Good Enough For Nelson (29 page)

‘What
are
you talking about, Shiner?’

‘Did you never go to the cinema matinee on Saturday mornings when you were a boy?’

‘We haven’t all had the benefits of your middle-class upbringing, Shiner.’

Polly and Lionel Tinkle also watched it, down in Dartmouth town, on Lionel Tinkle’s landlady’s giant colour set.

‘I do think The Bodger’s very good,’ Polly said. ‘He’s got a sort of twinkle in his eye all the time, to warn you that he doesn’t take himself all that seriously and you shouldn’t take him all that seriously either. Where’s your landlady this evening?’

‘It’s her Strindberg evening. She’s rehearsing with the Dartmouth amateur dramatics.’

‘Strindberg. The mind boggles. What part did she get? Miss Julia, I expect.’

Lionel Tinkle knew his landlady’s front sitting room very well, but he had only begun to notice it properly. He felt constricted, oppressed, by her striped wallpaper, her yellow plastic hanging chandelier, the photograph of her late husband in his Coast Guard uniform on the mantelpiece above which hung a large circular plaster plate, embossed in cumbersome relief with a scene from the Tyrol, complete with pine trees, mountains, rushing river, and yodeller in lederhosen and feathered hat. It was a claustrophobic sort of room, dominated by the great shifting technicolor expanse of the television screen. When Lionel Tinkle switched off the set and its sounds died away, they were replaced at once by the clicking of his landlady’s clock, the flutterings and wire-twangings of his landlady’s canary in the cage by the window, and the purring of his landlady’s cat on the windowsill.

‘Polly.’

Lionel Tinkle was feeling socially as well as physically trapped. His relationship with Polly had progressed to the point where, as his mother used to put it, ‘something should be said’. He guessed he should propose to her. Make an honest woman of her, or whatever the sickening bourgeois phrase for it was. He had never proposed before, and he did not wish to start now. He did not even want to live with her. He found her fascinating, intriguing, physically attractive, but there were whole areas, stretching out like wide savannahs, of her tastes, her views, her upbringing, her politics, which were still as mysterious to him as outer Siberia. Besides, in a flash of intuition which was akin to self-preservation, Lionel Tinkle knew he would never survive a permanent liaison with Polly. That tongue of hers would skin him alive inside six months. She would have to choose a much stupider man, preferably a naval officer.

‘Yes?’

Polly waited for the proposal she knew was coming. He had that broody look on his face which showed that something was imminently about to happen to him which was not in the little red book. Polly had never been proposed to before, and she waited with a mixture of excitement, and apprehension and curiosity. How exactly was it done? How exactly would Lionel Tinkle do it? Polly hoped that he would propose almost as hard as she wished he would not. For she had not the slightest intention of marrying him. Polly had no finished conception of her destiny in life but it certainly could not include the prospect of Lionel Tinkle as her husband.

‘Polly?’

Lionel Tinkle wondered how best to avoid disappointing her too much, how to let her down as lightly as possible. He was very fond of her, more than fond. But marriage was out of the question.

‘Yes?’

Polly rehearsed how she would phrase her refusal as gracefully and as tactfully as possible. He was a dear little chap, and the best of company in his own peculiar way, and Polly was very fond of him. She had no wish to hurt him. But marriage would be unthinkable.

‘Polly.’ But, after all, she was the most gorgeous girl he had ever clapped eyes on in his entire life. And she was intelligent, too. Not just a pretty face. She was, in her own sledge-hammer way, a fearsome debater and a worthy opponent. With her encouragement and criticism, he would be able to do the research he had always longed to, perhaps publish the books he had always dreamed of.

‘Yes.’ There was much more to Lionel than most of the men one met. He had this silly blind spot about the bourgeoisie, and he was extremely vulnerable when he met a certain kind of naval officer. It sometimes made her weep inwardly to see the way they treated him. But he had tremendous guts. He never let them get on top of him and he was very considerate to other people.

‘
Polly
? There simply was no concealing a certain animal lust. It could not be entirely coincidence that he longed for her so much. Supposing he said nothing now? Would that mean more months, a lifetime even, of lying awake, sweating with yearning and frustration?

'Yes’
He was his own kind of aristocrat. He really did treat all men as equals. Except the Royal Marines. Lionel could not abide Royal Marines. He said their heartiness made him feel ill. But then, not everybody loved Royal Marines.

The clock suddenly gonged out resonantly seven times. The cat jumped lightly down to the floor and walked over to the door. The canary leaped on to its highest perch and butted its bell like a punch-bag, making a tiny silvery tinkling sound.

‘Polly, will you marry me?’

‘Yes, I will.’

The Prof. also watched, on the small portable set in his kitchen. He thought it ironic that The Bodger, the first prophet of the media, who had proclaimed its advent in the College and had prepared for its coming with Superjack’s lectures, should now be the first to experience their effects: Prometheus, struck by the lightning of his own fire. Listening to the interview, the Prof. recognised that it was gibberish, but in its way it was clever gibberish. The Bodger was employing that clearly enunciated non-language which the media welcomed as their own. It was all the more demeaning and contemptible that the interviewer and his audience should accept it without protest, because it was no more than reassuring vowel sound, phonetic pap. But nobody scoffed at it. Nobody threw a boot through the screen.

The Prof. thought it odd that The Bodger should be so convincing. For he was convincing, there was no doubt about it. In theory, a professional naval officer should have been all at sea in such circumstances. But although The Bodger patently was a stranger to television, he still had a certain gracefulness under scrutiny, like some great denizen of the forest suddenly caught in a spotlight. Not for the first time, the Prof. conceded that The Bodger and others of his ilk had a kind of residual professional cunning. Maybe even to become a senior naval officer at all required theatrical talent of some kind. But they also had a talent for survival, a knack of adapting to changed circumstances. The Prof. could discern the first stirrings of this professional resilience already in the faces of many of the OUTs at the College. Again, the Prof. considered whether he ought not to recast his opinions of the Service and offer his son the first encouragement and approval he had given him since he joined. For his son was unquestionably as good at it as all the rest.

The Captain’s Secretary also watched, on the set high up on the wall at one end of his ward. Through the haze of his sedative drugs, it all sounded to him like underwater Chinese, but he was satisfied that The Bodger seemed to be winning.

Simon Lefroy also watched, on the set in the Dean of the Faculty of Arts office. With no prior warning about the interview, Simon Lefroy was surprised and delighted to see The Bodger’s face and the College buildings. The mention of ‘riots’ sounded ominous, but The Bodger appeared to have the situation well under control. Once the interview was over, Simon Lefroy could not have explained what it had been about, but it had been enormously reassuring to see it. Somewhere outside this university, civilised life was still going on.

It was the sixth day of the sit-in, and there was still no sign of a break in the deadlock. Both sides had settled into fixed, non-negotiable positions. Simon Lefroy was now resigned to student demonstrations, which seemed to follow him from campus to campus. His arrival seemed to be the signal for demonstrations. The Dean’s office was a shambles, the floor covered with torn books, ransacked files, and papers, the bulkhead covered in graffiti scrawled with aerosols. Squalor was a word specially coined to describe student sit-ins. Simon Lefroy was kept under guard, being escorted to the lavatory along the corridor once a day. Otherwise, he was half-starved, and hourly and hoarsely harangued by hairy hooligans on the iniquities of capitalism.

‘OK Lord Nelson.’ It was one of the hoarsest and hairiest of the hooligans, standing with hands on hips by the television set. ‘You can split now.’

Simon Lefroy had no idea what he was talking about.

‘You can split now Horatio. Scarper, get lost, push off, remove yourself. We don’t need you. If the revolution’s come to the Naval College at Dartmouth, we don’t need you any more, man.’

This might be an excuse, or a face-saver, or a base for new demands, but Simon Lefroy did not pause to debate it. The logic behind his release was as amazing as the logic behind the whole sit-in, but Simon Lefroy stood not upon the order of his going, but went.

Lucy and Isaiah Nine Smith did not watch, because they were both at sea, Lucy as Isaiah Nine Smith’s guest in
Pegasus
, one of the College yachts. Every term, every OUT was expected to take a test and qualify as coxswain of every kind of boat in the College fleet. For experience in seagoing yachts, a staff officer normally took a crew of OUTs to sea for about twenty-four hours. Depending upon the weather and upon the force and direction of the wind, they either spent the night at sea in the Channel, or sailed to Salcombe or Torquay, sleeping on board, before returning to the College for debriefing the following evening. The yacht trips had recently tended to degenerate, in Isaiah Nine Smith’s opinion, into holiday ‘jollies’ and he had recently discussed with The Bodger ways of making the training more intensive and more realistic.

Lucy had been prepared to resent being automatically appointed cook, as girls normally were, but she found that McAllester had drawn up a correct roster of duties, so that everybody in the crew, including Lucy, took their turns at steering, watch-keeping, and cooking. Lucy joined the others in handling
Pegasus
out of harbour. They were so agile, so willing, so sexually attractive, she thought. Even the foreigners - that intense Malaysian, so moody and so determined to succeed. Lucy could feel the almost physical force of his determination to do well; he would have shinned up to the top of the mast, or dived overboard and down to the bottom of the sea, if Ikey asked him.

Lucy marvelled at the mysterious power the College seemed to have. These boys had all been so different such a short time ago. Now, they were beginning to look and act the same. It even affected their accents. She could not be sure, but Lucy fancied that even in the short time she had known them that Welsh midshipman, and the one from Yorkshire, were both beginning to speak in the same neutral ‘Navy’ way.

But the biggest change had been in McAllester. He had always been a very confident, rather brash young man at university, but now he seemed to have acquired an extra dimension of confidence. He had been forced to extend himself temperamentally as well as physically. He had met his peers, and matched himself against other young men who could do as well.

Lucy watched the panorama of the Dartmouth estuary hillsides slide by, the town houses with their gardens and walls, the other boats at their buoys, the wooded slopes, the Castle, Froward Point, the great cliffs outside with their green grass crests, and a line of bright white coast-guard cottages. Outside,
Pegasus
met a great heaving swell running up Channel from the south and west. She climbed up each gleaming silvery side of water and slipped easily down the other, as comfortably as breathing in and out. The light wind was astern and Isaiah Nine Smith soon ordered the huge red-and-white envelope of the spinnaker hoisted. To starboard opened the long expanse of Start Bay, and in the hazy distance Lucy could see the waves breaking on Slapton Sands, each one glowing white, ever extending its line of foam, until it sank from view and another took its place. To port, further out in the Channel, lay the long black pencil hulls and yellow superstructure, like a block of town flats, of a pair of super-tankers. They were so big they appeared stationary, whereas in fact they were rapidly slipping northwards.

With Isaiah Nine Smith in charge, there was to be little time for sightseeing. This was a working, instructional trip, with the inevitable College evolutions. McAllester and Bingley and Caradoc and Bombulada and Syllabub and Persimmons and Adrianovitch and Chung Toi and Lucy all took turns in steering a set course, in taking charge of hoisting and striking every sail in the locker, in rigging and replacing all standing and running rigging. They learned how the sheets ran best, how to work the winches, how to light the primus stove and heat the oven, how to operate the short-range radio set, how to take bearings with the compass, how to switch on navigation lights and how to place and light emergency lanterns, how to lay out gear for taking another yacht in tow, how to load and fire the Verey pistol, how to connect up and flash a message with the Aldis lamp, how to rig lifelines for rough weather. Isaiah Nine Smith had a check list and worked methodically through it: where and what was in the First Aid Kit, how to take a barometer reading and enter it in the log, how to estimate wind speed and direction, how to use the tide tables, how to put a position on the chart, how to hoist out and hoist in the dinghy, how to start the diesel engine and what to do if it stopped, and how to calibrate the Decca navigation aid. Lucy had some previous experience of sailing, but she had to concede how little she actually knew.

By the time Isaiah Nine Smith was satisfied with the evolutions, it was well on into the evening. There was, he reckoned, only just over an hour of daylight left. The wind was still north and east, but dropping slowly, with the sun. They might possibly make Salcombe at midnight, or early the next morning. But Isaiah Nine Smith decided it would be better to stay at sea on such a fine night and push gently southwards down the coast with the tide until morning, and then make an inshore beat at first light, and hope to arrive in Salcombe for a lunch-time glass of beer.