The Dangerous Years (29 page)

‘Why Kimister?’ he asked himself again. ‘Why bloody Kimister?’

Mabel supplied the answer. ‘Because he was
there
,’ she said bluntly. ‘And you weren’t. I did my best to keep the little toad at arm’s length, but it was too late by then. The poor kid didn’t stop crying for two days. If you ask me, you played her a damned dirty trick because she was always convinced she was going to marry you from the first time she hit you over the head with her doll. However–’ she flashed her scarlet smile at him ‘–that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Look at me. I’ve been engaged twice and they both escaped.’

As the year approached its end, the situation in Shanghai grew tenser. They knew the clash between the Nationalists and the Communists was coming and they were worried about how it would affect the city and the foreign residents. Occasional rescue parties were ordered out. Priests and nuns from an Italian mission on the coast eighty miles away were taken prisoner, and a destroyer put a landing party ashore to bring back the captives in a horrifying state of dirt and starvation.

The expected upheaval came at last. The Communists made an attempt at a coup but, as the Nationalists hit back, they were swept out of the city in a series of bloody reprisals that did little harm to the Westerners, though a lot of damage was done to buildings, and the ensuing work left Kelly in no mood to chase his wife round the night-spots with her friends. Somehow, despite the social life of the Navy, he’d always suspected in an old-fashioned way that evenings ought occasionally to be spent together at home, reading or knitting or something, with short ecstatic passages in bed which ended up by producing the usual family. Visiting friends, dining, dancing – chiefly with business taipans and their plump wives who didn’t even speak the same language – didn’t quite seem to fit the bill, and a suspicion was growing in Kelly’s mind which he finally blurted out one evening as they prepared to go out.

‘When’s the baby due?’ he demanded.

Christina turned. She had just emerged from the bathroom and was standing stark naked by the mirror holding a towel in front of her.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘For God’s sake put something on and listen to me!’

‘I don’t have to wear clothes to listen to you,’ she said coolly. ‘And I am listening. What did you say?’

‘I said “When’s the baby due?” I thought you were going home to have it.’

‘Ah!’ She smiled at him under a fringe of dark hair. ‘Well, now I’m not.’

She leaned over to him and kissed him. ‘You do worry about that silly old career of yours a lot, don’t you?’ she said.

‘It’s the only one I’ve got.’

‘Well, try not to do it too much in front of me, there’s a dear.’

‘I asked you a question.’

‘What was it?’

She seemed quite unwilling to pay attention and, in a rage, brought on by tiredness and concern, he snatched her wrist and swung her round.

‘Why aren’t you going home?’ he snapped.

She stared back at him coolly. ‘Because it’s no longer necessary,’ she said.

‘Do you mean you’re not having a baby?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Did you get rid of it?’

There was a momentary pause before she answered. ‘Yes.’

He didn’t believe her and in that moment he knew he’d
never
be able to believe her. She’d played him like an angler with a trout and had finally landed him. She’d wanted him and, because she’d never been denied anything in all her life, she’d cheated him with the oldest trick in the world.

‘You were never having one,’ he accused. ‘You were lying as usual.’

She smiled and he went on angrily. ‘You’ve got so much bloody money you think you can behave just as you like! You thought you could get me the same way!’

Her smile grew wider, triumphant and delighted. ‘
I got you
,’ she pointed out.

‘I ought to walk out on you.’

‘You wouldn’t dare.’ She beamed at him, quite unperturbed. ‘Think what your precious Navy would say: Walked out on his wife after only a few months’ marriage. Tut tut! Demote him. Keelhaul him. Hang him from the yardarm, or wherever it is they hang them from. And now you’d better hurry and dress. We’re dining at the Rowntrees’.’

Kelly glared at her,
‘I’m
not.’

‘I’ve accepted.’

‘To hell with the bloody Rowntrees!’

‘They’re father’s friends – mine too, for that matter – and very influential.’

‘I don’t give a damn!’

She stared at him, her eyes hot. ‘You’re a fool, Kelly,’ she snapped.

‘And you’re a liar!’

As her hand came round to hit him, he grabbed her wrist and wrestled with her. As they fell across the bed, he heard her chuckle unexpectedly and, to show he meant what he’d said, he snatched at the towel she wore.

‘I say,’ she said gaily. ‘Steady on!’

‘Damn you,’ Kelly snarled. ‘I’ll show you whether we’re going out or not.’

Afterwards, with her lying alongside him. Kelly found himself frowning with disgust at himself.

‘You know,’ she said quietly, ‘that was rape.’

‘It’ll make up for the time when you
weren’t
raped.’

There was a long silence.

‘Actually, you know–’ her voice was dreamy ‘–you were rather good – though there’s no coming back for seconds – not tonight, anyway, because you’ve tired me out and the Rowntrees, as you say, can go to hell.’

As she turned and pulled the sheet over her, Kelly, lying alongside her, straight-limbed and angry, stared at the ceiling. There was only one thing in his mind: clear as a blinding light, he knew, after only a few short months, that he wasn’t in love with his wife and never would be.

Gashed with red lead and festooned with wire hawsers and ropes, the battle cruiser,
Rebuke
, looked like a vast steel fortress, a man-made mastodon against the graceful lines and spars of Nelson’s flagship,
Victory
, resting in her new concrete dock not far away. The R Class ships had none of the elegance or symmetry of
Hood
, which in comparison looked more like a yacht, and in her square lines and ugly turrets there was an awkward look of aggression. The great guns pointing fore and aft were an indication of her power, and her high sides and towering bridge an indication of her size. Commander Kelly Maguire disliked her on sight.

She was obsolete and, though she was just finishing a refit, he knew as well as every man aboard her that she was years out of date, a monument to the creed of the big gun and the dead belief in the power of the great capital ship, which even its creator, Jacky Fisher, had repudiated before his death.

As he climbed from the taxi that had dropped him alongside, the Marine sentry rattled his rifle butt on the concrete, and he noticed with approval that the side party was already appearing at the top of the gangway. As he stared up at the ship, towering and monstrous in her iron-grey paint and representing over thirty-thousand tons of expensive equipment, he knew full well that, in spite of her cost, she was not of great value.

Like everybody else first joining a capital ship, he was taken aback by her sheer size. It had become an old joke that every new officer exploring her inside tied a thread to the handle of the wardroom door to guide him back, and his heart sank as he studied her. He didn’t like big ships. Remembering the war years at Scapa when he’d watched them swinging at anchor for month after month, their crews staring wistfully at the destroyers rushing past about their everlasting business with the sea, he had long since come to the conclusion that battleships were an expensive luxury, too slow to do much damage yet too valuable to be risked, expensive monuments to the idea of a fleet in being that had held sway throughout the Great War. There was no feeling of belonging among their crew, too much specialisation and little idea of what was going on. He’d once met a junior officer who’d been in one of them at the rear of the fleet at Jutland, who’d had no idea there’d been a battle until he’d read the papers on his return to Rosyth.

As executive officer, his duties were going to cause him a great deal of thought, and what he was going to do with the thirteen hundred men of her crew in peace time when there was nothing much to hold their attention and no excitement beyond holystoning and painting he couldn’t imagine.

He climbed the gangway and saluted the quarterdeck. Despite himself, despite his dislike of
Rebuke
, he couldn’t help but feel the old surge of pride in the Navy as he felt her size beneath his feet and caught the hum of ventilating machinery that provided the background to all the other noises of a living ship.

As he acknowledged the officer of the day, he saw a familiar face among the men lined up behind him.

‘I know you, don’t l?’

The leading seaman he addressed, a big red-haired man with a washtub belly, grinned. ‘Yes, sir. Leading Seaman Doncaster.’

‘
Mordant
. Novorossiisk, 1919.’

‘That’s right, sir. We was sorting out the Russkies. You took us to a garden party at a house belonging to some Russian princess, sir.’

And you made a speech, Kelly thought to himself, and that same Russian princess warned me to keep an eye on you.

As he saw his black tin trunks being put down in his cabin and watched Corporal O’Hara, the elderly Marine who was to look after him, begin to unpack them, he decided it was going to take him weeks even to get to know half the people aboard. It seemed important that he had a link with the lower deck and it crossed his mind at once that Petty Officer Rumbelo was just the man. It wouldn’t be difficult to have him drafted to
Rebuke
and, while Rumbelo had been somewhat distant since Kelly’s marriage, he was still entirely loyal.

‘Do you ’ave photographs, sir?’ O’Hara asked.

‘Photographs?’

‘Children, sir. Your lady wife. Most of the officers like to have ’em about. I’ll stick ’em around for you.’

‘No,’ Kelly said. ‘No photographs. Don’t believe in ’em.’

It was a lie. Photographs in the bare steel cabins, even if they didn’t give the place a homely aspect, at least allowed a man to think of home. He preferred not to.

Home, to Kelly Maguire, was still the old house at Thakeham, efficiently run, between looking after her children, by Rumbelo’s wife, Bridget. Kelly’s mother had moved out to a cottage at the end of the lane so that Kelly and Christina could take it over, and there had been no objection from his father who, in any case, rarely appeared from his London club. It had not come to much, however. Christina had never liked the country and rarely went there.

‘I don’t intend to moulder quietly away in this bloody place,’ she had announced firmly as she had stood staring round her in the hall on their return from China. ‘Not with you away all the time in your ridiculous ships. It might be all right for some people but I’m not cut out for that sort of thing. Naval wives are almost a biological subspecies, and I’m not one.’

It was true that naval wives had tended to come in batches of a dozen – service background, unimaginative and able to hold their own in their husband’s struggle for promotion – but post-war generations were learning to marry healthy, unembarrassed middle-class girls who possessed the gift of being good letter writers, and in the absence of their husbands at sea could handle the tradesmen, the children and quick-witted estate agents while pursuing the everlasting chore of house-hunting.

Kelly frowned. The first year of his marriage had seemed normal enough and, with no knowledge of what a happy marriage ought to be, to Kelly it had even appeared that his own was jogging along contentedly enough despite his doubts. But Christina had never enjoyed playing second fiddle to a ship and her first glamorous view of the navy had quickly changed. It soon became obvious that she was not prepared to play the role he expected of her, and by the end of the second year the melting away of trust between them had started. Now, beyond the physical attraction which still undoubtedly existed, there was nothing to admire but her sharp wit and efficiency and her shrewd ability to handle her own affairs.

She’d done all the right things, of course. Her father, making sure his bread was buttered on both sides, had a minor position in the government – not big enough for him to be associated with failure if things went wrong but sufficient to be associated with success if the government pulled things off – and he
made
sure
that she did the right things. The house had been redecorated and improved throughout so that Bridget no longer had to get up early to clean out the kitchen range but had instead a vast electric cooker she detested, and for shopping a car in the garage that she drove in a state of mortal terror when Rumbelo himself wasn’t home to do it for her.

Staring round him, Kelly decided that
Rebuke
was a bit like his marriage: involving too many people to handle successfully but too big, important and expensive to be put aside.

At least, he thought, there was no longer any worry about money. Christina never asked him for any and what he drew as naval pay was entirely his own, but she also never asked his views on how to behave. She had a house in Mayfair and spent most of her time there in the company of a set of people – mostly business tycoons or hothouse intellectuals – whom Kelly didn’t understand and couldn’t bear.

The marriage had staled even before they’d left China, and she had disappeared to her father’s estate in Norfolk long before his tour had come to an end. He had accompanied Tyrwhitt on a circuit of the whole China Station, and when he’d returned the house in the Bubbling Well Road had been closed and she’d left him a letter which showed how much she’d inherited her father’s shrewdness. With the Shanghai taipans still considering there was a future for them in China, she’d cut her losses early and sold the house while it was possible to do so without too much suffering.

A visit to Japan with Tyrwhitt with
Kent
,
Suffolk
and
Berwick
, to attend the naval review that had followed the coronation of the new Emperor, Hirohito, took away some of the unpleasantness of suddenly finding himself alone. They had visited Shinzu and Fujiyama, and the endless round of salutes and calls had kept him too busy to think. The lines of anchored ships were not so different from those he’d seen off Portland, and they’d all been introduced to the Emperor, each of them clutching a small basket wrapped in a silk cloth and containing a piece of fish, a piece of pie, an apple, an orange, a piece of cake and a box of sweets. It was only when he’d made considerable inroads on the contents that he’d learned the correct procedure was to take out only a little and use the rest to distribute among his friends. He’d met Admiral Togo, victor of Tsu-Shima, danced at the British Embassy with Princess Chichebu, who spoke perfect English and seemed a vast improvement on the diamond hardness of Christina, then Tyrwhitt had left for England ahead of him at a time when it was becoming clear that Britain’s interests in China were going to have to be confined to Shanghai and Hong Kong, and there was even a doubt about those.