The Cruel Sea (1951) (45 page)

The sensual daydream merged gradually into a drowsy night version, which lasted a long way north.

For Ericson, there were no daydreams, and few night ones: he had found himself very tired by the time his leave came round, and he wanted to do nothing except sleep, and relax, and potter about the house until he had to return to the ship. It was a programme which Grace understood, and could adapt herself to; but the third member of the household, her mother, seemed unable to take it at its face value. It was clear that she interpreted his laziness, in some odd way, as a reflection on Grace, or on herself, or even on the quality of the housekeeping. The old woman had aged, becoming querulous in the process: from her permanent stronghold by the fireside, (used to be my chair, thought Ericson), she issued comment, criticism, and an undertone of discord which cut right across his need for a quiet life.

‘He ought to take you out more,’ was one theme which was always good for a triangular half-hour of discomfort when the three of them were together. ‘Is he ashamed of you, or what?’

It always annoyed Ericson that she spoke as if he were a small boy allowed, on sufferance, to listen-in to the grown-ups.

‘I don’t want to go out, Mother,’ Grace would say. ‘It’s quite comfortable here, thank you.’

‘Of course you want to go out! You’re still a young woman. What’s the good of him winning all these medals if he never stirs outside the house?’

Ericson, on whose chest the blue-and-white ribbon of the D.S.C. stood out in solitary splendour, lowered his newspaper.

‘You’ve got it mixed up,’ he said tolerantly. ‘They gave me a medal for the U-boat, not for parading up and down Lord Street with Grace.’

The old woman sniffed. ‘It’s not natural . . . He ought to take you down to the ship, too. He’s the Captain, isn’t he?’

‘Mother!’ said Grace warningly.

‘She’s refitting,’ put in Ericson shortly.

‘They can still give you a nice dinner, I shouldn’t wonder. It’d make a change for Grace.’

‘I don’t want a change,’ said Grace.

‘If I’m going to eat corned beef,’ said Ericson, ‘I’d rather eat it here than in a stone-cold wardroom.’

‘What’s the matter with corned beef, I’d like to know?’ asked the old woman pregnantly. ‘I’m sure Grace does her best to make things nice for you. Slaving away in the kitchen all day, with never a chance to go anywhere . . . When your father was alive,’ she said to Grace, ‘he used to take me out twice a week.’

Poor old bastard, thought Ericson, raising his newspaper again: that’s probably what killed him off so quickly . . . It had, as usual, been a mistake to join in the conversation: it never got them anywhere, and the old woman could twist and turn and shift her ground like something in the zoo. But later, when he was alone with Grace, he returned to a point which had worried him momentarily, and he asked:
‘
Do
you want to go out in the evenings, instead of staying at home?’

She smiled comfortably. ‘I want to do what you want. And I know you’re tired when you come back.’

He squeezed her arm, with a rare gesture of affection. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Grace . . . But your mother makes me angry sometimes, always complaining, whatever we do or don’t do.’

‘She’s getting old, George.’

‘We’re all getting old,’ he said irritably. ‘I’m getting damned old myself. It doesn’t mean I have to keep nagging away all the time, just to show I’m still alive.’

‘You’re different.’

‘So are you.’

She smiled again. ‘They say that daughters always grow up to be like their mothers, in the end.’

‘Then God help me, twenty years from now!’

‘Now, George . . . What are you going to do this afternoon?’

‘Sleep.’ He caught her eye, and laughed. ‘I suppose you’d really like to dress up and go out calling.’

‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘You have your sleep. You’ve earned it. We’ll go calling when all this is over.’

Tallow and Watts sat side by side in a Lime Street pub, drinking beer and watching the dart players. The two Chief Petty Officers’ caps lay peak-to-peak on the table in front of them: their two square cut uniforms, with the gold buttons and badges catching the light, seemed far too smart and businesslike for their surroundings. The place was crowded, dingy, and uncomfortable: a near-miss in one of the big raids had removed every square foot of glass, and the windows were permanently boarded up, so that even at high noon the lights had to be burning, the air stale. Every time the door swung open, loosing a vicious draught round their ankles, a rather drunk man at the end of the counter called out: ‘Mind the light – you’ll have us all blown to bits!’ He had been saying this virtually every night for the past year: it had involved him in arguments and fights a few times, but usually people grinned at him and said nothing. The door was on an automatic spring, and heavily curtained, in any case: it completed the pub’s air of makeshift inferiority.

Tallow and Watts had spent every evening of their leave there: it was as good as any other pub in the district, and it was the one nearest to the Y.M.C.A. hostel where they were staying. Though they did not voice their thoughts, they were both in mourning for the past, and for the comforts and cheerfulness of the house in Dock Road. Then, there had been some point in going ashore, some sense in the way they spent their time: now there was just this sort of place, and a shakedown in a glorified dosshouse, and a cup of tea and a meat pie at the corner café. It was a break with the past which they still had not got used to.

For Watts, there was another break which, after the first weeks, he had never mentioned again: the way that Gladys Bell had been killed, just when things seemed to be coming straight for them. He could not pretend, even to himself, that the bomb falling on 29 Dock Road had destroyed any wild and colourful romance; but it would have been a comfortable sort of marriage, it would have been what he wanted . . . He mourned her death in the same way that Tallow had mourned when
Repulse,
his old ship, had been sunk: it had destroyed a more promising, more significant past, it was a senseless waste, it left a blank where no blank should be.

The pub door swung open, the draught stirred the sawdust on the floor, the man at the bar said: ‘Mind the light – you’ll have us all blown to bits!’

‘Bloody fool,’ said Tallow morosely.

‘Round the bend,’ said Watts.

They returned to their silence: drinking, not talking, watching a small man in a cloth cap placing his darts wherever he pleased, with an easy skill which brought a murmur of appreciation from the other players. Presently Watts said: ‘He must have played before.’ Then he stood up, and collected their empty glasses for another pint.

Ferraby played in the garden with the baby, but the baby was different, and Ferraby was different too.

The little girl was now eighteen months old, and starting to talk: she was also starting to have an expressive will of her own, and the will seemed to be directed against himself. It was as if the tension and the jitters which he could not now shake off, communicated themselves to the child as soon as he touched her: it was to her mother she ran now, whenever she wanted comfort or companionship, never to him, and if he took her in his arms she would wriggle free within a few moments, and then keep a careful space between them. She would watch him, and in the small lively face would be the beginning of fear; and even as he grieved, he wondered at it. How could she sense his terrible unease? What could a shaking hand mean to a child? How was it that, as soon as they were close to each other, the small mind could feel the brush of his disquiet, the chaos of his thoughts?

He admitted the chaos; he knew, though he could not control, the nightmare direction that his mind was taking, the total preoccupation with violent death. He kept seeing, in the child’s smooth and soft limbs, other bodies neither soft nor smooth – crushed bodies, burnt bodies, bodies that came apart as soon as they were lifted from the water. Under the brown curls he saw a bleached skull: under the pretty shoulders he saw a watery skeleton. He imagined death in his child, and he imagined things more terrible still in his wife.

For many weeks now he had been unable to make love to Mavis, because of an insane fear of a happening which he saw in acute detail: the fear that he might do something terrible to her body, and it would prove to be rotten, and rip apart from the crutch upwards, and never come together again.

Now, in the quiet garden, the little girl said: ‘Leaf,’ and pointed to the tree above their heads. Ferraby said: ‘Leaf – that’s right,’ and reached out and gently squeezed her leg. She said: ‘No,’ immediately, and drew away and then stood watching him – serious, withdrawn, on guard. He said: ‘I won’t hurt you, love,’ and she hesitated, and took a step – but it was a step backwards; and before he could help himself she had turned into a different picture altogether, and was lost to him.

He saw, in the bare pointing foot, a bony splinter sticking out from under a blanket; and in the finger that went up to her mouth he saw the finger of a man trying to make himself vomit, to rid his stomach of the oil that was poisoning him.

He turned away, and lay down, and felt his body tremble against the earth.

Morell was washing his hands in the cloakroom of a nightclub when he overheard some RAF officers talking about his wife. As a result of this, when he finally took Elaine home they had a furious quarrel which lasted for several days and which was still unresolved – except in the fatal sense of surrender and defeat for himself – when his leave came to an end.

The two RAF officers were moderately drunk: they had come into the cloakroom a few minutes after Morell, and had not seen him as he bent over the washbasin. But the thick speech was clear enough for him to hear every word.

‘That’s a lot better,’ said the first voice.

‘Mine’s pure gin, old boy,’ said the other.

‘Better tell the quack in the morning.’

‘He knows already . . . Who’s the tarty-looking number in the red dress?’

‘Actress type, old boy. Elaine Swainson.’

‘Oh, her . . . Know her?’

‘Used to. She aims a bit higher these days. The hat on the bedpost has to have a ton of brass on it.’

‘Nice take-off?’

‘They say . . . Try your luck if you want to. She might feel like slumming.’

‘Isn’t she married?’

‘Not all that amount. Got marital thrombosis.’

‘What’s that, old boy?’

‘Got a clot for a husband.’

There was a sound of laughter. ‘That’s bloody good, old boy.’

‘Think I’ll write a book about it . . . Are you going to have a crack at her?’

‘Maybe.’ There was another laugh, of a different sort. ‘Lend me a quid, old boy.’

‘A quid?’ A snort of derision. ‘More like a tenner, and don’t expect any change.’

‘Commercial type, huh?’

‘There’s a safe-deposit box under the bed . . . Come on – let’s look over the stable again.’

Morell carried that conversation back to sea with him. He could remember every word, every inflexion of it; he could remember the exact smell of the antiseptic, and the look of servile discontent on the attendant’s face as he slipped out without tipping him. But as well as the conversation, there was the quarrel with Elaine; and the quarrel was worst of all.

It started in the taxi on the way home, it continued at the flat; it drove him to sleep alone, on the sofa, and to suffer the most fearful night of his life. In the morning, there was no truce, and no respite for his thoughts either: she would excuse nothing, she would admit nothing, she would not even give a straightforward denial to his suspicions. It was clear that she did not give a damn either way; in the music hall phrase, he knew what he could do with it.

The trouble was that he did not know at all. He could believe, or he could disbelieve, that she was faithful to him; but he could not say truly whether he wanted Elaine on any terms, or only on honest ones.

She knew this: it gave her a whip in either hand.

‘You can think what you like,’ she said disdainfully, later next morning. ‘I’m sick of all this questioning, all this drama every time you come home.’

‘Darling, it isn’t drama.’ He looked at her as she stood by the window, in her green flowered dressing gown, with the edge of her nightdress showing above the patterned mules: after the night spent apart from her, she was specially lovely, specially desirable: her body beckoned to him, her set face overrode the beckoning. ‘But can’t you see how I feel? It’s natural for me to be jealous, when I hear people talking about you like that.’

‘You should give me the benefit of the doubt.’

‘There shouldn’t be any doubt.’

‘Oh, God!’ She gestured impatiently: he had seen her duplicate it a hundred times on the stage. ‘This is such tripe . . . Do you expect me to stay home every night, just to make you happy?’

‘You would if you loved me . . . Do you love me?’

She said: ‘When you behave. But I won’t be told what I’m allowed to do. I won’t be taken for granted.’

‘You can take
me
for granted.’

She nodded to that. At first she said nothing; it was as if he had produced some cliché which had hardly been fresh the first time she heard it. Then she said: ‘That may not be what I want.’