HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour Page 8

  He walked back to his chair, sat down, and said, in as level a voice as he had ever used: ‘That’s the north coast of Ireland. We’ll be going to Derry.’

  It was a peerless morning: the clean, grey sky, flecked with pearly grey clouds, turned suddenly to gold as the sun climbed over the eastern horizon. There was now land ahead: a dark bluish coastline, with noble hills beyond. The Captain’s stiff stubbly face warmed slowly to the sunshine: the ache across his shoulders and around his heart seemed to melt away, taking with it his desperate fatigue. Not much longer and then sleep, and sleep, and sleep … Bridger handed him the morning cup of cocoa, his face one enormous grin. But all he said was: ‘Cocoa, sir.’

  ‘Thanks … We made it, Bridger.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Who won that sweepstake?’

  ‘The Buffer, sir – I mean, Petty Officer Adams.’

  The Captain laughed aloud. ‘Bad luck!’ For the ship’s company that must be the one flaw in an otherwise perfect morning. There were a lot of the hands on the upper deck now, smiling and pointing. He felt bound to them as closely as one man can be to another. Later, he wanted to find some words that would give them an idea of that. And something about Marlborough, too, the ship he loved, the ship they had all striven for.

  ‘Trawlers ahead, sir,’ said the signalman, breaking in on his thoughts. ‘Three of them. I think they’re sweeping.’

  Back to civilization: to lights, harbours, dawn mine-sweepers, patrolling aircraft, a guarded fairway.

  ‘Call them up, signalman.’

  But one of the trawlers was already flashing to them. The signalman acknowledged the message, and said: ‘From the trawler, sir: “Can I help you?”’

  ‘Make “Thank you. Are you going into Londonderry?”’ A pause, while the lamps flickered. Then: ‘Reply “Yes”, sir!’

  ‘Right. Make: “Will you pass a message to the Port War Signal Station for me please?”’

  Another pause. ‘Reply, “Certainly”, sir.’

  The Captain drew a long breath, conscious deep within him of an enormous satisfaction. ‘Write this down, and then send it to them. “To Flag Officer in Charge, Londonderry, v Marlborough. HMS Marlborough will enter harbour at 1300 today. Ship is severely damaged above and below waterline. Request pilot, tugs, dockyard assistance, and burial arrangements for one officer and seventy-four ratings.” Got that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Right. Send it off … Bridger!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Ask the surgeon-lieutenant to relieve me for an hour. I’m going to have a shave. And wash. And change. And then eat.’

  Book Two: Leave Cancelled

  1

  While I was waiting for you in the foyer of that superb hotel, I started talking with the head porter. Once, during the time when we were getting engaged, you said to me: ‘I think you talk to people – strangers – for a funny reason: not because you really want to, but as if you had to prove that you can make friends with anyone.’

  This was one of your more acute comments, sweetheart; there is some kind of back-handed conceit which prompts this habit of mine. But it really sprang originally from my being rather undersized and shy when I was younger, and having never quite emerged from the continuous ordeal which that entailed. It’s a habit that pays dividends, at all events.

  This head porter (who is quite a personage in London, by the way, so famous is the hotel he stands sentry for) had been attracting my attention for the last quarter of an hour by the competent way he had been dealing with the usual run of hotel problems – the old ladies caught in the swing door, the tarts who wanted to try their luck in the lounge, the drunk left over from lunch. He had an air of complete authority, the kind which is only challenged by the rash or the conceited.

  I myself had been striding up and down, feeling sad and livid and nervous, all at once: as far as the porter was concerned, I did not need dealing with, but I knew he was fully equipped for the job if the necessity arose.

  Bored with waiting, too nervous to settle down to anything else, I strolled over, on an impulse, and stopped in front of him, and said: ‘Were you ever promised three weeks’ leave, and then, on the first day of it, told it was all a mistake and they only meant twenty-four hours after all?’

  He was a big man, and he looked down at me for a moment without answering. He had a good straight eye: on the impressive, straining chest the row of last-war medals confronted me. They stood for something, as they usually do, something right outside the master and man relationship. ‘Don’t fool about with me,’ said the eye and the medals together, ‘I’m the head porter, you’re an officer; but I know it all, I’ve lived it all, before you were born maybe, and no young squirts need apply.’

  But it happens that I have not got that kind of face or manner, and after a moment he relaxed and smiled, and said: ‘Bad luck, sir. I’ve had a bit of that myself, but never that bad. Spoilt your arrangements, I expect.’

  ‘Written them off altogether, yes.’

  ‘Were you meeting your wife, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was sympathy in his eye: I needed sympathy, and I did not feel it was disloyalty to you, or showing off, to explain what it was all about. I added: ‘We were starting a delayed honeymoon, as a matter of fact. Now it’ll be delayed indefinitely.’

  He shook his head and glanced sideways at a page boy who was whistling, and then came back to me. A lot of men, up and down the social scale, would have been unable to stop themselves reacting to the word ‘honeymoon’ in the usual way – that is, as if they saw the bed and the bride and the snigger of it, right in front of their dirty eye. But if he thought any of it, it didn’t show in his face; which means that I had not, after all, betrayed you. I was glad.

  He said: ‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir,’ and I felt that he was sorry. The touch of genuine feeling was all I had been wanting, and I relaxed a little and answered, looking round the crowd in the foyer: ‘Thanks … You’re pretty busy these days, aren’t you, one way and another?’

  ‘Very busy, sir.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Don’t know where they all come from, though, or where they get the money to do it. Having a good war, some of these people. Wish I’d had one like it myself, the last time.’

  I glanced back at his chest again. ‘The Military Medal says that you did not.’

  He shook his head: coming from a big man, the movement had an odd wistfulness, as if he realized that cunning will always outwit the good and simple. ‘I got that in the Salient, spring of nineteen-seventeen. Nobody’s heard of the Salient nowadays. Some of them haven’t heard of Dunkirk yet, either.’ He looked round the foyer, as I had done. ‘We have to watch a lot here that we don’t like.’

  The conversation was subtly degenerating: I had my own views on the subject of ‘war effort’, but somehow I didn’t want to join in the heresy hunt. It doesn’t get you anywhere: that kind of nagging criticism never does. And I was too sad anyway. I hadn’t told him the worst part, of course – I mean about marrying you two months ago, and our funny one-night honeymoon because of your leave getting sabotaged, and the battle course I had sweated through in the meantime, and how this meeting was to have made up for all of it, and now it wasn’t because my regiment was going foreign.

  Come to think of it, I hadn’t told you the worst part either, yet … That made me nervous again, the idea that in a few minutes you would be coming towards me, so happily, and I would have to stop you in your tracks. Indeed, the thought of what I would have to do to your happiness induced one of those ridiculous moments of panic, and all sorts of odd ideas – desertion, feigned illness, leaving you a note and running for it now – chased across my brain, one after another, like a splutter of matches in the dark. You were coming to me. You were meeting me with the same secret and loving excitement which had been mine up to three hours ago; and I had to make it falter and die, to change your expression utterly and destroy what I knew would be in your eyes when they met mine. If only I coul
d –

  The hall porter’s voice recalled me to the fact that I was not yet in hell, but only hanging about on the verge of it.

  ‘My lad was at Dunkirk,’ he was saying, with a sort of subdued determination, ‘and at Sicily too, and sometimes I feel like standing here and shouting it out loud.’ (What on earth was he talking about?) ‘You’d think that people living in London and seeing a lot of uniforms all the time wouldn’t forget the war so easy, but sometimes it seems the other way about. You can see them here night after night, chucking it about like dirty water – it’d do some of them a bit of good to get what you’re getting, sir.’

  ‘Yes, I dare say it might.’ I recalled what he had been talking about, with an effort, and I acquiesced for the sake of not having to argue or become entangled in thoughts that did not concern you: I did not really agree. In fact I didn’t agree at all. Once you start looking round to see whether the other fellow is matching your own effort, the machine automatically slows down and may come to a dead stop. People can’t be taught their duty either by compulsion or by calling them names: the only way to teach anyone – man, woman, or dog – is by example. To hell with what the next man is doing; make your own effort, satisfy your own conscience, preserve your own integrity: if the others don’t follow it can’t be helped and can’t be cured – least of all by striking attitudes, shouting ‘Slacker!’ or coming to a stop and waiting, with an injured look, for them to catch up.

  The idea made me impatient and I felt an extreme need to start pacing up and down again: and by good fortune the hall porter had to deal with a theatre ticket inquiry at that moment, and I was free to become preoccupied with you once more. It was an odd thought that I should probably have been restless and nervous in whatever circumstances I had been waiting for you, even in the happiest anticipation: I’m not cast by nature as the confident, forceful lover, all poise and flaring nostrils, and you affect me (as you know, sweetheart, having helped me through it) rather in the manner of a small boy whose teacher affords him favours a trifle more grown-up than he is equipped to enjoy.

  No, that’s not quite it, is it? You give me assurance and confidence when I am with you, by your own natural response, but this would only be the second act of intimacy (or whatever you call it in print) which we had shared, and the anticipation of it induced more sweat than sensuality. The privilege of your body is a royal favour: when you accord it I am, somehow, able to match the qualities of grace and fervour which the moment brings; but to wait for the accolade is an ordeal compounded of tension and shyness, and nothing much more.

  The foyer round me was crowded and full of movement: people registering at the desk, people buying papers or theatre tickets, people paying their bills, people drinking, shedding top coats, waiting for the lift, talking in groups or standing silent. Looking at them through the hall porter’s sated eye, the impression was perhaps of a certain well-upholstered ease, a leisurely corner of the world insulated, by money, from the stress of war. If the atmosphere had been one of elegance, if the people had been good-looking or graceful, one might not have minded the contrast with remembered brutality; but most of the luxury products on view lacked distinction of any sort, if they were not actively unpleasing.

  This was not the real London, of course: it was not even ‘upper-class’ London, which has (to its unexpected honour) geared itself to the struggle with patience and distinction; it was some kind of gold-plated vacuum, unrelated to England or the war of human endeavour of any significant kind. Its inhabitants, by subtlety or ruthlessness, were able to cling to standards of luxury unattainable by the majority of their fellows, to escape the common wartime lot, to evade full citizenship; and they were the people who least deserved such a haven. For there were people who did deserve it, as a respite from other surroundings: soldiers sweating in some noisy hell, sailors at the extreme limit of strain and tiredness, airmen running on their nerves: it was not for them, they hadn’t the price of admission, they were nowhere near winning it, and they would die before they ever got there – and that was the unfair part, the silly, raging shame, the fact which made one look round these permanent residents of Paradise and wonder what in hell one was fighting for.

  I didn’t like the place at all, except that it would bring me an unaccustomed comfort and the chance of concentrating on you in absolute warmth and security. It would aid our meeting at odd points: it meant good food and a tiled bathroom and smooth, clean sheets and a light by the bed. It meant not worrying about anything except the important things: it would set us free to enjoy each other.

  It was, perhaps, not such a bad hotel after all ...

  The time was three o’clock. I bought a newspaper, and read about an air raid and a rude man in Hyde Park who had given a Miss Pauncefote, according to her sworn testimony, the biggest surprise of her life.

  Then you came in.

  2

  You’re lovely, of course: my eyes, most of my other senses, and the invisible male reaction to your presence, make that quite clear. You ought to love your mirror, if that is not a silly way of putting it: it shows you to be blonde, level-eyed, and rather grave, and that, combined with a slim, rounded, just-maturing figure, is a wholly loving combination. And then you have something else – a spark or a flame or the promise of warmth – some odd element which grips the inner imagination and turns every moment I spend with you into a prickling challenge to the best that is in me. You prompt, always, a desire of a kind more subtle than a sexual one: the desire to do my utmost to engage your attention, win your sympathy, and deserve your admiration. Straight masculine vanity has something to do with it, I suppose; but showing off has to be worth the trouble, and you make it so, you are worth every sort of effort – in talking, in mental adroitness, in playing the man – of which I am capable.

  When I once told you this, you said: ‘It’s nice to be spoiled. But I’ll try not to trade on it.’ So far as I can see, you never have.

  It’s difficult to say what is really behind that continuous effort to entertain you: it is not sexual ambition or the hope of any obvious reward; it is rather the absolute certainty that your standards are worth meeting and that to win your favour is a cast-iron triumph. I remember once reading a rather old-fashioned novel in which one of the manlier characters proclaimed that it was more exciting to hold the hand of a good woman than to shoot the works with a professional (I dare say it was worded more elegantly than this). To the best of my knowledge I have never done either, so I cannot return a verdict; but it is a fact, in the same tradition, that I would rather make you smile and seem happy, than to win the most loving welcome from any woman I know. (This you would no doubt answer by reminding me that I have been accorded the whole range of welcomes, from cheerful to passionate, by you in any case; to which remark I would probably return a self-conscious and meaningless grin.)

  The working fact remains that to have you contented by one’s side is quite exceptionally good advertisement for one’s own entertainment value. The man must have something, you feel the spectators are saying … Perhaps it is just vanity after all. But you are lovely, certainly.

  You were lovely now, as you came towards me across the carpeted foyer. You walked with a young, swinging grace, as if each step were a cardinal statement of your happiness in being a woman. I shared that happiness … It was a shock to realize that this was only the second time I had seen you out of that damned uniform (you were married in it, if you remember, and even your wedding nightdress seemed to have a grisly Service touch about it): a shock also to learn that you could after all dress with elegance and complete femininity, and that silk stockings of the proper shade might have been invented for just your shape of leg. Realizations of this sort have their place in the history of lechery, I suppose, and there was no doubt that to see you dressed as a woman should be, was a fairly sharp reminder that we were newly married and that tonight would end the two months’ celibacy of two physically enraptured people. Would you like to pretend otherwise? I don’t th
ink so. Love is not lust-in-action, as we agree: but at the beginning, at the stage of physical discovery which is so sweet, it is never far from holding the foreground completely.

  Seeing you in your smooth, honeymoonish red dress, I looked forward to the night-time, and for the moment it killed all the sadness that there was to be in our meeting.

  I kissed your hand (our shy limit in public) and stared at you for a second or so. Then: ‘Sweet,’ I said. ‘Hallo! You look lovely. Is that bag very heavy? It’s got your new initials on. I’m afraid I have to go, quite soon.’

  Out of that odd, disjointed slice of nonsense you took what was important, and the shadow that flicked across your eyes seemed to traverse the limits of pain.

  ‘How soon, darling?’ you asked. ‘What’s happened? Have they cancelled your leave?

  ‘Twenty-four hours,’ I said. ‘Till tomorrow morning. Then I’m off.’

  ‘Oh, God ...’ You looked round the foyer. ‘Do people cry in this hotel? I expect not.’ Your eyes came back to mine. ‘I can’t quite take it in, sweetheart. And you look so tired, too. How was the battle course?’

  ‘A damned good imitation.’

  ‘And now this … So soon … Can we sit down somewhere?’

  We found a quiet corner settee in the bar, and when we were settled I gave you the full strength of it, as quietly and evenly as I could, while we looked at each other with that loving intentness which came so naturally. You kept silent while I was explaining what they had done to me: sitting there, with one leg bent under you, your lips slightly parted, your troubled eyes not leaving mine, you had an air of childish dismay which was entirely new. For you are very grown-up really – more than I am, in fact – and I had never before seen you confronted by anything you could not deal with competently and concisely. Even the first time I kissed you (not exactly a cool occasion) you only said: ‘Was that as nice as you expected?’... So here, to see you undecided, unhappily confused by what I was saying, was in itself as deeply moving as anything in the story I had to tell. When I had finished, and fallen silent once more: ‘It’s for good, then, tomorrow?’ you asked. ‘You won’t be back in England for – for a long time?’