. Mary sat stiffly upright. She had never known Michael so peremptory. She was aware of his presence, of his sex, more strongly than ever before.
3
Although very few of the thousand servicemen lining the boatdeck rails of H.M.T. Astrakhan had ever left England by trooper before, they all knew that this was how it should be done.
Below them they could see a satisfactory crowd of wives, sweethearts and mothers weeping, waving handkerchiefs and holding up babies. Behind, some Military Policemen were keeping a look-out for any passengers who may have had second thoughts about travelling. At the jetty’s edge, six men in brown overalls and bowler hats stood ready to let go the ship’s lines. A brass band was playing “Good-bye Dolly, I must leave you,” surrounded by a light fringe of newspaper sellers, telegram boys, florist’s assistants, private detectives and a huddle of cynical cats.
When the ship’s siren unexpectedly gave a long blast, the crowd on the jetty somehow recognized it for what it was, no idle testing, but the authentic leave-taking of a departing ship. The women waved ever more wildly. The Military Police closed the gangways as though to prevent even a rat leaving the ship. One of the men in bowler hats blew a whistle and the others spat on their hands and began to take turns of wire off the bollards. The last gangway was lifted and the last umbilical wire dropped clear. The siren exploded again and the ship slowly moved away in the wash of water swirled back by the screws.
All together, the women, the Military Police, the men in bowler hats and the messengers joined in a ringing cheer which was echoed and thrown back by the troops at the rails and swallowed up in the noise of the siren and the hooting of the tugs.