Her Victory (22 page)

He thought she hated him, but half-way through the concert she held his hand hard while laughing at the jokes. Perhaps she didn't hate him after all, not at the moment anyway. Nothing was certain except at sea. The water might drown you, but it didn't hate you, though if it drowned you whether you could swim or not maybe it did.

The next day was Sunday. Church was boring, but he had a way of making time go quickly, imagined he was looking from the window of a train, which made his eyes twice as sharp and brought everything so close that soon he was walking in the scenery and not riding through it, and then he was no longer part of the place he was being bored in, for he could sit down and stand up or sing and pray without disturbing the walks he was having in the landscapes he had gone into. For as long as he could remember he had never been bored unless he'd wanted to be, which sometimes was when he couldn't make up his mind what scenery he should choose.

After lunch she sat in an armchair doing the
News of the World
crossword puzzle. She wouldn't let him read the finished pages, but gave him a
Wide World
magazine to look at. She cut the crossword out and put it into an envelope with a postal order. ‘We'll find a pillar box for it,' she said, ‘on your way to the railway station.'

‘I hope you win five hundred pounds.'

‘You never
win
anything in this world,' she snapped, ‘and don't
you
forget it.'

‘Some people do.'

She looked at him, so that he could only stare again towards the sea. ‘
You
never will.'

There was no sense in caring. If he were going to sea he wouldn't need to win. Every time you came back from a sea voyage you had lots of adventures to tell worth more than five hundred pounds. If they didn't let him go, he would run away and find a ship on his own. He liked being alive now that he had something to think about.

‘All you have to do, Thomas, is study hard in the next year or so, and then we'll get you on to a training ship. You'll be happy in the Royal Navy, and I shall be glad to get you settled.'

She went out of the room. The Royal Navy seemed too grand, too severe, too much like the orphanage. You went in battleships to war. He had seen pictures of HMS
Hood
and HMS
Rodney
on Players cigarette cards. In a battle the ship burned around you, and turned over, and you sank with it. He had counted the guns, and knew the names of fifty warships.

‘Before I forget,' she said, ‘take this back with you.'

He put the ten shilling note into his blazer pocket. ‘Thank you, Aunt.'

‘And here's a bar of soap. Use it for when you come again in the summer. Write a letter and tell me what you buy with the ten shillings. I hope you don't spend it on bars of chocolate, because if you do you're sure to be sick.'

He'd never been sick in his life. ‘I don't want to go in a battleship, Aunt.'

She poured something from a bottle which said ‘Dry Sack' on the label, but it looked very wet to him. ‘I suppose it'll be all the same when the war starts.'

Older boys listened to the news on the wireless twice a week, but the voice said one thing, and then it said the other, telling of battles in overseas places. ‘Is there going to be a war?'

Her coat was on, and a hat. ‘There will be if the Germans go on listening to that silly twerp Hitler. But I suppose you'll be as well off in the Merchant Marine as anywhere. Now, don't dawdle, or you'll be late for the train.'

His mind had been empty. Now it was full of pictures and prophecies. He couldn't wait, but everything would happen when it happened, so he knew he would have to. Unlike any other time, he had something to expect. Eunice gave him a packet of sandwiches tied with string, and Clara held his hand as they went down the steps. Both actions embarrassed him. When the train was half-way to London he went into the toilet and left the soap on the shelf.

3

He had watched her get old, and she had seen him reach the bleaker side of middle age. Her face was a calendar for the passing of his own life, otherwise he would have felt no older than twenty-five, that heady ridge on which the awkwardness of youth is left behind but the plateau of fulfilled manhood is not yet realized. He had left one stage and had not yet been too severely mauled by the other, which may have been what Clara liked about him, if she had ever found anything attractive in him at all. Perhaps she recognized a trait from her own family that he would pass on, though he would not get married while she was alive in case he made a mess of it.

He had never quite thought of her as needing to be looked at as one adult to another. Frail as she was, he could never be in any but a subordinate place when close to her. The assumption after his last time ashore that she hadn't much longer to live made him feel that her demise might accelerate his own trot downhill. But as she stood at the door, and made him remain for a while outside, she glared as she always had, eyes fierce as if to say he had never known what the trouble of life was about, and that now he was fifty she hoped he never would.

She leaned on a silver-topped stick, and looked at the knuckles of the shaking hand that wouldn't hold still. He recognized stony courage in such an exhibition of unbending formality which she would keep up to the end for his especial benefit. It was as if he expected to be kept waiting, as in his younger days he often was by the Old Man of many a ship. He knew her to be a person without malice, but in her attitude there was an unshakeable dislike that he would be glad to see go.

But in the meantime she would teach him the necessity, and the value, of knowing his place, expecting him to pass the same futile rigidity to others. While she stayed alive it was the only hard time she could give him, for hadn't his appearance put the final touch of devastation on the family? He didn't want to know. She blamed him, but could never make up her mind whether or not to utterly damn him. Until she knew one way or the other he must always be made aware of her dislike in the minute or so she kept him outside her door like a man selling bootlaces.

‘Hello, Aunt Clara. It's me, Thomas.'

Her hands were so pale they were almost blue. They were streaked with purple. In the dim hall he wondered where the tall stout woman had gone, saddened by her lack of stature compared even to three months ago when he had thought she could not possibly get any thinner.

‘I can see who it is. I'm not blind.'

Instead of finding her sharp voice offensive he wanted to say thank God you can still speak. ‘I came straight from my ship.'

She drew her head back, aware that she hunched too much over her stick. ‘You smell better than you once did.'

He smiled. ‘I was in Jamaica, you know.'

‘What a place for a naval officer!'

It was a shame to waste his few bits of conversation in the hallway, yet he didn't know how else to fill in the obligatory time. ‘I've been to worse.'

‘I dare say you have.' She would get a cold standing in the draught, and looked so tired that he thought she would be wise to sit down. If she fell he would catch her, for it seemed she was almost certain to. On a ship you had to anticipate any emergency in a Force Nine gale, yet needed to be more careful on a calm sea, though you would be a fool to hope for much even at the best of times.

He had stood to attention for enough. ‘You might as well come in for a while,' she said. ‘No use jawing where everyone can hear.'

The doors of the other flats were solid and heavy. No one could. The large front room was the same as when he had first walked into it as a carbolic-smelling orphanage boy over thirty years ago. Nothing was altered, but everything was faded, and a faint dust had grown on all surfaces. A woman came in by the day to clean, cook a meal, make the bed, and bring drugs from the chemist's. You couldn't find maids any more. They weren't
willing
when you could, she said. They wanted you to pay them the earth. And even so, they didn't
care
.

He sat on the same sofa, away from the plainer but more fragile chair. ‘Did you get my postcards?'

He'd sent one from every port of call. ‘Came in yesterday. Go tomorrow. I hope you are keeping in good health. I'm fine, as always.' Or some such variation. The picture spoke more than anything he could say: palm trees, volcano, hills covered by forest with a narrow-gauge rack-and-pinion railway slicing to the crestline; waterfront, fort or government house. Hard to know what she thought of such sceneries. The only places she had been to were France, where she had visited her brother's grave near Arras; to Belgium where she stayed in Ostend; and to St Moritz and the Rigi in Switzerland. ‘But I have
never
been to Germany,' she told him more than once.

‘Yes,' she said tonelessly, ‘I got all your cards.'

‘We had a rough old time coming back.'

She was not the sort to stand his postcards on the mantleshelf, or leave letters lying around, as he knew happened in some homes. He'd never received any letters from her, nor been thanked for his communications. He mentioned them because he wanted to know whether or not they had reached her. Most did, but a few didn't. He could think of nothing else to say.

‘Sailors must expect it,' she said. ‘It can get very rough around England. I look out at the water every day.'

When she did, he had to believe that she thought of sailors in general and of him in particular. In any case it was the nearest she'd get to expressing concern for him in his presence. She stood up to make tea, ignoring his offer of help. He looked around the room that had sent him to all parts of the world. He walked from end to end as if on the bridge. Only table lights were on, but the eyes of dead Uncle John in khaki watched him pace about. There was more in the portrait-figure's gaze than dread of the unknown, and he wondered whether he'd ever know what it was.

She would order him to do something, but not countenance the least offer. ‘Come and get the tray.'

He brought it from the kitchen. The daily woman must have got the meal ready: chicken, salad, bread, pastry and a half bottle of chilled wine.

No matter how hard the days of heavy weather across the Atlantic might be, he always felt a surfeit of energy as he stepped ashore. But it didn't last. A sudden exhaustion raddled him. A sensation of inner wastage brought on a shameful urge to weep both for himself and his aunt. His vision of a painful world without hope or purpose lasted a few moments. It went away, but left its track.

He shook himself, and she did not notice. In the orphanage and nowhere else had such a mixture of despair and tenderness swept through him. A trace had come abruptly, born from the same despondency of days gone by, but more of a threat than those fragments of former times.

He drank a glass of wine before eating. Several bottles might drown his whiff of anguish. There was nothing to say, but he knew better than to be silent. She looked straight at him. The skin hung on both sides of her face, and she could not help the shaking of her hands on the stick. Even that did not distress her sufficiently for her to acknowledge it. He felt insignificant when with her, but out of her presence no one awed him, a quality that came directly from her, and which had made him an efficient naval officer.

He talked of departures and landfalls during the last few months and, unable to know whether or not she was listening, remembered those moments in the orphanage before falling asleep that were marked by such intense despair that he wondered for the first time in his life why she and her father had got rid of him like a piece of rotten fruit, when they had accommodation where he could have been so much better cared for. The question had come too late. He couldn't blame them, not having thought about it until he was old enough to know he might have acted with the same lack of charity.

‘Can I pour you a glass of wine, Aunt?'

Heavy and wrinkled, her lids shifted. Her eyes were wide open. ‘I can't drink any more.'

‘Wouldn't hurt you, I'm sure.'

‘I used to drink a bottle of sherry every day, and felt very well on it.'

He ate his meal quickly, then replaced the napkin into its ring, as if he would be there to use it tomorrow night also. ‘I never drink anything alcoholic while on board. Too many ships have been in trouble because of a soddened officer on watch, or a drunken captain in his cabin. I don't touch anything from leaving land to walking off the ship.'

Her stick shifted. Her lips moved. ‘More fool you!'

He lit his cigar. The truth she spoke scorched him to the roots. He'd got his master's ticket, but had never been given a command. No complaint had been made about his work, but he left ships at the shortest possible notice, or became ill, or didn't get on with the captain – and didn't trust himself to drink. That's what she had meant. What are you frightened of? Can't you hold yourself in properly? It was a look he got often when refusing a touch of liquor. For some reason he had made it a rule. On shore, it was different. Sometimes he came back to the ship hardly able to get on board. He would collapse into a sleep so deep that he didn't waken till the ship was on the open sea. But no liquor was drunk between ports. The captain pushed the decanter towards him:

‘Hair of the dog?'

‘No, sir.'

‘You stank like a lousy old tomcat when they trundled you on deck last night.'

‘That was last night. I believe I was drunk.'

The captain laughed. ‘Is that what you call it? I call it rotten and senseless.'

He signed off as soon as he could.

‘I drank a bottle of sherry for my health – one a day at the best of times,' his aunt was saying. ‘Now I don't, because my body can't take it.'

‘Here's to you, then.' He finished the glass, and the bottle. It was no feat to drink someone under the table. He'd often done it, so that no companion would chide him on board for a teetotaller. When they saw him as two people they knew when to leave one of them more or less alone. He walked to the heavy curtains drawn across the window. ‘I enjoy coming to see you.'