Kitabı oku: «Acts of Mutiny», sayfa 2

4

If you asked me to describe the night of my return to Abbey Wood with Erica, I could not. There may have been scenes, recriminations, blows. What I do know is that afterwards the name Armorica never crossed our lips. Not once. The voyage’s memorabilia were trashed from our luggage: the menus with their little seabed illustrations, the brochures of ports, the bus tickets, waiter’s bills and so on. Our Australian effects, my school notebooks – even Erica’s snaps were handed over to be destroyed. When we returned and my grandfather was ‘gone’, the house was brought ruthlessly up to date. A proper television went in, fitted carpet, a three-piece suite, all hire purchase. It was fumigated of its past. And the television stayed on all the time, sealing them into their marital capsule.

And this is my utter frustration now, of course: that for my father’s honour, my original voyage was so rubbed out. Within those walls it had absolutely never happened, though I can hardly think our self-censorship had the power to extinguish a whole ship from public record.

My father hated memory. He never spoke of his war. Out of the Navy for good by VJ, he went to work in the arsenal – like everyone else. It remained for some years a large employer. All the while some kind of suffering was palpable in him, but unarticulated. You could see it in his arrogance, his ironic grin, as if he were perpetually biting back the pain of an inventive old-world punishment. Hating religion by the same token, he shrugged off any approach of emotion with grim clowning. He used that peculiar baby-talk larded with back slang, which tends to lurk in the Navy. By these means he cemented what must have been our conspiracy, for it was always to him that I took my troubles, right from a toddler. I regarded him as my special protector; like a joking Jesus.

I try hard to imagine him in his own youth, cycling up to the grammar school at Shooter’s Hill; I rode there myself in my teens, on the same bike. Though he left at fourteen and was sent soon enough to HMS Ganges at Ipswich, the ‘stone frigate’ hell-hole, where his own dad had once been an instructor.

I went through sixth form and qualified for my commission because the war had changed everything. There was technology and free education. And he told me in a gruff voice how I had ‘bloody gone aft’, how he ‘wouldn’t know how to speak to me no more’ – Ganges being to Dartmouth what the beast is to beauty. Gone aft! Dad, no one ‘goes aft’. It was wilful and jealous, this adherence to Jack Tar, who never slings his mental hammock but in a wooden man-o’-war.

Once I was commissioned, the eddies of career kept me in the northern hemisphere. Not so unusual. It is not all ‘See the world’. So it was perhaps not until seventy-nine that I first found myself south of the Line. That would have been with Zebra, the best destroyer I served in. I was in my late twenties, keen, good at my job, making progress.

We waved our flag at Cape Town and sailed east for Sydney on a goodwill visit, bound for Hong Kong. Oceans are all different. To trace the famous old trade routes of the roaring forties holds an excitement, a freshness. I enjoyed my baptism in those last-discovered waters, the southern seas. We hurried along to Australia at a steep clipper-fast run, and made landfall.

But just as we approached Sydney harbour a flotilla of small craft blocked our route. We had to hold off: yachts, cabin cruisers – even a few old steamers. They were making their way out past the Heads which mark the harbour’s entrance. It seemed as though the whole population had taken to the water, skittering and skimming about like a vast shoal haunting a reef.

The few Sydney folk who had not got themselves afloat were up there waving right on the bluff, or drawn up to the very edges in their cars – we could just make them out and just hear, dimly on the breeze, the noise of their horns mingled with the hoots and blarings from the little fleet.

In the midst of them stood a great white passenger ship dressed over all, proceeding out to sea. Every few minutes a blast of sound would come from her funnel across the swell, and the small fry would reply at once hooting back; and then tack or dart all the more.

We lined the wires; it was a sight. I turned to speak to the man next to me, and found Tommy Hall-Patterson, our Principal Warfare Officer. He said it was the send-off for the liner Avalon on her last voyage. He was a distant, rather isolated man; but a hard-nosed sailor, one of the old school. Hated to see a damn good ship go to waste, he said. ‘She’s the last of the three white sisters, the Avalon, the Armorica, and the Hispania. There goes what it’s all been about, Ralphie. You see that glorious thing, beside which this old tub, though I love her dearly, is no more than a rocket-launching sardine can sharpened at one end …’ He paused. ‘Look at those bloody lines. Isn’t she a vision?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said.

‘And what are we having to do with her?’ he continued. ‘Sell her to the damn Chinks. She’s off to Taiwan to be broken up. With all her bloody glad rags on. Makes me livid.’ He nodded towards her, and added some half audible snippet of verse. ‘You know that?’ He repeated it: Kipling – about the great imperial steamers in their white and gold liveries. ‘When you see the like of her, what do you think?’ His angry eyes turned from the Avalon and seemed to bore into me. I hesitated, not knowing what sort of reply he was after.

But he carried on: ‘For three hundred years, the Royal Navy has kept the seas so that a creature like that could slip off Clydebank and go anywhere she wanted without fear of bloody molestation. But there’s no more cash, boy. We’re all washed up. Men have given their lives for a cause and what does it amount to. The Jap, the Yank, the Russian, the damn German and the heathen bloody Chinee; these shall inherit the earth, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.

‘And if anyone has the balls to say nay,’ I can hear his cultured, old-fashioned voice even now, ‘if anyone questions the damn carve-up, Ralphie, why then it’s all hell and four-minute warnings. Short and curlies, eh? No one can move a damn muscle, for the awful poise of the balance. If poor old Britannia dares draw the line again what a bloody flap there’d be. Before you know it an unstoppable escalation, some idiot politician presses the button, and the lot of us gone up for good. You and I, Ralph, will never see active service. Have you grasped that? Lucky, are we? By God, I’d give anything for a crack at someone about this.’ He indicated the Avalon. ‘But the bastard politicians will cut us, and cut us, and cut everything down to the bloody bone. No merchant fleet left and nothing to defend.’

His fist tightened on the wire before him. ‘But we never lost a war, did we? Battle or two maybe, but we never lost a war. Eh? No Vietnam. D’you see? No bloody Vietnam. Well, I’ll soon be hanging up my hat, boy. But what about you?’

I had no answer. After eyeing me meaningfully once again, he went about his business. He was a good man; the sort you would want next to you in a crisis. Though of course he did not see active service; while I, of course, did.

But later that day, when we were all in a bar in Sydney somewhere, he made a point of buttonholing me and buying me a Scotch. He insisted he had confused the names. Two sisters only: Avalon and Hispania. Why he should have made a mix-up like that he had no idea. Two sisters only.

‘What?’ I said.

‘That’s all right then. That’s all right.’ And I cudgelled my brain then for the other name he had let slip.

But now glimpses of the Armorica burst softly around me like the artillery of butterflies. The barrage of memory takes its own time, its own slow motion of opening.

5

It had not been calm all the way. In fact, the Armorica was late because of the Bay of Biscay. Only a few days out from Tilbury and the English Channel, a huge winter storm had forced her to turn head on to the waves, and stand far out into the Atlantic.

‘It claimed in the brochure this ship had stabilisers,’ Barry Parsons said to the steward that lunch-time, when the motion first went beyond a joke. Penny overheard him trying to help his green-faced wife out of the dining-room. All morning there had been wry smiles and comments about sea-legs. An ominous pewter sky bottomed wider and lower, beaten out by a dinting wind. The lounges were suddenly deserted; the clamorous gloom penetrated the cabins themselves. But Penny had always reckoned herself the kind of person who would, when put to the test, make a good sailor.

In her neat blouse, her light jacket cinched at the waist, her long skirt of brown serge, and her court shoes which turned out slightly when she walked, she presented herself for lunch; though at the back of her mind she did worry that a ship made entirely of steel – it was, wasn’t it? – should be able to creak and grind so.

The dining-room was large, brightly lit and expensively panelled. But, lying between the outermost cabins each side of D deck, it had no windows or portholes – and therefore no reassuring horizon. She shared a table with the Finch-Clarks, and now their little girl. Children were permitted at lunch. It was a table at the edge of the dining area, where carpet gave way to wood. About her, the slightly built Goan waiters coped with chops, game, fish, soup, and deployed their twin spoons to serve level vegetables on a treacherously sloping plate. The air was full, too, of the usual cuisine smells, made sharper and a touch greasier, she felt, by the worsening sea. Yet she began her meal in a spirit of bravery: with a portion of asparagus in butter, excellent as always. And then the lamb.

But now a tray full of upturned coffee-cups slid off its side-table and avalanched pieces of crockery past them. A bad wave. From around the dining-room there were shrieks and remarks from folk caught up in similar local calamities. Hardly a moment to recoup before there came another. Tests of character. Penny gripped on to her own table with one hand while maintaining her plate with the other. Gravy trickled over her fingers. She could see the Parsons couple. They had been unable to move. Half slumping, half standing a few yards away, they clutched at the door-frame, the handrail and each other. She could see white knuckles. Then all the debris came cruising along the floor as the ship tipped back through what now seemed an enormous angle.

And slowly – but not so slowly that it became acceptable – up again.

‘I’m afraid we can’t have the stabilisers out in this sort of a sea, sir. They’d break off.’

‘What!’ Barry Parsons’s fleshy presence boomed. ‘You’re joking, I take it.’ But its sound was as unconvincing as an echo.

‘Absolutely not, sir. They said yesterday we were likely to run into some heavy stuff. Just have to head up and ride it out. Besides, they only affect the roll, not the pitch, stabilisers.’ The steward gestured with his flattened hand. ‘The captain won’t want to get stuck in the Bay, see. I’m sure you’ll understand.’ He grinned. He was enjoying it, Penny thought. ‘ATM afraid it’s likely to get a touch worse than this, even. Which is a little unusual even for this time of year, sir, I admit.’ Definite relish.

Queenie Parsons just managed, ‘Worse?’ Then, ‘But this is a liner’ died to a whisper as she fought with incredulity, terror and her stomach. Hanging on, the Parsons couple appeared to Penny as ham dramatics conversing from across an unkind wooden stage. But she was hanging on to the table herself, surprised, yes, genuinely surprised that the captain could allow roughness to get to the point of breakages.

‘You’d think they’d know what to expect, wouldn’t you? And have special racks or whatever – for the things. You’d think they would.’ She made the remark to no one in particular, voicing her disquiet.

Paul Finch-Clark leaned in to the table and managed to make a quip about Battersea fairground. Something else smashed. Penny caught the words ‘… You realise it isn’t quite what it looked like from dry-ground level.’

Little Rosalind Finch-Clark gripped her chair at both sides, watching with wide eyes as her plate of half-eaten poached egg on toast moved now towards her father, now towards Penny.

‘When does it stop?’ Penny called out.

It was the steward who replied. ‘Not for a few days, I’m afraid, madam.’

‘A few days! Like this!’ She found her voice joined by several from the neighbouring tables. Then she glanced to where the Parsons couple had been standing. They were now nowhere to be seen. They had been slid out of the ship and sluiced away, so she could fancy.

A general lurching exodus from the dining-room was in progess, however, for the big sea continued. Every wave was a bad wave. Penny regarded her fellow travellers, trying herself to decide what to do. The ship’s creaks and groaning had increased, quite alarmingly. Surely that was not right. A noise overhead. She looked up in case signs of fracture should appear in the ceiling. She expected the lights to flicker. There was indeed an air of consternation. Sparks or water would burst through the walls.

Only the hardiest old birds of passage were still eating, managing their plates with a degree of superiority. One or two were still calling out to waiters as if a regime of bouncing, splintering glassware and cascading cutlery were just what their specialist, when reminding them to go south again this year for the winter, had ordered. An old woman in pearls summoned assistance from her seat two tables away. ‘Cabin, I think, steward.’

And of course the steward was propelled into action, partly by sycophancy – probably; but Penny would have liked to think, compassion – and partly by the momentary angle of the ship. ‘Directly, your ladyship.’ And, proud it seemed of his white uniform, and the braid in colours-of-the-line looped at his left shoulder, he rescued her theatrically past them all, one arm for the dowager and one for the ship.

The dowager nodded politely to Penny. ‘I went through the Suez Canal for the first time in thirty-seven, and since then I’ve done it eighteen times, this way and that, regular as clockwork. Not counting the war, you see – and the Arabs. Isn’t that so, steward?’

‘Certainly, your ladyship.’

And certainly she was remarkably good at the alternate steep climb and drop which they had settled into: ‘Just take it carefully, and keep your cabin. That’s my advice, if anyone wants it. Keep your cabin, keep your head, and thank God you won’t be stuck in Kensington all winter.’

Yes, the extremity of the movement could begin, Penny supposed, to be something they might at least accept, if not adjust to. If there were really no alternative, and if the ladyship, whoever she was, could do it. Think of England indeed. Indeed she tried.

Most of what was loose and fragile had now broken; most of what could be spilled, had spilled. Most of those diners who were still making up their minds about how to leave and where to go had found regular fixtures to help them – in the reciprocating cling and brace that was necessary. So when no one else mentioned that it sounded more and more as though the vessel were on the point of ripping in two, Penny clenched her teeth. Nevertheless, in that very act her thoughts turned first to the boys, at her mother’s school in Essex, and next to Hugh, already on the other side of the world. If she were to drown she would be of no use to any of them.

And the next thing after the thought of imminent death was the awareness of fear. Close upon that, nausea. And between the first consciousness of sickness and the worst feeling imaginable were about three suffocating minutes amid the smells of pheasant, liver, mayonnaise and chocolate.

D was one of the lower decks. Its floor and walls staggered by; its door heaved open. She managed to find a closet on that level; though, regrettably, she was not the first. Monstrous, her mouth like a burst porthole. Like an act of recall; but so painful, all the confused past springing through, still fully formed. And with that over she felt drained, but just about in command – and in the greatest need of air.

6

A good open-air walk ran along the whole length of both sides of A deck. It was the kind of broad, sideless corridor Penny was familiar with from popular ocean films in which five days of love culminated in New York. It ran along the whole length, that is, except for the steerage class – that old label for poorer travellers. On this level, she noted, the steerage was sealed off from the main part of the vessel, to port and starboard, behind impenetrable steel dividers in the bulkhead.

Coated and belted now, wind-whipped, with hands outstretched, she made her way towards the bow – along the scrubbed planking where in undreamable fair weather deck-chairs might be set. It was to press uphill for several seconds, march deceptively level for a moment, and then loom dangerously giant-strided. Wiser to stop and hang on to a frame or to the rail when the ship’s nose went down. Queenie Parsons’s last words kept running through her head, ‘But this is a liner!’

Truly, Penny had not imagined the white floating city which had so taken her breath against the drabness of Tilbury dock could be subject to anything like this. If they were not exactly storm-tossed – the ship was too grand and provident for that – yet it was obvious their assurance was being very seriously examined. Astride the huge ridges of complex and crazing black, the Armorica was undergoing, yes, something of an inquisition. The groaning and creaking, so audible in the dining-room and now mingled with the debate of sea and wind, were proof enough of that, if proof were wanted.

There, up ahead, the part of the bow she could see had gone in, and a wash of foam came over all the great steel winches and fittings, flushing and draining away as she watched. She would never have thought so high a point as that strong, curved prow could be at risk. Surely this could not go on. Surely. The grown-up in her told the child not to be silly. But she remained unconvinced.

She passed a Lascar with a mop, a small figure, of brown imagined bones inside his maroon jacket. Dealing, presumably, with some mess, some distressed passenger’s sick, he seemed hardly to be holding on to anything. He stared at her with opaque eyes, then looked away. These outdoor folk, diminutive, cropping up like sad, solitary djinns, she had already found them unsettling. Should she speak? Technically they fell outside the ship’s account of itself, they did not exist. Yet everyone knew the terminology: Lascars. How was that? She found herself several yards past him in only two steps. And she worried about the life-jacket instructions. Would she get the ties the right way round? The diagram was confusing.

At the forward reach of A deck she came with surprise on the Sinhalese couple tucked away in a protected nook. She had seen them about, of course. But, like everyone else, had not yet found it possible to speak. They were standing with their backs to the steel, the woman wearing a coat over her blue sari. He, smiling, smaller than his wife, was neat in his Burberry jacket and fawn slacks. Penny stopped about a yard from them. She leaned on the rail and looked out at the same prospect, comforted a little that they seemed in no immediate hurry as regards lifeboats. Indeed, the man was about to raise a pair of binoculars to his eyes. On seeing her he stopped, took the strap off and volunteered them. She shook her head and smiled queasily. Now she had ceased her struggle along the deck, it might be that the nausea was about to return.

‘No, please. Have a look.’ He insisted, holding the glasses out.

She looked. The horizon, looming nonsense for half the time, did her stomach good; though to tell the truth there was little to focus on that was not frenzied water, or ragged grey cloud. She stood, resting her elbows on the rail, in those moments when she had not physically to cling to it. She surveyed the waves, broke off. It was quite dismal. She looked again, held on, and then again. Momentarily she caught sight of something far off in the whelm; which promptly disappeared. Maybe flotsam, the corner of a box, waterlogged, she thought. A tea-chest, possibly, like the ones her own belongings were packed in. A piece of wreckage, or something thrown overboard from a tanker. Nothing worth looking at, really, but even rubbish gave the eye a mark. Like a gravestone. She suspected no life-form could live in all that desolation; they were utterly abandoned.

‘My name is Piyadasa. Is it your first trip?’

‘Yes.’ She managed a weak smile.

‘It is very rough.’

‘Yes.’

‘Please carry on looking.’

Magnified, each wave was colder and more intimate. She found herself noticing the skid, of water over water, the detachment and reattachment of drops and strings, the innumerable facets of unnameable colours – unnameable because they were all the same colour, and yet clearly not. She thought less about the depth.

She handed the glasses back. ‘Thanks very much. Not feeling too good.’

‘You should drink tea.’ The lady smiled.

‘I don’t think I could drink anything, just at the moment.’

‘Perhaps without milk or sugar. Perhaps even gunpowder tea.’

‘Gunpowder tea?’ Penny felt her eyebrows rise.

‘Any kind of tea you like.’

‘Oh. Do you think so?’

‘Ask my husband. Even beef tea.’ Mrs Piyadasa laughed. ‘Why don’t you come along with us. We’re just going inside. They will bring you something. Come with us. My husband knows everything there is to know about tea. He grows it, and then he sells it.’

Her husband acknowledged his expertise with a wry expression.

Penny was on the point of demurring, as if she ought to be seen to deal with her fear and nausea alone.

‘This way.’

Thus she found herself back inside, kidnapped, as it were, by kindness. Yet the gunpowder tea, brought by a steward to where they sat in the main lounge, helped. As did the polite conversation. She took to the plump, smiling lady. ‘Yes, we live in Colombo. You must visit us there.’ Mrs Piyadasa seemed in no doubt that they would make it safely home. Penny was impressed.

‘She misses her children,’ said the husband.

‘Yes, I do.’ Mrs Piyadasa mimicked a sigh of grief and turned up her eyes. ‘Not seasick, but homesick. I have three boys, one girl.’

‘I miss mine,’ Penny said.

‘You have children?’

‘Two boys.’

Mrs Piyadasa took a small book of photographs from her handbag. They sat for some minutes, comparing ages and characteristics. Then there was a pause.

‘So you have never travelled abroad?’ Mrs Piyadasa adjusted her sari under her large cream cardigan.

‘I went to France with my parents before the war. Several times. We took the boat train; but it was nothing like this.’ Penny smiled.

‘Ah, before the war,’ Mr Piyadasa said. ‘The war changed everything.’

Penny nodded and found herself smiling again. Then she felt disconcerted. It was an obvious remark, the sort heard in all sorts of small talk. It was a conversation filler; and yet it struck her peculiarly now. She was an educated, articulate woman, but it had never quite occurred to her as it did now, the effect of the war. She had come to womanhood through the conflict, and at home the scars had always been patent, everywhere. Even now, more than a decade on – could it be so long? – London still had enough gaps in its blackened fabric, still had bomb-sites, was gritting its teeth, flexing its sooty muscles and struggling on. And out of town there was the accelerating attempt to put all that in the past, rebuild standards, families; she and Hugh and the boys growing up with a new town on their doorstep. And there was the rhetoric of course; of starting again, an end to poverty, the promise of the Commonwealth.

But now she felt the words shake her. If the ship did not sink she might be the guest of oriental strangers in a city she could not begin to imagine. What would their house be like? Would she be expected to take off her shoes? She would make some religious faux pas. But no, it was not that. It was that everything really was different, absolutely and completely different – because of the war. She had thought it was over and done with. She had not realised. No one had realised. She looked around at the few uncomfortable-looking occupants of the main lounge, the chairs heaving to ludicrous angles, the low tables that would now shed whatever was placed on them. No one had realised. And herself: she had never actually spoken before to anyone who was not white.

Mrs Piyadasa was saying something about shopping in Oxford Street. Penny pulled herself back from her reverie. The nausea returned, distinctly flavoured now with intellectual disorientation. She found herself craving air again. She got up and made her excuses, pulling a grim face and holding her midriff by way of explanation. The Piyadasas smiled and nodded as she struggled towards the exit. There was a need to be close to the terrible water, to see it and know its extent – in order to be ready for it, perhaps.