The Shouting in the Dark (8 page)

‘A shot across the bows and the order to stop. The answer came at once. The ship raised the Japanese war flag. On deck the so-called containers fell open, turned out to be camouflage for a set of four 15 cm cannons. We were faced at close range with a Japanese auxiliary cruiser, a provisioning vessel for submarines in the Arabian Sea.

‘Almost instantly four projectiles came from her, two plunging into the sea in front, two behind. Ace work – a straddle with the first salvo. But Captain Sluijter, too, wasted no time. Already he'd given his orders. “Hard a-port. Emergency front. X-guns open fire.”

‘A quick destroyer can turn on its ass like a gymnast. Without warning, the
Tjerk Hiddes
showed the Japaner her stern. My mouth fell open. Were we running away? Never ever, says the Marine Catechism, turn your back on the foe. Never ever.' The father emphatically shakes his head. Ko, as if in a dream, slowly follows suit. ‘But Sluijter was one pace ahead of the game. He hadn't forgotten his Flores tricks. “Steer zigzag seven,” he cried. So every seven minutes we changed direction by fifteen degrees. The ship became a pair of pinking scissors. Imagine the speed, the churning of that ship through its own bow wave, our wake arrow a white zigzag, the dexterity of our fire command that minute-by-minute had to adapt its bearings. At that range only the 12.5 cm cannons in the X-formation where I was positioned could be used.

‘The second strike like the first was the Japanese cruiser's. Our starboard sustained a hit from a 15 cm projectile. Six of the English service staff, poor chaps, lay stretched on deck. At last my X-cannons responded, twelve salvos a minute ploughing into the enemy's side. We'd reached a distance of five miles from him, our maximum range, when our Captain threw the ship into a 180 degree turn, whisked our bow towards the enemy's face. A new strategy, I saw. Klaas Sluijter had the Japaner where he wanted him.

‘Built for speed, a destroyer is not a tank. This is what you non-Navy men don't know. Its steel sides are only about as thick as an arm, so it chooses never to fight broadsides. A direct hit broadsides is fatal for the sardine-tin construction. What you do is you show the enemy your bow or stern while at the same time forcing him into repeatedly exposing
his
broadside. The Japaner caught in our sights in just this way, we surged forward to make good our threat, forty-eight high explosives a minute coming from all three chief gun installations. The noise nearly exploded my ears.

‘The Japaner's bridge was destroyed and fire broke out on deck. We could see the dark figures of the crew running silhouetted against the flames. Then suddenly the ship's aim went wild and almost as suddenly her cannons fell silent. Our torpedoes finally took their turn. Two wing-torpedos working together with the movement of the ship launched from starboard at two thousand meters. All that remained for us to do was to count. One . . . two . . . three . . . it didn't take long. Both were direct hits. The auxiliary cruiser broke in two, the waves quickly closed over her. We didn't stick around to look for survivors.

‘What a terrible shame it was though, those six young fellows of ours, blown to bits. Just ordinary fellows, liked a spot of roulette after hours with the set I'd bought at Crawford Market, Bombay. I remember a couple of the names. Alan Jones. Dirk Kan. Someone Smith who got on well with Schilperoort. It was left to the Boatswain and his mates to ready them for their final rest. Within the hour the Commodore granted us permission.

‘But now there was a potential difficulty. Admiralty instructions are clear about the order of service for burial at sea: a reading from the Book of Job, the fourteenth chapter, followed by the Prayer for the Dead. Thomas Overbury, however, the only British Officer on board, had a heavy cold. And though Klaas Sluijter might have his wizard way with steering, the clotted English of the King James Bible was a whole different challenge again. Was there not among the Nederlands officers on board one with a big enough voice to attempt a reading? Sluijter asked. There was. And there would be again every time we lost any of our chaps. In my cabin I laid matchsticks in the correct places in both books and at the appointed hour followed the Captain on deck.

‘There the six were, sewn up in sailcloth, bound at the feet, each laid on a plank on deck, covered with the White Ensign. The turbines stopped, the ship lost speed. The flag came down to half-mast. There was just the ping-ping-ping of the submarine surveillance apparatus and the wash of the Polish battleship
Pidulski
circling us for protection.

“Ship's company, attention!” the First Officer gave the command. Everyone came into position. “Caps off. Stand at ease.”

‘Cap under my left arm I began to work my way through the Bible verses that so many others have pieced out across almost three and a half centuries.

‘“Caps on, attention, general salute!”

‘The dead slid
over the wall
, as the English say, as Tom would agree if he were here, the planks and flags well lashed together so that they stayed fixed, retained for future use.

‘“Ship's company, stand at ease, dismiss!” The flag went up again. The officer on duty called the machine-room telegraphist. Full services were resumed.'

The father falls suddenly silent, stares at his feet. Ella cranes forward at the window. Ko's chin long ago fell on his chest. His rib-cage rhythmically rises and falls, saliva glistens in a corner of his open lips. The father pays him no heed. He slumps lower, then suddenly jolts. A cry rips from his mouth, a torn, hollow sound of shock and abandonment.

‘
God, O Godverdomme
,' he cries – the same cry, Ella thinks, as on the nights when he believes he's alone on the verandah. ‘Can you credit it, Ko? How fucked we've been,
gesodomierterd
by the lot of them, the bosses, the Admiralty. We gave everything, everything, and in exchange— '

Ella steps back and closes the gap in the curtains. She doesn't want to hear more. What the father's invisible listener waiting out there in the darkness makes of these cries, she doesn't want to think.

She lies down in bed, puts her pillow over her head. Enough, it's been enough. She hears Ko stagger upright and a few minutes later the click shut of the guest room door. Out in the darkness there still are noises, hoarse and ragged. She presses the pillow harder to her ears. As many times as Ella has heard the noises, it still is terrible, the wordless snarling, spitting and gasping, the father no longer the English-speaking deck-officer at the centre of the action, no longer the level-headed artillery man managing the guns when Crommelin's taken ill. She sees him instead, a poor frantic fellow, stumbling about on deck in the thick of enemy fire, his X-installation abandoned, squeezing his head in his hands.

‘Sleep,
schat
, sleep,' the mother begs, standing beside Ella's bed. She wrings her hands and sighs, ‘You lay your head on the pillow, Ella, you go to sleep. You
will
go to sleep. Without sleep a young person will go insane.'

But sleep in up-country Braemar, Ella already knows, though it's often commanded, is easier said than done.

Her Mam and Dad, each after their own fashion, believe in sleep. Her father believes in short sleep, intense and economical, two hours for the price of one. He says that less sleep is required with increasing age. He cuts down his sleep at the start of the night by following the stars that shine through the crack in the curtains, as he used to do on board his plucky Netherlands destroyer the
Tjerk Hiddes
.

‘What about robbers, Dad?' Ella asks, ‘People who might come in the night?'

‘There are worse things that come to you in the night than robbers,
meid
,' he says, casting a look at the mother through his black-rimmed glasses. ‘Besides which, this great country South Africa looks after its own. Robbers and other miscreants are put where they belong.'

The mother craves sleep but cannot easily find it, same as her daughter. Sins of the fathers and the mothers. In bed at night, she says, her thoughts will not drift off, a great heaviness presses on her heart. Sometimes she doesn't have the breath even to stretch out for the Catherine Cooksons on her bedside table.

‘I was awake last night for hours,' the mother tells her husband and daughter at breakfast, cradling her forehead in woven-together fingers. ‘I had to get up and walk about. The birds were already singing. This lack of sleep will boil my brain, I know. It will end up breaking my skull in two.'

Like an eggshell, Ella thinks, a head cracked by sleeplessness. She knows what her mother means. The thin Braemar air here on the high Zululand escarpment doesn't weigh her head down on the pillow either. With the father's night-time talking added in, sleep is tough to find. As soon as he starts his noises, she must get up, check on things, catch what he will say, the stories of the
Silindoeng
, the
Oranje Nassau
, the
Tromp
. She must make sure he eventually comes inside, especially on nights when he is raging, see that he gets to bed.

Lately, though, her wakeful mother has discovered what she's up to. Ella hears her in the passage just outside her door, creaking about, listening out for her listening. If ever by mistake she makes a sound, the bedroom door opens, the mother peers into the darkness. ‘You go to sleep, Ella,' she says, night-time breath spitting, ‘I don't want to find you up. Go on, go to sleep.'

One sweaty summer's night, the father long in bed, the mother's footsteps in the passage are louder than usual, much louder. There's something about those footsteps that wants to be heard. Ella pushes up from her rock-hard pillow to listen. She slips out of bed, into the passage.

In the living room a side-lamp is on. The mother in her pink nightgown is perched on an arm of the yellow velvet couch, as close as to the portrait of Aunt Ella as she can get without actually touching it, framed by its rectangle of darkness. ‘Are you – ?' Ella begins to say, but the rush of her mother's arms snuffs her voice.

‘I didn't mean to wake you,' she grips her shoulders. ‘Sorry. You sounded asleep – for once. But there are nights, Ella, you know, I can't stand it, I must come to her. I shouldn't say this really, you're wakeful enough yourself, but the words well up. I feel she needs me, especially now. See here, this crack in the oil-painting, around the skirt of the dress. Our dry winters. I can't stand to think of her portrait breaking up, flaking away – when we've already had to lose her once. Look at her, staring down at us. Don't leave me here, she's telling me. Oh, it's sometimes too much, Ella, all this, living this life she should've been living.'

Ella sits down on the couch. ‘But why, Mam?' she says, ‘I don't see . . .? Even if it's your sister's picture. A crack can be fixed.'

The mother's profile is white against the portrait's dark blue dress. A quick hand goes through her hair.

‘Well,' she says suddenly, and sighs, ‘Maybe the portrait's extra-special because my sister Ella was also at one time married to your father. Before me. And after the Englishwoman called Edith who left him. And then, not long after her marriage, she, Ella, died. Cancer. So, yes, you can work it out, if she hadn't died, you'd not have been born.' She puts the heel of her hand to the portrait frame, as if to steady herself. ‘She was different from me, Ella,
baldadig
, cheekier, a proper big sister. Wouldn't let him push her around.' She sighs again. ‘She wasn't musical like I am. Her soul didn't need music and gentleness like mine does. She didn't care about raising her voice. I can only imagine how she yelled at him. The two of them met after the war, back in Nederland. Your father was home from the Navy, from England. Friends paired them up. He was lonely and rootless with no job and they got on. She liked adventure, Ella, she grabbed opportunities with both hands. I'll always try something once, she used to say. She even took to Africa. For her, Africa was a place where you could try things out. She wanted to set up a trading store in some
dorpje
, sell things like blankets to the blacks – '

But Ella can't stand to see how the mother's face is working, her forehead stretching and wrinkling, black shadows darting over her cheeks. She looks away.

‘Oh, she was remarkable, Ella, unforgettable,' the mother's voice pulls her back. ‘Everyone said so. It was a way she had, she burrowed under your skin, saw the world from your point of view. You felt you couldn't do without her. So that, when she died, you thought your life would end. I did, when she died. I think your father did, too. Who could replace such a person? Not a sister, no; certainly not me. When I was hollow inside for missing her.'

She stoops forward. In the muted light it's as if she's leaning against the painting, pressing her front to its breast, speaking into its face. ‘They had their big plans.' She coughs, swallows, presses on. ‘After the war, it was thought, places like this, South Africa, Australia, remote places, they offered opportunities to Dutch people down on their luck, reduced by all that had happened. The Far East by then was no more. They couldn't go there. And your father knew about Africa. His Singapore shipping company had seconded him out to Dar es Salaam, then Durban. He knew it was green and prosperous here. It wasn't a bad idea of Ella's to establish a trading store somewhere in the Lowveld where lush gardens can be coaxed out of the bush. Ella, your Tante Ella, she loved peonies and magnolia and such like, flowers that grow well in humid places . . .' She pauses. ‘Her skin was the colour of creamy-white peonies,' she adds, ‘
Peon-rozen
. The painter captured it almost exactly. He painted the portrait around the time she met your father.'

Ella has stopped listening.
Tante Ella
? It was then that she stopped. The more the mother talks, the more distant the lady in the portrait becomes. Her aunt, her father's
wife
, second wife, the wife after the Englishwoman – she doesn't want to hear more. It sounds a scandal, this story. She wants to walk away from it. She herself, named for Mam's sister Ella, looking like her – like some version of her returned from the dead? Mad. As for the business about her father setting up a home in the African bush, selling blankets and buckets in a place far from proper roads or a library with books by Winston Churchill – it's crazy. The father says he hates Africa
in his gut
.

‘I couldn't bear it if the painting began to crumble.' The mother scrubs at her glistening cheeks. ‘What would I do without it? Here in the half-light I like to sit and imagine her alive, what she could be telling me. She was always ordering me about, her baby sister, telling me what to do. God knows I needed it. Still do. But I never imagine her reproachful, when, after all, we're alive and she's a portrait. See, he wanted someone after his loss, Ella, and not just anyone. Loving her as I did, I was happy to stand in. How could I have known it would be like this, a lifelong walk in her shadow?'

Ella goes over to the window and looks out. Squinting at the stars through her lashes, she merges the Milky Way into a shimmering scarf of light. ‘What happened to the trading store plan?' she says. ‘Did it get off the ground?'

‘'Course not.' The mother dabs a finger to the portrait's face, as if it, too, were weeping. ‘They had no capital, knew nothing about trading. They rented something for a week, perhaps, who knows – then they backed out. There were too many natives in the bush, natives without pay packets. Durban's good life sidetracked them, I imagine, the bridge clubs, the golf club. Ella got ill . . . Hodgkin's, the cancer was called. She had to be sent home to Europe for treatment.'

The mother walks over to the piano. Her eyes move silently over the music on the stand, Chopin's
Nocturnes
. She lays her hands on the white keys without depressing them. Here in Braemar, miles from Durban's City Hall, she often says, unless she plays her beloved music herself, she doesn't get to hear it. Ella makes her way to the door but her mother doesn't look round.

 

Ella's wakefulness begins to come unprompted. Before the conversation beneath the portrait, she went to bed when her father's vigils ended. Sometimes she slept. Sometimes she heard her mother pace. Now, she's mainly just awake. She tries to make no movement but still tiny sounds escape her. Her hair rasps on the pillow. Her book thumps across a fold in the sheets. At once the door cracks open, and her heart sinks.

‘Sleep, Ella, sleep,' the mother stoops over her, eye sockets pooled in shadow. ‘
Please
, just sleep. Don't worry about the things I said that night. I said too much. I'll get a painting restorer to come up from Durban, see about the crack. So sleep. We must sleep to live. Go to sleep, Ella, go to sleep.'

But Ella does not sleep. She lies as still as she can and wishes her mother wouldn't mention the portrait. She doesn't want to hear more about it. The picture of her
Tante Ella
is different to her now. Before, she thought it the prettiest thing she knew, but it was the portrait of a stranger. Now, it knows everything about her. Its gaze follows her round the room with tenderness, maybe curiosity. Some days, when she's alone, she sits and lets it stare at her. But these sessions leave her feeling drained, wrung-out, as if something inside her had been sucked away.

The mother telephones Mrs Garth. Rosy-cheeked Adam Garth, a year above Ella at Braemar School, is One of Our Bright Kids, so hearsay has it. The mother has never before laid eyes on Mrs Garth. She looks up the number in the telephone book. Ella sits on the floor beside the phone table, her hands over her ears.

‘Please, Mam, do you want everyone to know?'

The mother's finger slips determinedly into the first round hole in the dial.

Invisible Mrs Garth is helpful, however – helpful and matter-of-fact. Yes, she says, the bright ones think they can survive on less sleep. Adam takes a while falling asleep. To pass the time, she says, he reads
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.

‘The thought,' says the mother, putting down the receiver. ‘
Bright ones
, what does that mean? All children are bright. As for giving a wakeful child books to read, big heavy books!
Wat een nonsens!
'

She brings into use the bed-strapping contraption she bought at a radical health
Reformhuis
on one of their trips to the Netherlands. In temperate Braemar, she explains to the father, the contraption will keep the girl tucked up warm at night. It will fasten her into her bed clothes like a passenger is belted into an aeroplane seat, only tighter. Back in Holland, lots of people use them.

‘
Kind in zijn kooi
,' she says, yanking at the straps each night to tighten them. ‘Bug in a rug. You'll learn to sleep again. Nature's sweet way will teach you.'

Ella doesn't feel taught. She's fond of her strapping contraption. She looks forward to the mother hugging her, then belting her in, the round clicking sounds the fasteners make as they latch onto the bedclothes. She likes lying snug and straight as a board as the mother pulls at the straps, snaps the six metal fasteners into their plastic holding cups. The straps tie her down so firmly she can barely turn over. There's no way she can get up, go to stand at the window, meet the mother crying in the living room. She likes it very much this way. Strapped down, unable to move her arms, sleep strikes her like a concussion.

Some days she wriggles in under the bed to take a look at the contraption. The spinal cord of the thing, a leather thong with branching straps, hangs beneath the mattress like a hammock, filled with a soothing quiet force, a patient spirit of hiding and waiting. This space under her bed is the safest place in the world, she decides. It's a hidey-hole almost the same as her hydrangea den, tucked away and invisible.

The contraption's straps remind her of something different, however. The straps are made of the same stretchy woven nylon from Holland as the fittings on the father's pinky-brown hernia truss. It, too, was purchased over there, though its straps are much thicker.

After six months or so, the contraption begins to lose its tightness. The stockingette starts to fray, the fasteners grow slack. Once again Ella is free to move about at night. Once again she hears the mother's creaking, opens her eyes and finds her pleading beside her bed. ‘Sleep, Ella, sleep,
please go to sleep
.'

‘I cannot stand it another day, Har,' the mother begs at breakfast, ‘Help me find a solution. We must find a way to sleep.'