Bel Ria

by Sheila Burnford

  He was a lighthearted diversion, and the men around cheered him on. After a while Sinclair clicked his fingers as he had seen the woman do, and to his surprise, the little creature came immediately, running crablike over the deck to reach up and offer the mug. He removed the lighter, restored it, and dropped in a franc instead. The monkey picked out the coin, bit it, and replaced it; then rattling the mug suggestively, importuned a row of men sitting on a Carley float. Good-humoredly, they reached into their pockets and contributed.

  Someone produced a mouth organ and began to play. The monkey jigged and hopped around and rattled the mug, deftly catching any pieces of chocolate or biscuit in the other paw — all of which he brought to Sinclair. The dog began to show a spark of interest; his eyes brightened, his ears crept up, and at last his tail unfurled as he watched. But the interlude was all too short; minutes later the music and voices were drowned out by the alert bells shrilling out again, while over the racket a voice came booming almost into their ears from a nearby Tannoy speaker: “Action Stations! Action Stations! Take cover — take cover — take cover . . .”

  There was nowhere to take cover. Men flung themselves to the deck again, those who could crouched under the lifeboats or under the superstructure, others sheltered behind ventilating shafts, floats or seats, and monkey and dog fled back into their refuge tunnel. As the aircraft swept screaming towards them, the liner bucked to the blast of her own guns. Sinclair crouched at the end of the seats, saw the after Bofors gun swiveling and braced himself for another ear-splitting round. Only a few feet away, two gunners had set up their machine gun and were already blazing away in company with scattered volleys of rifle fire. Above it all he heard the spaced whistle of an approaching stick of bombs, felt the ship shudder violently to each closer underwater explosion, and hunched himself tightly before the last wailing downward scream that filled his head to bursting point. As though scoring some Olympian goal, the bomb dropped down the single funnel, exploding below the water line with such force that the Lancastria leaped like a mortally wounded animal, the jolting waves of her pain passing through every rivet of her length.

  A still second of shocked acknowledgment followed, then the guns roared out again over the clang and rattle of falling flak and twisted red-hot metal. The liner had listed sharply, then, as the sea surged in far below the water line she righted herself, wallowing in a sluggish roll that became increasingly ill-balanced. Under such a momentum, it could not be long before the more heavily listing side would lose, and then she would turn turtle. Sinclair reached for his life jacket.

  Clear above the bedlam of noise, a steady voice through a loud hailer directed men to remove their boots and clothes and jump now, for with the deck already beginning to tilt ominously, only the starboard lifeboats could be released. Within minutes the angle had become so steep that men, equipment, floats and seats avalanched together towards the rail.

  Clinging onto the fixed seat as they kicked off their boots, Sinclair and the Frenchman waited until the area directly below was cleared; as they slithered down together the monkey leaped for his shoulder and clung tightly around his neck. The dog shot past, paws scrabbling without traction until halted by the raised coaming beyond the rail.

  “One, two, three, and over we go,” said Sinclair, as the other man hesitated by the rail.

  “As yet I am unable to swim,” said the Frenchman in thin, precise tones, looking down with extreme distaste.

  “You won’t learn standing here,” said Sinclair. “Here, put this on —” and he pulled at the tapes of his jacket, trying to wrench it off; but the limpet monkey had hold of his hair and clung on grimly.

  The rail was within twenty feet of the water now. As he struggled to dislodge the monkey a lifeboat swung out on its davits a miraculous few yards away. There was a rush to fill it, but he steadied the Frenchman as the other climbed onto the rail and reached for the bows. He heaved, and the man was up and over and safely into the lifeboat.

  From below in the water a face looked up, and a voice yelled: “For God’s sake, hold your jacket down when you go — I nearly dislocated my bloody neck —”

  He was over the rail when he saw the dog, desperately balancing on the almost vertical edge. He scooped him up as he jumped. He knew that he must get as far away as possible from the sucking vortex that would follow when the ship went down. He was mad to hinder himself with the dog. He released his grip and started swimming, encumbered by the life jacket and breathless with pain. The dog paddled along easily beside him.

  Behind him a demented medley of noise escalated almost unendurably above the hiss of escaping steam and bells still jangling madly, whistles and shouts, and somewhere, muffled, an inhuman screaming, while overall the calm strong voice directed steadily from the loud hailer. Incredibly a machine gun was still firing. He heard the slapping crash as the lifeboat dropped free from the falls and, turning his head, was suddenly aware that the monkey’s arms were once more wrapped around his neck; it must have wedged itself in somehow between his back and the hump of the old-fashioned cork life jacket when he jumped.

  A spar of wood to which was still attached part of a cane seat suddenly bobbed up in front of him; he grabbed it and rested for a moment. The dog’s paws churned as he tried to get some purchase on the wood and raise himself out of the water, and had almost succeeded when the spar rolled over. Choking on the salt water, he bobbed up again, his eyes wildly imploring, his paws beating ineffectually. Sinclair raised him by the scruff of his neck and rested the forepaws over his own forearm. If the dog had resisted him, used up too much of his small reserve of energy, he would have held its head underwater then and there and put an end to it; but almost as though recognizing the possibility, the dog hung on without struggling.

  Sinclair turned to watch the last mortal moments of the Lancastria. Her bows already under, men still retreating fly-like up the stern, the great liner reared almost three-quarters of her length clear of the water, then slid with slow inexorable majesty to the depths, her siren still blaring, silenced only with a last hissing sigh of steam. The waters closed over her in a great swirling emptiness. Then heads bobbed up like corks, and debris erupted and boiled over the surface.

  In the silence that followed, the shouts of one to another traveled clearly across the water. Over the flat horizon that was now his, Sinclair saw an assorted local fleet of fishing boats and launches converge on the area; beyond them two small cargo ships had altered course, while farther away to the south he could make out the bow wave of a destroyer heading towards them.

  The water was cold, but he felt confident that he would be picked up soon — provided that enemy aircraft had the decency not to return and shoot up the survivors. And provided that he had the strength to swim out of reach of the oil, he thought more urgently as he saw the first viscid blackness float up and begin to spread, edged widely in places by the shining silver of shoals of dead fish.

  The grasp of the wood was comforting: he turned away from the oil slick and paddled towards the distant destroyer against the light wind. Presumably crouched on the life jacket at the back of his neck, the monkey was burdenless and undemanding, almost nonexistent. As long as it stayed that way it could remain there. He shifted the dog’s paws to a better purchase on the cane seat and pushed on.

  Other men had had the same idea of turning into the wind in the hope of outmaneuvering the oil, and now there was a steady, slow, almost organized movement; the helpless and helpers were sorting themselves out. Sometimes one of the strong single swimmers catching up from behind shared his spar for a brief rest. An empty lifeboat floated by, men clinging to the looped ropes on her sides.

  A small crate, empty and very buoyant, both ends stove in, followed. He caught it, shoving the spar through until the seat jammed against the sides so that the spar now rode fairly steadily. He gave the dog a slight heave, so that it gained the half-submerged seat and crouched there shivering. At this the monkey leaped onto the crate top, clear of the w
ater.

  Among the bobbing heads before him he could make out those of two other dogs. One paddled in aimless splashing circles. The other, obviously a large and powerful animal, was rapidly closing the gap from its target, a man without a life jacket holding on to some partially submerged piece of flotsam. Powerless to intervene at this distance, Sinclair watched as the dog caught up and made frantic clawing attempts to climb onto the man’s back. Despite his struggles, the weight on his shoulders forced the man’s head below water time and time again. He was probably a nonswimmer, for it was all over in a few minutes, and the head went down for the last time. The dog swam on, searching for another foothold, and as it turned in his direction Sinclair reached in his pocket for a knife, but the first few feet of a wide ribbon of oil intervened. The dog tried to board this apparently solid surface, gulped oil in its panic, and shortly after its head disappeared too.

  The oil when it reached him spread over in a vile viscid embrace, coating the spar so that his hands slipped off, and for a moment it drifted smoothly ahead, its occupants staring back in bleak anguish until he caught up with them. The dog tried to scramble up beside the monkey on the crate top, still clear of oil. The crate rocked wildly; somehow the monkey hung on, but the dog’s paws slipped and he fell back. For a moment it all seemed too hopeless to try and sort out again; it was as much as he could do to hang on to the spar himself and keep his mouth clear of oil. Then, despite himself, he bent his elbow under the haunches, and with this purchase to the hind legs, the dog scrambled back onto the cane seat, the gleaming blue-black oil plastering his coat all except the head. After many attempts, and hardly knowing why he did so, Sinclair undid one of the tapes of his life jacket and passed it under the spar and back, where he knotted it again securely.

  Another lifeboat went by, dangerously low in the water, packed with men, the ropes festooned with others. “What happened to your hurdy-gurdy, mate?” someone called. Then, “Hang on, lad,” called another, “plenty of boats picking up now.”

  He could see them, the launches and lifeboats and whalers of the destroyer and other ships, zigzagging to and fro as they picked up survivors. But none came his way, although he waved and shouted. Later he was thankful for his apparent invisibility, for the enemy aircraft returned, machine-gunning where the survivors and boats were thickest, and dropping incendiaries in an attempt to ignite the oil. Mercifully the flames only flickered briefly into life.

  The remaining heads were widely scattered now, none within earshot; he missed being within range of the shouts of encouragement one to another, and the silence was beginning to be so oppressive that he spoke words of reassurance to the animals from time to time if only to hear his own voice. He found himself envying their animal ability to take whatever came without protest, to go with it somehow, and turn themselves off into an almost trance-like state with half-closed withdrawn eyes. Yet every time he spoke, the dog turned his head and gave him his full regard, with eyes as suddenly alert as though blinds had sprung back.

  Sinclair seemed to have drifted farther and farther away from the rescue ships on the horizon, and as the lonely hours wore on he became increasingly weak and at times lightheaded. His legs were numb with cold, and he knew that he must keep moving them, but all effort to propel his spar towards that distant goal of the destroyer had become excruciating.

  The monkey seemed to be shrinking, gray and cold; he wondered vaguely, but without real concern, how long it could survive. It looked impossibly fragile, eyes closed, and huddled into its own enwrapping arms. But as he rested for a moment, it suddenly reached down and touched his eyebrow, withdrawing its fingers to examine the oil on them closely, sniffed them, plainly did not like the smell, and wiped them delicately on its as yet unplastered chest.

  The dog crouched only inches before him, the oil-slicked coat sculpturing bone and muscle to shining blue-black relief, the eyes no longer half-closed, but wide and alive, always riveted on his now, so close as to reflect him within the pupils like twin convex mirrors. There were times when he felt the effort needed to hold on was too much, that it would be so much simpler just to let go and drift off into peaceful oblivion. Then always, just as his will was slipping away, he would be jerked back to open his eyes and see himself again in those other intent summoning ones.

  Then came a moment of sharp lucidity, returning from a pleasant drifting dream, and he suddenly knew at last that the tiny black face with the red-rimmed eyes was real, it was himself; and the moment he no longer saw himself there, he would no longer see any of the things he held most dear in the world either. He must stay wakeful and cling on to the spar, to life — even as these animals clung to their precarious raft; they might appear to have withdrawn from the situation behind shuttered eyes, but he saw now that their bodies were always controlled, and tensed to balance, to survival. Once again, his world was circumscribed to their small one.

  “All right,” he said aloud, and taking the monkey’s nearest paw he wiped his eyes clear with it. “All right, lads,” he repeated with louder determination as both heads turned towards him. “Here we go — hold on, everyone, we’re off.” He kicked his legs until some circulation returned, took a firmer grasp on the slimy spar and swam on.

  He was almost unconscious but his legs still fractionally moving, robot-like, his eyes fixed wide open, when the dog began to bark. It was a high, piercing bark, but even that did not penetrate his mind; nor did a voice when it called out, very close above his head; his legs continued to move. Only when another voice said, “Cut that jacket free —” did he rouse into sudden wide-awake panic, seeing the descending knife, the severance from his known world. He fought desperately for sensibility, but all that his voice would utter above the barking was “No, no, no . . .”

  At last he forced a complete sentence out. “Grab the dog,” he said and tried to take the scruff of the slimy black neck himself, but his fingers slipped. A pair of arms reached out and hauled him so that he lay half over the coaming of the boat, resting in agony on crunching ribs before he finally slithered over, the pain forcing his breath out in shallow gasps. Someone wiped his mouth and eyes clear of oil, and eased off the cumbersome jacket. The whaler was filled with other slumped figures, black shining faces, red lips, red eyes, and from all around came the harsh racking sounds of retching and coughing from oil-filled stomachs and lungs. From these blacknesses, a small blackness detached itself and crawled to his side. He clung to it in sudden fierce protectiveness and, still clinging, dropped off into unconsciousness at last.

  Part Two

  Chapter 4

  SICK BERTH ATTENDANT Neil MacLean, of HM Destroyer Tertian, was tending a group of walking wounded on deck when word reached him that the ship’s whaler had been swung aboard and that there was a man hemorrhaging in it. He called for a stretcher and made his way forward, pressing urgently through the jammed mass of soldiers. Only two men were left in the whaler. The one who lay stretched in the stern sheets, one leg at a grotesque angle with a blood soaked jacket under it, was obviously the hemorrhage for someone had twisted a belt around his thigh as a tourniquet. MacLean sent him as an emergency to the wardroom, where the ship’s doctor was working with the help of an Army Medical Corps Captain.

  He turned his attention to the other man, the front of his battle dress stained bright recent red, a matching trickle running from his mouth. He bent down to take the man’s pulse, and his fingers suddenly came in contact with a warm slimy black mass below the hand, so horrible in its unexpectedness that instinctively he withdrew his fingers. Part of the black mass split open to red and gleaming white, and a low warning snarl preceded the snapping together of the white gleam.

  “A’thiaghrna!” said MacLean, reverting aloud in the reflex of relief and surprise to his native Gaelic. The man’s eyes opened in the blackness of his face, and he answered in the same tongue: “Leave the dog be,” he whispered. “I’ll leave him all right,” said MacLean with a sour look at the sharp teeth so close to his hands as
he investigated the wound below the blouse. “I need my hands the day.”

  The man struggled to sit up, but the effort brought an ooze of scarlet froth to his lips.

  “Stay where you are,” said MacLean sharply, and called back for another stretcher. But the soldier suddenly strained up in such wild incoherence that MacLean had to hold him down. Now the man’s words came in such panting distress that MacLean felt certain one lung must have been pierced by a rib fragment. “The monkey — the monkey — where was it?”

  “Resting — lying back resting,” said MacLean smoothly, thinking that this one would be resting eternally himself very soon if he didn’t lie still and stop torturing the remaining lung. He felt in his satchel for an ampule.

  “The horse —” panted the soldier, barely audible. “The rabbits — all those rabbits, they were innocent — I tell you, they were innocent . . . even the bear.”

  “All having a nice wee rest the now,” crooned MacLean hypnotically as he slid in the needle.

  The man’s eyes closed but they shot open again wildly when they came to move him to a stretcher. His hand groped to his side and across his chest, searching.

  “All right, all right,” said MacLean. “Lie still, for Christ’s sake, the dog’s there — no one’s going to take it away.”