Dead Water (19 page)

Good grief.

The Ministry of Shipping has written to Eric requesting that he hand over his merchant fleet to the British authorities under a demise charter. They’re uncomfortable to be entrusting sensitive military and industrial surpluses to a fleet owned by a foreign national.

Ronald Cross turned up in person today: a young, smiling, insufferably self-confident Old Etonian, chopping logic as though the pair of them were at a school debate. ‘Mr Moyse, British registered companies control your ships!’

‘They have majority voting rights. They don’t have the right to interfere in management.’

‘But –’

‘Given what you have been asking me to manage,’ Eric says, fed up with this, ‘I would have thought the English expression “over a barrel” would serve quite nicely here.’

‘I must say –’

‘For example, the ships you’re talking about are actually owned by
Panamanian
companies.’

‘But –’

‘For example, the major shareholders in the British companies you speak of are
Norwegians
.’

Too hot. Too strong.

‘Look –’ Laying down the law to a minister of His Majesty’s government. No wonder they won’t give him his permit to travel to America. ‘Look, I’m not against you having the ships. Sign a bloody time charter like everybody else.’

When he is not getting into arguments with the British government, Eric spends his hours looking for Vibeke Dunfjeld. There is no word from her and no report of her from fishermen crossing from the Lofotens. She has surely reached London by now! Dowdy men in frayed suits show no special discretion as they follow Eric out of the hotel and on to trams bound east for Deptford and Bermondsey and Rotherhithe. They haunt his passage from wharf to wharf, church to church, mission to mission. He has half a mind to confront them – ‘If you’re being paid to shadow me, you may as well help me’ – but he won’t. Vibeke Dunfjeld is his affair.

Pamela Harriman slides in beside him under the dining table. He feels her warmth, her static charge of sex. How old is she? Not as young as the role she plays: the flighty, precocious schoolgirl of many a middle-aged MP’s fantasy. She lays a cool hand on his. ‘My dear,’ she whispers. She knows his story. His dramatic escape from Norway. His troubles with the authorities. His hunt for his fiancée. Under cover of intrigue and sympathy, she flirts with him. ‘Any news of Miss Dunfjeld?’

Everybody knows she’s Churchill’s spy, his eyes and ears in the bedrooms of this staff officer, that politician. It is impossible to resent her and only an invert could resist her, although a cool eye might register, in the conscientious way she feminizes every gesture, that sex has become an act she performs more than a quality she embodies. ‘No news? Oh, my poor dear.’ She squeezes his hand. The hot response of his loins to this simple gesture is so abrupt, so mechanical, he feels no more real than a puppet. He wonders at this appetite he has acquired for the women of the Dorchester. Pamela Harriman. Nancy Cunard. Women who know what it is to be feminine, who understand its power and wield it well. They have been taught about it, trained up to it, as to a birthright.

He thinks about Vibeke. This girl he took under his wing. This girl he shaped so strangely. He has always assumed that what he did with her was motivated by care, even love. The cameras. The maps. Papers in the
Geografisk Tidsskrift
. Lying in the arms of the women of the Dorchester, he can no longer be so sure of his motives. What, after all, did Vibeke become in the end? (He has begun, unconsciously, to think of her in the past tense.) A vagabond. A woman closer to her animals and birds than to the people of the islands. An Arctic nymph – or an Arctic witch. A scarfed girl shod in heavy boots. Not feminine at all.

This is what keeps him awake, troubled and oh-so-fascinatingly mysterious between the sheets. The thought that all his care and encouragement of Vibeke Dunfjeld might after all have been directed against her sex, against her power, against her womanhood. That he took a girl he was afraid of loving and year by year made her unlovable.

A bomb lands near the building. Light wheels, sunlight under water, as the chandeliers swing. Another explosion whomps the dining room. A plate topples off the edge and lands on the floor by Eric’s hand. Instinctively he catches it as it bounces. It pulses for a second between his fingers as though it were made of rubber. The harmonics die away, damped in his thick-fingered grip, leaving him holding a dish greasy with turbot and cheese.

There is applause.

Eric thinks of his smart, chilly bedroom on the roof, thinner-walled, and several degrees colder, than the apartments below. He says: ‘I wonder if my room will survive.’

Pamela’s little voice is hot in his ear: ‘I shouldn’t worry about that tonight, dear.’

Wharfingers with hooks for hands beetle four-limbed among the boxes, barrels and bails of Tooley Street. Case-hooks of hardened steel, splithandled, piratical and huge, tug and trawl the city’s goods about its rumbling yards. Hands of leather, gristle, chipped bone and scar tissue wield hooks aloft, careless and savage, as shifts retire and shifts awake: ceaseless waves of burdened men. Gutters run with weak beer, vomit, essences, sump oil, spit. From Tooley Street, Eric Moyse makes desultory sorties into the terraces: a nervous stranger with a thick accent, apologetic and uncomfortable. Resting wharfingers and cracked old men, oblivious so far to the injunctions posted up on public buildings – ‘Keep mum she’s not so dumb!’, ‘Talk less, you never know!’ – whisper behind his back and cast around, uneasy, for the nearest policeman.

They should recognize Eric by now. He comes here three times a week at least to explore and explain, traipsing back and forth from London Bridge to Rotherhithe, Shad Thames to the Old Kent Road: anywhere there’s a knot of refugee Norse blood. It is a solitary and dispiriting business to be hunting one woman in a city of exiles and refugees, firewatchers, fantasists, Blimpish ex-cavalrymen, calculators, damp-handed cadets. Hopeless, anyway, to be looking for Vibeke as though she were some child mislaid in a market! She might be anywhere. Processing refugees in Fife. Translating decrypts in some nameless Nissen hut in the home counties.

So, steadily, inexorably, Eric’s original quest falls away and his visits to this ‘little Norway’ acquire their own justification. He learns his way around the streets of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe by smell. Lavender from Yardley’s. Fruit from Hartley’s. Baking from Peek Frean’s. Over all, the stench of tanneries. Walking by wharfs and factories, breathing the spicy miasma of lime and decay spilling from James Garner and Sons and Barrow, Hepburn and Gale, Eric finds himself ever more at ease in this place. Something draws him here. Some as yet unformed idea. A magnetism. A hope.

On Tower Bridge Road, at the mouths of alleys and in the porticoes of defunct shops, local children, saving up for Saturday’s tuppenny rush at the cinema, build grottoes out of fruit boxes lined with shredded grass. They arrange daisies and dandelions in small vases filched from their mothers’ mantelpieces. They prop holy pictures, even cigarette cards, behind a stub of candle. They sit by their shrines like sadhus. It is a form of begging: they kick the grottoes to pieces and scamper off if a policeman happens by.

In the shadow of a railway viaduct a different kind of grotto is tended by two boys – twins, by the look of them, wilder than the rest and darkerskinned. They have no pictures, no candles. They create no mood. The boys are obviously idiots. They have grasped that their crate is a kind of box and that boxes are for putting things in, but that’s as far as their arrested understanding takes them. One fills their crate with shoeboxes and the other fills the shoeboxes with matchboxes. They have no jar, and were you to drop a copper or two on the pavement beside them – Eric has done this, many times – they will either ignore it or, less often, one will pick it up and slip it into a matchbox, one coin per matchbox, as though preparing the apparatus for a complex three-dimensional game.

Eric, fascinated, hunkers down to watch. The boys stack and fill their boxes methodically. Boxes in boxes in boxes. Eric stares. Something is taking shape inside him: a bright new idea that will propel him beyond the confines of this silly war and into the future.

The sirens sound.

The street is already emptied out. (The locals have their own, private early warning system: old men sit in their backyards, watching air-raid signals shuttling up the railway lines from Kent.) Eric stands. The nearest shelter’s obvious enough: the viaduct’s only a few yards off. ‘Come on!’

The twins, oblivious, persevere with their little boxes, their shrine to who knows what private divinity.

Evening has gathered, yellowing the sky, stripping the blue from every shadow. The first detonations shiver the air: the guns in Southwark Park have opened up. Shadows shimmy across the road. A warden springs out at him, waving his arms. The blast is so close Eric doesn’t even hear it and the warden vanishes in a cloud so white it must be flour.

Eric turns back towards the boys and their grotto. The children have vanished. A wriggle of shadow cees and esses around their shrine: their perfect cube, their intricate, perfectly squared-off stack of boxes. The shadow vanishes. The air stinks of vinegar. Eric walks through clouds of pearly white. There are bells. White figures move amidst the clouds. Some are on fire. He finds himself on Tower Bridge. In the river, just a few hundred yards away, a boat is burning fiercely. He retreats.

In Tooley Street, London’s larder fries in coconut oil, palm oil, fat. Walls of yellow heat corral him into reservoirs of smoking grain and bails of burning twigs. Drums and barrels burst and jump, cartoon-like, at his approach. Canvas sheets flame and spin like Hollywood dancers. All the variety of the material world sings to him.

Another blast, very close, hurls him to his knees. He cannot breathe. The mess and chaos of the port, its complexity and industry, evaporate before the flames and, with a terrible abruptness, the whole landscape flips, like one of those trick geometrical figures, into something mean and disordered: a rubbish tip on fire.

The air rushes in from behind, urging Eric towards the flames’ bright centre. He knows he must run. He cannot move. He is fixed to the spot by a strange and burdensome thought. The fire will sweep all this away. These heaps and stacks and barrows of jumbled stuff. It will clean the slate for a more ordered world. A cleaner trade. Contained. No stench of sweat, no broken limbs, no sores, no sprains. No ham-boned supermen rolling drunk of a Friday night on wages that their children never see.

The future, when it comes, will come in boxes. From port to port, big, square-built ships will carry ever bigger quantities of the future about the earth. Great cranes will lift the future from open holds and deposit it on trucks and railway locomotives, and they will bear the future inland, to every town, every settlement. Ships that today are shackled, constipated, squeezing out their goods for weeks on end on the backs of men made beasts, will then evacuate themselves in a matter of hours! Eric pictures them: great tanker hulls converted to dry storage...

For a moment, the white core of the fire is obscured by smoke as thick and black as ink dropped in water. An autumnal smell – burning stubblefields – sweeps thickly over him, as though the season itself were come to carry him out of time. Eric finds his feet and staggers, propelled towards the future. Boxes. Boxes and boxes and boxes in boxes, boxes everywhere and every box the same. He falls to his knees, buckling under the weight of his vision, and crawls through the litter of the old world: swatches of banana hemp and drifts of ash and the stubs of hand-rolled cigarettes and burlap threads and, here and there, surreal and precious, the greenish heads of discarded pub-lunch prawns. He has to stand. He lies with his back against the rippling tar of the road while heat rolls over him like blankets. He has to sleep. The vision is bigger than he is. It overcomes him.

Presently, out of the rain of ash, the red drizzle of molten shrapnel, something else impends. A tower. A statue. An angel. ‘Moyse?’

Something human. Vast. Red.

‘Eric!’

Stalin. Satan. A red death.

‘Eric, come on! Come
on
...’A bearded balloon swims drunkenly toward him. Two eyes veer and vanish. Eric feels himself gripped under the arms. A ring around his chest. He’s lifted. He staggers as an invisible muscle rasps round him, round and round, drawing him clear of the sucking blaze. His heels drag against hot cobblestones. He feels under him, around him, a muscular labour, as though a motor were trying to drive his hull of flesh out of its doldrum channel and into clear water, and it comes to him, by some faint signature of breath and muscular rhythm, that this figure is a man, a man he knows. If only he could –

‘Eric! Heaven’s sake, move!’

Eric struggles and frees himself. He kneels and wraps frail arms around his old friend’s legs. ‘Oh...’ He looks up through his tears, blinks salt and ash away and there, haloed by the bright sulphurous light of the future, is Peder Halstad.