Landfall (4 page)

A girl came up to him from the beauty stand. “Can I get you anything, sir?”

He said: “I’m not quite sure. I wanted an electric torch.”

“I think we’re out of torches. We have lamps.”

He brightened. “A lamp would do. Could I see them?” He followed her down the shop. “I didn’t really think you’d keep that sort of thing. Like trying to buy a lipstick at the ironmonger’s.”

She said: “We always keep a fancy line.” She opened a carton. “This is the only lamp we have at the moment.”

It was a moulded glass rabbit with red eyes. It stood upon a round chromium base with a little handle; when you turned the switch a bulb lit up inside it and the rabbit glowed with light.

The pilot said: “My God, that’s wizard. Just look at its eyes! What sort of battery does it use?”

He made her take it to bits to show him; then he bought it and took it away, very pleased with himself. He went on to a cinema and sat for a couple of hours watching a gangster melodrama; at about nine o’clock he was in the snack-bar of the Royal Clarence Hotel.

It was the busiest hour of the day; the long room was crammed with people. Most of them were young, most of the men were in uniform. There were naval officers, a fair sprinkling of naval surgeons, a good many sub-lieutenants and lieutenants of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, the Wavy Navy. There were lieutenants and captains of Marines, and anti-aircraft-gunners, and young Sapper officers. There were young Air Force pilots with the drooping silver wings upon their chests, and young Fleet Air Arm pilots with the golden wings upon their sleeve.

The room was filled with smoke, a smell of grilled food and a great babel of conversation. There were two bars serving drinks, and a snack bar with stools arranged around a grill. The centre of the room was filled with tables and the walls were lined with settees. There were perhaps a hundred people there, all talking and smoking and eating and drinking.

Chambers took off his coat and hung it on an overloaded stand and pushed his way to the bar where Mona was at work. There were two other barmaids with her, all immensely busy. She gave him a swift smile and served him deftly with a gin and Italian.

He said: “Dancing?”

She smiled brilliantly and nodded. He took his glass and elbowed backwards from the crowd into a corner.

A man behind his back said: “We never got that signal. I got it from Purvis in T.87. He flashed it to me by lamp round about one o’clock.”

Chambers turned: there was a little knot of R.N.V.R. officers standing beneath a blue poster warning them not to discuss naval matters in public places. He judged them to be off the trawlers that came into harbour every night. Another said:

“We ought to carry more life-saving equipment. I’d have got more of them if I’d had a couple of Carley floats.”

“Couldn’t the boats have got them?”

“There were only two proper seamen in the boat. They had all that they could do to keep her head to sea, of course. The ones in the water were just drifted away.” The speaker paused, and then said very quietly: “It was a stinking bloody mess. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Much fuel oil about?”

“God, yes. They were covered with it—the ones that were in the water. Just choked with the bloody stuff. I’d have picked up a few more of them if it hadn’t been for that.”

“How many did you get in all?”

“Thirteen in the boat and then we picked up seven from the water. We got three bodies, too.”

“The women were all in the boat, weren’t they?”

“No—of the seven we picked up, there were three women and four men. But two of the women died within ten minutes and one of the men. They’d been in the water over an hour.”

Somebody said: “Christ. I suppose they were practically gone when you got them?”

“Just floating in the life-jackets, you know. To all intents and purposes, they
were
dead.”

“What about another?”

“I don’t mind.”

One of the Wavy Navy pushed his way towards the bar. Another said: “I don’t understand why they only got one boat away. They weren’t shelled, were they?”

“Not that I know of. We’d have heard it, anyway. But she went down still steaming ahead at about six or seven knots, as far as I could make out from what they said. They never got her stopped to get the boats down.”

“She just went on till she went under?”

“That’s right.”

“Christ!”

Another said: “Who owned her?”

“I’ve no idea.” And then another said: “Sanderson and Moore—Sunderland. They had the
Lochentie
, and the
Glen Tay
, and the
Glen Ormond.”

Chambers turned to them. “I’m sorry—I heard what you said about the
Lochentie
. I’m Coastal Command, patrolling in your sector.”

The other nodded. “In an Anson?”

“That’s right. Tell me—was it a submarine?”

“Must have been. Too deep for a mine—there’s thirty fathoms of water out there.”

“Did you see anything of the submarine?”

“Not a smell of it. Did a bit of listening, but she’d been gone an hour. Nothing to go by.”

Another said: “She’d slip away ten miles and then lie quiet on the bottom till nightfall. She might be anywhere.”

Chambers said: “Can’t you get her when she surfaces?”

The trawlerman shrugged his shoulders. “Got a couple of drifters out there now on listening patrol. It’s just a chance if they contact her in the dark.”

One of the others said: “What are you drinking?”

Chambers said: “I don’t see why you should. Well, gin and Italian.”

He turned back to the first speaker. “I was on the morning patrol,” he said, “but my zone was to the east of you. It was filthy visibility—we couldn’t see a thing. I’m afraid the chap who had that zone missed the ship altogether.”

The other nodded slowly. “An aeroplane flew near us twice while we were picking up the boat. We heard it, but we couldn’t see it.”

One of them said: “It’s a wonder you come out at all, this sort of weather. Bill Stammers picked one of your Ansons out of the sea on a day just like this about a month ago.”

Chambers said: “I know. Chap called Grenfell was the pilot. Flew right in. He and the wireless operator ruined themselves. That’s the one you mean?”

“That’s right. The other two were in a little rubber boat.”

“Too bloody cold for that this weather.”

“You’re right. Though for December it’s not as cold as it might be.”

The pilot said: “We could do without all this blasted rain.”

He stayed with them for a quarter of an hour and stood a round of drinks. Then he said:

“Well, I must go and feed. I’ll keep my eyes skinned for your little friend when I’m out tomorrow.”

The officer who had rescued the survivors said suddenly and harshly: “If you see the bloody thing, give it everything you’ve got.”

There was a momentary silence.

The young flying officer nodded soberly. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do that, with your love.”

He went off to the grill.

I
N
the Pavilion the lights swung and changed colour on the dancers. The floor was crowded. Most of the dancers were in uniform, sailors and officers mixed indiscriminately. There was a sprinkle of khaki and of Air Force blue, but most of the uniforms were naval.

Chambers swung the girl deftly in and out of the crowd of dancers on the floor. They were laughing together in the changing lights. She still wore the plain black frock that she had worn when serving in the bar: he had not allowed her time to go back home to change.

They turned and side-stepped merrily in an open space.

He said: “Don’t sing that song. It sends an arrow right through my heart.”

She bubbled with laughter. “You do talk soft. What’s it this time?”

“I had a date with Snow White. I broke it to come here and dance with you.”

“You do tell stories. It was Ginger Rogers last time.”

“I know it was. They’re all after me because I dance so well.”

“Do you tchassy in a reverse turn when you dance with Ginger Rogers?”

“We won’t go into that again,” he said, with dignity. “I do it every time I dance with Snow White. And what’s more, Disney makes it look all right.”

She laughed again up into his face. “He must stretch out one of your legs to make it look all right, like Pluto’s tail.”

Presently the dance came to an end. He took her back to the table which they had left loaded with their overcoats to retain it and bought strawberry ices for them both. Presently she said:

“What do you do when you aren’t flying?”

He said: “I’m writing my autobiography. It’s the right thing to do that when you’re twenty-three.”

She looked at him uncertainly. “You don’t know how to write a book, I don’t believe.”

“Anyone can write that sort of book. I’m going to call it
Forty Years a Flying Officer.”

The dance-hall was built out upon a pier on the sea-front. Beneath their feet the tide crept in over the sand, menacing in the utter darkness. Outside no lights whatever showed upon the waste of waters. On the black, tumbling sea a very few ships moved unseen, unlit, and stealthily. Twenty miles out two little wooden vessels lay five miles apart, with engines stopped and drifting with the tide. In each of them a man sat in a little, dimly lit cabin. Before him was an electrical apparatus; he wore head-phones on his head. From time to time he turned the knob of a condenser.

He sat there listening, listening, all the winter night.

Over her strawberry ice the girl said: “No, but seriously, what do you do when you aren’t flying?”

He said: “I build ships.”

She laughed again. “No—seriously.”

“Honestly, that’s what I do. I’m making a galleon.”

“Like what you buy in shops, in bits to put together?”

“That’s right.”

Her mind switched off at a tangent. “Wasn’t it terrible about them people in that ship today?”

His mind moved quickly. There had been no mention of the loss of the
Lochentie
in the evening paper. He said innocently:

“What ship was that?”

She said, wide-eyed: “The one you was talking about in the bar. You know.”

He said: “I never talk of naval matters in a bar. It tells you not to on the poster.”

She said: “Don’t talk so soft. You was talking to the officers off the trawlers all about it, the ones what picked the people up out of the water.”

He said: “I knew you were a spy right from the first. The next thing is, I threaten to denounce you to the police unless you let me have my way with you.”

She said: “If you’re going to talk like that, I’m going home.”

He said penitently: “I’m sorry. I was only going by the books.”

“Well, don’t be so awful.”

“Did you hear all that we were saying?”

She said: “Not all of it, because of turning round to get the things from the shelves. But you’d be surprised if you knew what we got to know behind the bar.”

He nodded, serious for a moment. When old friends in the service meet for a short drink and a meal, not all the posters in the world will stop a few discreet exchanges on the subject of their work. Leaning upon the bar, they say these things in low tones to each other, so low that nobody can hear except the barmaid at their elbow.

He said: “Let’s go and dance again.”

They went out for a waltz. He was not a bad dancer,
and like most girls of her class she was very good. They were together well by this time, and went drifting round the floor weaving in and out of the crowd in a slow, graceful rhythm. A faint fragrance came up from her hair into his face; he was quite suddenly immensely moved.

He said: “You’ve done something to your hair.”

She laughed. “I had it washed.” She paused and then said: “Do you like it?”

“Smells all right.”

“You do say horrid things. I never met a boy that said such horrid things as you.”

He squeezed her as they danced. “It’s the stern brake I have to keep upon myself. If I told you what I really thought about you you’d slap my face and go home.”

She laughed up at him. “I’ll slap it now just for luck.”

“Then I’ll have you arrested. You can’t do that to an officer in war-time. It’s high treason.”

Presently they went and sat down again for a time. He lit a cigarette for her, and said:

“What else did you do today besides getting your hair washed?”

“Did the shopping for Mother before going to the snack-bar. We open at twelve-thirty, you know. Then in the afternoon I had my hair done and went home for tea.”

“And back to work again.”

“That’s right. What did you do?”

He considered. “Did a spot of flying. Just scraped clear of a blazing row.”

“What about?”

“Only something to do with the work. Then I worked on the galleon for a bit.”

“How big is it?”

He showed her with his hands. “About like that.”

“What are you going to call it when it’s done?”

“Mona.”

She was pleased. “You do talk soft—really you do. What else did you do after that?”

“After that? I—oh, my God, yes—I came into Southsea and bought a rabbit.”

She stared at him in amazement. “A rabbit? Whatever are you going to do with that?” And then she said: “You’re just kidding again.”

“You hurt me very much when you say that.” He turned and rummaged in the pocket of his long blue overcoat. “You don’t deserve to see it.”

He pulled out the carton. She bent across the table curiously, her head very close to his. He opened it and took out the lamp, clicked the switch, and the rabbit glowed with light.

She breathed: “Isn’t it lovely! Wherever did you get it from?”

He told her. “I went in there to get a lipstick and saw it on the counter.”

“A lipstick?”

“I’ve got it on now.” He took the mirror from her bag and looked at himself. “I think it’s rather becoming.”