Stark Realities

by Stark Realities (retail) (epub)

  ‘He may not ask. May not even try to get in touch. In any case I won’t mention you if I don’t have to.’

  ‘But you can. I honestly don’t care.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it make for trouble between you?’

  ‘No reason it should. He has no proprietory right to you that I’m aware of. Nor have I, come to that – although I’d like to have… Anyway, there’s no need for you to tell fibs, I’ll handle anything that comes of it.’

  ‘You handle everything so beautifully, Otto.’

  ‘You’re not exactly fumble-fisted yourself. Maybe I said this before – or something like it – but I’m – I’ve completely fallen for you, Helena. I want every minute of you that I can get. Minutes, weeks, months, years—’

  ‘I want the same. You can have any proprietory rights you want.’ Arms round his neck, breasts against his shirt-front. ‘Think we might even marry, one day?’

  ‘Yes. I do. I’m not proposing it here and now because with things in such a mess and no idea what position I’d be in to support you – support us – but yes, please let’s pray to have it turn out like that?’

  ‘We should drink to it.’

  ‘Regrettably the bottles have become empty. I could go down and get another, of course – if the Weinstube’s still in operation, which I think it may be—’

  ‘Metaphorically drink to it, I meant. Having never proposed to a man before. But in any case—’

  ‘I’m deeply honoured. Should have been quicker off the mark myself. Although – for those reasons… Anyway, you want to be taken home now. Get your beauty sleep. How about tomorrow – collect you at eight again?’

  ‘To come here again?’

  ‘I don’t know where else. Kramer’s is a little dull, and—’

  ‘It’s not so bad. We could eat there, then take a little drive, find somewhere, you know, quiet, and—’

  ‘Could do that. Put some blankets in the motor – or some other one if necessary. Two nights in a row in this place might be overdoing it, rather.’

  ‘The expense of it. Kramer’s is quite reasonable, isn’t it?’

  ‘The main thing is the risk of being seen here, if we came too often. Your reputation, so forth. But how about I book this room again for Wednesday?’

  There were still customers in the Weinstube, you could hear them. Earlier they’d been singing to the music of an accordion. Otto left Helena in the ladies’ powder room, went down and paid his bill to the woman – who it turned out was Frl. Grueninger – and booked the same room and dinner for two on Wednesday. He’d telephone or call in before that to arrange the menu. Yes, it had been an excellent meal, and the service had been more than adequate. He’d already tipped the old waiter. He went back up to collect Helena and escort her down; she was ready, had her fur jacket’s collar turned up and the silk scarf arranged as before. He told her, ‘All fixed for Wednesday. I asked for the same waiter if he’s available.’

  ‘Another week of it, you’ll be bankrupt.’

  ‘Well, not quite…’

  They went down together side by side, her arm crooked inside his and holding it tightly. It was, he realised, an ordeal for her, a running of the gauntlet. Off the bottom of the stairs, starting across the tile-floored public area that was an anteroom to the Weinstube premises and off which was the office where he’d paid the bill. This was the back way out, of course, to the yard where the car was. He’d just tried to encourage her by muttering, ‘In the clear, almost…’ when one of the Weinstube’s swing doors was flung back, and glancing that way in quick reaction he was virtually face to face with a rather bulky naval officer, a U-boat CO by name of Willi Ahrens – Korvetten-Kapitan, friend of Winter’s – and emerging behind him two others, one of them an Oberleutnant by the name of Hahn who’d been in the Mess last night or the night before and whom he thought was Ahrens’ first lieutenant. They’d seen and obviously recognised Otto, Ahrens raising a hand and calling his name – jocular, tipsy – while Otto kept going, manoeuvring Helena as it were on to his starboard bow, at least partially hidden: if Ahrens had got a clear sight of her, as he might have done, he’d have known her – he’d been at Winter’s party on board 201 that evening, one of the group of COs who’d been with her and Winter. Otto shouted, ‘Can’t stop, motor’s waiting!’, and pushed on out, heeling the yard door shut behind them.

  No idea whether Ahrens had had any clear sight of her. If he had, it would be the first thing Franz would hear about when he got in tomorrow. Or rather today – midnight having come and gone.

  Helena said, ‘That’s really torn it. Friend of Franz’s, name of Willi something?’

  ‘Willi Ahrens. D’you think he saw you?’

  ‘Certainly he did! For a second we were looking straight at each other! Before you nearly yanked me off my feet. Christ, it’s so dark…’

  ‘Fogs still with us, is why. Come on.’ The door had opened behind them, sending a shaft of light across the cobbles. Otto bundling Helena into Graischer’s motor and reaching across her to pull out the choke, shutting that door then and moving to the crank-handle, hoping to God as he stooped to it that (a) it would start easily, and (b) that he hadn’t left it in gear. Taking a chance on that anyway and – OK, on the second swing the engine fired, and it was not in gear, didn’t run him down… On round to his own side, into a reek of petrol. Too much choke. Helena saying as he got them moving, ‘He’ll tell Franz, won’t he?’

  ‘Certain to.’

  Down the alley, having switched the lights on while backing out of the shed – not looking for those others, preferring not to see them – then to the left into the road. Headlights behind them brightening the yard end of the alley as he turned out of it. He’d known they must have a motor, otherwise the three of them wouldn’t have been leaving by the yard door. Anyway, they’d be heading north, back to Wilhelmshaven.

  Shifting into third. Seeing the answer, or beginning to – at least an answer – to Helena’s reputation being shot to ribbons, Helena herself in any social sense virtually destroyed. To have been caught leaving an upstairs rendezvous in the Snake Pit – well, for a woman, a young girl of anything like decent background…

  And who’d taken the chance of having this happen to her?

  ‘Helena, darling, listen now—’

  ‘It’s actually quite dreadful…’

  ‘No. Seems so, but actually it’s not.’ Noting as he spoke that she should have been crying and was not. Explaining then what he’d just said: ‘What we were saying earlier – how we feel about each other, but having to wait and see what comes out of any so-called armistice and all the rest of it… Well, slight change of plan, that’s all. Marry me, will you?’

  ‘You mean, not wait? Just like that?’

  ‘So I can tell Franz Winter – or Ahrens – anyone – that you’re my fiancée. Believe me, I’d be very proud to. It’s what we both want, isn’t it – an adjustment of timing, nothing else. And you see, our engagement explains your presence at the Pit. Which we’d better refer to as Grueninger’s, henceforth. Where else could I have taken you where we’d be completely on our own? Man to man, as an explanation this is perfectly understandable. Your mother mightn’t like it – if she got wind of it – but one, with any luck she won’t, and two, I’d swear to her I took you there only to have you to myself while begging you to become my wife. A little unconventional, I know, but that’s the plain truth of it, there’s no other – and naturally there was the devil of a lot to say, we talked for hours – huh?’

  ‘We did, didn’t we. I mean, would have. But do you mean this, Otto – you’ll stick to it?’

  ‘Of course I’ll stick to it, it’s what I want! If you’ll accept me, that is. Damn it, I love you!’

  ‘And I love you. Respect you, too. Of course I accept. I’m – well, reeling… But – in practical terms – no way we could set a date, or – exactly as we were saying before, as things are at present—’

  ‘When they’ve settled, I meet your parent
s and you meet mine. Meanwhile, we’re engaged to marry, and in the immediate future—’

  ‘Kramer’s, etcetera?’

  He reached to find her hand. ‘Etcetera.’

  8

  Tuesday 29 October, one a.m. Otto had dropped Helena at the Muellers’ house in Oldenburg and was on his way back to Wilhelmshaven, a distance of less than fifty kilometres via Rastede and Varel; while Franz Winter in U201 was in position 50 degs 40' N, 7 degs 20' E, steering SSE, making-good ten knots with a running battery-charge from both diesels and ETA Wilhelmshaven 0930.

  Winter lowered his binoculars, used a scrap of absorbent paper to clean their front lenses. Hohler, officer of the watch, had just queried whether they’d make it into the Jade by that time and at this speed; he told him, ‘You’d have found it in my night orders, if you’d taken the trouble to read them, that at five o’clock the charge is to be broken and speed increased to fifteen knots.’

  ‘Jawohl, mein Kapitan.’

  One didn’t argue with one’s skipper – certainly not with this one – but he thought it hadn’t been in the night order book when he’d come on watch; in any case he’d be out for the count at five a.m. They were working two-hour watches – he, Neureuther the first lieutenant and Kantelberg the navigating officer – thus had two hours on watch and four hours off, round the clock. With occasional interruptions in the form of alarms or sightings, leading sometimes to action, they’d been doing this for the past three weeks, and it was a magnificent thought that one would be getting the whole of this next night in the sack. An early one, at that, please God. Knowing damn well that in practice you never did and that it had damn-all to do with any God. On the last day of every patrol you swore you would, but midnight of the ‘first night in’ invariably saw you still celebrating in the bar.

  Celebrating what? The fact of having returned – survived yet another patrol? Being now nineteen years of age, at sea in submarines since clocking-up seventeen, having maybe a decent chance of reaching twenty?

  Winter had his glasses up again: swivelling slowly as he swept across the bow then down the port side as far as the beam or a little farther. The seascape, nightscape abaft the beam could be left to the two seamen lookouts in the after end of the bridge. The looking-out primarily for enemy submarines, which tended to be active in these waters, between the mine-belts: the boat that spotted the other first was the one that got home.

  New minefields permitting, of course.

  Not that one took such a fatalistic view of it. Although aware that according to the statistics one’s chances were roughly fifty-fifty every time. Better than that maybe in this boat, with a skipper as experienced and competent as Franz Winter. A rock of a man, was Franz. So thoroughly committed to his duty and the service of his country – and in particular to the submarine service – that there were jokes made and circulated about him, as the automaton with the one-track mind, also as ‘the bison’. In fact he was as highly respected as any U-boat CO you’d ever heard of – by his own officers and crew, at any rate, those who knew him and served under him. Do the job as it should be done, according to his precepts, and he’d support you through thick and thin; fail in it or shirk it, you didn’t stay long with ‘old Franzi’.

  His subordinates wouldn’t want you to, either.

  Emil Hohler was maintaining a bare-eyed lookout while wiping his own glasses. You needed to quite often in this salt sea-mist, as well as occasional bursts of spray as she dipped her stem lance-like into the long, low swells, tossing a few bathfuls of it back over her grey length, the solid white flood rushing over and inside the casing to burst against the base of the tower and stream away over her flanks.

  Glasses up again: sweeping steadily across the bow. The wind was of the boat’s own making, a ten-knot wind from right ahead therefore, and the motion regular, the grumble of her 1200-HP diesels seemingly in rhythm with it. He’d often thought how he’d miss all this, when he left it – as he’d have to one day, obviously. But years and years ahead, as an old man, whatever he might have done with his life between now and then, he guessed he’d hear in his sleep the thump and flood of sea over the hull and through the casing, only a few metres below your feet at any time, and in the rougher stuff a lot less than that, the noise and the power of it, rearing whiteness pounding aft from her plunging stem, swirling around the gun down there and bursting over, while solid green ones mounted to drop on you in ton weights. Old man waking and telling himself, That was how it was, was my life, was me, one time…

  ‘Going down.’ Skipper lowering his glasses. ‘Shake me for anything at all.’

  Meaning he’d sooner be woken and/or have the boat dived for a seagull or a Flying Dutchman than be left to sleep and the boat continue on the surface when it might turn out to be an enemy. It was entirely possible, all too easy, to see things and dismiss them as figments of the imagination – which they often were – but the truth was that a few seconds’ delay in reacting to that ‘figment’ might prove to be the last seconds of existence for the boat and her crew of thirty-two seamen and stokers and four officers. It was one of the themes on which old Franzi tended to hold forth.

  * * *

  The five o’clock dead reckoning position put them twenty-five nautical miles NNW of Heligoland, sixty-five miles from Wilhelmshaven. The ETA could be amended or confirmed when Heligoland was abeam; meanwhile the charge was broken and revs increased to bring her up to fifteen knots. Kantelberg – navigator, Oberleutnant – had the watch at this time, having taken over from Neureuther at four a.m. Franz Winter, who’d been at the chart table checking speeds, distances and tidal streams, joined his first lieutenant now at the wardroom table, where A.B. Thoemer, wardroom messman, had just set down mugs of a coffee-like liquid and a plate of biscuits. Winter had had three hours’ uninterrupted sleep, which for him was a lot: he told Neureuther, as he dumped himself into the canvas chair in which no-one else ever sat, reached for a biscuit and crammed it into his mouth with the flat of his hand, that it looked as if the DR position would turn out to be spot-on, which after a run of about 600 nautical miles from the Pentland Firth was not at all bad.

  He took a swig of coffee, then went on munching the biscuit. The cement-mixer routine, Neureuther had heard it called. Cement well in evidence as Winter added, ‘That is, if the log’s behaving itself.’

  ‘One might reasonably assume so, sir.’

  ‘A log of the same type made monkeys of us off Liverpool on one occasion, if you remember. That one had had all my trust until it decided to chuck its hand in – eh?’

  A smile on his first lieutenant’s long, narrow face. ‘Remember the occasion well, sir.’

  During Winter’s time in command of a ‘C’, a minelayer, that had been. Neureuther had been his first lieutenant then; Winter had brought him with him to U201 when he’d transferred to her. While not exactly outstanding – as von Mettendorff had been, for instance – he was competent, hard-working and loyal, the ship’s company respected him and Winter trusted him.

  ‘How long d’you guess we’ll stay in, sir?’

  ‘No idea at all. What the devil they’re playing at… Recalling boats from patrol and not relieving them with others suggests some change of strategy. One possibility for instance would be transferring us to work with the Hochseeflotte – conceivably therefore some kind of fleet action.’ Pausing to light a cigarette, expelling smoke, which the diesels’ powerful suction instantly snatched away. ‘Talk of an armistice – which some were doing before we left, if you remember – well, sending most of us back out, whatever it’s for, at least it’s not bloody surrender.’

  ‘But fleet action – if that’s what’s in the wind – a submarine trap, they’d most likely want us for – we might be too late for it now?’

  Winter shifted in his chair; glancing to his left past the chart table into the central control-room, then the other way. Back to Neureuther: leaning forward, forearms on the table, staring at him fixedly under shaggy greying brows – the l
egendary ‘bison’s stare’. Growling, ‘Wouldn’t mind if we were, Neureuther. Two reasons – no, three, it one includes the usual one that we’re overdue for docking. Bigger reason is – how to put this… See – if there’s to be an armistice, rendering all we’ve done in the past five years plain damn futile, I’d as soon call it a day, be done with it. May surprise you that I should say this, but – we’ve not dishonoured ourselves, you know!’

  What surprised Neureuther was that he was hearing this at all. Right out of bisonic character as well as custom, principle…

  Bison stubbing out his cigarette. Shoulders hunched. ‘Thank God we haven’t.’ A scowl: ‘So who has?’ Another glance left and right, shake of the wide head, cutting himself short, thinking better of it. Neureuther watching him curiously – knowing his man, who was most certainly not given to baring his soul; had never been known to do so. At least, not to an inferior. Therefore, guessing that he had to be seeing this as a moment of crisis for him personally as well as for the Navy and for Germany. Continuing, ‘Is the Hochseeflotte up to it, I wonder. Intelligence informs us that the British and Americans are in fine fettle and eager for a fight. British learnt some lessons they needed to learn at the Skaggerak confrontation – and now they have this fellow Beatty at their head. Thinks he’s a latter-day Nelson, apparently. Doesn’t matter whether he is or not, he thinks he is and it seems he’s sold the notion to others. The word is that the Grand Fleet is on its toes and exceptionally well trained. You know me, Neureuther – or you should by this time – you know I’m not disposed to run from any fight—’

  A shake of the head. Eyes startled…

  ‘Or to blather as I’m doing now, eh? Well, don’t quote me, not a word of it. But to take on a first-class, well-led fighting force with a bunch of demoralised near-incompetents—’

  ‘As bad as that?’

  Winter drained his mug. He was both smoking and eating now, having pushed another biscuit in. You’d have thought he’d choke. But a shrug was the only answer he was giving. Neureuther tried after a pause: ‘You said three reasons, sir?’