The Dangerous Years (31 page)

Steaming trials passed without too much dissatisfaction though Kelly noticed that, like Tyrwhitt’s
Hawkins
,
Rebuke
was wet; her funnel, despite the money and effort spent on streamlining it, still threw out boiler fumes which obscured her spotting top; and at high speed she seemed to suffer from an acute form of St Vitus’ dance. The engineer commander, a small, uncertain angry man who had the shrunken look of something that had been too frequently laundered, was on edge throughout the whole business in case any of the dozens of sea-connections which could cause flooding had been left open. Dockyard workers weren’t known for their sense of responsibility and, since they weren’t likely to be on board if the ship filled with water and sank, they didn’t have the same feeling for leaky steam joints, untightened nuts or bilges choked with cotton waste, fag ends and lunch paper. The skeleton crew with which the steaming trials were completed were also hardly to be recommended, and with
Rebuke
part of the Atlantic Fleet and due to sail with them in the summer, Kelly went to the commodore in charge of the port establishment to demand that when the proper crew arrived it should contain at least a nucleus of good men.

The drafting commander was sympathetic but unable to help much. ‘You know what they’re like,’ he pointed out. ‘They’re not exactly enamoured of the Navy these days.’

Verschoyle filled him in on the facts.

‘Now we have a Labour Government,’ he explained bluntly, ‘they prefer the socialist method of approach. They know the ways of the Admiralty are as tortuous as Hampton Court maze and that any request to them can disappear from sight, never to be seen again, so if they don’t like something, instead of going to their officer, they go to the dockyard MP, who’s usually a Socialist, and it’s brought up in Parliament. It induces what you might call a slow erosion of confidence both ways.’

‘Can’t you lot at the Admiralty do anything?’ Kelly demanded. ‘
You’ve
been here long enough to put down roots.’

Verschoyle smiled. ‘My dear chap, I’m just one more bottleneck in the stream of papers passing round.’ He paused. ‘Seen the Little ’Un lately?’

Kelly shrugged. ‘Not since Shanghai.’

‘I saw Kimister.’ Verschoyle smiled. ‘He’s in the mine-laying cruiser,
Advance
. Said it was nice to have the Three Musketeers back in England.’

‘Three Musketeers?’

‘You, me and him. I asked him what made him think he could ever be a Musketeer. He’d probably shoot his own foot off.’

Kelly laughed. It was cruel but no less than the truth.

‘Heard they had to give up that house in Wales they had,’ Verschoyle went on. ‘He lost all his money.’

Kelly pretended disinterest but he was overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness. Everything seemed to have happened to Charley.

‘They’re living entirely on Kimister’s pay now,’ Verschoyle said, ‘and he hasn’t the guts or the brains to get on or get out. I reckon that at the next counting of heads he’s due to be tossed out on his ear.’

Only once did Kelly meet Charley. He stopped in the Keppel’s Head for a meal before catching the train to London and she was waiting there for Kimister. She didn’t seem much older and, with her dark hair and blue eyes, there was a strange sort of calm about her.

‘How’s Albert?’ Kelly asked.

‘Oh, he’s all right!’ Her greeting was warm because she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been in love with him and, despite everything, she still was. ‘He’s not too happy in
Advance
but he doesn’t see any alternative. He says he’s been in the Navy too long to look for a job outside.’

‘I think we all have, Charley. How about Mabel?’

She shrugged and gave another little smile. ‘Running a dress shop again.’

‘Married?’

‘Not yet. She seems to have accepted now that she won’t be. She’s very cheerful.’

‘And you?’

‘Times aren’t quite what they used to be, are they, Kelly?’

‘No, not quite the same.’

‘I see Christina’s picture occasionally in
The Tatler
or
The Sketch.’

‘Yes.’ Kelly said bleakly. ‘She gets around quite a bit.’

So bloody fast, he thought, he never managed to catch up with her. He’d suspected for some time that she’d already taken to having men friends who were rather more intimate than they need have been and he’d been reminded several times of the captain of
Clarendon
, in which he’d been serving when war had broken out in 1914. He’d married some tart while on the China Station who’d turned out to be the daughter of a third-rate entrepreneur in Shanghai, and they’d all laughed at him because Chinasides was noted for what it did to men’s reputations, sending them back drunks, corrupt or married to someone they wouldn’t normally have looked at. Well, he was an old China hand himself now and he’d suffered in the same way.

He started back to the present. ‘How about you, Charley?’ he asked.

‘Poor Albert’s finding things a bit difficult at the moment.’

‘And you?’

‘Me, too.’ She smiled. ‘But we all have to furrow our own row, don’t we? Albert tries very hard.’

‘Sometimes I think–’

She put a hand on his quickly. ‘It probably wouldn’t have worked, Kelly,’ she said in a breathless little rush. ‘It often doesn’t with people you’ve known all your lives, you know.’

He had a feeling that it would always have worked with Charley if he’d given it a chance. It was working even now, he felt bitterly, reaching out to him in a way that nothing about Christina ever did, despite her sex and her money.

Christina was already dressing to go out when he arrived at the house in CarIton Terrace.

‘Not again, for God’s sake,’ he said angrily.

She was in full warpaint and she smiled at him, everlastingly cheerful and completely indifferent to his distaste.

‘We’re going to the Carters’,’ she said. ‘There’ll be a lot of Germans there from the Embassy. I’m told they’re a very interesting lot.’

‘I don’t like the bloody Germans,’ Kelly snapped. ‘I spent four years of my life disliking them. It’s not easy to start doing the other thing now.’

She turned from the mirror. ‘You really are narrow-minded, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘There are things
happening
in Germany, you know. This chap Hitler’s going to make the place hum.’ She dabbed at her nose with her powder puff. ‘Looks a bit like Charlie Chaplin, of course, but he’s the head of a large party and he knows what to do about the economic crisis.’

Kelly scowled. ‘Do we
have
to go?’

‘Yes, old thing. It’s for charity.’

‘These bloody parties for charity that everybody gives these days seem to consist of a great deal of junketing and bloody little charity.’

She stared at him coldly. In her sophisticated world, following the rules and dictates of the shallow society in which she moved, she’d once considered herself too clever for him. He was an extrovert individual, normally happy, brisk and full of an energy that seemed to suggest he rarely thought deeply. But she was astute enough to acknowledge that, though she disliked the Navy, it demanded at least that a rising young officer should be intelligent, too, and she often suspected he was sneering at her, because he had acquired a disconcerting habit of hiding behind his own face so that she didn’t know what he was thinking.

‘You sound like a bosun’s mate or something, not a commander.’ she said. ‘The industrialists are supporting Hitler more and more. He’s found the answer to all the unrest we suffer. Pity a few of our own lot can’t set up someone like him here. Somebody like Oswald Mosley. Father says that if a few of the troublemakers had the stuffing knocked out of ’em as they’re having it knocked out in Germany, it might be a bit easier to run things.’

‘Your father,’ Kelly said deliberately, ‘is a bloody funny Socialist.’

Unwillingly, he changed into evening dress. ‘I hope we shan’t be late,’ he said.

Christina was indifferent. ‘These things always go on a bit.’

‘Then I shall have to leave early. We’re commissioning on Monday.’

‘Doesn’t mean a thing.’

Kelly’s scowl deepened. ‘It means that it’s taken three weeks of careful planning with a list of twelve hundred ratings and seventy officers. Every department has to be manned and it’s my job to see to it.’

She dabbed at her nose once more. ‘See Hugh?’ she asked. He might just as well have been commenting on the colour of the carpet for all the interest she showed in his problems.

‘Yes,’ he snapped.

‘How was he?’

‘Wanting to see his mother.’

‘I don’t believe you. He’d much rather see you. Told me so last time I went down, in fact. Bit off-putting, I thought. Decided the little beast could fish the next time there was a weekend out. In any case, I hate that bloody town where the school is as much as he hates London. He’d much rather look over one of your ships or something or go sailing with you in the Solent.’

The party seemed to consist of all the same faces he’d seen a hundred times a year since they’d returned to England. He had a feeling that after the years in the Far East and the Mediterranean, he was out of touch, and that the people he met in England were a cleverer lot who could tie him in knots. The fact that it wasn’t true made no difference and he still felt lost for words in their company. Fortunately, Verschoyle was there, bland, amused and casual.

‘How’s that monstrous monument to Jacky Fisher you’re in?’ he asked.

‘Coming to be known as
Rebuilt
.’

Verschoyle looked about him. ‘Odd things, these charity functions,’ he observed. ‘Be much easier if we just turned over the money we spend to the poor and went out and had a drink at a pub. By the way, there’s someone over there who claims she knows you. She’s the wife of Count von Schwerin, one of the German attachés, and she said she knew a few naval people from after the war. Yours seemed to be the name she dwelt on most.’

The German attaché was a middle-aged man with a bald head, a monocle and a face like a borzoi. His wife had her back to them but Kelly knew at once who she was.

She turned eventually and he saw a pair of slanting topaz eyes smiling as she raised her glass to him.
Za vashe zdorovye
, Kelly Georgeivitch,’ she said. ‘Your good health.’

‘Vera Nikolaevna, as I live and breathe! What in God’s name are you doing here?’

Vera von Schwerin smiled. She looked in command of herself, poised, wealthy and enjoying a far better life than when he’d last seen her in Odessa.

‘Germany’s full of Prussian junkers who married Russian princesses,’ she said. ‘Half the Russian nobility was German in origin, anyway. If nothing else, we taught them how to behave like gentlemen and not aggressive boors.’

She didn’t appear to have changed much and Kelly’s instinct was to back away. She didn’t fail to notice his hesitation.

‘You remember me with warmth, I hope?’ she said.

‘Of course. And your husband?’

She gave him a cool look. ‘When I met him, all he had to be proud of was the fact that he’d been a captain in the Death’s Head Hussars. Now he’s a colonel in the reconstituted German army. I told you I would survive, Kelly Georgeivitch. I married him in 1923 in Berlin where I went from Constantinople.’ She fished in her bag and slipped a square of pasteboard into his pocket. ‘That’s my telephone number,’ she murmured. ‘A fortnight from today, my husband has to report back to Berlin for a week. I shall be alone. We could meet again and talk about old times.’

Verschoyle was just putting the telephone down in the hall when he escaped.

‘You off, old boy?’ he asked.

‘I’ve had enough of this bloody place,’ Kelly said.

‘You always were one for salty language. What about Christina?’

‘She has the car. I’ll take a taxi.’

Verschoyle gestured. ‘Take the car. I’ll see her home for you. Where did you pick up the beauteous countess?’

‘Novorossiisk, 1919.’ Kelly was still a little shaken by the meeting. ‘What we got up to was nobody’s business.’

‘Better not get up to it again, old son. Not just now, anyway. Things are happening.’

‘What sort of things?’

Mutiny, old lad. Submarine depot ship,
Lucia
. Chaps refusing to obey orders. She was converted from a captured German freighter, so perhaps some of the ghosts of the High Seas Fleet are still hanging around her holds.’

The whole fleet and all the dockyards were talking about
Lucia
, and the whisper was already running through
Rebuke
’s skeleton crew.

Lucia
had been an unhappy vessel with a long record of trouble, and because of the dirty state of her decks after coaling ship, weekend leave had been cancelled by a choleric first lieutenant. Nothing had been said about the crew not being allowed ashore for the normal Sunday afternoon leave, however, and when the duty watch were ordered to fall in, they had remained sullenly on the mess deck until marched off under close arrest. There had been no trouble, only a protest.

More news came in later in the day along the invisible grapevine that carried titbits from one port to another, and they arrived in the wardroom unadorned.

‘First lieutenant’s got as much tact as a bull in a china shop,’ the engineer commander said bluntly. ‘I was in
Caerhays
with him and he couldn’t organise a whelk stall.’

Kelly had long since put the final touches to
Rebuke
’s watch and station bill, the key to every ship’s organisation, and with the manning of every branch from Signals to Stores worked out days before, Captain Harrison was anxious that commissioning day should go well.

‘I want only men of the highest integrity for the ship’s police,’ he pointed out.

‘That goes without saying, sir,’ Kelly said. Harrison seemed to be trying to teach his grandmother to suck eggs.

‘There’s to be nobody who’s likely to take a bribe to let a man ashore when he’s not entitled to go. And inform the Paymaster that I want the same thing for the officers’ stewards. There was a case of thieving in
Royal Oak
last year. And, although we use the older Marines for the wardroom, make sure we don’t get them hamfisted with six thumbs. There’s more to it than freedom from drills and awkward duties. I expect to be visited by the commander- in-chief and commanding officers from other ships, and I shall expect them to carry out their duties not only with decorum but also with efficiency. I also want the Paymaster to make sure the first day’s food is hot and at its best.’ The nagging check on things Kelly could have attended to in his sleep stopped abruptly. ‘Have you organised the petty officers and leading hands?’