Pincher Martin (10 page)

Cuckolding reminded him. He turned from the mirror, bound his dressing-gown with the cord and opened the bathroom door. And there, coming towards him, as if the rather antiquated expression had conjured him up was Alfred. But it was a different Alfred, pale, sweating, trembling, coming at a run toward. He took the wrist as the fist came at his chest and twisted it till Alfred was gritting his teeth and hissing through them. Secure in his knowledge of the cosmic nature of eating he grinned down at him.

“Hullo, Alfred!”

“You bloody swine!”

“Nosey little man.”

“Who’ve you got in there? Tell me!”

“Now, now. Come along quietly Alfred, we don’t want any fuss.”

“Don’t pretend it’s someone else! You bastard! Oh Christ——”

They were by the closed door. Alfred was crying into the lines round his mouth and struggling to get at the door handle.

“Tell me who she is, Chris. I
must
know—for God’s sake!”

“Don’t ham it, Alfred.”

“And don’t pretend it’s not Sybil, you dirty, thieving bastard!”

“Like to look, Alfred?”

Hiccups. Weak struggles.

“You mean it’s someone else? You’re not fooling Chris, honestly?”

“Anything to cheer you up old man. Look.”

The door opening; Sybil, giving a tiny shriek and pulling the sheet up to her mouth as if this were a bedroom-farce which, of course, in every sense, it was.

“Honestly, Alfred old man, anyone would think you’d married the girl.”

But there was a connection between eating and the Chinese box. What was a Chinese box? A coffin? Or those carved ivory ornaments, one inside the other? Yet there was a Chinese box in it somewhere——

Astonished, he lay like a stone man, open-mouthed and gazing into the sky. The furious struggle against his chest, the slobbering sobs of the weak mouth were still calling their reactions out of his stronger body when he was back in the crevice.

He cleared his throat and spoke aloud.

“Where the hell am I? Where was I?”

He heaved over and lay face downwards in the crevice, his cheeks on the lifebelt.

“Can’t sleep.”

But sleep is necessary. Lack of sleep was what sent people crazy. He spoke aloud and the lifebelt wobbled under his jaw.

“I was asleep then. I was dreaming about Alfred and Sybil. Go to sleep again.”

He lay still and considered sleep. But it was a
tantalizingly
evasive subject.

Think about women then or eating. Think about eating women, eating men, crunching up Alfred, that other girl, that boy, that crude and unsatisfactory experiment, lie restful as a log and consider the gnawed tunnel of life right up to this uneasy intermission.

This rock.

“I shall call those three rocks out there the Teeth.”

All at once he was gripping the lifebelt with both hands and tensing his muscles to defeat the deep shudders that were sweeping through him.

“No! Not the Teeth!”

The teeth were here, inside his mouth. He felt them with his tongue, the double barrier of bone, each known and individual except the gaps—and there they persisted as a memory if one troubled to think. But to lie on a row of teeth in the middle of the sea——

He began to think desperately about sleep.

Sleep is a relaxation of the conscious guard, the sorter. Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind. In sleep time was divorced from the straight line so that Alfred and Sybil were on the rock with him and that boy with his snivelling, blubbered face. Or sleep was a consenting to die, to go into complete unconsciousness, the personality defeated, acknowledging too frankly what is implicit in mortality that we are temporary structures patched up and unable to stand the pace without a daily respite from what we most think ours——

“Then why can’t I sleep?”

Sleep is where we touch what is better left unexamined. There, the whole of life is bundled up, dwindled. There the carefully hoarded and enjoyed personality, our only treasure and at the same time our only defence must die into the ultimate truth of things, the black lightning that splits and destroys all, the positive, unquestionable
nothingness
.

And I lie here, a creature armoured in oilskin, thrust into a crack, a morsel of food on the teeth that a world’s
lifetime
has blunted.

Oh God! Why can’t I sleep?

Gripping the lifebelt in two hands, with face lifted, eyes staring straight ahead down the gloomy tunnel, he
whispered
the answer to his own question in a mixture of astonishment and terror.

“I am afraid to.”

T
he light changed before the staring eyes but so slowly that they did not notice any difference. They looked, rather, at the jumble of unsorted pictures that presented themselves at random. There was still the silent indisputable, creature that sat at the centre of things, but it seemed to have lost the knack of distinguishing between pictures and reality. Occasionally the gate in the lower part of the globe would open against the soft lifebelt and words come out, but each statement was so separated by the glossy and illuminated scenes the creature took part in that it did not know which was relevant to which.

“I said that I should be sick.”

“Drink. Food. Sanity. Rescue.”

“I shall call them the——”

But the glossy images persisted, changed, not as one cloud shape into another but with sudden and complete differences of time and place.

“Sit down, Martin.”

“Sir.”

“We’re considering whether we should recommend you for a commission. Cigarette?”

“Thank you, sir.”

Sudden smile over the clicked lighter.

“Got your nickname on the lower deck yet?”

Smile in return, charming, diffident.

“’Fraid so, sir. Inevitably, I believe.”

“Like Dusty Miller and Nobby Clark.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’s the life up forrard?”

“It’s—endurable, sir.”

“We want men of education and intelligence; but most of all, men of character. Why did you join the Navy?”

“One felt one ought to—well, help, sir, if you see what I mean?”

Pause.

“I see you’re an actor in civvy street.”

Careful.

“Yes, sir. Not a terribly good one, I’m afraid.”

“Author?”

“Nothing much, yet, sir.”

“What would you have liked to be then?”

“One felt it was—unreal. Not like this. You know, sir! Here in this ship. Here we
are
getting down to the basic business of life—something worth doing. I wish I’d been a sailor.”

Pause.

“Why would you like a commission, Martin?”

“As an ordinary seaman, sir, one’s the minutest cog in a machine. As an officer one would have more chance of hitting the old Hun for six, sir, actually.”

Pause.

“Did you volunteer, Martin?”

He’s got it all on those papers there if he chooses to look it up.

Frank.

“Actually, no sir.”

He’s blushing, under that standard Dartmouth mask of his.

“That will be all, Martin, thank you.”

“Aye, aye, sir, thank you, sir.”

He’s blushing like a virgin of sixteen.

The Chinese box was evasive. Sometimes it was the fretted ivories, one inside the other, sometimes it was a single box like a cash-box. But however evasive, it was important and intrustive.

She’s the producer’s wife, old man. Fat. White. Like a maggot with tiny black eyes. I should like to eat you. I should love to play Danny. I should love to eat you. I should love to put you in a play. How can I put you anywhere if I haven’t eaten you? He’s a queer. He’d love to eat you. And I should love to eat you too. You’re not a person, my sweet, you’re an instrument of pleasure.

A Chinese box.

A sword is a phallus. What a huge mountain-shaking joke! A phallus is a sword. Down, dog, down. Down on all fours where you belong.

*

Then he was looking at a half-face and crying out. The half-face belonged to one of the feathered reptiles. The creature was perched on the slab and looking down sideways at him. As he cried out the wide wings beat and flapped away and immediately a glossy picture swept the blue sky and the stone out of sight. This was a bright patch, sometimes like a figure eight lying on its side and sometimes a circle. The circle was filled with blue sea where gulls were wheeling and settling and loving to eat and fight. He felt the swing of the ship under him, sensed the bleak stillness and silence that settled on the bridge as the destroyer slid by the thing floating in the water—a thing, humble and abused and still, among the fighting beaks, an instrument of pleasure.

He struggled out into the sun, stood up and cried flatly in the great air.

“I am awake!”

Dense blue with white flecks and diamond flashes. Foam, flowering abundantly round the three rocks.

He turned away from the night.

“Today is a thinking day.”

He undressed quickly to his trousers and sweater, spread his clothing in the sun and went down to the Red Lion. The tide was so low that mussels were in sight by the ship load.

Mussels were food but one soon tired of them. He wondered for a moment whether he should collect some sweets but his stomach did not entertain the idea. He thought of chocolate instead and the silver paper came into his mind. He sat there, chewing mechanically while his mind’s eye watched silver, flashing bright.

“After all, I may be rescued today.”

He examined the thought and found that the whole idea was neutral as the mussels had become, harsh and negative as the fresh water. He climbed to the water-hole and crawled in. The red deposit lay in a band nearly two inches wide at the nearer edge.

He cried out in the echoing hole.

“It will rain again!”

Proof of identity.

“I must measure this pool. I must ration myself. I must force water to come to me if necessary. I must have water.”

A well. Boring through rock. A dew pond. Line with clay and straw. Precipitation. Education. Intelligence.

He reached out his hand and prodded down with the finger. When his hand had submerged to the knuckles his finger-tip met slime and slid. Then rock. He took a deep breath. There was darker water farther on under the window.

“A fool would waste water by crawling forward, washing this end about just to see how much there is left. But I won’t. I’ll wait and crawl forward as the water shrinks. And before that there will be rain.”

He went quickly to his clothes, took out the silver paper and the string and climbed back to the Dwarf.

He frowned at the Dwarf and began to talk into the blotting-paper.

“East or west is useless. If convoys appear in either of those quarters they would be moving towards the rock anyway. But they may appear to the south, or less likely, to the north. But the sun does not shine from the north. South is the best bet, then.”

He took the Dwarf’s head off and laid the stone carefully on the Look-out. He knelt down and smoothed the silver paper until the sheet gleamed under his hand. He forced the foil to lie smoothly against the head and bound it in place with the string. He put the silver head back on the Dwarf, went to the southern end of the Look-out and stared at the blank face. The sun bounced at him from the paper. He bent his knees until he was looking into the paper at eye-level and still he saw a distorted sun. He shuffled round in such arc as the southern end of the
Look-out
would allow and still he saw the sun. He took the silver head off the Dwarf again, polished the silver on his
seaboot
stockings and put it back. The sun winked at him. There stood on the Look-out a veritable man and one who carried a flashing signal on his shoulders.

“I shall be rescued today.”

He fortified and deepened the meaningless statement with three steps of a dance but stopped with a grimace.

“My feet!”

He sat down and leaned against the Dwarf on the south side.

Today is a thinking day.

“I haven’t done so badly.”

He altered the arch over his window with a frown.

“Ideally of course, the stone should be a sphere. Then no matter where the ship appears in an arc of one hundred and eighty degrees the sun will bounce straight at her from the Dwarf. If a ship is under the horizon then the gleam might fetch her crow’s-nest, following it along like a hand of arrest on the shoulder, persisting, nagging, till even the dullest of seamen would notice and the idea sink in.”

The horizon remained empty.

“I must get a sphere. Perhaps I could beat the nearest to it with another stone until it rounds. Stone mason as well. Who was it cut stone cannon-balls? Michael Angelo? But I must look for a very round stone. Never a dull moment. Just like Itma.”

He got up and went down to the sea. He peered over the edge of the little cliff by the mussels but saw nothing worth having. There was green weed and a mass of stone between him and the three rocks but he turned away from it. He went instead to Prospect Cliff, climbed down the ledges to low water. But here there was nothing but masses of weed that stank. His climb tired him and he clung over the water for a moment, searching the surface of the rock with his eyes for anything of value. There was a coralline substance close to his face, thin and pink like icing and then not pink as though it were for ever changing its mind to purple. He stroked the smooth stuff with one finger. They called that paint Barmaid’s Blush and splashed on gallons with the inexpert and casual hand of the wartime sailor. The colour was supposed to merge a ship into the sea and air at the perilous hour of dawn. There were interminable hard acres of the pink round scuttles and on gun shields, whole fields on sides and top hamper, hanging round the hard angles, the utilitarian curves, the grudgingly conceded living quarters of ships on the Northern Patrol, like pink icing or the coral growths on a washed rock. He took his face away from the casing and turned to climb the ladders to the bridge. There must be acres of the stuff spread on the
child-time
rocks at Tresellyn. That was where Nat had taken her—taken her in two senses, grateful for the tip.