“Fiona Gascoyne. Mrs—a widow. Very pretty, young, and rather rich.” She’d added, “Perhaps just a little young for him …” In the short silence that followed, Paul thought he could see her claws retracting again. She said suddenly, “Oh, dear. Perhaps I should have kept my trap shut. If it’s a secret from the rest of the family …”
Jack was looking quite put out, as if the idea of Nick Everard remarrying was an affront to him. Paul suggested to Phil, “If you introduce us to her, it might be best that none of us mentions it. Then if she does, you’re off the hook.”
“That’s a very smart idea.” She patted his hand where it rested on the bar. “Thanks. And before I let any more cats out of bags, I’ve a few chores to see to. So I’ll leave you for a while. Remember, tonight you don’t pay for any drinks.”
“It’s very sweet of you, but—”
“Any argument, you don’t get membership. Right?”
“We surrender.”
Jack nodded. “Force majeure.”
“You said it.” She slid off her stool. “Look after these two, Doris.” Doris was the second bartender. “Terry knows—their drinks are on the house, because I’m crazy about their father.” She looked at Jack: “Sorry. Half-brother. Enjoy yourselves, now.”
Paul remembered Jack looking after her as she threaded her way out through the crowded room. From the back, with that cloud of red hair and her slim figure in the grey silk dress, she could have been in her twenties. Jack murmured as he turned back, “Old Nick has an eye for them, all right. I’d have said he had an eye for them, but apparently …” He frowned, without finishing the sentence. Two years ago, Paul was remembering, he’d hardly been able to look you in the eye. Now he had eyes like stones; they looked as if they wouldn’t have blinked if you’d stuck your fingers in them.
He wondered why Jack disliked the idea of Nick remarrying.
Well, a fairly simple theory was that if Nick Everard was killed, he—Paul—would succeed to the baronetcy and to Mullbergh, the house and the estate. And if he then drowned—or whatever—that would leave Jack in line. It wasn’t such a remote possibility, at that. In wartime people did get killed, and Nick Everard was invariably in the front of things. Submarining mightn’t be the safest way of earning a living, either. But on the other hand, if Nick married and started a new family—well, any baby son would stand to inherit after Paul.
Something like that?
He mightn’t have thought of it, except that two years ago at Mullbergh he’d had quite a strong impression that his presence and existence didn’t exactly thrill either Jack or Jack’s mother, Sarah.
Jack murmured, “Must say, I’d like to catch a glimpse of the so-called ‘future Lady Everard.’ Are you sure you didn’t know it was in the wind?”
“Not a bit of it … But listen—you were telling me about your time in Crete?”
“I’ve said everything that’s worth telling.”
He’d said it irritably. Bored with the subject, because he had something else on his mind now. Paul said, “I was finding it very interesting.”
“Did I mention that my beloved half-brother, your parent, was present in his destroyer when I was sunk in Carnarvon.”
“Dad told me all about it, in a letter.”
Jack took a swallow of his drink. Pink gin. “He didn’t hang around for long. Did he tell you that too?”
“He described it all. It must have been pretty damned awful for him.”
“It wasn’t exactly fun for the rest of us … Cigarette?”
“I just put one out, thank you. Care to tell me what this job is you’re doing now?”
“Be difficult. I wouldn’t, if I could, anyway; but to be honest I don’t know exactly what it’s in aid of—except it’s something fairly extraordinary … I wonder who this bloody woman is?”
“Sounds like it’s a special op of some kind …” It had to do with MLs, motor-launches; and Jack had been employed in cloak-and-dagger work in Crete, of course … “Hey, we aren’t talking about the Second Front, are we?”
“We aren’t talking about anything at all.” Jack emptied his glass, and pushed it forward to be filled again. “But when you hear about it over the BBC one of these days, you’ll know what I was talking about.” He shrugged. “So will I … Let’s change the subject, shall we?”
Paul tried to, without much success. Jack had turned moody, and he was drinking faster. It was a relief when Phyllis Gordon came back. With her, was one of the most attractive women Paul had ever set eyes on.
“Now then, Everards, pay attention!” She slid an arm round the girl’s shoulders. “Fiona darling: this is Paul, Nick’s son, and this is Jack, the half-brother. Jack, Paul, this is Fiona Gascoyne.”
Jack said, getting off his stool and with his eyes fixed on the girl, “Oh I know you!”
Her black dress was sleeveless, and he’d taken hold of her arms.
She glanced round at Phil. “I never saw him before in my—”
“I know you, though! You don’t know me yet but I do know you!”
Fiona was the only one who didn’t seem embarrassed: just amused. Then a wing commander came up on Fiona’s other side, asking, “Who are these far-from-ancient mariners, now?” Fiona looked round at him, and turned away again: Jack asked her, “Want to hear how I know you?”
“Oh, everyone in London knows Fiona. Everyone who’s anybody, that is.” The RAF man had an inane laugh, Paul remembered, and Phil had cut into it, telling him, “Harry, I only borrowed her for a moment. Take her away, will you?”
“All right.” Fiona moved back a pace, and Jack’s hands slid off her arms: you could see the marks where he’d been holding her. “I give up.”
“Your portrait. In Nick’s cabin in a destroyer thousands of miles away. About a year ago, it was.”
“But how sweet of him to have had—”
“The hell with him! I’ve lived with your face in my mind ever since! Now I know you’re real, and it’s incredible. I’d begun to think you were a figment of my imagination—or Nick invented you, or—”
“You’re not at all like him, are you?”
“No.” He inclined his head, like someone acknowledging a compliment. “I’m not.”
The roar of an aircraft engine blotted out the daydream. Paul and the four OEMS gunners stared upwards as a fighter swept over. No guns were firing, and there was just enough light to make out the shape of a second one as it hurtled over behind the first: they’d both been Fulmars. Memories of that evening in the Gay Nineties were like bits of an old film that he could rerun at will in his brain. And the shot of Jack as he’d uttered those three words, “No, I’m not,” became a still, the camera holding on an expression that was a mixture of excitement and vindictiveness. Beale said, “Patrols goin’ up.”
The two that followed were Sea Hurricanes. One pair of fighters from each of the two carriers, probably. Paul checked the time, as the noise of the last one faded: 6:22. The escorting warships would almost certainly have enemy formations on their RDF screens by now, and two of the cruisers, Mackeson had said, were equipped as fighter-direction ships, able to vector fighters on to approaching bombers.
Daylight growing. Waiting, watching. Wally and McNaught chewing gum: even in this half-light you could see the rhythmic chomping. Withinshaw yawned like a great fat cat.
The commodore’s siren had blared for an emergency turn to starboard, and out on the wing of the screen destroyers were hunting and dropping depth charges: so it was obvious what the emergency turn was for. No bombers had appeared yet, but it was almost fully light and the red air-raid alert signals were flying, indicative of there being RDF contacts on the big ships’ screens.
The Montgovern’s Willet-Bruce moaned, repeating the emergency-turn signal. Mackeson had swung round for a quick look at the destroyer activity on the bow, but his glasses were trained out on the quarter again now, at the carriers who’d turned into the wind to fly-off a batch of Sea Hurricanes. Reinforcemen
ts to those already airborne, and another sign that enemy formations couldn’t be far away.
Humphrey Straight was beside his quartermaster at the steering position, conning the ship round to starboard.
Thornton came into the bridge. He’d stopped just inside the door,
with a look of surprise, as if he’d expected to be welcomed. Now he’d come over to Mackeson. He cleared his throat, as the siren wheezed itself into silence, and told him, “Signal. About a concentration—as you were, two concentrations—of U-boats on our track.”
He’d announced it rather pompously, as if the information derived from his own private sources.
“They’re right here, never mind on our track.” Mackeson lowered his glasses and perused the signal. He murmured, “Galitia Island, northeast and northwest of it. That’s about where we’d expect them to be thickest, isn’t it. But it’s—what, ninety miles ahead.” He took the message over to show the master. “I’d say it’s a case of sufficient unto the moment are the U-boats thereof, captain.”
Straight told his quartermaster, “Steady as you go.” The pipe in his mouth had gone out but he was still sucking at it. He glanced at his chief officer, Devenish, and muttered, “I’d say it’s a case of fuck the lot of ’em.” Thornton’s eyebrows were raised as he left the bridge. Out on the convoy’s port beam some destroyers had opened fire: before the turn, of course, that had been the bow. Now a more solid build-up of AA fire as battleships and cruisers and the Hunts on the quarter let rip too. Young Gosling, out in the exposed port wing of the bridge, was pointing astern and he had his whistle in his mouth. He was blowing it, presumably, but he might as well have been sucking it for all the use it was. Shell-bursts were gathering in the sky, which was silver-bright now from the rising sun ahead, and black-brown-grey puffballs of the exploding time-fused shells had edgings of gold and silver. To the bomber pilots they’d be plain black, and more deadly than decorative. The bombers were Junkers 88s again, a pack of a dozen or fifteen planes with a similar-sized group astern of them. They were high, and they gave the impression of climbing against the background brightness as they came in, most of the shell-bursts below them at first but getting closer: in fact they weren’t climbing, they were flying straight and level, giving warships’ HA control systems the kind of shoot they’d been designed for and didn’t often get. Bursts were appearing under the Junkers’ noses and all around them: and either they were dodging now or it was the percussions of the shells jarring them this way and that. Still coming, though—black wings, black crosses on white backgrounds, slicing through the drifting smoke of the shell-bursts as they held on towards the centre of the convoy.
A signalman—the naval V/S rating who was one of Mackeson’s team—was pointing out to starboard: “Sir, that—” It was drowned in sharper, closer noise as the Montgovern’s Bofors guns opened fire. The signalman had been pointing out at the RAF man in the starboard wing. He in turn had been trying to draw Mackeson’s attention to something in the sea on the starboard bow, but now he’d given up, he was leaning over to watch the “something” as it passed.
Devenish muttered, “Torpedo track.” There wasn’t much else it could have been. But it was as well they’d turned: the escort commander must have told the commodore that torpedoes had been fired. From the Blackadder now another siren-signal was wailing, ordering a return to the mean course, and at the same time every gun in the convoy and in the warships surrounding it was blazing vertically or near-vertically at bombers overhead. Humphrey Straight leaned close to his quartermaster’s ear and growled, “Port fifteen degrees.” Bombs were raising dirty-looking heaps of sea between ships in the rear half of the convoy as they began the turn. Then, from the quarter, an explosion was deep, solid-sounding … Mackeson, still out in the wing—he’d gone to see what had been exciting the Air Force man out there—saw several bomb-splashes between the rearmost merchantmen and the battleships: it looked as if the battleships had been the targets for those bombs. But that deep boom hadn’t been the bomb-burst: he was almost certain someone had been torpedoed. He had his glasses trained on the quarter as the whole convoy turned back towards its mean course: and one ship back there was turning the wrong way. It was the freighter on the far side—the starboard side—of the tanker Caracas Moon. The last ship in column four. She was swinging out to starboard, away from the rest of the convoy and across the bows of a Hunt-class destroyer which was taking sharp avoiding action. That ship was also listing. Gunfire, which had slackened, was building to a new crescendo as the second half of the bomber force came over. Mackeson, turning to go back inside the bridge, happened to glance down at the foc’sl and saw young Everard grab one gunner’s arm and point. Then both Oerlikons were spitting fire. These Junkers, unlike the front-runners, had gone into shallow dives, flying faster because of that and dipping through the barrage of AA fire and across the forepart of the convoy. This part. But they weren’t in Oerlikon range yet, he thought. Everard lacked experience, but that DEMS killick should have known better and held his fire. He went inside, shutting the bridge door quickly to keep some of the noise out. Humphrey Straight was telling the quartermaster, “Ease to five degrees of port wheel.” He glanced around, stared bull-like at Mackeson, who told him, “End ship in column four. Torpedo. She’s dropped out.”
Straight scowled, looking at the convoy diagram on the bulkhead.
“Agulhas Queen. Old Vic Kerrick.”
He stared aft in the hope of a sight of her: then he’d turned back. “Midships the wheel.” He muttered, “Bastards.” A stick of bombs came slanting, and sea rose in a mound of white and grey not far off the port bow. The other three of the stick hit and smothered the Warrenpoint: sea leaped from near-misses right against her hull, and one bomb landed in her after well deck. There was a spurt of smoke and debris, then a second afterwards an explosion near the waterline on her port side. Smoke gushed out of her, enveloping her afterpart.
Humphrey Straight was leaning forward with his blunt nose almost touching the glass front window of the bridge. He ordered “Port fifteen degrees. Two short blasts.”
Devenish moved that way, but the bosun was ahead of him with a hand on the lever that operated the siren. He jerked it down twice, sending two short, strong wafts of steam through the whistle, two blasts meaning, “I am directing my course to port.” The ships astern would follow his lead.
It was close enough. The Montgovern’s stem was hidden in the smoke pouring out of the ship ahead. Swinging through it, swinging faster now: and they would almost certainly have carried away the Warrenpoint’s Cherub speed log, coming that close under her stern. Straight had ordered the wheel to be centred, then put the other way, so as not to swing his own ship’s stern in a swiping blow at the Warrenpoint as they pounded by her. The Warrenpoint’s guns were still in action: all of them, even a Bofors on her stern with Army gunners manning it. You could see the rapid winking stabs of flame as it flung up its forty-millimetre shells. In her after-well deck men were struggling with hoses. The smoke seemed to be coming up from her number five hatch. Mackeson, out on the bridge wing as the Montgovern passed her, saw a big gash with jagged, out-turned edges just above the waterline. So that bomb must have exploded on its way out, after it had passed almost right through the ship. They’d got by her now: she was dropping astern between columns one and two. While about a mile astern of the convoy—he used his binoculars, looking back between the columns and out past the battleship on the quarter—a long way back now a Hunt-class destroyer was nosing around the bow of the Agulhas Queen. She was leaning right over and he could see boats in the water, and a Sea Hurricane dipping protectively overhead. So the Agulhas Queen was being abandoned; and from the condition of the Warrenpoint as she’d been when they’d passed her he wouldn’t have betted on her survival either.
As he went back inside, Humphrey Straight had just ordered five degrees of starboard wheel, to edge her over into station at the correct distance from column two; he’d also glanced at the
bosun and shaken his head, a negative to the man’s readiness to give one short blast from the siren. He’d take her in gradually, not swerve in. He told Devenish, with a nod towards the engine-room telegraph, “Up a touch, mister.” Devenish gave the telegraph handle a jerk, one clang of the bell in the “ahead” direction, a private signal for a couple more revs per minute. They had a voicepipe to the engine-room, fitted specially for the requirements of convoy manoeuvring, but they weren’t accustomed to it and Mackeson had noticed that they hardly ever used it. The Montgovern had to move up now to take the Warrenpoint’s station as a column leader on the commodore’s port beam.
Gunfire had died away, except on the bow where a mutter of it was still following the attackers round: they’d be circling that way to get back on to their northeastward course for home.
They’d be back later, Paul supposed. Or others like them.
Ahead of the convoy a parachute drifted slowly seaward. Beale said, “One of our lot. On ’is own, must be.” He was probably right: the 88s had a crew of four, so from any of them there’d have been more than one parachute. Wally Short said, stepping back with an empty or part-empty Oerlikon magazine and swinging round to dump it in the bin, “I seen four Gerries down.”
Paul had seen three bombers hit and in trouble, but only two actually go down in the sea. The others might have crashed, but they hadn’t done so in his sight. Not much of a swap anyway, for two ships … Another depressing fact was that although they’d fired off a lot of ammunition, these Oerlikons hadn’t had any targets low or near enough to have had much chance of hitting.
When they’d been choking in the Warrenpoint’s smoke he’d thought There but for the grace of God … and then, But there’s still lots of time. For the grace of God to be less in evidence, he’d meant. And it had become real now, it was happening just as one had been told it would. When you were lectured on things like previous convoys’ losses and what was therefore certain to be in store for this one you heard it and believed it, but somehow without seeing it as applying to you directly. Until you saw it happening it was theory, talk, speculation. But it was real now. Or it had been, for a few minutes …
All the Drowning Seas: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 3 Page 11