“You mean when you tell him?”
“If no one else does first, you can count on it.”
“Well, she wouldn’t like that. Personally, I don’t give a damn.”
“You want him to hear about it, is that it?”
“It doesn’t matter to me, Paul. I don’t bloody care. Can’t you understand that?” He was staring at him, across his glass. “It’s pretty damn simple, if you’d—”
“Yeah.” Paul nodded. This wouldn’t be a good place to start a brawl, and in any case he thought Jack could probably take him on one-handed, and enjoy it too. He muttered, “It’s just I never imagined an Everard could be such a total shit. I wouldn’t have thought anyone could—”
“Takes people different ways. Some men leave other men to drown, some help themselves to other men’s women. Which brand’s the shittiest might be a matter of opinion … Oh, here she is!”
Fiona Gascoyne, wreathed in fur. Jack slid off his stool, and took her hands. “Wow. Such glamour …”
“Only because the old bags won’t let us wear our uniforms in dives like this one. Otherwise I’d wear it all the time. Day and night.” Paul remembered the way she’d smiled up at Jack: then she’d glanced at him. A different kind of smile: “Hello, Paul.” He was remembering it now through other movement, action building round him, the immediate surroundings in visual if not mental focus. He remembered Jack saying blandly, “She does look terrific in the MTC uniform. For some reason it’s verboten when they’re off-duty. Not that I’m complaining …” He was showing Fiona the face of his watch, then: “Look, we’ve got to skid along, I’m afraid. I mean right away.” “Oh, damn it all!”
In hindsight and memory you could sort the exchanges into a rational sequence. At the time, it had been a blur, confused by the way he felt. Fiona complaining to Jack that she’d have liked to spend longer here, talk to Paul and get to know him, and Jack answering that if she arrived half an hour late it wasn’t his fault … Paul told him, “My leave’s up tomorrow. I’ll be on an early train north.”
“Too bad.” Jack nodded. “Good luck, anyway.”
“It might be a good thing if we could talk together about that drowning angle.”
It was totally irrational, he thought: no more than an excuse …
“We do truly have to run, unfortunately.” Jack’s hand was in the crook of Fiona’s elbow, turning her away. A lot of men looking at her: she really was quite sensational …
“Fookin’ soddin’ bastards!”
No need to look round to know who’d yelled that. Paul was on his feet between the two guns, Beale and Withinshaw closed-up at them and the loading numbers standing by. There was a red alert and the commodore’s siren was calling for an emergency turn to port, there was a pack of bombers right ahead with a fighter escort weaving against the sky above them, and a big force of Junkers 88s approaching on the beam. They had fighters over them too. They’d need them, with Sea Hurricanes, Martlets and Fulmars streaming up from the two carriers astern. He’d been watching the pattern of a multiple attack develop—destroyers abaft the beam to port had just opened fire, a low-level barrage which could only mean there’d be torpedo-bombers moving in on that quarter—he’d been seeing it and reacting to it while the close-up of Fiona Gascoyne, dazzlingly attractive, faded from his mind.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The noise bewildered him. Searching for voices in it he found one inside his head, Fiona’s voice telling him, “Of course I’ll marry you, you great oaf!” She was naked: she was striking poses, wearing his new cap, strutting around in it, playing the fool and looking absolutely sensational, shouting things like “Hard a-port! Are you hard a-port again yet?” He’d been urging her to come back to bed. The cap had arrived yesterday by parcel post from Messrs Gieves of Bond Street, who’d sent it to him at this pub where they were spending a few days of his leave. It was muddling, because it seemed to be happening in the wrong war: the cap had gold oak-leaves on its peak, which made it a commander’s although he was still a junior lieutenant. He’d only come back—been brought back—from the raid on Zeebrugge in which he’d commanded his old “oily-wad” destroyer Bravo: he’d been wounded, on Bravo’s bridge, in the course of towing another destroyer, Grebe, out of trouble, and this was why he was in bed now in Sister Agnes’s private hospital in Grosvenor Gardens.
The clattering and hammering made no sense either. Unless they were tearing the lead off the roof. Which wasn’t likely, he thought … Actually, she was a Mrs Keyser. Her patients called her “Sister Agnes,” and she was a personal friend of the King. His Majesty had given her a key to some private entrance to the palace gardens, someone had told him. It might have been Sarah, his stepmother, who’d mentioned it.
Getting muddled again now. Because if he was in Mrs Keyser’s establishment, how could Fiona have been here with him?
Christ, the din … Connected with it was an ache in his head like a slowly turning knife.
The pub was in Sussex. But that had been a leave in the second war. And if Sarah wanted to persuade Mrs Keyser to discharge him, it could only mean that—
Well, he’d dreamt the bit about the pub. That was it.
But—damn it, if this was 1918 …
He was panting, his own heartbeats shook him like blows inside his chest. It was the sheer effort of thinking this out, trying to get events in their right order, trying to reason with it all, make sense … He warned himself, One thing at a time, now …
Sarah wanted to have him in her care at Mullbergh while he recuperated. He wanted this too. Except he also knew it should be avoided, because he had some fore-knowledge of what would happen at Mullbergh, if he was alone there for long with Sarah. He didn’t want it to happen. His feelings for her were protective as well as adoring: and she was his father’s wife. Besides, Fiona—who’d looked tremendous in his cap, who was one of those girls who’d been designed not to wear clothes—wouldn’t approve of it either. He’d told her, “You have the most beautiful breasts I ever saw.”
“Kiss them, then.”
Cap flat-aback, soft hair flowing around her bare shoulders, which were also beautiful. She had large eyes set slightly aslant above prominent cheekbones. He’d asked her, “What if Sarah comes?”
So she had been here!
He wished to God they’d stop that hammering …
You got to it eventually, though, if you took it step by step and didn’t rush it. Everything fell into place quite naturally and simply then. The afternoon was the time for visits, and Sarah had come specially to London to get him out of Sister Agnes’s place and take him to Mullbergh. He rather liked the idea of Mullbergh, because his father wouldn’t be there. Sir John Everard was in the Army, in France. Fiona asked him, “Who’s Kate?”
“She’s in Australia. But if I’m going to marry you—”
“Will Sarah object?”
He didn’t see what Sarah had to do with it. It was his having married Ilyana, Paul’s mother, that had turned Sarah into a block of granite … He thought that was what had done it; that more than anything else. But Kate was in Crete, where the Stukas had come in screaming packs in a day-long, day-after-day-long bedlam. Orion had been hit again: smoke was gushing out of her and the whole armoured top of one for’ard turret had been blown off, the gun-barrels twisted and blackened, and every man in that gunhouse would be dead. He hadn’t known it at the time but her captain had been dying on his bridge at that same moment. Her steering had gone and she’d swung right around, reversing course and heading back towards Crete with a new Stuka swarm coming up from Scarpanto. She was the flagship and they’d crippled her, and now they’d concentrate on her and do their damnedest to finish her. You had to stay close to her, keep the bastards high, give her a chance to draw breath and fight her fires, shift to emergency steering and get back on course. All the destroyers were turning with her, closing in around her. She’d been packed with the troops they’d lifted out of Crete and he’d guessed then what it would be like inside her, in
those crowded messdecks to which Stukas’ bombs had penetrated, and he’d guessed right because they couldn’t make much of a job of cleaning her, in Alex. They sent her for refit, reconstruction in the States, and when she stopped at Cape Town she smelt so badly they wouldn’t let her dock. She had to anchor, outside.
He told Sarah about it, when she came to take him up to Yorkshire. Sarah had brown hair and hazel eyes and an intriguing mouth: vulnerable, adorable. He told her, “Jack’s cruiser was sunk by dive-bombers, off Crete. I couldn’t stay to pick up survivors because—well, you couldn’t stop, if you did the Stukas had you nailed. If I’d have stopped I’d have only killed more men—”
“Did you kill Jack, then?”
“He’s alive. He got ashore, and—”
“No thanks to you. And David drowned, didn’t he? At Jutland? He died like a hero, trying to save other—”
“He died in a blue funk. Off his head.”
“You’re lying, Nick! You killed your own father with that lie!”
“It’s the truth. I heard it all from a man named—”
“You killed your own father, Nick!”
It was Sarah but a different Sarah. Transformed totally. Bitter, tight-faced, shrewish. Cold, harsh eyes hating him … “You’d have let Jack drown, too—your father first, then your—”
“No.”
It wasn’t true. Ordering his destroyers away had been an agonizing, terrible decision. The sea full of swimmers and the German aircraft dipping to machine-gun them in the water, murder them as they tried to swim away: you’d see a man stop swimming and lie still in the water while it turned pink around him. Jack’s face, blood-stained, staring up at him from the water. Jack screamed, “I’m your son!”
“Steady. Steady, now. You’ll be all right, now. Easy does it …”
A different voice asked quietly, “Could we get him aft to his own cabin?”
“I suppose we could move him without doing any damage. Trouble is, looking after him. He can’t be left alone, and with this lot here I can’t spare an SBA.”
“His own steward full-time, plus visits from you?”
Beyond the curtain, a sailor muttered something in a voice like a groan, and an SBA told him, “’Ang on, Lofty. With you in a mo’.”
“Well, I suppose that’s possible …”
The voices had dropped lower, and with the clanging and general racket from up top he couldn’t hear what they were saying. It hadn’t made much sense anyway, but he’d been glad to hear the voices. Such a ghastly bloody din up there: it was like being in a destroyer in dry dock, with workmen banging around here, there and everywhere … There was no engine vibration, he realized, her screws weren’t turning. In intervals between bouts of hammering from above he could hear the whirr of a fan, but there was no draught from it that he could feel.
All he could feel was the pain in his head and a sort of confused sadness involving Sarah and Jack, the whole mess that was the past but still contaminated the present and in some way seemed to threaten the future too.
“Will I be allowed to travel up to Mullbergh?”
Silence … Except for the row elsewhere. Then: “Mullbergh?”
“Sarah’s running it as a sort of recuperative centre.”
Sibbold looked at Gant. “Sounds very suitable.” He didn’t smile. He paused before he added, addressing his patient, “To start with we’ll move you to your own quarters, sir.”
Whatever that meant.
Tired. But he didn’t want to sleep if it meant slipping back into the nightmare of Sarah’s accusations. It wasn’t the same Sarah whom he’d loved, whose screams had woken him in the night, brought him out of bed and hurrying down that long, icy corridor. He’d been a boy then, a child: remembering it, he was a child again, dropping off to sleep. There’d been rows before, time and again he’d lain awake trying not to hear his father’s drunken raving and Sarah’s quiet, defensive reasoning, pleading. Misery would hold him doubled in the bed, cold from the old house and colder still inside, helpless despite his urge to protect, to love Sarah as much as his father seemed—inexplicably—to hate her. Head under the bedclothes, praying for it all to end … But that night she’d screamed, he’d heard a crash and another scream and he’d thought, He’s murdering her: then he’d been running, bare-footed and shaking with cold and fright … Sarah’s dress had been ripped open, downwards from the neck. She was trying to hold it together with one hand and the other was out defensively towards Nick’s father, who was in evening clothes and raving, mad-bull drunk. The top half of Sarah’s bedroom door had been smashed in—he’d done it with a heavy shoe-case, which was lying among the broken wood. For years and years, her voice had echoed in his skull: “It’s all right, Nick. Truly. Go back to bed.”
“Why are we stopped?”
He wondered why they didn’t answer him. And then, why he was down here anyway. What the noise was, what was going on … He was below decks: he could feel that—sense it, smell it. Besides, all the hammering and rasping was overhead. And—that smell was ether, a hospital smell … Well, of course, he’d been dreaming, he’d dreamt he was at sea … He asked, “Has my stepmother been in today?”
He wondered whether Kate might come: whether anyone had told her he was here. But he didn’t like to ask about Kate, because the people here wouldn’t know who he was talking about.
He wondered whether he’d told Fiona about Kate. He didn’t think he had.
“All right, sir, are we?”
“Who’s that?”
“SBA Green, sir. PMO’ll be back in two shakes.”
“Why are we stopped?”
“Stopped, sir? Oh. Well—we’re at anchor, sir.”
“Where?”
“Surabaya, sir.”
Surabaya. Java, in the Dutch East Indies …
Combined Striking Force. They’d sent him to join China Force and he’d got rumbled with this fellow Doorman … And—it came to him suddenly—there was to be a conference, a captains’ meeting in the Dutch flagship de Ruyter, and he had to get to it. God almighty, he’d be late!
“Help me up, would you? Are my clothes here? Come on, give me a—”
“Steady on now, sir. PMO’ll be back any minute, he’ll explain—”
“I can’t see!”
“Because of the bandage, sir, that’s all it is. Here—easy does it, just lie back again, sir, lie still a while and—that’s the way …” Hands on his shoulders were holding him down. “Look. I have to get over to the flagship. Otherwise—”
“Hello, hello.” Different voice. The first one began to whisper: then the newcomer murmured soothingly, “All right. All right, now, all right …” There was something familiar about the voice, despite its tendency to repeat itself like a stuck gramophone record. Nick said, “I have to get up and dress, because Sarah’s coming for me. She’s arranged it with Sister Agnes: I’m going up to Mullbergh, to recuperate.”
“That’s a first-class idea, sir.”
He felt the slight pressure of the antiseptic swab and then the prick of the needle.
“There. Relax now. Rest’s your best medicine now.” Sibbold straightened up. So did Green, who’d been holding Nick down on the cot. Leading Seaman Williams, on the upper berth, had his head turned to the right and he was eye to eye with the doctor. He asked, “In a bad way, is he?”
“Not necessarily, Williams. If we’re lucky, it’ll turn out to be quite a temporary condition.” He pointed upwards. “Hear that?” “Couldn’t hardly not hear it.”
“They’re straightening out your wheelhouse for you. All we’ve got to do is get your legs healed up, and you’ll be right back on the job.”
“D’you know how long we’re staying here, sir?”
“Just long enough to get essentials working, I’d guess. Commander Gant’s ashore, seeing the rear-admiral. We’ll know more about it when he gets back.”
“Repairs’ll take a while, sir, won’t they?”
“I think just patc
hing up, jury-rigging—”
“Any other ships in Surabaya, sir?”
“Oh, yes. Exeter, Encounter, five or six Yank destroyers … Williams, old chap, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get around the other patients now. You’re feeling a lot better, aren’t you?”
“Except I’d as soon be dead.”
He’d said it flatly, unemotionally, and turned his head away to stare up at the deckhead, which was white-enamelled with heavy I-sectioned girders crossing it.
“Listen, Williams. Here is one fact. There is no reason or evidence to believe that your wife did not get away from Singapore. Here’s another. If she did get away, she’ll be as anxious to find you now as you must be to find her. You’d be no use to her dead, and precious little use alive if you adopt that kind of attitude. Aren’t you giving up a bit too easily?”
“I’m sorry.” His eyes stayed on the deckhead.
“Damn it, she’s going to need your help, man!”
The head turned. Williams nodded. “Sir.”
Sibbold hesitated. Then he turned away, beckoning Green to follow him out through the curtain. He told him quietly, “Keep an eye on that one. I don’t want him left alone for any length of time.”
Gant was still ashore when the first air attack came in. They were Val dive-bombers with an escort of fighters. They went mostly for the harbour front, with only a few desultory passes at the ships—like afterthoughts, as if they hadn’t been briefed to expect anything afloat here and didn’t have bombs to waste on them. The shore guns put up an extremely effective barrage, too, and it kept all the attackers high. Repair work in Defiant, even the work on the bridge, continued without interruption while her four-inch AA guns joined for a short while in the barrage; the only notice the men working with cutting-torches in the bridge paid to the enemy was to put on tin hats.
There was damage to some buildings and to an oiling jetty, where a fire was started, and there was a nearish miss on an American destroyer in dry dock. Then it was over, and the ERAs took off their tin hats. They were cutting away the wreckage, as much as needed to be removed before new beams and plates could be riveted and welded on. LTOs—electrical ratings—were re-rigging telephone and gunnery-control circuits, and shipwrights, mechanics and ordnance artificers were all working flat out, backed up by teams of less skilled assistants. The biggest job of all, of course, and the most important, was in the boiler room.
All the Drowning Seas: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 3 Page 13