The Cruel Sea (1951) (50 page)

After waiting, afraid to put it to the test, he said: ‘Are you all right, Rose?’ There was no answer. He bent down and touched the face that was close under his own. By some instinct of compassion, it was with his lips that he touched it, and his lips came away icy and trembling. Now he was alone . . . The tears ran down Ferraby’s cheeks, and fell on the open upturned eyes. In mourning and in mortal fear, he sat on, with the cold stiffening body of his friend like a dead child under his heart.

Lockhart did not die, though many times during that night there seemed to him little reason why this should be so. He had spent most of the dark hours in the water alongside Number Two Carley, of which he was in charge: only towards morning when there was room and to spare, did he climb on to it. From this slightly higher vantage point he looked round him, and felt the cold and smelt the oil, and saw the other raft nearby, and the troubled water in between; and he pondered the dark shadows which were dead men, and the clouds racing across the sky, and the single star overhead, and the sound of the bitter wind; and then, with all this to daunt him and drain him of hope, he took a last grip on himself, and on the handful of men on the raft, and set himself to stay alive till daylight, and to take them along with him.

He made them sing, he made them move their arms and legs, he made them talk, he made them keep awake. He slapped their faces, he kicked them, he rocked the raft till they were forced to rouse themselves and cling on: he dug deep into his repertoire of filthy stories and produced a selection so pointless and so disgusting that he would have blushed to tell them, if the extra blood had been available. He made them act ‘Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree’, and play guessing games: he roused Ferraby from his dejected silence, and made him repeat all the poetry he knew: he imitated all the characters of ITMA, and forced the others to join in. He set them to paddling the raft round in circles, and singing the ‘Volga Boatmen’: recalling a childhood game, he divided them into three parties, and detailed them to shout ‘Russia’, ‘Prussia’, and ‘Austria’, at the same moment – a manoeuvre designed to sound like a giant and appropriate sneeze . . . The men on his raft loathed him, and the sound of his voice, and his appalling optimism: they cursed him openly, and he answered them back in the same language, and promised them a liberal dose of detention as soon as they got back to harbour.

For all this, he drew on an unknown reserve of strength and energy which now came to his rescue. When he climbed out of the water, he had felt miserably stiff and cold: the wild and foolish activity, the clownish antics, soon restored him, and some of it communicated itself to some of the men with him, and some of them caught the point of it and became foolish and clownish and energetic in their turn, and so some of them saved their lives.

Sellars, Crowther, Gracey, and Tewson did not die. They were on Number Two Carley with Lockhart and Ferraby, and they were all that were left alive by morning, despite these frenzied efforts to keep at bay the lure and the sweetness of sleep. It was Tewson’s first ship, and his first voyage: he was a cheerful young Cockney, and now and again during the night he had made them laugh by asking cheekily: ‘Does this sort of thing happen
every
trip?’ It was a pretty small joke, but (as Lockhart realised) it was the sort of contribution they had to have . . . There were other contributions: Sellars sang an interminable version of ‘The Harlot of Jerusalem’, Crowther (the sick berth attendant who had been a vet) imitated animal noises, Gracey gave an exhibition of shadow-boxing which nearly overturned the raft. They did, in fact, the best they could; and their best was just good enough to save their lives.

Phillips, Grey, Spurway, and Widdowes did not die. They were the survivors of Number One Carley, with the Captain; and they owed their lives to him. Ericson, like Lockhart, had realised that sleep had to be fought continuously and relentlessly if anyone were to be left alive in the morning: he had therefore spent the greater part of the night putting the men on his raft through an examination for their next higher rating. He made a round game of it, half-serious, half-childish: he asked each man upwards of thirty questions: if the answer were correct all the others had to clap, if not, they had to boo at the tops of their voices, and the culprit had to perform some vigorous kind of forfeit . . . His authority carried many of the men along for several hours: it was only towards dawn, when he felt his own brain lagging with the effort of concentration, that the competitors began to thin out, and the clapping and shouting to fade to a ghostly mutter of sound: to a moaning like the wind, and a rustling like the cold waves curling and slopping against the raft, the waves that trustfully waited to swallow them all.

The Captain did not die: it was as if, after
Compass Rose
went down, he had nothing left to die with. The night’s ‘examination’ effort had been necessary, and so he had made it, automatically – but only as the Captain, in charge of a raftful of men who had always been owed his utmost care and skill: the effort had had no part of his heart in it. That heart seemed to have shrivelled, in the few terrible minutes between the striking of his ship, and her sinking: he had loved
Compass Rose,
not sentimentally, but with the pride and the strong attachment which the past three years had inevitably brought, and to see her thus contemptuously destroyed before his eyes had been an appalling shock. There was no word and no reaction appropriate to this wicked night: it drained him of all feeling. But still he had not died, because he was forty-seven, and a sailor, and tough and strong, and he understood – though now he hated – the sea.

All his men had longed for daylight: Ericson merely noted that it was now at hand, and that the poor remnants of his crew might yet survive. When the first grey light from the eastward began to creep across the water, he roused himself, and his men, and set them to paddling towards the other raft, which had drifted a full mile away. The light, gaining in strength, seeped round them as if borne by the bitter wind itself, and fell without pity upon the terrible pale sea, and the great streaks of oil, and the floating bundles that had been living men. As the two rafts drew together, the figures on them waved to each other, jerkily, like people who could scarcely believe that they were not alone: when they were within earshot, there was a croaking hail from a man on Lockhart’s raft, and Phillips, on the Captain’s, made a vague noise in his throat in reply.

No one said anything more until the rafts met, and touched; and then they all looked at each other, in horror and in fear.

The two rafts were much alike. On each of them was the same handful of filthy oil-soaked men who still sat upright, while other men lay still in their arms or sprawled like dogs at their feet. Round them, in the water, were the same attendant figures – a horrifying fringe of bobbing corpses, with their meaningless faces blank to the sky and their hands frozen to the ratlines.

Between the dead and the living was no sharp dividing line. The men upright on the rafts seemed to blur with the dead men they nursed, and with the derelict men in the water, as part of the same vague and pitiful design.

Ericson counted the figures still alive on the other Carley. There were four of them, and Lockhart and Ferraby: they had the same fearful aspect as the men on his own raft: blackened, shivering, their cheeks and temples sunken with the cold, their limbs bloodless; men who, escaping death during the dark hours, still crouched stricken in its shadow when morning came. And the whole total was eleven . . . He rubbed his hand across his frozen lips, and cleared his throat, and said: ‘Well, Number One . . .’

‘Well, sir . . .’

Lockhart stared back at Ericson for a moment, and then looked away. There could be nothing more, nothing to ease the unbearable moment.

The wind blew chill in their faces, the water slopped and broke in small ice-cold waves against the rafts, the harnessed fringe of dead men swayed like dancers. The sun was coming up now, to add dreadful detail: it showed the rafts, horrible in themselves, to be only single items in a whole waste of cruel water, on which countless bodies rolled and laboured amid countless bits of wreckage, adrift under the bleak sky. All round them, on the oily, fouled surface, the wretched flotsam, all that was left of
Compass Rose,
hurt and shamed the eye.

The picture of the year, thought Lockhart: ‘Morning, with Corpses.’

So
Viperous
found them.

1943: The Moment of Balance

Three out of the fourteen mirrors that lined the walls of the smoothest bar in London gave Lockhart three versions of himself to choose from. There was the looking-straight-at, and the looking-sideways-to-the-right, and the looking-sideways-to-the-left: having nothing better to do, while he waited for Ericson to keep their midday appointment, he studied, with a certain speculative interest, these three different aspects of the lean young naval officer relaxing from the fatigues of active service. The uniform was immaculate: the face was thin, but not without a significant determination: the smudges under the eyes were an understandable tribute to the rigours of the past . . . Against the background of this enormously sophisticated room, with its thick carpet, shiny furniture, and general air of luxury, the face and figure were perhaps a trifle on the functional side: though there were other officers, from all three services, lined up at the bar or seated at the flanking tables, they were hardly warlike – in fact they looked as though they had been sitting where they were since the beginning of hostilities; and the women they escorted had, to an even greater degree, this same air of permanent availability. But he did not appear wholly out of place, Lockhart decided; if he could not attain the easy self-confidence of the habitués, at least he brought to his corner of the room an authoritative look, a dark blue consequence which matched the carpet. And one more pink gin would come near to putting him in the habitué class, in any case . . . He glanced around him.

‘Waiter!’

‘Sir?’ The waiter, a very old man in a soft frilled shirt, appeared by his side.

‘Another pink gin, please.’

‘Pink gin, sir.’

‘And waiter—’

‘Yes, sir?’

Lockhart pointed to the water jug on his table. ‘This water has some dust on it.’

The old man clicked his tongue. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ He lifted the jug, examined it for a moment, and then put it on his tray. ‘I’ll have it changed immediately, sir.’ He bent forward. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he repeated. ‘It’s the war, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Lockhart. ‘In that case I don’t want to make too much out of it.’

The old waiter shook his head. ‘You’ve no idea what it’s like now, sir. Cracked glasses – not enough ice – bits of cork in the sherry . . .’ He bent forward again. ‘We had a cockroach in the potato chips, just the other day.’

Lockhart swallowed. ‘Should you be telling me this?’

‘I thought I’d just mention it, sir. It’s not at all what we like to give our customers, but what can we do? We just can’t get the supplies like we used to. There was an American officer here only last week, complaining about the soda water being warm.’

‘Warm soda water is a terrible thing,’ said Lockhart dreamily.

‘It spoils everything, sir.’

‘Yes, indeed. Horrible to swim in, too.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Nothing,’ said Lockhart. ‘I was just thinking of something.’

‘Pink gin, then, sir?’

‘Yes, and make it a big one.’ He looked up suddenly and caught sight of Ericson standing at the entrance to the bar. After staring at him closely for a moment, he added: ‘Make it two big ones, in fact. I think we have something to celebrate.’

Ericson caught his eye, and began to twist his way through the crowded room towards the table. There was a certain faint self-consciousness about the big figure which Lockhart noticed, understood, and indubitably loved. This was a man to go through the war with . . . When Ericson reached his table, Lockhart stood up, and smiled broadly.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘congratulations.’

Ericson looked down, a trifle shyly, at the cap he was carrying under his arm. The shining gold braid on its peak proclaimed a very new promotion. ‘Thanks, Number One,’ he said. ‘They only told me last week. The passage of time, of course.’

‘Nothing else,’ said Lockhart equably. ‘But here’s to it, all the same.’ He drank off the last quarter-inch of liquid in his glass, and looked towards the bar. ‘I ordered you a large pink gin.’

‘That,’ said Ericson, ‘will do for a start.’

The drinks arrived. As Ericson nodded and raised his glass, Lockhart glanced down once again at the gold braid on the peak of the cap. He was now feeling a trifle shy himself: he had not seen the Captain for over two months, and their last dockside parting – a strange blend of formality, raw emotion, and mutual astonishment at their survival – was not a thing to be recalled, in these or indeed in any surroundings.

‘I doubt if I shall ever be a commander,’ he said finally. ‘The passage of time won’t be enough – at least, I hope not – and nothing else will operate in my case.’

‘Don’t be too sure,’ said Ericson. He paused. ‘I was at the Admiralty most of yesterday. Things are starting to move again.’

Lockhart was suddenly attacked by a spasm of the nervousness, the near-terror, which he had not yet learned to subdue. If things were ‘starting to move again’, he himself must move with them: it meant the end of the hard-won interval, the end of relaxation and recovery: it meant taking the whole thing on again. He knew Ericson must have been settling his future, or at least suggesting to the Admiralty the line it might take; and he was almost afraid to learn what the future was going to be. For him, the balance between control and surrender was delicate still: his nerves, tautened and laid bare under the shock of
Compass Rose,
seemed ready to treat any change as if it were the end of the whole world. Even Ericson’s brass hat came into this category: it was like a secret signal, dismissing all he knew and trusted, promising nothing but change and complication. It could mean anything: it could mean loneliness, strange difficulties, goodbye . . . Aware of how odd it must sound, he switched the subject abruptly, and asked: ‘What else have you been doing? Did you go and see Morell’s wife?’