The Cruel Sea (1951) (22 page)

‘Yes,’ said Ericson, ‘yes, I see.’

For a moment Gregg hadn’t known what to do, he’d been so taken aback, so horrified, so sick with it. He had stood in the dark street, looking from the car up to the light, the terrible bedroom light. ‘I didn’t need telling any more, sir: there was enough to bet on, there . . . I waited a long time, thinking what to do, and then I thought, well, give her a chance, she’s only a kid really, and lonely by herself, so I walked up the path whistling a bit, and I made a lot of noise opening the door and going inside . . . You see, I love her, sir,’ he said, with simple determination, as if only he knew about love. ‘We’ve been married just the six months.’

But now there was a long silence which Ericson could not break, so clearly pitiful was the feeling behind it: the word ‘love’ must have struck a hopeless note of memory. When Gregg started again, it was as if the key had now changed to something darker, more horrible still: as if this part of the story, which he had not yet shared with anyone, had a special forbidden quality which made them both guilty, teller and hearer alike.

Gregg’s wife had called out when she heard the door go: scared, she sounded, and there was a lot of moving about . . . She said: ‘Who is it?’ and he answered ‘Tom’, and there was whispering which made him feel angry and sick at the same time. He had switched on the light in the hall and waited, knowing quite well what they were doing and what the whispering meant; they were wondering if it could be bluffed out, what the evidence was, how much he had seen and guessed. But evidently they soon decided that it was hopeless, for now a man’s voice spoke quite loud, and when Edith called out ‘I’m coming down,’ it had a sulky note of defiance.

‘I still didn’t know what to do, sir – I couldn’t make sense of it at all. She’d always been so different, there’d never been anything like this. We were only married a couple of leaves back – you read the banns for us, here on board.’ Ericson suddenly remembered that this was so: he could even recall, with a queer distaste, having read: ‘Edith Tappett, spinster, of the Parish of Highgate, London’, and wondering what a girl with so unromantic a name could be like. Now he knew: now they both knew . . . ‘Pretty soon she came down,’ Gregg went on, speaking rather fast and looking at the floor. ‘She hadn’t got dressed, even then: she was all anyhow, in her dressing gown. There was stuff on it, sir – I could see.’

Ericson thought: that’s something he’ll never forget: what a horrible thing to have in one’s mind, for ever and ever . . . But Gregg was hurrying on, leaving one scene for another yet more terrible, as if his choice were so rich and so wide that he need not stay long over one aspect of it.

‘She’d had a bit to drink, sir – I could tell that. But that wasn’t enough for her to talk the way she did. You’d have thought it was
my
fault. “I’ve got a friend”, she said, “I wasn’t expecting you” – just like that. And when I said: “Friend? – what do you mean, friend?” she said: “There’s no need to shout, Tom, you don’t want any trouble, surely?” And then she called out: “Walter”, and after a minute the man came down the stairs.
He
didn’t care,’ said Gregg, with fury and misery in his voice, ‘he walked down the stairs doing up his coat . . . A big flashy chap, well-dressed, full of himself – you could tell he did this sort of thing every day of the week.’ Gregg looked up and then down again, flushing remembering a deep humiliation. ‘He was twice the size of me, sir. I couldn’t even – I couldn’t—’ His voice tailed off into an empty realm of cowardice and despair, where only his defeat, his still-raw shame, was real.

‘Never mind that,’ said Ericson quickly, as if there were no significance in the pause, the moment of abasement. ‘Tell me what happened next. What did your wife say?’

‘You should have let me know, Tom,’ was what his wife had said. ‘How was I to tell you’d be back?’ And then she had actually introduced them, and the man had said: ‘Ah, the sailor home from the sea,’ and Gregg had told him to get out, and the man had answered: ‘We don’t want any unpleasantness, thank you.’ It was all part of a topsy-turvy nightmare in which Gregg could not get his bearings at all. ‘After he’d gone, we had it out properly, but I couldn’t get her to see it straight at all.’ Gregg’s voice still held some of the astonishment of that moment. ‘She said she’d got used to – to love, sir, with me, and she couldn’t do without it. She said it had been going on for two months. She said that this chap had talked her into it, but she wasn’t really sorry, only on my account. She said it was the war, and lots of people did it . . . She acted like a different person. In the end we just went off to bed. She was with me that night, sir, though – though I could hardly touch her at first.’

There was now a much longer pause, almost as if Gregg had finished putting his side of the affair and were waiting for the verdict. But that could not be the end of the story, thought Ericson, looking down at his desk: it was horrible enough, and it excused a good deal as far as Gregg’s behaviour went, but it only accounted for two days – three at the outside – and he had been away for seventeen . . . He waited, wanting to prompt the other man but unable to find a way which would not sound brutal or indifferent: he had been moved by the recital – horrified, even – and he did not want it to seem as if he considered it of no account, or was brushing it aside in favour of a strict, immovable justice. But presently Gregg took up the story again, without any reminder: perhaps he had merely been collecting his thoughts, perhaps there was worse to come.

‘That was the first day, sir,’ he said, ‘and I stayed two more, just to make sure – I’d still be back in time to catch the ship, and that way it didn’t seem it would be so bad.’ He looked swiftly at the Captain, aware that he was taking a lot for granted, but the latter made no sign: the verdict, the judgement was to come at the very end . . . ‘She was just like she used to be in the old days,’ Gregg went on: ‘she stopped talking about the other chap, she didn’t say anything more about these funny ideas, she seemed to have forgotten all about it, except when I spoke about it at the end. But before I left I asked her what was going to happen, and she promised faithfully to give it another try. So I went off to catch the early train’ – Ericson could tell there was yet another climax coming, another stroke of pain, from Gregg’s swifter, shorter breathing, and the way his words came faster and faster, ‘and I missed it because of the traffic, and I came back, thinking I’d spend the day with her and catch the train in the evening, and she wasn’t there – the house was empty, and she’d taken her case as well.’

This time Ericson was afraid that Gregg was going to break down altogether: his voice came to a sudden stop, and his mouth, working and trembling uncontrollably, seemed on the point of puckering into tears. It was a moment of surrender: he looked young and capable and smart in his uniform, and then, above the neatly-rolled collar and the clean white flannel, his defeated face destroyed the picture utterly. Without a word Ericson went to his cupboard, poured out some whisky, and handed the glass to Gregg: because it was so unusual a thing to do, so far outside the normal, it was capable of being a failure and a mistake. For a moment Ericson wondered if, at a later date when Gregg had forgotten the worst of this matter, he might translate the occasion into different terms: perhaps boasting cheekily in the mess decks: ‘Trouble? Not
me!
The skipper gave me a tot of whisky and told me to come back any time . . .’ But no, it would not be like that. The giving of the whisky seemed to surprise Gregg into an effort of control: as he sipped it, looking round the cabin and out through the sunlit porthole, his mouth and face firmed again, and he prepared to go on. What he had said, and what he had still to say, was desolate, but not too desolate for ordered speech.

It was possible, he had thought, that his wife might be at her mother’s, over at Edgware; even though she had said nothing about going, she was in the mood for impulsive action. So to Edgware he went, by bus, only to draw another blank. ‘She wasn’t there, and she hadn’t been there for weeks. I could see her mother thought it was funny, but I wasn’t answering any questions. Then I went to see my pal, the one that wrote the letter, but he’d gone back after his leave and they didn’t know anything. So I left it, and went home again.’

He had been alone in the empty, silent house for a week. As he dismissed it thus, in a single sentence, Ericson tried to visualise what it must have been like: the waiting, the loneliness, the suspicion, the knowledge of betrayal. ‘I had to stay, sir, in case she came back,’ he said, and Ericson could not, for pity, deny the claim. ‘I’d have gone looking for her, but I didn’t know where to look – there was the whole of London. And then I got an idea, I should have thought of it before. There was a married friend of hers, woman I never cared for, over the other side of London, down White City way. I thought she might be staying there, so I went over, and asked at the house. She said the wife
had
been there, a few days back, but had gone away again, she didn’t know where.’ The story was pouring out now, unchecked by any reserve: in the silent cabin the words and sentences, clumsy and ill-formed, yet flowed with an eloquent readiness towards their cruel end. ‘I thought she was telling lies, there was something in the way she looked, so I hung about a bit, watching for the car, and then I turned into the first pub I came to, for a pint and something to eat, and there they were, the two of them, sitting down and drinking port.’ He swallowed. ‘She was laughing, and then she looked up and said: “Look who’s here”.’

Ericson thought he was going to stop, as he had stopped many times before, but the whisky had done its work – or perhaps it was the story itself, which could not be delayed at so crucial a point.

‘I asked her what she was doing there, instead of being at home,’ Gregg went on immediately, ‘and she said there was no harm in having a drink. Then I said: “Where’ve you been the last week?” and she said: “Staying with Else” – that’s this woman. I said I wasn’t going to stand for it, and the man said: “What you need is a drink”. I said: “I don’t want a drink from you – if this goes on I’m going to see about a divorce”. I didn’t really mean it, I just wanted to give him a scare. He said: “You’ve got no evidence”. So I said: “How about you coming down the stairs that night?” and he said: “I was just saying goodnight to Mrs Gregg – it was quite innocent”. I said: “How about that stuff on her dressing gown, then?” and he said: “Reckon we must have spilt the milk”, and then he winked at her and she laughed like a – like a rotten tart.’

What an accurate description, thought Ericson: how can he want her now, how can he feel anything but hatred and disgust? But in Gregg’s voice there was neither of these: when he said ‘rotten tart’ he was not condemning, he was mourning what he and she had lost. There was no trace of rationality in it, no balancing of right and wrong: there was simply the incalculable instinct of love, of what people feel – or feel that they should feel – when they undertake to bind themselves to other people. Even now, it seemed, Gregg did not question the validity of that binding: the bargain might be bad, but it was a bargain still – and all this sprang from ‘love’, a word in a book, a scene in a film, a foolish core of determination in a man’s brain.

Gregg was continuing, with quiet assurance. ‘I was going to say something to him about that, sir, but then he said: “You needn’t worry, anyway, I’m off to the States next week, big buying job”. And the wife said: “First I’ve heard of it, Walter, when are you going?” and he said: “Thursday – I’ll come round to say goodbye”, and I said: “Like hell you will – you don’t come near the house again”. It was funny, sir, he didn’t try to argue the toss about that, he just said, “Have it your own way, then”; I think what I said about the divorce must have rattled him a bit, but perhaps he’d had enough of it anyway. Then he stood up and said to the wife: “Thanks a lot, see you again one of these days”, and she said, very surprised: “Do you mean goodbye, Walter?” and he walked off, and by and by she started crying and I took her home.’

At that, Gregg paused and looked at Ericson, as if judging how he would receive what he was going to say next: he was near the end now, and he must, in spite of his earlier indifference, have felt it necessary to justify himself while he had the chance. Ericson was careful to keep his expression as non-committal as possible: even now, there was no verdict to be given, no comforting words to forestall the threat of discipline. This was still a private hearing, out of the main stream, with the normal course of events held in suspense.

Gregg seemed to gather himself together. ‘That was the Friday, sir,’ he said. ‘I’d been adrift ten days already, and this chap didn’t leave till the next Thursday, six more days.’ He swallowed again. ‘I still couldn’t go, sir, I still couldn’t leave her, even now it wasn’t safe: he might change his mind and come round to the house, and if he didn’t, I knew she’d be off to meet him if she got half a chance . . . So I thought I’d stay on, and keep her there with me: I was in the rattle anyway, whatever happened, and there was only one way to make sure she didn’t see him. Even then it was touch and go. We went to the pictures once, and she got up to go to the Ladies, and after a bit I went out myself, and I just caught her as she was going out through the front entrance. After that, we stayed at home all the time . . . She used to cry a lot: she was always on at me, wanting to go out – I was afraid to go to sleep, towards the end, and then I locked up all her clothes and hid the key where she couldn’t find it.’ He passed his hand over his forehead. ‘But one night – it was the Wednesday, the night before this chap left – she waited till I was asleep and broke the cupboard open and got dressed, and then something woke me up, and she tried to run for it, and I got to the door first and she was screaming and pulling at me, I thought she’d go mad . . . I stayed awake all that night, to make sure, and then in the morning she saw it was too late, and she kind of gave up and I knew it was all right to leave . . . I wasn’t going to talk to her at all about it, I wanted to forget it and start afresh; but when I was saying goodbye she said: “Will you be in trouble?” and I said yes I would and she said: “I’m in trouble too, Tom”, and then she said she was going to have a baby.’