The Lion at Sea (5 page)

‘Will it make any difference to you?’ she asked.

‘In what way?’

‘Promotion, of course.’

‘Shouldn’t think so. People are always jumping into the sea to pull people out.’

Charley emptied her glass at a gulp and gazed at him with shining eyes. Her cheeks were faintly flushed and there was a strand of dark hair that fell across her nose which she kept having to blow away. Even to Kelly, occupied with the stern business of approaching manhood, it was obvious she was going to be a beauty – and a sight more intelligent than Mabel for all her airs and graces.

She began to refill his glass and he gestured. ‘Steady on with the sherry, old thing. You shouldn’t really gulp it down like that, you know.’

She giggled at him. ‘I know. But today I feel like it. Drink it up and we’ll have another.’

‘No fear. I’ve got to sit my exams tomorrow and I’ll need a clear head.’

‘Another one won’t do us any harm.’

Kelly took the decanter from her and put it firmly back on the sideboard. After a glass and a half she was already looking bright-eyed and not quite under control.

‘Perhaps not me,’ he said importantly. ‘I’m a bit older and more used to the stuff. But you’re still a kid. You’ve got to be careful. Your mother’ll throw me out of the house if she comes home and finds her youngest lying under the table blotto.’

As it happened, Mrs Upfold was none too pleased, anyway. She had long since decided that the impoverished son of an impoverished father was not the best bet in the land for one of her daughters. Even the medal for saving life at sea didn’t change things much. It just showed how impulsive Kelly was, and Mrs Upfold liked steady men like her husband who had advanced from subaltern to brigadier-general without ever really putting his neck at risk, even in the recent vulgar scuffle with the Boers.

Since Kelly was there, however, there was nothing she could do but invite him to stay the night and give him supper, and they were joined by Mabel and her latest admirer, a lieutenant in the Fifth Dragoon Guards whom Kelly considered must look a little like his own horse.

Charley waded in at once. ‘Kelly’s just won a medal,’ she announced. ‘He saved a sailor’s life.’

‘Oh?’ The dragoon seemed to consider winning a medal a little like being involved in a rough-house.

Supper could hardly be called riotous with Mrs Upfold sitting at her end of the table disapproving of the cavalryman for not showing enough attention to her elder daughter and of Kelly for showing too much to her younger.

‘When will you be going to sea again?’ She asked pointedly.

‘As soon as I’m through my examinations Mrs Upfold. When I’ve got them –
if
I get them – I’ll be a sub-lieutenant and then I’ll be posted to a ship again.’

‘What sort of ship do you want?’ Mabel asked, her shoulder’s gleaming in the candlelight, a tantalising glimpse of her bosom presenting itself as she leaned forward.

‘Dreadnoughts, shouldn’t wonder,’ the dragoon said. ‘Under the admiral’s nose.’

‘Not for me,’ Kelly said. ‘I want destroyers. Perhaps even submarines.’

‘Sneaky things, submarines.’ General Upfold sat up with a jerk. ‘Bit like hitting a man when he’s not looking.’

Kelly thought he was joking. ‘Well, that’s a good way to fight war, isn’t it, sir?’ he said cheerfully. ‘Saves getting hurt.’

General Upfold’s face tightened and Kelly realised to his amazement that he had meant every word he’d said.

‘Didn’t fight that way in South Africa,’ he snorted.

Kelly stared at him. Perhaps the army was as out-of-date in thinking as the Navy, he decided. The little he could recall of the Boer War consisted chiefly of battles lost by mid-Victorian tactics and thousands of men dead of disease caused by indifference and lack of knowledge. He looked quickly at Charley and as she gazed back at him, troubled, her loyalties divided but nevertheless firm, he swallowed and gathered his courage.

‘Perhaps that’s why it took us so long to win,’ he said brusquely. ‘After all, that’s what the Boers did to us, and they seem to have been jolly good at it, too.’

There was a frozen silence. Clearly, in the Upfold household one didn’t recommend wars where men didn’t stand up to each other face to face like gentlemen.

‘After all,’ Kelly went on, aware that he was making things worse but perversely enjoying his defiance, ‘that nonsense they went in for at Fontenoy’s a bit out-dated these days.’

‘What nonsense was that?’ Mrs Upfold asked.

‘The French saying to the English, “You fire first,” and the English saying, “No, thanks, you.” If I’d been the English general I’d have said “Thanks very much” and let go with everything I’d got. That’s how things’ll be when the war comes.’

‘Wasn’t aware war was coming,’ the dragoon said, and Kelly decided he not only looked like a horse but probably also thought like one because there’d been a smell of war in the air ever since the Agadir crisis just after the Coronation Review, when the Germans had faced the French with their teeth snapping and their sabres rattling in their scabbards. If the noise hadn’t reached the Horse Guards, it had certainly reached the Admiralty and had passed through every ship in the fleet. Every midshipman and snot-nosed ship’s boy knew that the Kaiser resented the size of the Royal Navy and wanted one equally large.

‘It’s bound to come sooner or later,’ he said. ‘The Germans are getting far too big for their boots, and the Kaiser’s half-wit enough to go off at half-cock. I’ll bet Jacky Fisher thinks it’s coming. That’s why he’s been building bigger ships than everybody else.’

He looked about him, sure of support this time. After all everybody quoted Fisher – even the most junior midshipman who considered it made him sound modern, up-to-date and go-ahead. But Fisher’s pronouncement that the Navy was a drowsy, inefficient, moth-eaten organisation filled with splendid seamen but not many men of vision had split the fleet into two camps – the ‘Fishpond’ versus the Rest – and so it seemed, the whole of London, so that Kelly’s enthusiasm wasn’t reflected in the faces of the others.

‘Man’s a menace,’ General Upfold said. ‘Looks like a Chinee. Perhaps even got a touch of the tarbrush in him. Don’t know how he got the Admiralty.’

‘I heard,’ Mrs Upfold said firmly, ‘that there’s something very odd about him. Mad on dancing, they say.’

‘Well–’ Kelly grinned ‘–they do say the midshipmen of the Mediterranean Fleet used to get a bit annoyed when he pinched their girls – and even more when they found the girls actually
enjoyed
dancing with him.’

‘Sounds like some rather unpleasant parvenu,’ Mrs Upfold decided.

‘It’ll be a land war anyway,’ General Upfold said. ‘The Germans would never accept battle at sea. Never risk it. Not with our navy.’

Mrs Upfold sniffed. ‘I don’t think there’ll be a war at all,’ she said. ‘War’s grown far too serious these days for anyone to take the risk.’

‘What if some bright spark starts something in the Balkans, Mrs Upfold?’ Kelly leaned forward eagerly. ‘Between Austria and Serbia, say. Russia would have to go to the help of the Serbs because she has an agreement to look after Slav interests, and then Germany would come in because she’s got a treaty with Austria. Then France would have to come in because she’s got a treaty with Russia, then England–’

Mrs Upfold stared at him. Clearly she considered him a troublemaker. ‘You seem to know a great deal about European politics, Mr Maguire.’

Kelly shrugged. A few days before, with the joyous indifference of youth, he hadn’t known a damn thing about them, but with the possibility of war looming on the horizon, the instructor at Greenwich had seen fit to include in the curriculum a short discourse on international affairs and he’d suddenly become aware of what was going on in the world around him.

Mrs Upfold had clearly decided that the discussion had been going on too long, and she put down her napkin and brought it to an end like a conductor bringing his baton down for
the last firm beat. ‘I don’t think England would come in,’ she said and began to rise, as if certain that no government would ever dare defy her.

They all trailed weakly after her and, over coffee, Kelly sat on one side with Charley, conscious that he’d probably put his foot in
it and done himself a lot of no good in the matter of free meals. Charley squeezed his hand. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she whispered. ‘Truly it doesn’t.
I
’m sure you’re right.’

It seemed a good idea to go to bed early and Charley went too. Outside his bedroom door, she stopped, close to him, her face raised to his.

‘Don’t worry about them, Kelly,’ she said. ‘I shan’t take any notice of them when we get married.’

‘Marry a sailor, marry trouble,’ Kelly said.

She looked faintly embarrassed. ‘Mother thinks you’re not good enough.’

Kelly grinned. ‘She’s probably right.’

Charley’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, no, Kelly! Not for a minute.’

‘Did you tell
them
we
were going to get married?’

‘But of course!’ That possibility to Charley was as natural as breathing. Getting married to Kelly was as inevitable to her as the sun coming up the following day.

Kelly pulled a face. ‘No wonder they weren’t very friendly. I expect they think I’m getting you in dark corners. At your age, no mother’s going to welcome that.’

There was an awkward pause. Charley was standing very close to him and he could smell the perfume she’d been allowed to put on for the occasion. She’d also been permitted to put her hair up and looked surprisingly grown-up with the white column of her neck rising from the ruched frill round the top of her dress. He knew she was itching to fling her arms round him. It was something she’d never done before, though they’d often exchanged friendly kisses of greeting or goodbye, and he felt that perhaps the perfume had gone to her head.

As her hands fluttered and she gazed at him, her face close to his, he thought of all the free meals he was jeopardising.

Her body sagged with disappointment as he didn’t clutch her to him. There seemed a faint odour of treachery about his indifference. Their previous kisses at parties had always been with someone else looking on and, with her hair carefully arranged by Mabel and the perfume she had lathered on until its scent seemed overpowering, she had hoped he might be overwhelmed.

‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded unhappily.

‘Nothing,’ he said briskly as he opened his door. ‘It’s just that it’s getting late.’

The examinations were taken in sub-zero temperatures and Kelly was so cold he sat them wearing a greatcoat in the pockets of which he secreted ginger beer bottles full of hot water. Despite what he’d said at the Upfolds, he had no real fear of failing. He’d had his head crammed with mathematics, applied mechanics, physics, chemistry, nautical astronomy and navigation, surveying, meteorology, naval architecture and foreign languages, and behind all that was the stolid and steady work of years, watch keeping and the hard facts he’d learned about gunnery and torpedoes. Even the boatwork with cutters and picket boats with seamen twice his age who’d nursed him from the day he’d first appeared, sometimes even finding cocoa for him, or fried bread and eggs when he was at his hungriest, their faces always bland and uninformative. ‘Well, you know that canteen stuff we took aboard, sir. One of the crates was a bit damaged so we got an egg or two for nothing.’

While he waited for the results, he wrote to Their Lordships of the Admiralty, suggesting that he might be considered for the submarine service. As a sub-lieutenant on five shillings a day it was going to be hard to make ends meet and the extra few shillings he would get as a submariner were a big inducement. The only thing he didn’t want was a battle cruiser, and a request for submarines, even if it didn’t bring a posting, might at least convince Their Lordships that he had a preference for small craft.

He had no sooner been confirmed as a sub-lieutenant, however, than he was informed that there was no lack of volunteers for the submarine service and he had, therefore, been posted instead to
HMS Clarendon
,
part of the Second Cruiser Squadron. Since some sort of celebration seemed to be called for, he borrowed a couple of pounds and took Charley out to lunch at the cheapest place he could find. She turned up wearing half of Mabel’s finery and looking such a sight in high-heeled shoes, large hat, make-up and too many beads he felt vaguely ashamed of her.

It wasn’t the happiest of meals, with Charley trying not very
successfully to be grown-up and Kelly trying not to be big brotherly. Afterwards, outside the restaurant, he put her into a taxi and was startled to see her begin to take off her make-up, hat and beads, miserably aware that her ploy to overcome Kelly with the charm and sophistication of an older woman had somehow not come off. She had wanted with all her heart for him to be enraptured at the sight of her and she was very conscious that not only was he not very impressed, he probably even actively disapproved.

‘Mother will kill me if she sees me in this lot,’ she said gloomily. ‘She doesn’t like me trying to look older than I am.’

Aware that she was hurt, he tried to put things right. ‘I don’t know that I do either,’ he said. ‘You’re much nicer as Charley than as Charlotte.’

She gave him a grateful look but, realising he was being charged waiting time for the taxi and that the driver was looking at his watch, Kelly kissed her hurriedly. She tried to cling to him, her mouth following his eagerly as he backed away and turned to the driver. ‘Bessborough Terrace,’ he said. ‘I’d like to pay now. How much?’

‘With the waiting time, sir, that’ll be two bob.’

‘Two bob?’ Kelly’s jaw dropped. He had to join his ship at Chatham and he had a long way to go on the three shillings he had left. Despite the fact that he’d chosen the cheapest wine and eaten the cheapest dish on the menu, his calculations had not been careful enough.

The driver grinned. ‘That too much, sir?’

‘No.’ Kelly’s pride was touched. ‘No, that’s all right.’

‘Make it one and nine, sir. I’ll see the young lady home safe.’

Blurting his thanks, Kelly handed over the money and closed the door, and the cab drew away with Charley gazing at him with lost eyes through the rear window. Staring after her for a second, Kelly drew a deep breath and headed for the station where he’d left his luggage, aware that he had barely enough for a tip to the porter.