The Cruel Sea (1951) (30 page)

How wonderful it would be, he thought, to be married, really married.

Morell, nursing a glass of brandy, sat in the warm, subtly feminine sitting room of the flat in Westminster, watching the clock and waiting till it was time to fetch his wife from the theatre. His uniform jacket lay on the chair opposite him, waiting also for the moment to move. But the moment, much as he wanted it, was not yet here.

The clock showed five past ten, which meant another half-hour before he could reasonably start: Elaine did not like him hanging round the theatre or her dressing room when she was on the stage, and she was rarely ready to leave – make-up off, clothes changed – before eleven o’clock each night. (At sea, he had pictured himself waiting in her dressing room, playing with the make-up box, talking to her dresser, until she came off stage: but it had not worked out like that.) Many times he had found himself wishing that the run of the play would come to an end, but it showed no sign of doing that: besides, the wish was purely selfish – she would have been so disappointed . . . But certainly the engagement meant that he had not seen much of her during his leave: six evening shows a week, and two matinees as well, left her with very little spare time, even leaving out of account the extra appointments – lunches, dinners, cocktail parties – that seemed to go naturally with being in a current West End play.

Morell sipped his brandy, while the clock crawled towards the half-hour. His mood was morose and uncertain, in spite of the fact that they would be meeting again very soon: the trouble was that he could not count on the meeting being a happy one.

At the beginning, Elaine had seemed genuinely regretful of the time they must spend apart. ‘Oh darling, what a shame!’ she had exclaimed, on the night of his arrival. ‘Just when you’ve got long leave, I’ve got a part in a play that’s actually going to run . . . But never mind,’ she had continued, rubbing her face against his shoulder, ‘fetch me at the theatre, and I’ll make it up to you afterwards.’ And later that night, when he had claimed her at the stage door and taken her home, she did make it up to him, with all the sensual tenderness he remembered from the past. Indeed, it had been like that for three or four nights, without a shadow of hesitation on her part, so that he was immensely, violently happy. And then, and then . . .

What did it amount to, exactly, the obvious deterioration? What had made her attention fade, and his happiness and confidence with it? To begin with, it had been the fault of living in a crowd: people ringing up all the time, engagements she would not cut, late parties after the play was over, parties from which he was excluded. ‘But darling,’ she would say, ‘it’s no good you coming along. It’s just theatre people, probably talking shop the whole time. You’d be bored to bits.’ And when he had remonstrated further: ‘Darling, I’ve
got
to go,’ she would insist, with an edge of irritation. ‘It’s important – it might mean more work when this play is finished.’ There was no getting past that argument: or none that she would recognise as valid.

It was no good asking questions, either. ‘Oh, just a party,’ she would say, when he wanted to know where she was going. ‘You don’t know the people – you probably wouldn’t like them, anyway.’ Question and answer, question and silence, question and angry protest. (But he could not help the questions: he was wretchedly jealous of every moment of their separation.) ‘Oh darling, don’t
heckle!
’
she would answer finally, when his probing reached a foolish level of persistence. ‘It’s driving me mad . . .’ And that would be that. He wanted to explain to her where it was driving
him,
but he had begun to be afraid of any sort of emotion, any groping beyond the normality of their life together, any experiment. He had so much to lose, and it seemed clear, for some reason, that he could afford it far less than she. Each time he tried to re-establish himself, the effort was feebler, the ground more surely lost, the abject surrender more obvious.

He really had no weapons, and he had already betrayed the fact, with fatal effect upon them both.

There was something else, too, worse than all this, something he noticed quite early on in his leave: a subtle lessening of her fervour, a certain automatic response, so that he could not decide, in cold blood, whether she were genuinely moved in love, or merely a competent performer . . . There had been one moment, a moment of ludicrous detachment when, close as they were, he had seemed to be observing her from an immense distance, and had suddenly found himself making up a speech in his head. This woman, as your Lordship will observe,’ the strange words formed just behind his tongue, ‘makes love with a degree of technical competence which—’ but he had not been able to complete the sentence. Indeed, suddenly cold and sick, it was all he could do to complete the act of love, so as not to betray himself, and her.

There was nothing definite to go on, and nothing definite to comfort him either. Worst of all, he was no longer able to talk to her about it, to ask for reassurance and to receive it. They shared a house and a bed, they shared an easy conversation and a range of jokes; but they shared nothing below the surface – the candour and the closeness were gone, and he was afraid to challenge their passing, for fear of what he might uncover.

The clock struck the half-hour, and with a thankful readiness he rose to put on his coat. As he moved, the telephone rang.

For a full minute he let it ring unanswered. Almost certainly it was one of her friends, her intolerable friends – the women with their quick malicious tongues, the fat men with wandering hands and contracts in their pockets, the juvenile leads who were very nearly homosexuals but were willing to try anything, the stage riff-raff swelled by home-based officers on the make . . . But the ringing persisted, and finally he crossed to the side table and lifted the receiver.

It was Elaine.

‘Darling,’ she began, speaking quickly as if knowing that he was going to object, ‘I’ve been asked to a party, after the show tonight.’

‘Oh,’ he said, non-committally.

‘I
must
go, darling. Readman will be there. You know – the producer.’

‘All right,’ he said, after a pause. He had other words ready, but he knew they would not be effective. ‘Can I fetch you from anywhere?’

‘No. I’ll be so late, darling.’

‘You know it doesn’t matter. Where will you be?’

‘I don’t know, really.’ The edge of irritation was creeping into her voice again. ‘We’ll probably go on somewhere. Don’t you worry.’

But foolishly he persisted. ‘Ring me up, then. I can come along anywhere, any time.’ Oh darling, he thought, you’re my wife, and this is the last week of my leave, and I want you here, not at parties with other people. But these also were words which were not effective.

‘That’s so silly—’ she began – and then, treacherously, she disposed of the matter in a swift series of sentences, leaving him no time to answer. ‘Really it’ll be too late, darling. And don’t wait up for me. Get some sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning. Goodbye.’

He had already opened his mouth to start another pleading sentence when he heard the telephone click. Presently the dialling tone began.

He sat down again, and took up the glass of brandy, conscious only of a shattering disappointment. Then, before he had time to control the direction of his mind, he thought suddenly of two things, in swift and horrible succession. He did not know what wretched instinct presented them so vividly, but once they were there he could not drive them out again. He remembered, first, the huge bruise which he had found on Elaine’s thigh, the first night of his leave. She bruised very easily; it had been rather a joke on their honeymoon, and on their first night it was still a joke. ‘I knocked it getting out of a taxi,’ she had answered when he asked her. ‘Fine story!’ he had grumbled, and then, in a different mood: ‘May I bring you another taxi – pretty soon?’ and she, in answer: ‘The meter’s ticking up already . . .’ A charming scene, melting into frenzy – but now he remembered only the readiness of her first answer.

The second thing he thought of made him get up and, with a clear sense of shame, go into the bathroom. Hanging behind the bathroom door was a sponge bag, a special sponge bag in which Elaine kept her ‘things’. He leant against the wall, unwilling to put, even secretly to himself, so disgusting a question. Then he reached out his hand, and took the sponge bag from its hook, and opened it, loathing himself, and looked inside.

What he was looking for was not there.

Of course, it was not conclusive. Once – rather a long time ago – she had said: ‘Oh, I always want to be ready for you.’ It could have, even now, a simple and tender explanation.

But as soon as he was back in the sitting room, and had sat down, he began to imagine, in very terrible detail, Elaine making love with someone else.

Lockhart also spent his leave in London, though on a less emotional plane. Indeed, there were times when, if he had been offered some kind of overflow from Morell’s situation, he might have taken it on just to keep his hand in. At sea, he was aware in himself of a celibate dedication to the work he was doing: a long leave ashore was inclined to probe the chinks in that armour, reminding him of a different sort of past and exposing a human weakness for sensual indulgence which he had imagined was stowed away with his civilian clothes. But, in the event, the occasion never offered, and his leave passed as a tranquil extension of the male world which the past two years had made normal for him.

He stayed in a borrowed flat in Kensington, the owner of which was absent on some mysterious mission to America; after living for so long in a crowd, he might well have been lonely. But on his doorstep was London, his own fine town, shabby and bomb-damaged but with all her offerings unimpaired: the people, the bars, the theatres, the concerts, the simple slow walks down streets that ended at the river or the green open parks – these were all here under his hand, and he made the most of them, with a thankful appetite for variety.

He met a great many people – by chance, by coincidence, by arrangement, by misfortune: of them all, he best remembered two. They were not good examples of wartime London, and they were not the pleasantest people he met; but they stuck in his memory, just as, at a children’s birthday party, it is the child who is sick or who loses its temper who makes the most lasting impression – particularly on the adults.

He met, in the Café Royal, a man who had been, for a brief and inglorious period, his employer in an advertising agency in London. Lockhart had taken on the job, some time in the middle thirties, when he was broke – indeed, he would scarcely have considered it in any other circumstances, so foolish and irksome was it from the very beginning. His work consisted of writing advertising copy in praise of food: in outlining the style to be aimed at, his employer, a large fat man by the name of Hamshaw, tried to communicate his own sense of mission, and was clearly taken aback by Lockhart’s somewhat frivolous approach. Matters proceeded uneasily for some months: more and more of Lockhart’s stuff was returned to him, marked ‘too harsh’, ‘too stiff’, ‘a softer approach, please’, once even ‘the reference to saliva is indelicate’. There came a day when Lockhart’s projected phrase to round off a dog biscuit advertisement: ‘Dogs Like ‘Em’, was rejected in favour of ‘No more toothsome morsel has ever been offered to the canine world’, and he knew that, broke or not, his patience was exhausted.

He waited for the chance of a parting gesture, and the chance came. On his desk one morning was a note from Hamshaw: ‘Please let me have a suitable slogan for Bolger’s Treacle Butterscotch’. Lockhart considered for a moment, scribbled a line at the bottom of the page, picked up his hat, and walked out. Not till some hours later did Hamshaw, nosing round the copy room, light upon the farewell effort: ‘Bolger’s Butterscotch – Rich and Dark like the Aga Khan’.

Even in those days, Hamshaw had been sufficiently pompous; now, appointed to control the thought of entire subcontinents on behalf of the Ministry of Information, he was positively Olympian. He greeted Lockhart with a detached bow, and said: ‘Ah, Lockhart – come and share my table’ as if he were offering Holy Communion to a dubious backslider. When they had chatted warily for some time: ‘A fine service, yours,’ said Hamshaw with deliberation, gently massaging a ponderous chin. ‘But I must confess that at the Ministry we find you – shall we say? – a little backward.’

‘Backward,’ repeated Lockhart non-committally.

Hamshaw nodded, popped a sandwich into his mouth, and nodded again. ‘Yes. We’d like to see a little more readiness to release material – about the Atlantic, and so forth. It’s very difficult to get the Admiralty to cooperate, very difficult indeed.’

‘I think they take security fairly seriously.’

‘My dear Lockhart, you can’t teach me anything about
security!
’
said Hamshaw, as if it were his own personal conception. ‘I can assure you we have that
very
much at heart. What we want is more willingness to publicise what’s going on, once the demands of security are met. These successes – if successes they are – are no good unless people hear about them, no good at all.’

Lockhart frowned, not seeing why he should accept this nonsense, even as a matter of social convenience. ‘A sunk U-boat is sunk,’ he said shortly, ‘whether it’s on the front page in two colours or not. The advertising afterwards doesn’t affect it at all.’