The Cruel Sea (1951) (57 page)

‘It’s not a particularly successful combination.’ Once more he was struck by the low clarity, the beauty of her voice in the darkness. Their steps slowed again, willingly matching each other’s, as he listened to it, and to her. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I have this face, and I have a brain, and I can talk. But people don’t really like the arrangement: they prefer things one at a time. Women are afraid of the mixture, men don’t want it – they don’t know what to do with it.’

‘Surely they do. Look at the droves of courtiers tonight.’

‘But what did the courtiers want? Me as a woman, solely, not as an individual.’

‘They enjoy talking to you as well.’

‘And all the time they think: Chat, chat, chat – doesn’t she know that a mouth is for kissing? True?’

He laughed. ‘Maybe true. You wouldn’t want yourself changed though.’

Her head went up, challenging him and the dark night as well. ‘Not I . . . I wouldn’t pretend to change, either. I won’t pretend to be a plain girl with brains, to suit the women, or a pretty one without them, for you people.’

‘Count me out,’ he said. ‘I have a weakness for organised perfection.’

After a moment, she stopped before a tall gloomy building and said: ‘This is where I live.’

He did not know how to say goodbye. He remembered her phrase, ‘a mouth is for kissing’, but the moment was not that moment. He said: ‘The walk made the party. Thank you for it.’

A shaded light falling on her face showed it serious, and heartbreakingly lovely at the same time. Its shape held him in a spell he could have prolonged for ever: its nearness transfixed him. But this was still farewell: the night that had embraced must now divide them.

‘The walk was a good idea,’ she said. ‘Mine, too . . . Would you have asked me?’

He shook his head.

She said: ‘Why? Dedication to war?’

He shook his head again. ‘I just thought the answer would be “No”.’

‘Next time—’ she began and stopped.

There was a long pause, while they eyed each other: she hesitant, even discomposed, he diverted. Finally: ‘I just thought I’d leave you in the air for a moment,’ he said. ‘Next time, I’ll certainly take a chance and stake the earliest possible claim.’

‘It will be very embarrassing if you don’t,’ she answered, restored to her grave serenity. ‘Even with Puritans, one can’t make the running every day of the week.’

‘My turn next,’ he agreed. ‘Goodnight.’

She nodded and was gone, walking quickly up some steps and through a curtained doorway. Lockhart stared for a moment at the place where she had been standing; and then he turned and went slowly down the street again. His footsteps made an endless hollow ring on the lonely pavement, but the man within him had never been further from loneliness.

Vice-Admiral Sir Vincent Murray-Forbes, K.C.B., D.S.O. came down to the quay at Ardnacraish as soon as
Saltash
was signalled, and put off in his barge almost before she was secured to the buoy.
Saltash
would be the five-hundred-and-twenty-first ship to pass through his hands, and she received exactly the same welcome as the previous five hundred and twenty: if the enormous amount of work which this number entailed weighed heavily on the Admiral, it did not show either in his face, which was alert and attentive as usual, or in his scramble up the ladder, which was as energetic as it had ever been. Tremendous in gold braid, he acknowledged the piping and the salutes of Ericson and his officers, who were drawn up in a respectful semicircle on the quarterdeck; then he walked a pace or two forward, glared round him, turned back to Ericson, and said: ‘She’s bigger than I thought.’

Ericson, working it out rapidly, came to the right answer and put on an expression of interest.

‘Is this the first frigate to arrive here, sir?’

‘Yes. Yours was the first corvette, too, back in 1939. Strange. Long time since then. Introduce me to your officers.’

The Admiral went quickly round the assembled ring. To Lockhart he said: ‘You met me without a cap last time,’ and to Vincent: ‘You were in
Trefoil
’; the rest of them received a nod and a straight glance from under the bushy eyebrows. After that he toured the ship at a brisk pace, and then descended to Ericson’s cabin, where he sat down, accepted a glass of their best sherry, and said: ‘They seem a good class of ship, these frigates. We want something bigger and tougher in the Atlantic, though the corvettes have done a good job, a first-rate job.’ He looked at Ericson. ‘You lost
Compass Rose.
’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Ericson.

‘It’s a long war,’ said the Admiral, looking as though he were ready to begin the whole thing over again if necessary. ‘A damned long war. But the Huns are running, by God, they’re running! Or they will be soon. This is the beginning of the end of it.’ His manner changed. ‘You’re here for three weeks, Ericson. I needn’t tell you anything about the training course, or what I want you to do. You know the sort of standard I expect.’ He looked out of the porthole. ‘You’ll find it a bit bleak here, as usual. We’ve got a cinema ashore now, and a better canteen, but that’s about all there is.’

Ericson ventured a smile. ‘As far as I remember, sir, there won’t be much spare time anyway.’

‘I should think not, by God! It’s still the middle of the war . . . How’s that First Lieutenant of yours? Better than the last one you had?’

‘He’s first class, sir. We’ve been together for a long time.’

‘Remarkable what these R.N.V.R. fellows have done. I wouldn’t have believed it, at the beginning.’ He drained his sherry, refused a second glass, and stood up again. ‘Time for me to be moving . . . You must dine with me one night. I want to hear about that U-boat.’

How does he do it, wondered Ericson, ushering him out on to the upper deck: is it a prodigious memory – or just good briefing? . . . By the ladder, the piping party came to attention, headed by the coxswain. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ said the Admiral, looking at the yellow beard rather than the man. ‘Barnard, sir,’ said the coxswain, his West Country accent very prominent: ‘coxswain of the
Tangerine
when she was up here.’ The Admiral nodded, satisfied. ‘No beard then,’ he said to Ericson, ‘but it takes more than a beard to hide a man. Knew him straight away.’

The pipes shrilled, and the Admiral saluted and climbed over the side, all in one agile movement. With his head at a level of the rail he said gruffly: ‘You start your sea exercises at half-past five tomorrow morning.’ Then he disappeared down the ladder, and presently the sleek and spotless barge shot out from the side of the ship and sped towards the shore. On the way it started signalling to
Saltash
with a hand lamp. ‘All guns should be trained fore and aft in harbour,’ came the message. Lockhart looked round swiftly, and saw, alas, that ‘X’ gun was trained approximately ten degrees out of the true. He walked heavily aft, calling to Allingham as he went.

Three weeks, the Admiral had said, and three weeks it was, with every hour counting. The time went more quickly now: for all of them except Holt, there was less to learn, more to practise and to perfect: they were simply picking up again the outlines of a known job, on a bigger and broader scale than ever before.
Saltash
steamed faster, fired more guns, detected U-boats at a greater range, and dropped more depth-charges; in the matter of degree, they were breaking new ground, in the matter of anti-submarine warfare they were not. It was the same task as it had been for the last three years; they now had better weapons to help them in it, but its essentials never altered. They must accept A, they must guard against B – and A and B were the same old characters, the weather and the enemy, waiting in the wings for yet another scene from the longest play in the world.

The days passed: the ship shook together and started to work: the men smartened up, and the time taken for each operation – for firing a gun, dropping a depth-charge, sending a signal, lowering a boat, rigging a hose – decreased gradually as the seconds were pared off.
Saltash
began to fulfil the picture in the Admiral’s mind – and in Ericson’s as well. A bigger and better
Compass Rose
, Ericson wanted her to be: in moments of introspection and memory, it did not seem a particularly happy thing to be aiming at, but it was the whole point of being given a new ship and more men to man her. He and Lockhart were alike in mourning the past, and in turning their backs upon it; it was made easier by a ship that came readily to hand, and by the intensive and demanding future they knew they must prepare for.

In a ship of this size, both of them were far more remote from the crew than had been the case in
Compass Rose;
the working day was no longer a matter of dealing with personalities at close range, it was simply a question of the allocation of numbers – twenty seamen to do a job on the fo’c’sle, sixteen stokers to practise oiling at sea. All that mattered was that there should be enough men available at any given moment, with a petty officer to detail them off by name, using his closer knowledge of their capabilities.
Saltash’s
crew was almost double the size of
Compass Rose’s,
and sometimes it seemed that they were twice the distance away as well, and twice as anonymous. There was no one like Gregg, the seaman with the unfaithful wife, there was no one like Wainwright to cherish the depth-charges, there was no one like Yeoman Wells who looked after the signalmen with a father’s care; or if there
were
these characters on board, as there must still have been, they did not meet the eye, they had the permanent disguise of being names on a watch bill or a pay list, not individuals whose foibles had to be remembered. Perhaps it was a gain, perhaps it was a loss: when he took ‘Hands Fall In’ each morning, and looked down a long double line of eighty seamen whom he barely knew by sight and would not have recognised ashore, Lockhart sometimes regretted the intimate past, and the feeling, which he had had in
Compass Rose,
that this was a family matter, not a parade. But possibly the gain was in efficiency, which was always liable to be a cold-blooded matter.

I just want the whaler lowered, thought Lockhart to himself on one occasion, when he could not avoid noticing that one or two of the hands were still miserable with seasickness, after a day outside. I need twelve men to do it. I don’t want to bother about whether they’ve got hangovers this morning, or whether they’re in debt or in despair. I just want the whaler on the water. Twelve men, that’s all I need. Bodies . . . Coxswain!

It was he who dealt mostly in this principle of numbers, not people; and he could not help being aware of the change. He could even feel guilty about it, like a man forced by circumstances to replace twelve trusted workmen with twelve mechanical grabs. The answer, of course, lay in the extra amount of work the grabs could do; but that did not salve the general wound to humanity . . . Without doubt, however, that was the way the war was going: the individual had to retreat or submerge, the simple unfeeling pair of hands must come to the fore. The emphasis was now on the tireless machine of war; men were parts of this machine, and so they must remain, till they fulfilled their function or wore out. If, in the process, they did wear out, it was bad luck on the men – but not bad luck on the war, which had had its money’s worth out of them. The hateful struggle, to be effective, demanded one hundred per cent from many millions of individual people: death was in this category of demand, and lower down the list, the cancellation of humanity was an essential element in the total price.

They were all together in the wardroom, after dinner, when their sailing signal arrived, marking the end of their stay at Ardnacraish. Earlier, the Admiral’s report had come through; he was satisfied – no more, no less – and
Saltash
could go. The signal which translated this into action was short and to the point.

‘HMS
Saltash
sails for Greenock 0600 hours April 15th, and will be attached to Clyde Escort Force.’

‘Damn,’ said Vincent as he read the message. ‘I wanted to be at Liverpool again.’

‘The Clyde will do for me,’ said Johnson.

‘Anything will do for me,’ said Holt. ‘I want to see the world.’

‘I must say,’ remarked Scott-Brown, ‘that there are worse places than Glasgow in the spring.’

‘We may not see much of it,’ said Lockhart, carefully non-committal. The midshipman’s bright and speculative eye was on him, but he avoided meeting it. Julie, he thought: it wasn’t goodbye after all . . . ‘But Glasgow is certainly something to have in the background.’

So, once more, they went to war.

The war to which they went, towards the middle of 1943, had reached a hard and hopeful moment. Since the new year, the escorts and convoys in the Atlantic had been neither winning nor losing: the moment of balance was at hand, with the escorts cutting back the long start which the U-boats had gained, and attaining, with tremendous effort, some sort of parity in terms of sinkings. They were still stretched thin – sometimes there were seven hundred ships at sea at one time, and a hundred escorts, which meant a huge choice of targets for the U-boats; but the thin weapon was sharp, and try as they would, the U-boats could no longer break through in any decisive sense, could not hold the bloody advantage they had gained during the past three years.