On the Beach

by Nevil Shute

  That morning the First Naval Member, Vice-Admiral Sir David Hartman, came down to inspect the only ship in his command that was worth bothering about. That took about an hour, and he spent a quarter of an hour with Dwight and Peter Holmes in the office cabin, discussing with them the modifications that they had proposed to the draft operation order. He left then for a conference with the Prime Minister, at that time in Melbourne; with no aircraft flying on the airlines, Federal Government from Canberra was growing difficult, and parliamentary sessions there were growing shorter and less frequent.

  That evening Dwight rang Moira Davidson, as he had promised. “Well,” he said, “we got back in one piece. There’s just a little being done on board the ship, but nothing very much.”

  She asked, “Does that mean I can see her?”

  “I’d be glad to show her to you. We shan’t be going off again before Monday.”

  “I’d like to see her, Dwight. Would tomorrow or Sunday be the best?”

  He thought for a moment. If they were to sail on Monday, Sunday might be busy. “I’d say tomorrow would be best.”

  In turn, she thought rapidly. She would have to run out on Anne Sutherland’s party, but it looked like a dreary sort of party anyway. “I’d love to come tomorrow,” she said. “Do I come to Williamstown station?”

  “That’s the best way. I’ll meet you there. What train will you be coming on?”

  “I don’t know the times. Let’s say the first one after eleven thirty.”

  “Okay. If I should be all tied up, I’ll get Peter Holmes or else John Osborne to go down and meet you.”

  “Did you say John Osborne?”

  “That’s right. Do you know him?”

  “An Australian—with C.S.I.R.O.?”

  “That’s the one. A tall guy with spectacles.”

  “He’s a sort of relation—his aunt married one of my uncles. Is he in your party?”

  “Definitely. He joined us as scientific officer.”

  “He’s dippy,” she informed him. “Absolutely mad. He’ll wreck your ship for you.”

  He laughed. “Okay. Come down and see it before he pulls the bung out.”

  “I’d love to do that, Dwight. See you on Saturday morning.”

  He met her at the station the next morning, having nothing particular to do in the ship. She came in a white outfit, white pleated skirt, white blouse with coloured thread embroidery vaguely Norwegian in style, white shoes. She was pleasant to look at, but there was concern in him as he greeted her; how in hell he was going to get her through the cramped maze of greasy machinery that was Scorpion with her clothes unsullied was a problem, and he was to take her out in the evening.

  “Morning, Dwight,” she said. “Have you been waiting long?”

  “Just a few minutes,” he replied. “Did you have to start very early?”

  “Not as early as last time,” she informed him. “Daddy drove me to the station, and I got a train soon after nine. Early enough, though. You’ll give me a drink before lunch, won’t you?”

  He hesitated. “Uncle Sam doesn’t like it aboard ship,” he said. “It’ll have to be Coke or orangeade.”

  “Even in Sydney?”

  “Even in Sydney” he said firmly. “You wouldn’t want to drink hard liquor with my officers when they were drinking Cokes.”

  She said restlessly, “I want to drink hard liquor, as you call it, before lunch. I’ve got a mouth like the bottom of the parrot’s cage. You wouldn’t want me to throw a screaming fit in front of all your officers.” She glanced around. “There must be a hotel here somewhere. Buy me a drink before we go on board, and then I’d just breathe brandy at them while I’m drinking Coke.”

  “Okay,” he said equably. “There’s a hotel on the corner. We’ll go in there.”

  They walked together to the hotel; he entered and looked around, unsure of his surroundings. He led her into the Ladies’ Lounge. “I think this must be it.”

  “Don’t you know? Haven’t you ever been in here before?”

  He shook his head. “Brandy?”

  “Double,” she said. “With ice, and just a little water. Don’t you come in here?”

  “I’ve never been in here,” he told her.

  “Don’t you ever want to go out on a bender?” she enquired. “In the evenings, when you’ve got nothing to do?”

  “I used to just at first,” he admitted. “But then I went up to the city for it. Don’t mess on your own doorstep. I gave it up after a week or two. It wasn’t very satisfactory.”

  “What do you do in the evenings, when the ship’s not at sea?” she asked.

  “Read a magazine, or else maybe a book. Sometimes we go out and take in a movie.” The barman came, and he ordered her brandy, with a small whisky for himself.

  “It all sounds very unhealthy,” she observed. “I’m going to the Ladies. Look after my bag.”

  He managed to detach her from the hotel after her second double brandy and took her into the dockyard and to Sydney, hoping that she would behave herself in front of his officers. But he need have had no fears; she was demure and courteous to all the Americans. Only to Osborne did she reveal her real self.

  “Hullo, John,” she said. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I’m part of the ship’s company,” he told her. “Scientific observation. Making a nuisance of myself generally.”

  “That’s what Commander Towers told me,” she observed. “You’re really going to live with them in the submarine? For days on end?”

  “So it seems.”

  “Do they know your habits?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “All right, I won’t tell them. It’s nothing to do with me.” She turned away to talk to Commander Lundgren.

  When he offered her a drink she chose an orangeade; she made an attractive picture in the wardroom of Sydney that morning, drinking with the Americans, standing beneath the portrait of the Queen. While she was occupied the captain drew his liaison officer to one side. “Say,” he observed in a low tone, “she can’t go down in Scorpion in those clothes. Can you rustle up an overall for her?”

  Peter nodded. “I’ll draw a boiler suit. About size one, I should think. Where’s she going to change?”

  The captain rubbed his chin. “Do you know any place?”

  “Nothing better than your sleeping cabin, sir. She wouldn’t be disturbed there.”

  “I’ll never hear the last of it—from her.”

  “I’m sure you won’t,” said Peter.

  She lunched with the Americans at the end of one of the long tables, and took coffee with them in the ante-room. Then the junior officers dispersed to go about their business, and she was left with Dwight and Peter. Peter laid a clean, laundered boiler suit upon the table. “There’s the overall,” he said.

  Dwight cleared his throat. “It’s hable to be greasy in a submarine, Miss Davidson,” he said.

  “Moira,” she interrupted.

  “Okay, Moira. I was thinking maybe you should go down in an overall. I’m afraid you might get that dress pretty dirty down in Scorpion.”

  She took the boiler suit and unfolded it. “It’s a comprehensive change,” she observed. “Where can I put it on?”

  “I was thinking you might use my sleeping cabin,” he suggested. “You wouldn’t be disturbed there.”

  “I hope not, but I wouldn’t be too sure,” she said. “Not after what happened in the boat.” He laughed. “All right, Dwight, lead me to it. I’ll try everything once.”

  He took her to the cabin and went back to the anteroom himself to wait for her. In the little sleeping cabin she looked about her curiously. There were photographs there, four of them. All showed a dark haired young woman with two children, a boy eight or nine years old and a girl a couple of years younger. One was a studio portrait of a mother with two children. The others were enlargements of snapshots, one at a bathing place with the family seated on a spring-board, perhaps at a lake
shore. Another was apparently taken on a lawn, perhaps the lawn before his home, for a long car showed in the background and a portion of a white wooden house. She stood examining them with interest; they looked nice people. It was hard, but so was everything these days. No good agonising about it.

  She changed, leaving her outer clothes and her bag on the bunk, scowled at her appearance in the little mirror, and went out and down the corridor to find her host. He came forward to meet her. “Well, here I am,” she said. “Looking like hell. Your submarine will have to be good, Dwight, to make up for this.”

  He laughed, and took her arm to guide her. “Sure, it’s good,” he said. “Best in the U.S. Navy. This way.” She repressed the comment that it was probably the only one in the U.S. Navy; no sense in hurting him.

  He took her down the gangplank to the narrow deck and up on to the bridge, and began explaining his ship to her. She knew little of ships and nothing about submarines, but she was attentive and once or twice surprised him with the quick intelligence of her questions. “When you go down, why doesn’t the water go down the voice pipe?” she asked.

  “You turn off this cock.”

  “What happens if you forget?”

  He grinned. “There’s another one down below.”

  He took her down through the narrow hatchways into the control-room. She spent some time at the periscope looking around the harbour and got the hang of that, but the ballasting and trim controls were beyond her and she was not much interested. She stared uncomprehending at the engines, but the sleeping and messing quarters intrigued her, so did the galley. “What happens about smells?” she asked. “What happens when you’re cooking cabbage under water?”

  “You try not to have to do it,” he told her. “Not fresh cabbage. The smell hangs around for quite a while. Finally the deodoriser deals with it, as the air gets changed and re-oxygenated. There wouldn’t be much left after an hour or two.”

  He gave her a cup of tea in the tiny cubicle that was his cabin. Sipping it, she asked him, “Have you got your orders yet, Dwight?”

  He nodded. “Cairns, Port Moresby, and Darwin. Then we come back here.”

  “There isn’t anybody left alive in any of those places, is there?”

  “I wouldn’t know. That’s what we’ve got to find out.”

  “Will you go ashore?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. It all depends upon the radiation levels, but I wouldn’t think we’d land. Maybe we won’t even go outside the hull. We might stay at periscope depth if the conditions are really bad. But that’s why we’re taking John Osborne along with us, so we’ll have somebody who really understands what the risks are.”

  She wrinkled her brows. “But if you can’t go out on deck, how can you know if there’s anyone still living in those places?”

  “We can call through the loud hailer,” he said. “Get as close inshore as we can manage, and call through the loud hailer.”

  “Could you hear them if they answer?”

  “Not so well as we can talk. We’ve got a microphone hooked up beside the hailer, but you’d have to be very close to hear a person calling in reply. Still, it’s something.”

  She glanced at him. “Has anybody been into the radioactive area before, Dwight?”

  “Why, yes,” he said. “It’s okay if you’re sensible, and don’t take risks. We were in it quite a while, while the war was on, from Iwojima to the Philippines and then down south to Yap. You stay submerged, and carry on as usual. Of course, you don’t want to go out on deck.”

  “I mean—recently. Has anyone been up into the radioactive areas since the war stopped?”

  He nodded. “The Swordfish—that’s our sister ship—she made a cruise up in the North Atlantic. She got back to Rio de Janeiro about a month ago. I’ve been waiting for a copy of Johnny Dismore’s report—he’s her captain—but I haven’t seen it yet. There hasn’t been a ship across to South America for quite a while. I asked for a copy to be sent by teleprinter, but it’s low priority upon the radio.”

  “How far did she get?”

  “She got all over, I believe,” he said. “She did the Eastern States from Florida to Maine and went right in to New York Harbor, right on up the Hudson till she tangled with the wreck of the George Washington Bridge. She went to New London and to Halifax and to St. John’s, and then she crossed the Atlantic and went up the English Channel and into the London River, but she couldn’t get far up that. Then she took a look at Brest and at Lisbon, and by that time she was running out of stores and her crew were in pretty bad shape, so she went back to Rio.” He paused. “I haven’t heard yet how many days she was submerged—I’d like to know. She certainly set a new record, anyway.”

  “Did she find anyone alive, Dwight?”

  “I don’t think so. We’d certainly have heard about it if she did.”

  She stared down the narrow alleyway outside the curtain forming the cabin wall, the running maze of pipes and electric cables. “Can you visualise it, Dwight?”

  “Visualise what?”

  “All those cities, all those fields and farms, with nobody, and nothing left alive. Just nothing there. I simply can’t take it in.”

  “I can’t, either,” he said. “I don’t know that I want to try. I’d rather think of them the way they were.”

  “I never saw them, of course,” she observed. “I’ve never been outside Australia, and now I’ll never go. Not that I want to, now. I only know all those places from the movies and the books—that’s as they were. I don’t suppose there’ll ever be a movie made of them as they are now.”

  He shook his head. “It wouldn’t be possible. A cameraman couldn’t live, as far as I can see. I guess nobody will ever know what the northern hemisphere looks like now, excepting God.” He paused. “I think that’s a good thing. You don’t want to remember how a person looked when he was dead—you want to remember how he was when he was alive. That’s the way I like to think about New York.”

  “It’s too big,” she repeated. “I can’t take it in.”

  “It’s too big for me, too,” he replied. “I can’t really believe in it, just can’t get used to the idea. I suppose it’s lack of imagination. I don’t want to have any more imagination. They’re all alive to me, those places in the States, just like they were. I’d like them to stay that way till next September.”

  She said softly, “Of course.”

  He stirred. “Have another cup of tea?”

  “No thanks.”

  He took her out on deck again; she paused on the bridge, rubbing a bruised shin, breathing the sea air gratefully. “It must be the hell of a thing to be submerged in her for any length of time,” she said. “How long will you be under water for this cruise?”

  “Not long,” he said. “Six or seven days, maybe.”

  “It must be terribly unhealthy.”

  “Not physically,” he said. “You do suffer from a lack of sunlight. We’ve got a couple of sunray lamps, but they’re not the same as being out on deck. It’s the psychological effect that’s worst. Some men—good men in every other way—they just can’t take it. Everybody gets kind of on edge after a while. You need a steady kind of temperament. Kind of placid, I’d say.”

  She nodded, thinking that it fitted in with his own character. “Are all of you like that?”

  “I’d say we might be. Most of us.”

  “Keep an eye on John Osborne,” she remarked. “I don’t believe he is.”

  He glanced at her in surprise. He had not thought of that, and the scientist had survived the trial trip quite well. But now that she had mentioned it, he wondered. “Why—I’ll do that,” he said. “Thanks for the suggestion.”

  They went up the gangway into Sydney. In the hangar of the aircraft carrier there were still aircraft parked with folded wings; the ship seemed dead and silent. She paused for a moment. “None of these will ever fly again, will they?”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

 
“Do any aeroplanes fly now, at all?”

  “I haven’t heard one in the air for quite a while,” he said. “I know they’re short of aviation gas.”

  She walked quietly with him to the cabin, unusually subdued. As she got out of the boiler suit and into her own clothes her spirits revived. These morbid bloody ships, these morbid bloody realities! She was urgent to get away from them, to drink, hear music, and to dance. Before the mirror, before the pictures of his wife and children, she made her lips redder, her cheeks brighter, her eyes sparkling. Snap out of it! Get right outside these riveted steel walls, and get out quick! This was no place for her. Into the world of romance, of make-belief and double brandies! Snap out of it, and get back to the world where she belonged!

  From the photograph frames Sharon looked at her with understanding and approval.

  In the wardroom he came forward to meet her. “Say,” he exclaimed in admiration, “you look swell!”

  She smiled quickly. “I’m feeling lousy,” she said. “Let’s get out of it and into the fresh air. Let’s go to that hotel and have a drink, and then go up and find somewhere to dance.”

  “Anything you say.”

  He left her with John Osborne while he went to change into civilian clothes. “Take me up on to the flight deck, John,” she said. “I’ll throw a screaming fit if I stay in these ships one minute longer.”

  “I’m not sure that I know the way up to the roof,” he remarked. “I’m a new boy here.” They found a steep ladder that led up to a gun turret, came down again, wandered along a steel corridor, asked a rating, and finally got up into the island and out on to the deck. On the wide, unencumbered flight deck the sun was warm, the sea blue, and the wind fresh. “Thank God I’m out of that,” she said.