The Cruel Sea (1951) (46 page)

He thought, in surprise: But darling, you
married
me . . .

There was something here that no longer added up. He shut his mind to what it was: he had no weapons anyway, and he had to bring her back, he could not lose her . . . When he gave in, and asked for her forgiveness and appealed for her continuing love, she allowed him no more than a perfunctory acquiescence. It was clear to him – except when he blinded himself with emotion or sentiment or hope – that she did not give a damn about that either. She was in the strongest position in the world: the loved woman who need only love when she chose, and who, at the slightest crossing of her will, reverted to natural ice.

He wanted to kiss her, he wanted to take her in his arms, and then back to bed. But he did not know what the answer would be – not now, not any more. He looked away from her, and round the softly furnished room with its overflow of cushions, its feminine accent and promise. He remembered suddenly the bridge of the bombed ship, adorned with blood and scraps of dead men. He thought: this is a slaughterhouse, just like that was.

Baker, for the first time, did not spend his leave at home. He did not even tell his mother that leave was due again: he wrote that
Compass Rose
was in port for a bit, and then, when his fortnight’s spell of freedom arrived, he booked a room at a small downtown hotel, and settled in there. He had no clear idea of what he was going to do, except for one point, one action – the thing he had dreamt and thought about for so long.

This leave, he
must
do it. The time for dreaming was past. Everyone else slept with women, and talked about it, and took it for granted. He had overheard a mess deck phrase which pricked his imagination: ‘She gave me a slice on the mat.’ He wanted a slice on the mat – not the next time they were in harbour, but this time.

On the first night of his leave he stood by the tram stop outside Central Station, looking about him, and wondering. He realised that he knew nothing at all about what he meant to do: now that it had come to the point, he was in a panic of indecision. He ought to have asked someone, he ought to have listened properly when people were talking about it, instead of pursuing his own daydreams . . . How did you pick up a woman? What did you
do
?
How did you tell a prostitute from an ordinary woman, anyway? And then, did you give them the money first, or did you say nothing, and leave it on the dressing table afterwards? Would it be expensive? Did they tell you how much it was, before you started? Did they understand how not to have babies? Could you be arrested if they found you doing it? What was it like, how did you begin, how long did it go on for?

Confused with doubt, sweating a little, but desperately determined, he started to walk slowly along the street towards the Adelphi Hotel, looking at the women as they came towards him. He had twenty-five pounds in his pocket: he wanted to be on the safe side.

When the members of the wardroom reassembled, on the last night of the refit leave, and were sharing a rather silent after-dinner drink, Lockhart said suddenly: ‘I’ve been looking at some figures.’

‘I’m sure you have,’ said Morell suavely, glancing up from his newspaper. ‘Please spare us the details.’

‘Please don’t,’ said Baker.

‘These are the other kind,’ said Lockhart, ‘and they’ve taken me the best part of a day to work out, from the old deck logs. Do you know that tomorrow’s convoy is the thirty-first that we’ve done, and that we’ve now put in four hundred and ninety days at sea – nearly a year and a half?’

A glum silence greeted the intelligence. Then: ‘I didn’t know,’ said Morell. ‘Now I do. Tell me some more.’

Lockhart looked at the piece of paper in his hand. ‘We’ve steamed 98,000 miles. We’ve picked up 640 survivors.’

‘How many have we buried?’ asked Ferraby.

‘I left that out . . . We’ve each kept about a thousand watches—’

‘And we’ve got one solitary U-boat, out of the whole thing,’ interrupted Morell. ‘Are you trying to break our hearts?’ He stood up, and stretched: his face was pale and rather drawn, as if he had either had a very good leave or a very bad one. ‘And tomorrow we start another convoy – and then another, and another . . . I wonder what we’ll die of, in the end.’

‘Excitement,’ said Baker.

‘Old age,’ said Ferraby.

‘Food poisoning,’ said Lockhart, who had overeaten.

‘None of those things . . .’ Morell yawned again. ‘One day someone will ring a bell and say the war’s over and we can go home, and we’ll all die of surprise.’

Lockhart smiled. ‘In the circumstances, not a bad death.’

Morell nodded to him. ‘Not a bad death at all. But I don’t think it will happen tomorrow.’

Waiting on the fo’c’sle, with the two lines of men on either side and the petty officers facing him, Lockhart wondered why Ericson had decided to have Sunday Divisions, when
Compass Rose
was due to sail at eleven that morning. Usually he skipped Divisions if they were sailing on a Sunday – there was too much to do, and it was a nuisance for the hands to dress up in their clean rig when they had to get back into working clothes immediately afterwards. But possibly he wanted to smarten the ship’s company up a bit, the day after their long leave ended: a formal parade, with a church service at the end, was a good way of taking a fresh tug at discipline, a method of pointing out, in simple terms, the difference between life ashore and life afloat. And perhaps, thought Lockhart, he might as well point a bit of it out himself.

‘Lieutenant Morell!’ he called out sharply.

‘Sir?’ said Morell.

‘Stop those men in your division talking.’

‘Aye, aye, sir.’

By agreement, Lockhart looked exceedingly bleak, and Morell unusually attentive, during this exchange, which was a purely formal expression of reproof within the naval hierarchy. His seniority over Morell was just under three weeks: enough to preserve the chain of command, not enough to make his position as First Lieutenant any sort of dividing line between them.

He heard Morell administering a rocket to the offender, and he turned away towards the bows of the ship, glancing down the lines of men whom he had just inspected as he did so. Leave or no leave, they looked smart enough: clean, polished up, fundamentally tidy and seamanlike. There was a breeze whipping across the dock, setting the signal halyards rattling, ruffling the men’s collars here and there: a cold breeze, a sharp breeze, promising a brisk start to their convoy. He wondered how many of the hands would be seasick tonight, after their spell ashore: it was going to be lively enough, as soon as they left the shelter of the river.

Ericson’s head appeared at the top of the ladder. Lockhart called out: ‘Divisions! ‘Tenshun!’ and saluted, formally presenting the ship’s company for the Captain’s inspection.

Ericson took his time as he walked up and down the lines: it was a smart turnout, he saw immediately, and he wanted, as usual, to make it seem worth while by giving it careful attention. (He remembered overhearing a rating off another ship complaining: ‘Divisions? Skipper runs past like a bloody ferret and then dives down to the gin again . . .’)
Compass Rose
had been lucky in the way she had kept her ship’s company together, for though it was getting on for three years since they commissioned, there had been remarkably few changes. As he walked slowly round, Ericson was reminded of this passage of time, and the movements up the scale which had taken place within the family: Wells, for instance, was now a yeoman of signals again, Leading-Seaman Phillips and Carslake, the leading-steward, were both petty officers, Wainwright a leading-torpedoman. God knows they’ve earned it, he thought as he reached Ferraby’s communications division, and the latter saluted: they had made of
Compass Rose
one of the best ships in the flotilla, the one that
Viperous
seemed to choose automatically when there was anything out of the ordinary to be done. (That cut both ways, of course: it was one thing to earn the limelight by sinking a U-boat, but quite another to qualify, on that account, for all the odd jobs, all the towing and rescuing and searching that were liable to keep a ship at sea for a couple of extra nights at the end of a convoy.) These were the men, anyway, who had made
Compass Rose
what she was; the process had meant, for them, nearly three years of training and practice and learning at first hand, three years of sweating it out in wretched surroundings, three years of cruel weather, cruel dangers, cruel sights to remember.

Life in corvettes had claimed them altogether: there were times when each man was, for days and weeks at a stretch, reduced (or perhaps exalted) to nothing more than a pair of strained eyes, a pair of seaboots anchoring him to the deck, and a life-belt snugly clamped round his waist. These were the essentials, these were what a man had to become . . . The thing that Ericson still found amazing was that the great majority of his crew, who had taken on this astonishing transformation, were amateurs: they had volunteered or been conscripted from a dozen different jobs, without a hint of the sea in them; and the original stiffening from the ‘Old Navy’ no longer stood out at all in the general picture.

The sea in their blood, he thought, as he acknowledged Baker’s salute and turned to his division of stokers: the phrase meant something after all: it was not just a romantic notion left over from Nelson, it was not just a baritone rendering of ‘Heart of Oak’, with manly emphasis on ‘Jolly tars are our men’. ‘The sea in their blood’ meant that you could pour Englishmen – any Englishmen – into a ship, and they made that ship work and fight as if they had been doing it all their lives, catching up, overtaking, and leaving behind the professionals of any other nation. It was the basic virtue of living on an island.

He was proud of them.

He completed his inspection of this last division, walked back to his place in the centre of the square, took off his cap, and after a pause began to read the Morning Service.

The noises of departure began, sounding all over the ship like repeated calls to action.

Ericson, sitting in his cabin and listening to the familiar activity intensifying as their sailing time drew near, could follow its progress in detail. He heard the pipe for the hands to fall in: he heard them begin to move about the deck, making fast all the spare gear, getting out the fenders, running back with the wires as they were cast off from the dockside. Another pipe sounded close by him, and with it the quartermaster’s voice: ‘Testing alarm bells! Testing alarm bells!’: presently the bells themselves sounded, clanging for a full minute throughout the ship and giving him, in spite of the preliminary warning, a twinge of discomfort somewhere under his heart. Muffled in the background, Chief E.R.A. Watts’ contribution began to make itself heard: the windlass clanked as it was turned over, the steering engine ran backwards and forwards through the full arc of the rudder, and a gentle pulsing indicated that the main shaft was moving slowly, at five or ten revolutions a minute, in preparation for its long task. It would never stop turning, for the next four hundred hours at least . . . Just over Ericson’s head, the telegraph bells rang in the wheelhouse, and were faintly answered from the engine room; and then, after a pause, came the last pipe of all: ‘Hands to stations for leaving harbour! Special sea duty men – close up!’

Lockhart appeared at the door of his cabin, his cap under his arm, and said: ‘Ready to proceed, sir.’

Ericson took his binoculars from the shelf over his bunk, buttoned up his greatcoat, and made for the bridge ladder.

Downriver, to seaward of the Bar Light Vessel, the convoy assembled.

There were forty-four ships, ranging from a 10,000-ton tanker to what looked like the oldest refrigerator ship in the world: another six would join them south of the Isle of Man, and another eight off the Firth of Clyde; and Baker, checking the names and numbers of the Liverpool portion from the convoy list on the chart table, found himself wondering, not for the first time, at the immense complexity of organisation that lay behind all these convoys. There might be a dozen of them at sea at the same time, comprising upwards of five hundred ships: those individual ships would come from a score of different ports all round the coast of England: they would have to be manned, and loaded at a prescribed date, railage and docking difficulties notwithstanding: they would each have to receive identical convoy instructions, and their masters would have to attend sailing conferences for last-minute orders: they would have to rendezvous at a set time and place, with pilots made available for them; and their readiness for sea had to coincide with that of an escort group to accompany them, which itself needed the same preparation and the same careful routing. Dock space had to be waiting for them, and men to load and unload: a hundred factories had to meet a fixed despatch date on their account: a railway shunter falling asleep at Birmingham or Clapham could spoil the whole thing, a third mate getting drunk on Tuesday instead of Monday could wreck a dozen carefully laid plans, a single air raid out of the hundreds that had harassed the harbours of Britain could halve a convoy and make it not worth the trouble of sending across the Atlantic.

Yet the ships always seemed to turn up: as usual, here they were, on this bright cold afternoon . . . Baker, ticking off their names as Wells called them out, wondered idly who was behind the organisation: was it one superman, or a committee, or hundreds of civil servants all telephoning each other at once?