The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  He looks round at her. Grins. She swallows down the fear, and smiles back.

  HMS Goliath, Grand Harbour, Malta

  April 14, 1915

  THE POST COMES IN as William is scrubbing up after the forenoon watch. He’s bone tired, his back burning, his palms raw, and what he really should do is eat something, slump into his hammock, read her letter, sleep. But he has shovelled coal and slept and eaten, turn and turn about, for days, and now there is a whole new island out there. A whole new country. He has dug his way here through mountains of coal.

  As he climbs up from the mess, daylight dazzles him; he crosses the deck half blinded, stunned by sun and noise. Coal thunders into the hold, crates swing, ropes creak under the strain, gulls wheel and cry. He reaches the far rail and he leans there, and looks down and down the curving flank of the ship into the giddy depths, coloured flares swimming across his vision, and he breathes in the unfamiliar air, the smell of harbour water, coal, drains, bread and oranges, deal, the dusty smell of hemp. He sucks it in.

  Below, fishes flicker in the glassy water. Strange fishes, new fishes, Maltese fishes now. There’d been sea snakes off Africa, slithering through the waves. Flying fish scudding across the surf. His eyes adjust, and he looks up, across the harbour, where fishing boats sway at their moorings. They look back at him with blue painted eyes. Behind them, the harbour wall sweeps round like a protecting arm, and buildings straggle up the hills from the quayside. Above it all, on the clifftop, stands a vast building, quiet and empty. It must be a cathedral, he thinks, or some kind of ancient temple, to have that scale, that prominence.

  The colours are so clean, so simple here: just golden rock, just blue sea and sky.

  He recalls the letter, dangling from his hand. He opens it. There’s something about her letters—the neat, closed handwriting, her careful sentences—that’s just like her. He reads the words, and it’s like her voice is speaking them. It’s an uneasy feeling.

  I was able to speak to Mr. Travis, and he assured me that you can have your old job back, at Price’s, when the war is over, and we have you home with us again. It is great news, that we can have that to look forward to—your return, and our security as a family.

  He closes his eyes, and the redness pulses and flares with colour. He tries to imagine her. Her pale curls, her grey dress, her buttoned collar, the alien swell of her body beneath her clothes. It is all so far away. In the damp and chill of Battersea the workers stream into Price’s in the dawn dark, stream out again at twilight. He tries to see himself amongst them, another dark figure in a dark coat in the dark winter evening, the way he used to be.

  The baby is due in May.

  “Drink, Billy-boy?”

  Sully. He leans in beside William, elbows on the rail. Sully is an old hand, leading stoker, and a bad penny. It’s hard to say no to him.

  William folds the letter briskly, slips it into his pocket. Notices Sully notice it. Sully grins, and it reminds William of something, but he can’t quite place it. It’s like his skin is somehow too tight for his bones.

  “Seriously. Drink.”

  “Postcard first,” William says.

  “Everywhere we go, you’re off looking for postcards.”

  “For the missus.”

  “She must be quite something.”

  William inclines his head. Once, when they were courting, he’d caught a glimpse of her coming down from the offices at Price’s; the swirl of her skirts, a flash of ankle, the neatness of her waist: before he’d even realised it was her, his chest had tightened with desire.

  “Drink first though. You can buy a postcard after. It’s young Paveley’s birthday.”

  “It’s always someone’s birthday.”

  Sully shrugs. “You’ve got to take your chances when you can.”

  Of course you do. Because who knows what’s going to happen next, or if you’ll ever get another chance at all? Sully nudges closer, conspiratorial. He smells of the boiler room. Coal dust. Sweat. Damp. A smell like old mattresses.

  “We’re off to Spiteri’s,” Sully says. “You’ll come to Spiteri’s. You’ll like it there.”

  William looks out across the harbour, where the little boats rock on the little harbour waves. The blue painted eyes stare back at him. Above them stands the quiet temple. He’d rather go—just walk out through the streets. Climb up to the temple, its shadowed cloisters. See the city.

  “What d’they do that for?” William nods towards the fishing boats.

  “Eh?” Sully squints out along William’s sightline.

  “Those boats. Why do they paint those eyes on them?”

  “Oh,” Sully says. “That. It’s for good luck. Safe return. They think if they paint those eyes on their boats, they can outstare the evil eye.”

  Valletta wrong-foots him. He feels queasy, liverish. It’s like nowhere else he’s been, or rather it’s like everywhere: it seems caught between Africa, Arabia, and Europe. It’s like stepping into an imagined city, into someone else’s dream.

  There are five of them, climbing through the city streets. Sully, Paveley, Dwyer and Spooner. Him. The letter swings in his pocket as he walks, the corner of it pressing into his thigh with each step. It is cool and dim in the city: the buildings are high and the streets are narrow, cutting out the sun. The men pass by ornate carved stonework and under balconies and beneath a criss-cross of washing lines slung high above. They jump up onto doorsteps and skip along their length and leap off the other end; they run fingertips along the heavy wooden doors, over the cold metal stare of doorknockers. Everything is grand, but also somehow faintly shabby, like a girl in evening dress with bare and dirty feet. The men talk and laugh and shout, but the houses stand shuttered, silent, and as they make their way deeper into the city the silence begins to prickle into William’s skin, and makes him rub at the cropped hair on the back of his neck, and he falls quiet too.

  Something lands hard on his shoulder, making him jump, and it’s only when he touches it and brings his hand away wet that he realises that it’s water fallen from the dripping linen high above.

  He watches his step then, moves round the wet patches on the pavement. He becomes mesmerised by the progression of his boots over the flagstones, the way they keep taking him on and on, even though he’s not himself certain where he’s going, or that he wants to go there. Then, sudden and familiar, birdsong bubbles from a shuttered window. He looks up, looks round for the source of it.

  “You hear that?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that a nightingale?”

  “Think so,” Dwyer says.

  “At this time of day?”

  “They blind the birds, to make them sing all day.”

  Sully tosses this information back over his shoulder as if it’s nothing. William rubs again at the back of his neck, trying to rub away a shudder. When he was a boy, back in Kent, there’d been nightingales in the fields behind the house. He’d lie awake at night, crammed in between his sleeping brothers, and listen to the birds sing.

  They wheel round into a cross street and three women are coming down the far side. He feels it in himself, sees it instantly in the other men, the way they register the women’s presence. Go quieter, watchful. The women come towards them, wrapped in dark Maltese capes, the hoods arched high with ribs of whalebone, shadowing the face, concealing even the shape of the head. Passing the open door of a Roman church, William catches a glimpse of candlelight, hears the mutter of mass, catches the smell of incense smoke. Then the women turn silently and drop into the church, leaving behind a scent in the air, smoky and sharp, with a shade of roses. Their passing makes him acutely aware of himself. Of the hair bristling from his upper lip and the sweat gathering in his armpits. He pushes his hands into his pockets. The coal dust never quite washes from the skin.

  They turn a corner in shadow and climb a flight of stone steps. The streets are busier here. Market girls pass, barefoot, carrying baskets of scarlet tomatoes and sheaves of
green herbs on their shoulders, heads in determined profile. On the pavement, men in blue workclothes crouch to play dice. They glance up as the seamen pass, but then look back to their game, barely noticing.

  “There,” Sully nods.

  There’s a bar right up at the top of the street. It’s painted green; its windows are dark. Spiteri’s.

  “C’mon,” Sully says.

  They march on up towards it. Their footfalls echo back from the quiet buildings. They reach the door. William slows his pace, lets the others filter in ahead.

  “Watcher waiting for, Hastings?”

  “I’m not …” William says. “I’m going to …” He gestures out along the street, up ahead. See the city. Buy a postcard. Write home to my wife.

  Sully jerks his head at the dark doorway. “They sell postcards in here.”

  Of course they don’t. And up along the street there is a flight of stone steps, and a carriage clattering along the street above, and an archway that opens onto darkness, and a whole city just aching to be seen. But William can’t afford to put Sully’s back up. He steps up to the doorway of the bar. Sully grins.

  “I’ll just have the one.”

  “Course, son. Course.”

  It’s dark; it smells of dungy foreign cigarettes and old wine and spice. William’s heart lifts at the strangeness of it. Mr. Spiteri waddles over, arms open, pretending to remember Sully, happy to be introduced to the new hands, calling them his boys, ushering them across to a huddle of chairs round a circular table at the back. His apron is long and stained and his belly is as big and round as a horse’s. They order the local red wine, which is cheap. Spiteri’s delighted with their order, and off on his way to get it, still talking, commending the menu. William finds himself smiling: this is not the Prince’s Head, with his dad and his workmates playing dominoes and smoking and watching him through their pipe smoke. No-one knows him here.

  There are, as he’s already well aware there always are in harbourside bars, whores. They sit at the counter, in satin wraps, their legs showing right up to the calf, the bulge of flesh like a soft unfamiliar fruit. One woman turns and catches William’s eye, and he smiles instinctively in reply to her smile. He hadn’t meant to look, but he finds himself caught, until she drops her gaze and turns away. She’s pretty, in a rough sort of way. Ragged curls, bitten dirty nails. Skin like milky tea.

  Not like Amelia.

  He drinks. The wine is both harsh and sweet. The first mouthful makes him shudder. Sully proposes Paveley’s health; they tip back their little tumblers and empty them down their throats. Paveley is nineteen; he had his birthday while they were at sea. It makes William feel old. He is twenty-four next birthday. He is going to be a father. His job at Price’s is waiting for him, when the war is over.

  The bar fills quickly, becomes dark with men and noisy. He’ll have just one more. Then he’ll go and find her a postcard. Something pretty. You can’t say very much on the back of one postcard. You can’t be expected to.

  Sully tilts the bottle towards William’s glass. William nods. He watches the liquid tumble in, watches the dark level of it rise.

  Mrs. Spiteri emerges from the kitchen. She carries a plate of warm pastries, glistening with oil. Mrs. Spiteri’s face is round as an apple, shiny and damp. She sets the plate down and smiles at the men as they eat, enjoying their enjoyment, and when she catches William’s eye she nods to him, asking his approval. He smiles back, nods, It’s good. And it is—the filling is a kind of pease pudding, spicy, peppery—and she smiles broader, and nods again, more vigorously, saying something in Maltese, and when she nods her body shakes—unsupported breasts, soft belly, no corsets on—and William drags his thoughts away from her soft giving flesh, the clear satisfaction she seems to find in others’ pleasure.

  The lads are talking, but their conversation is trailing, loose-knit: they are distracted by the women at the bar, who glance round every so often to catch an eye. Then the pretty one turns round in her seat, and recrosses her legs, and her wrap slips away to show a smooth knee and a glimpse of thigh, and Sully’s on his feet, heading over to her, drink left unfinished on the table.

  William watches. He shouldn’t. Sully lays his hand on the whore’s hip, on the silky wrap. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t stiffen. She just turns to him, then leans in towards him, serious, big eyes looking up at Sully’s face. He talks, confident, sure of what he’s doing. She gives him a smile, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. She slips down from the stool and takes his hand; she leads him over to the stairs.

  William watches them until they move out of his line of sight. He downs his drink. He thinks he can hear them. Hear their tread cross the landing above, hear their talk, their creaking through the upstairs room. It’s not really possible, not with the noise of the bar. He wishes he could be like Sully. Just for a bit. Just for the next half hour or so. Then forget what he had done.

  Paveley downs his drink, gets to his feet. He brushes his hands off on the seat of his trousers, grins to the company, and heads over to the women. The one in the mauve wrap turns towards him, and when he stands talking to her she touches his chest, laying her hand flat there as she talks to him, looking right up into his face, like she knows him. Everywhere they go, the whores can always speak English.

  The two of them go upstairs. William pours himself another glass of wine.

  There’s no talk now. He sits and drinks with Dwyer and Spooner. They’re all locked into their own thoughts. The women.

  Then Dwyer gets up, his chair scraping back, his cheeks red. He goes over to the bar, just touches the remaining girl on the arm. She looks round at him and smiles. She’s not a girl; she must be knocking on forty. The agreement is made briskly. He follows her to the stairs, following her broad backside in its silky wrap.

  William downs his drink. There’s an ache in his belly. He wants.

  Boots thunder down the stairs, and Sully bursts back to the table, stuffing his shirt into his misbuttoned kecks, grinning like a baboon.

  “Be so kind,” he says, nodding to his glass, so William fills it, then fills his own glass too, and drinks it down. The wine is inky, sweet and dark, and it is not working, not softening or warming him at all.

  The bar has filled up with soldiers now; a few of the Scottish Borderers and the Welsh, and more seamen off the Goliath. It’s full and dark and noisy.

  Dwyer is engaged to be married. Earlier in the voyage, on shore leave in Simonstown, in that bar near the market, where the women with their glossy skin and their blue-black eyes lingered, a few drinks over the eighth, William had told Dwyer what he’d never told anybody else, what he only said to Dwyer because he’d thought their circumstances were similar, what he’d never dream of telling Amelia; though if he could tell her it might make her understand what the world was like and how he had to live in it now. That he’d made a promise to himself, that whatever else happened when he was away, he wasn’t going to go with a whore. He wasn’t going to bring home a disease, he’d told Dwyer, head drooping low and heavy over folded arms. Much less leave some poor half-breed bastard to starve in a foreign gutter. And Dwyer had nodded and agreed. William was just right, good man, good for him. And he, Dwyer, he’d do the same, because he had a girl at home who was worth the waiting for. Skin like cream, skin like the finest Welsh cream, he’d said, shaking his head, thinking of that skin and of the wedding night to come. But two bottles of rum empty on the table, and Dwyer had gone out the back with one of the black glossy women, and William had drunk on alone, chin on folded arms, tilting the glass to his lips.

  Sully empties the remaining wine into his glass, and Spiteri sets down another bottle with a flourish.

  Which is the difference, of course—the waiting for, William thinks. When it’s still all possibility, when it’s all still in the imagination. When you dream of plucking open those little pearl buttons on her blouse, of pulling the ribbon of her camisole bow to make it come undone, of her breath quickening, of pushing up h
er skirts in creamy folds of cotton to stroke her milk-white thighs and kiss her sweet, clean, legitimate wifely cunt. Before it’s real.

  He pours another glass, looks back to the bar. Sully’s whore is back. She sits on her stool, calm, unruffled, and the barman hands her a glass of something and stirs a spoonful of something into it. They chat easily; old friends. The way the satin slides over her hips, the way it hangs around her peach-soft calves. She lights a cigarette, and her lips are a fleshy mushroomy pink. At the table, Sully drinks contentedly, sucking down the wine between his teeth and leaning back in his chair, sated. He will sleep tonight, slung in the hammock above William. While William lies awake and wanting.

  Sully starts to talk about this new campaign in a distant, unbothered way, like it’s going to happen to someone else. This is the swift strike that ends the conflict; that Churchill fellow is sharp, you know. It won’t take much: they won’t be expected there, in the Dardanelles. They’ll ship in the Tommies, the Tommies will have a pop at old Asiatic Annie, and Annie will run squealing like the bunch of schoolgirls that they are, and Sully, himself, is going to watch it all from the safety of Goliath while the guns boom out overhead and pummel anything that’s left of the fleeing enemy.

  “You sure she’s safe?” William asks.

  “Goliath?” Sully asks. “She’s sweet as a nut.”

  “She’s getting on a bit.”

  “Give over. She’s well-seasoned, that’s all.”

  Nodding, William rolls himself a tickler, his fingers thick with drink. “Not quite got the turn of speed, though, of the newer ships.”

  “Bollocks,” Sully says, swigs his wine. “Shovel faster.”

  William laughs, lights his fag, making the tobacco strands flare and fall into ashes.

  “Might head up to that temple in a bit,” he says.

  Sully just looks at him. “Eh?”

  “That building up above the harbour. You know. Saw it today.”