The Cruel Sea (1951) (70 page)

He cabled: ‘Have it,’ and then sat down to write to her all that was in his heart.

‘It’s an absolute fact,’ Scott-Brown told them, wonder still lingering in his voice. ‘There were these two people sitting at the next table to mine: an old chap with white hair, the kind you see in
Esquire,
and a young person with all the bosom in the world, and a mink coat to match it. They were talking of this and that – I couldn’t help overhearing – and then suddenly the old chap leant across – it was lunchtime, mind you, and bright sunshine as well and he said, in a very respectful way: “Little lady, I sure would like to possess you”.’

‘What was the answer?’

‘She said’ – and here Scott-Brown’s voice reached an extreme pitch of disbelief – ‘she said: “Honey, I’m just brushing and combing my hormones”.’

‘Of course,’ said the man in the bar, ‘we Americans take a different view of women altogether, from what you folks do.’

‘I understand that is so,’ said Raikes, the navigator, who had been in the bar longer than most people.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the other man, who had been there almost as long. ‘We put them right high up on a pedestal.’

‘Very wise,’ said Raikes. ‘Best way of seeing their legs.’

‘And then,’ said the man, who wasn’t listening, ‘we bring them tributes of candy and flowers, and we respect them.’

‘That ought to do the trick,’ said Raikes.

‘That’s why,’ said the man, ‘America is the only country in the world where women are one hundred per cent safe all the time. Our young American girls,’ he went on, developing his theme with relish, ‘are clean and decent, without a wrong thought in their heads – and that’s particularly so in the State of Missouri, where I come from. Our American homes are sacred, our American mothers are honoured throughout the land, and our American womanhood is universally held to be the purest in the world.’

‘Good show,’ said Raikes.

‘Did you say something about legs, Captain?’ asked the man presently.

‘Yes,’ said Raikes.

‘I’m a tit man myself.’

‘What have you been drinking?’ asked Lockhart curiously.

‘Peppermint frappé,’ answered the midshipman.

‘A whore’s drink,’ commented Lockhart.

‘Is it, sir?’ said the midshipman, surprised. ‘It was her suggestion.’

‘I love my husband,’ said the girl, rising on one lovely arm from the pillow, ‘but I’m
in
love with you. You see?’

‘That’s fine,’ said Allingham.

‘But honey, you do understand, don’t you? It’s important.’

‘Sure I understand. Just lie still.’

‘It was between dances,’ said Raikes modestly. ‘We went out into the garden, and she said: “You’re welcome”, and I was.’

‘I noticed that it didn’t seem to take you long,’ said Scott-Brown austerely.

‘She seemed to have some sort of quick-release gear round her waist. No trouble at all.’

‘As long as it doesn’t harm Anglo-American relations.’

‘Huh!’ Raikes snorted. ‘It’s nothing to what the Yanks are doing to ours.’

‘They’re not a bit like us,’ said Johnson severely. ‘No morals at all.’

Lockhart wrote to Julie, from the New York hotel where he was spending a week’s leave:

I’ve been playing poker most of the night, with some newspaper men. What good company they are – and how grand
all
the Americans have been to us; and, after nearly two months, how I long to get back to you! Now it is Sunday, Sunday dawn: the birds are tweeting, the cards fall from the nervous hands, the Regency scene dissolves. I love and think of you, even in this cold untender hour on the fourteenth floor of a New York hotel: I think of being married to you soon, I think of the child you are guarding for me.

But are you with me, in this dawn? Are you sleeping, are you restless, do you think and dream of me also? Is our cottage, where we were lovers, in your dream? Are there seagulls crying, is there wet heather to walk through, do we hold hands, is there a stirring somewhere in both our bodies: does love live, does it grow, does it move for us? What are your eyes like, your trembling lips, your breast that stroked my own? What is there for us in your dream, in your waking?

No, the hour is not cold, not untender: you are ever wanted, ever missed: you are Julie always, my sensual sister and child and loved one. I reach out for you now: we have shared many dawns, we said goodbye on one, many weeks ago: we share this one again, horribly divided – but the same birds sing, the town stirs, the light comes through the curtain, I touch you and hope you will wake. Wake, sweetheart: that was a kiss, that was a hand on your shoulder. But how warm you are. What were you dreaming of? Was it of this?

Oh sweet, dawns are still like that, even masculine ones when the room is wrecked by empty glasses and cigar ends and smoke and stale water in the ice bucket. Perhaps it is bad to write like this, bad to send it to you; but it is no cruel reminder – these things are there for both of us, all the time, and soon, very soon, we will find them again. And now, in this belated dawn, you are kissed and bidden farewell.

‘Halt!’ said Chief Petty Officer Barnard.

‘Off caps! Signalman Blake, sir.’

‘What’s the charge, coxswain?’

‘Did leave a piece of chewing gum adhering to the signal projector, sir.’

‘Oh . . . You must keep your equipment clean, Blake, whether we’re likely to go to sea or not. Otherwise you’ll get into trouble. Caution!’

‘Caution, sir. On caps! About turn! Double march!’ ‘Chewing gum, coxswain? How revolting!’

‘We’ve been here too long, sir.’

‘Don’t come down to breakfast,’ Ericson’s host had said, when wishing him goodnight. ‘We none of us do on Sundays. Get your sleep, and I’ll have it sent up to you.’ Now, lying in bed on a bright Sunday morning, listening to a far-off radio and to some vague farm noises below, Ericson waited for the promised breakfast. Physically he was at ease, but his thoughts did not match his body; this bed, this comfortable and cheerful room, this kindly welcome should have been all that he wanted, but they were not – they had a sour taste of guilt about them which he could not dismiss.

It was the fault of the war, of course, the war they were escaping.
Saltash
had now been out of action for two months, and she would not be ready to go for another fortnight or even three weeks: though the Brooklyn Navy Yard had proved efficient and cooperative, the delay was due to engine room spares which could not be conjured out of the air.

Ordinarily, nothing would have been more pleasant than this lazy holiday. But the times were not ordinary, and the holiday could not be accepted save shamefacedly: while they lived on the fat of the land, the war went on, and other people carried it, people who had not had breakfast in bed for five years, and who usually had a rotten breakfast anyway . . . In their welcome, the Americans had been kindness itself – witness the present invitation, a surprise approach by a complete stranger; but Ericson and his ship’s company had been in debt to that kindness for too many weeks, and it was sapping and destroying all the hard, built-up training of the war. The waiting had put everything out of gear – men as well as machinery:
Saltash
now seemed to him a useless run-down hulk, shirking the battle, and her crew, strangers to the sea, were becoming in the process strangers to all but the most negative aspects of discipline.

The plain reason was that they had been there too long, and there was no cure except to go away and start being serious again, and that was still out of his hands.

There was a knock on the door, and a pretty child of ten or eleven, wearing bright red dungarees, came in, bearing a piled-up tray.

‘Good morning, Commander,’ she said, with the utmost self-possession. ‘How did you sleep?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘I’ll bring you the funnies just as soon as I can, but’ – she explained seriously – ‘in this family it’s very hard to get hold of them before noontime.’

‘There’s really no hurry.’

‘Dad says, eat a good breakfast, and then maybe you’d feel like playing a little golf.’

‘I haven’t played for a long time,’ said Ericson, ‘but I’d like to walk round.’

‘That’s fine . . . Dad also said,’ she went on, eyeing him gravely, ‘that I wasn’t to say anything about your accent. But it sure is cute.’

‘Thank you. What’s your name?’

‘Ariane. For my grandmother. It’s kind of French.’ She looked down at the tray. ‘Here’s breakfast. Is it enough?’

Ericson’s eyes followed hers. Breakfast consisted, besides coffee, of one large oval-shaped dish; and on it, neatly arranged, was a composite meal which was difficult to take in at a single glance. Its basic items were bacon, sausages, two eggs, some kedgeree, a piece of fish, four things that looked like scones, mustard, marmalade, a tomato, a fried banana, three slices of toast, and a waffle with a load of maple syrup.

‘It’s enough,’ said Ericson. ‘But stay and talk to me.’

‘I’d like to. I mustn’t stay long, though – I’ve got work to do.’

Disputes, sometimes small, sometimes big. Disagreements about how to do things, how to run countries, how to win wars. Arguments with workmen on board, with waiters ashore, with men in bars and women in bed. Slow grumbling in the mess decks, quick flare-ups at parties: stately or sulky anger when other people would
not
see the point of view. Leave-breaking, coming aboard drunk: a row with a dock policeman, a complaint about molesting which came near to rape. Recollection of what things were like in England; resentment against ease, against luxury, against an undeserved, opulent comfort in the midst of war.

Gratitude to Americans for being so kind, changing to so-they-bloody-well-ought-to-be when the mood sickened. Laughter, not kindly, at Yanks talking big. Yanks complaining about their rationing, Yanks with rows of medals simply for travelling from A to B, Yanks thinking they were wonderful and saying so out loud.

Remembering, sometimes mentioning, those first two years of neutrality, while Britain took it and bled and went broke. Fights, arguments, futile comparisons, bitterness, boredom. All part of the stagnation period, the waiting to get on with it.

‘Sounds to me like you British are kinda burned up because Patton’s troops are going ahead and yours are stuck down somewhere.’

‘It isn’t that. It’s just that we don’t like noisy generals.’

‘The trouble with these people,’ said Vincent, the quiet soft-spoken young sub-lieutenant who had been in corvettes since 1939, ‘is that they don’t take the war seriously. Even now – in 1944 – they’ve still only got one leg in. Their rationing’s a joke, though they could hardly make more noise about it: you can still get all the meat you want, all the butter, all the petrol – particularly if you know the man behind the counter, or the man who fixes the priorities, or the man at the garage; and it’s
still
considered a bit of smart operating if you get away with more than your share. But the thing that struck me most is their call-up system. There was a man at a party the other night, sticking his chest out because he had a wife and four children, and he’d got his call-up deferred again because of having them. It doesn’t make sense . . . Anywhere else in the world – in Russia or England or Germany – having a wife and four children is a reason
for
fighting, not for getting out of it: it means you’ve got something special to defend, instead of being free and on your own, it’s the best argument of all for not hanging back. But when I said that, I might as well have been playing the bagpipes . . . They don’t see the war as a fight at all, they don’t see it as something essential to win: for them, it’s still in the nuisance category, an accident that interrupts the Great American Plan – but if you’re smart you can keep clear of it, you can leave it to the next man to fight or overwork or go short of his comforts. That’s not the way to fight a war . . . Damn’ lucky for them we were there to take the first shock.’

‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ said Raikes. ‘It may not be the way to fight a war, but it’s the way to come out the winner.’

‘The trouble with these people,’ said Scott-Brown, ‘is that they take the war too seriously. They see the whole thing as a personal tragedy: if you’re drafted it’s terrible, if you leave home to go to camp it’s torture, if you have to go overseas it’s bloody murder . . . Wars should be taken in the stride, not inflated to ten times life size till everyone’s crying their eyes out. The newspapers play it up, of course, now that America’s started fighting: everything’s a disaster, everything’s the biggest victory since Bunker Hill, everyone’s a hero, even if he just puts on a dirty-looking pink uniform and bullies a lot of mess waiters at the nearest canteen. I wonder what would happen if they had a real air raid on New York? All the reserves of bravery have been expended already, on waving goodbye to Joe when he leaves for his basic training; and as for the papers, they haven’t any adjectives left to use . . . They’re not a great nation at all. There are just a lot
of
them.’