He heard Petty Officer Clover, the gunner’s mate, reporting to Cockcroft that libertymen were ready for inspection, and Cockcroft’s breezy ‘Ah, right-oh then, GM!’
Cockcroft should have said ‘Very good’ — in a clipped, impersonal tone. Nick had told him a dozen times about this sort of thing-for his own sake, because Wyatt and others of that stamp had deep reverence for the customs and habits of the Service; Wyatt would have just about thrown him over the side if he’d heard that chirpy ‘Right-oh’.
The sailors liked Cockcroft. They called him – amongst themselves – ‘Cocky-Ollie’.
Wyatt was in London. He’d gone up on the evening of the day they’d docked, two days ago, and he wasn’t due back until tomorrow afternoon, the 24th. In his absence, life had been quite enjoyable. Nick had had to forego the pleasure of going up himself, the idea of an evening’s dalliance with Lucy L'Ecstase; with Wyatt away, this was where he had to be. And in any case, the luscious Lucy didn’t lack admirers, and might not have been available at such short notice.
He’d passed the time pleasantly enough. That first night alongside he’d appointed himself duty officer, and invited his friends over from the submarine basin. Tim Rogerson, who was first lieutenant of an E-class submarine; Harry Underhill, a CMB – coastal motor boat – man; and Wally Bell, who commanded an ML, a motor launch. They’d come over to Mackerel for dinner, driving themselves round in Johnny Vereker’s constantly back-firing little Swift; and on the second night – last night – Nick had dined with them aboard their depot-ship, the old Arrogant.
Meanwhile, Mackerel’s boilers were being cleaned-by dockyard stokers, to allow the ship’s engine-room staff to enjoy their own rest-period – and Nick had been getting her smartened up and cleaned internally. The sailors had caught the Christmas spirit – which was an easier thing to do in Wyatt’s absence – and the work had progressed rapidly and cheerfully. The only defaulters had been minor cases of drunken behaviour ashore, which Nick had dealt with swiftly and as leniently as regulations allowed, getting them disposed-of before Wyatt should return to make mountains out of molehills.
When they’d docked on the 21st, Wyatt had gone ashore at once to see Captain (D), who commanded this Sixth Flotilla. But he’d come back without having seen him. There’d been meetings going on, strange persons down from London. Bacon himself had been up at the Admiralty, and nobody would see anyone or tell anyone anything. There was an impression that far-reaching decisions were being taken behind locked doors.
Wyatt had told Nick, ‘I’m not hanging about down here. I’ll be at my club in Town. You can hold the fort, I suppose, while the ship’s alongside?’
Nick strolled aft – wondering now, two days later, what was going on. Dover was alive with rumours. Rogerson and the others over in Arrogant thought Admiral Bacon was about to get the order of the boot. The destruction of several U-boats, followed by so positive an enemy reaction against the lit minefield that was catching them, proved how right it had been to light it up. Bacon had fought against it, stone-walled the Admiralty committee’s recommendations as long as he could – until, one story went, Sir John Jellicoe (Jellicoe was First Sea Lord now) had finally ordered him to implement the proposals. Bacon had argued that his nets were already barring the straits to U-boats, that none at all were getting through. Now it was plain he’d been wrong: on an issue so vital that the war could be won or lost on it.
Rogerson – long, lean, red-headed – had raised his glass. ‘Here’s to him, anyway. He’s done a thundering good job here, and with only half enough ships to do it.’ Nodding at Nick. ‘Your sort of ships, I mean.’
Wally Bell agreed. Burly, bearded, brown-eyed: until 1914 he’d been a law student at Cambridge. He put down his glass, leant back, stared up at the white-enamelled deckhead. Arrogant had been launched in 1896 as a third-class cruiser, and converted to a depot ship two years before the war. In 1914 they’d brought her round from Portsmouth under tow. Since there were now only two E-class submarines in Dover, she’d become mother-ship to the MLs and CMBs as well. Bell said, ‘I doubt if people realise what a complex job the old fellow’s got. What – four hundred ships? If you can call ’em ships… And airfields, dirigibles, shore guns—’
‘Isn’t it what admirals are for?’
Harry Underhill, the coastal motorboat man, was a former merchant navy mate with a master’s ticket; no respecter of persons, he had a direct, incisive way of summing-up either individuals or problems. A craggy, rather savage-looking individual. He added, ‘In any case – the higher they fly, eh?’
He was right, Nick thought. But one could still say ‘Poor old devil…’ Rogerson added, ‘Even if he doesn’t know how to use submarines. Frankly, I wonder why they bother to keep us here.’
The CMB people had the same complaint: that they weren’t used enough. Whereas the destroyers were, beyond doubt, worked to the very limit. The lightly-built, high-speed motorboats were limited to fine-weather operations, that was the main restriction; they needed moonless nights, too, for their kind of work.
Nick, strolling aft, saw Cockcroft, followed by Petty Officer Clover, completing his inspection of the libertymen.
‘Carry on please, Gunner’s Mate.’
He’d got that right, anyway. He might as easily, if he’d been in true ‘Cocky-Ollie’ form, have said ‘Well, have a spiffing time, you chaps…’ No – not quite… Nick smiled to himself; he liked Cockcroft. Clover had saluted, a rigidly correct, Whale Island gunnery-school salute that practically broke his wrist : and now his heels crashed together as he whipped round to face the lines of smartly turned-out, wooden-faced sailors who were about to be turned loose on Dover.
‘Libertymen – right – turn! Rear rank, quick – march!’
The Mackerels began to file down the gangway to the jetty. Nick stopped beside the guardrail, and Cockcroft joined him. Cockcroft said, stumbling slightly as he stopped, ‘Fine body of men, what?’
He was grinning after them as the front rank tailed on behind the others. Nick said, ‘See ’em in three or four hours’ time, and then say that.’
‘Well, dash it, I would!’
‘Yes. As a matter of fact, so’d I.’
He might not have, though, when he’d been Cockcroft’s age. Since then he’d seen, at Jutland, how sailors who were paid next to nothing, cooped up in miserably uncomfortable and overcrowded messdecks, subjected to a continuous, often petty and sometimes ruthless discipline and looked down on as riff-raff by quite a large section of the general public, how men like this could fight like lions, face quite terrifying danger and privation, remain disciplined, cheer themselves hoarse to keep their own spirits up, and die like heroes. He’d seen them doing all those things, at Jutland; and the knowledge, the recognition of the sort of men one led, was one of the things that made the Navy bearable.
He stood with his hands resting on the guardrail, and watched the crowd of destroyer men moving off towards the town. He murmured, ‘If anyone ever had a right to get drunk now and then – well, there they go.’ Cockcroft was delighted: ‘I say! D’you know that’s exactly what I was thinking when I was inspecting them just now?’
Nick glanced at him sideways. He advised him drily, ‘Just remember to keep it to yourself.’
He didn’t know what to do, this evening. Except for himself and Cockcroft, all the officers were ashore; and the Arrogant lot, his personal friends, were all otherwise engaged.
Rogerson had gone up to London, driving himself there in Vereker’s motor; he’d ‘found’ some petrol for it. He’d wanted Nick to go with him, to dine at his parents’ house in Mayfair, but it had been out of the question to leave the precincts of the port with Wyatt absent. He’d have liked to: Rogerson, who was probably his closest friend these days and perhaps the first real friend of his own age he’d ever had in the Navy, had an extremely pretty sister, Eleanor, who was a VAD at St Thomas’ Hospital; she would have been there, this evening.
Wally Bell was at sea, on patrol in the Downs, and Underhill had taken his CMB over to Dunkirk.
It had been a good evening, last night in Arrogant. There’d been a fifth member of the party later on, an amusing RNVR friend of Rogerson’s named Elkington, who was first lieutenant of Bravo, one of the old ‘thirty-knotters'. She was so decrepit, Elkington had told him, that they all yelled ‘Bravo!’ whenever she covered a sea-mile without something falling off… Nick remembered snatches of the conversation round that after-dinner table: about Evans of the Broke, for instance – how, when in some emergency last year no boat had come inshore to take him off to his ship, he’d sprung into the harbour and swum back – fully uniformed, and in a stiff December blow. Wally Bell had laughed… ‘A man of action, surely. But not – well, with all respect to him, not exactly brimming with the old grey-matter?’
Underhill had wagged a forefinger: ‘Ah. Certain to reach the top, then.’
Nobody had argued: it was more of a truism than a joke. Rogerson cast a friendly glance at Nick: ‘How does that place you, Nick? Are you going to the – er – top?’
Nick had taken the question seriously. ‘Doubt if I’ll stay on at all, when the war ends.’ This had been the opening of a discussion about what any of them might do when the Navy no longer needed them, or they the Navy, and eventually it was agreed they’d team up and start a shipping line. Between them, they had the talents: Underhill from the Merchant Navy, Rogerson’s rich family to provide the capital, Wally Bell with his knowledge of the Law, Elkington’s father some kind of city merchant. Nick, they decided, could be chairman… ‘After all, you’ll be a blooming baronet by that time, won’t you?’ They laughed: ‘Just what we need, a baronet!’
He’d told them he thought his father might live forever. Sir John Everard had survived so many battles – from somewhere in France. He was still a brigadier, though – which was odd, when one thought of majors who’d become generals by this time. Nick never heard from him. He wondered sometimes what would happen when the fighting stopped; whether Sarah, having enjoyed several years of freedom from that cruel, overbearing bastard, would find it possible to submit to living with him again. In most ways, and for her sake, one hoped she wouldn’t. And one saw, day after day, the hospital ships arriving, stretcher-cases flooding into the Marine Station here. One read the casualty lists and the ‘Roll of Honour’ in The Times. In the latter part of this year of 1917 nearly half a million men had died in the ‘push’ that had been swamped out at Passchendaele. And yet: he frowned, tried to clear the subject from his mind. There were enough things here to fill it with, and it was healthier not to allow that kind of speculation. The matter of inheritance had nothing to do with the way one’s thoughts ran: but one was left all the same with a sense of guilt – as if it did have.
He found some paper-work to clear up; and listed the jobs that had to be seen to tomorrow. Then he and Cockcroft had a rather early supper-served in Hatcher’s absence by Leading Steward Warburton, the captain’s steward – and after it he decided to go ashore for a walk. He had a vague idea of strolling along the Marine Parade and having a nightcap in the First and Last, the tiny windowless pub quite near the admiral’s house and offices. It had no windows because a hundred or two hundred years ago it had been a Revenue Officers’ depot for seized contraband, and windows would have added to their security problems.
There was quite a swell running in the harbour; even in this inner basin its effects were noticeable. Mackerel was sawing up and down against the timber catamarans which held her off the wall; the gangway lurched with the ship’s movements, its foot scraping to and fro across the stones. He stood on the jetty for a minute, watching it; Dover really was a rotten harbour, in anything like rough weather. And he wanted no accidents for Wyatt to come back to. He warned the sentry, ‘I think it’s likely to get worse, if anything. Make sure you keep the breasts and springs adjusted. If you’ve any worries on that score, let Sub-lieutenant Cockcroft know at once.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
He set of northwards, to cross the bridged gate of the Granville dock. This was drifter territory: the stubby little craft lay everywhere, singly and in pairs, or in trots of three and four. There’d be another sixty or seventy of them at sea, on barrage duty. From these in harbour, nets and other gear were spread on the jetties for repair and overhaul. And there was a smell of fish: which there should not be, because it was U-boats they were paid to look for nowadays, not plaice! He decided he wouldn’t, after all, go along the Marine Parade; he’d turn inland here, to Snargate Street, see if he could find the backroom bar that Skipper Barrie of the Lovely Morning had called his club. He was unlikely to be there, unfortunately; McAllister had predicted at least a week in hospital for him.
In hospital yacht, actually. There were three of them for naval casualties: Lord Tredegar’s Liberty, Lord Dunraven’s Grainaigh – with his lordship still in command of her – and Mr White’s Paulina. To one of the three Skipper Barrie had been carted off when Mackerel had docked two days ago.
Rounding Granville dock, Nick turned left, with the larger Wellington basin now on his right. Following his nose out through Union Street brought him into Snargate Street; and a short way down to the right, where Fishmongers’ Lane led off, stood the gaunt pile of the Fishermen’s Arms. Sailors were loafing round it and leaning against its dirty walls. Some were already more than cheerful, while others looked as if they’d no money left and were plainly less so. There were no women on the outside, but Nick saw a few inside as he pushed his way into the crowd. A Mackerel stoker spotted him, and bawled something to shipmates at the back of the room; a leading seaman came shoving through the throng – grinning, swaying, spilling beer.
It was McKechnie, a Glaswegian who was coxswain of the whaler. Black-haired, ruddy-faced, blue-eyed.
‘Will ye tak’ a glass wi' me an’ my mates, sir?’
‘It’s a kind suggestion. But I’ve come here to meet a friend.’
‘Och, she’ll not fret if ye tak’ just one first, sir!’
The killick’s friends were gathering round. Nick gave in. ‘A half-pint, then. Thank you very much.’ McKechnie, fighting his way towards the bar, told a disapproving-looking Petty Officer, ‘Yon’s m’ first lieutenant. Best officer I’ the whole Patrol. I’ll flatten the face o’ any man as says he’s not.’ Nick, divided between gratification, surprise and embarrassment, heard a hoarse voice shout somewhere behind him, ‘Good ol’ Lanyard!’
For a moment, he didn’t get it. Then it sank in. Lanyard had been the destroyer he’d served in at Jutland. Was that what they called him?
‘Thanks. Thanks very much indeed.’ The beer slopped over his hand as McKechnie thrust it at him. ‘Here’s a happy Christmas to you all.’
Cheers, applause. Men were trying to jostle their way through, but the Mackerel: shouldered them away. Nick told them after a minute, ‘Look, I do have to go and find this friend of mine… No, Carr, as it happens it’s a he, not a she – that drifter skipper we picked up… Look, d’you mind if I buy – pay for a round of drinks? If I leave this with you?’
He was offering McKechnie a ten-bob note. The Leading Seaman pushed it back into his fist
‘No, sir. God bless you, but—’
'Oh, come on! Carr, you take it.’
‘Well, sir—’
He fought his way through the throng and round the side of the bar. There was a low doorway: he went through it: and found himself in a stone-floored passage. A choice of doors confronted him, and a smell of cooking: fish… The drifter-men’s stock-in-trade: did they swap fish, perhaps, for their beer? Nick tried the nearest door, and he’d guessed right: the dozen or eighteen men inside could only be either trawlermen or drifter crew. Among them, one girl: he was staring at her through the floating layers of pipe-smoke when a stocky figure reclining at her side turned and stared at him.
‘So ye found me, lad!’
Skipper Barrie was in an armchair with his leg up on a bar-stool; a single crutch was propped beside him. He was lying back with his hand on a glass that rested on the raised thigh, and a pipe between his teeth. The girl, blonde and pretty, in her early twenties Nick thought, seemed to be looking after the old man like a nurse. Except she had a glass in her hand too.
‘Come on in with ye, my friend!’ Other faces, shading from mahogany-brown to brick-red and most of them unshaven, grinned at him ogrishly from out of the clouds of smoke, and the girl, right there in the centre of it all, made him think, Beauty and the Beast… Well, she wasn’t exactly a beauty, not as one would use the term elsewhere, and they weren’t beasts, just sailormen. Barrie announced, in a voice like a shower of rusty scrap-iron, ‘This is the feller pulled me out of the drink and had me use his cabin. Let me borrow his clothes, an’ all!’ Nick was shaking strong, horny hands left, right and centre; they were hands that had spent years grappling with wet nets an ice-cold seas. Barrie told him, ‘Now here – meet Annabel. Annabel, she’s – why she’s my own little girl, my little darlin’…’ She was smiling up at Nick, putting a hand to Skipper Barrie’s mouth to check his flow of words: Nick hadn’t found it easy to hear exactly what he’d said, in all this bedlam of talk and laughter – noise came not just from this bar but the other one as well, and men were singing in there now. Nick asked the skipper, ‘Your, daughter?’ He had her hand in his: an incredibly small, soft hand, after the succession of vast fishermen’s paws he’d been grasping: it was like holding something warm and living like a mouse or a bird, you didn’t want to hold too tight and hurt any more than you wanted to release it and have it fly away. Laughter and guffaws shook the whole room: Barrie was shouting. ‘Aye, my little daughter Annabel… Listen now, my precious: this is Lieutenant Everard, as won fame and glory at the Jutland battle. Hear me? Brung his destroyer home single-handed, half wrecked and full o’ dead an’ dyin’ men: destroyer by the name o’ Lanyard, ye’d ’ve read it in the newspapers…’
Nick would have liked to have shut him up, but the skipper was gathering an audience round him, shouting more loudly to gather others too. The girl hadn’t said a word: her hand was still in Nick’s, oddly enough, and she was smiling into his eyes as he stooped over her. Barrie roared, in the direction of the bar, ‘Bring my friend a drink. What’ll it be – rum?’
‘No – beer, please.’
‘Pint o’ the horse here, Jack!’
‘Aye aye!’
‘Holdin’ hands wi’ him, are ye, darlin’?’
Applause, back-slapping. The girl – he’d let her have her hand back now – turned a chair round with her foot, and patted it. She had very wide-set, pale-blue eyes and a generous, full-lipped mouth; her nose had a slightly rounded end to it, a sort of blob that finished it off, but somehow it suited the rest of her face, the friendly and outgoing nature which he read in it. He didn’t see the tot of rum someone poured into the tankard of beer on its way over to him.
‘Here’s health, a quick recovery, Skipper.’ Funny taste, that first mouthful had. He sat down beside the girl. ‘You’re from Tynemouth, then?’
‘If you say so.’ She laughed. Barrie leaned across her and hit Nick on his shoulder with a fist like a brick. ‘She’s a looker, eh?’
‘Indeed she is.’
‘Well, drink up!’
‘How’s the leg now?’
‘Told ye I’d be hoppin’ round!’
‘Yes, you did.’ He drank some more beer. Barrie shouted, ‘You’re our guest here. Private club, this is. Drink up, an’ have another.’ The girl asked him, ‘What’s your first name?’
‘Nick. I think Annabel’s a lovely—’
‘Here’s to us, Nick.’ She raised her glass, and drank, with her eyes on his. Strangely enough, he wasn’t in the least embarrassed; he felt he knew her and he knew he liked her, there was an immediate, ready-made rapport between them. She was rather, he thought, the ‘Brickie’ type: only less giggly. Her hand touched his where it rested on the arm of the wooden chair, between them; she leant closer, until her mouth almost touched his ear: she asked him, ‘Do you like me?’
It was an extraordinary question to be asked, he thought, right out of the blue like that. But there wasn’t any problem answering it. He nodded. ‘Yes. Enormously!’ Her eyes smiled, and her hand squeezed his; she was still leaning towards him and he wondered if she knew that she was showing rather a lot of bosom. Bosoms, plural. In a place like this, with only men – and not exactly a drawing-room lot, at that – around her… He realised that he felt protectively-inclined towards her. She asked him, ‘D’you think I’m pretty?’
He nodded. ‘Pretty’s not the word. You’re lovely!’
‘You’re not bad yourself.’
He was astonished. Not exactly embarrassed: no, not at all embarrassed, just surprised… She was so – unusual. How and where, he wondered, had Skipper Barrie brought her up, and where was her mother now? He’d emptied his tankard, and Barrie had gestured, pointing, and one of the others had taken it to the bar and brought it back full again. Barrie was telling the story, somewhat exaggerated, of Lanyard at Jutland. The girl had been handed a new drink too; Nick asked her what it was.
‘Eh?’
Leaning close again, smiling with her lips apart. From behind her shoulder, Skipper Barrie winked at him. Nick repeated his question; she told him, ‘Gin. Only to keep the cold out, mind. And that’s my ration now, I never have no more than two.’
This beer wasn’t bad, when you got used to it. But it was strong stuff; Nick felt quite light-headed. He told Barrie, shouting through the din and narrowing his eyes against the swirls of smoke, ‘I can’t stay long. Have to go back aboard, in a minute.’ He told Annabel, ‘Might take a walk first, to clear my head. This beer’s got Lyddite or something in it.’
‘What’s Lyddite?’ She’d glanced at some man behind him, then back at Nick. ‘What’s Lyddite, when it’s at home?’
‘Explosive. They make it down the coast there, at a place called Lydd.’
She leant forward, waited for him to lean halfway and meet her; she murmured, with her face so close it actually brushed his. ‘I could walk with you, if you like.’
‘That’d be splendid!’
‘Truly? You’d like me to?’
‘Like? Why, I’d—’
‘I could show you where I live, if you’d like that too?' Skipper Barrie broke in: ‘Now drink up there, Lieutenant, lad!’
‘No more, thanks. Very kind of you, very kind indeed, but—‘
Annabel told her father, ‘He’s taking me for a walk.’
Barrie stared at her, then at him. Stubble-faced, and eyes red-rimmed: one didn’t have to guess how he was spending his convalescence. What of the girl, though, did she have to sit with him all the time? The skipper laughed suddenly, and slapped his thigh: ‘So that’s how it goes, when a man’s laid up?’ He pinched his daughter’s ear-lobe; she squawked, slapping at his hand as she wrenched herself away. Nick assured him, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take great care of her.’ That, for some reason, practically brought the house down; Nick realized they were all pretty well half-seas over. There was a glass – a small one – in his hand, in place of the empty tankard; how this one had got there he had no idea, he’d just looked down and there it was. He sniffed at the dark liquid in it: neat rum. Just that one sniff was enough to make his eyes water. Skipper Barrie boomed, ‘Don’t smell it, lad, drink it!’ Nick would rather have poured it on the floor. He was already muzzy, and it was an effort to keep things in focus. All this smoke didn’t help… He shook his head.
‘Kind of you, but—’
The girl interrupted his refusal. For a moment he’d thought she was going to kiss him, her mouth came so close to his; she urged him, ‘Do drink it down. He’ll be upset if you don’t. Fresh air’ll see you right, and when we get to my room I’ll make you some nice strong tea.’
Funny sort of evening. Particularly when one had only come ashore for a breath of air in the first place. He waved the little glass at Skipper Barrie: ‘Happy Christmas!’ The girl was watching him, and smiling at him as if she was pleased with him. He remembered – next morning, as he fought against a combination of physical sickness and mental shock – exactly how she’d looked at that moment; and then he’d been leaving with her: he could recall the vociferous farewells of Skipper Barrie and his mates, and then, on the way out through the other bar, Leading Seamen McKechnie and his friends greeting them with cheers and jokes about the differences between ‘he-friends’ and ‘she-friends’; it was all extremely friendly and Annabel was laughing, enjoying it, clinging to his arm, but the whole feel of it was vague, clouded with smoke and the taste of rum and the roar of voices in the low-ceilinged room. He remembered telling McKechnie that Miss Barrie was the daughter of the skipper they’d rescued, and McKechnie’s look of surprise; at about that point, when they were halfway across the room with the crowd of sailors opening to let them through, the town’s air-raid alarm started up. A familiar sound, by this time, for the shoreside people: four short blasts and one long one, over and over again, from the siren on the Electricity Works; McKechnie told Nick, swaying like a palm-tree in a tornado and with a pint glass clutched in his tattoo’d fist. ‘Ye’ll likely lose her, sir. She’ll be doon the women’s shelter!’
The biggest air-raid shelters in the town were here in Snargate Street; the caves at the back of the old Oil Mills had been equipped with benches to hold thousands of people in complete safety from the Gotha bombers, with hundreds of feet of solid chalk above their heads. But it was true: they’d segregated the sexes, there were caves for men and caves for women. A very proper place, was Dover, under the eagle eyes of Lady Bacon and Mrs Bickford, wife of the general up at the Castle.
Annabel told McKechnie. ‘You’re mistaken. We’re off to the Girls’ Patriotic Club.’
Bellows of amusement… Nobody was taking any notice still of that siren as its last scream died away. The Girls’ Patriotic Club was run by a Miss Bradley, and its club-room was over Bernards the grocers; its purpose – heartily approved of by Lady Bacon and Mrs Bickford – was to keep young ladies off the streets. Off Snargate Street in particular. Nick had had enough of the crowd and the din, he felt a strong need of air; he cut into the chat with ‘We’re going to take a walk along the Marine Parade.’ He nodded to McKechnie: ‘Goodnight.'
‘If she’s going for any walk – it’ll be with me she’ll go.’
A large man: trawlerman, by the look of him. In a heavy blue serge suit and a seaman’s roll-neck sweater. He stood in front of them, between them and the door, and stared at Annabel.
‘With me, Annie. Eh?’
Nick stepped towards him. The man put one enormous hand out, like a policeman stopping traffic, but he didn’t take his eyes off the girl.
‘Well, then?’
McKechnie hit him. Annabel screamed. Everyone was shouting, closing in. The big man raised both his fists together and crashed them down like a sledge-hammer on McKechnie’s head; at the same time another of the Mackerels smashed a bottle against the challenger’s ear. McKechnie had staggered from that blow, recovered as he swayed forward, stumbling; the trawlerman had clamped a hand on his throat and with the other he was belting him in the stomach. There was fighting all over the room now, trawlermen or driftermen against sailors. A Mackerel stoker, O’Leary, had climbed up on the bar; now he jumped, landing on the big man’s shoulders and bringing him crashing down; Mick saw a sailor’s boot connect against the trawlerman’s jaw, and he thought it was probably McKechnie’s. All Nick was trying to do was protect Annabel from flying fists: McKechnie yelled in his ear, ‘Ye’d best be awa’, sir, while the goin’s good!’
‘Come on!’ Annabel tugged at him. Nick agreed: there’d be redcaps here at any minute. Behind the Leading Seaman he saw a bottle raised – a big one, full of liquor – he shouted, and sprang forward: McKechnie swung round, the other man side-stepped and brought the bottle down; Nick saw it coming and he tried to dodge…
‘There, my pet!’
Something cool was swabbing his forehead. Sarah’s voice was gentle, loving, soothing in his ear and brain… Sarah?
Sarah was up at Mullbergh. He, Nick, was in Dover, wasn’t he? What was—
He opened his eyes. Annabel smiled at him, her full lips only inches above his face, a damp flannel in her hand. They were on a bed: there was a cracked ceiling overhead, brown-and-grey patterned wallpaper. Grey morning light filtered through a dirty dormer window.
Morning light!
He felt his insides convulse with the shock of it. Morning. And he was still ashore. Then he remembered: Wyatt was still in London. He thought, Thank God for small mercies. He made a slight effort to sit up: Annabel gently pushed him back.
‘Easy, easy now, my darling,’ She rested on him. Bare, soft arms moved round his neck. Her breasts – full, heavy – pressed their nipples against his chest. He moved a hand down: she was naked, and so was he.
It had to be a dream. He shut his eyes. He’d been dreaming of – Sarah, his stepmother? Annabel asked him, ‘Tell me something, as a favour?’ He opened his eyes and found her pale-blue ones smiling into his; she asked him, ‘Why d’you call me ‘Sarah’ all night long? Who’s this Sarah you’re in love with?’
‘Love?’ It hurt, to move his head: he winced. ‘No – no, I’m not, I…’
His own stepmother: his father’s wife: how could one – even in a dream… It seemed the most dreadful thing of all. He tried to shake his head again, and felt the same sharp stab of pain. He told himself, My skull’s cracked, I’m deranged!
‘Liar. You must be.’ She kissed him slowly, lingeringly. ‘It doesn’t matter. Whoever she is, she’s a lucky girl.’
Impossible to think about, let alone discuss… ‘How did I get here?’
‘Two of your sailors brought you. They wanted to take you to the ship, but I said no, not in that state, I’d look after you myself. So – ’
‘I must get back on board!’
‘Now?’
'Yes – my God, I—’
‘Pity.’ She smiled, stroking him. ‘I thought, when you woke up—’ She shook her head. ‘Never mind. Shall I see you again?’
He thought, Sarah… There were more immediate anxieties, but that was the deepest shock in his mind. Annabel was helping him to sit up. He told her, ‘Of course. Yes, of course we’ll – ’
‘Do you still like me?’
Standing beside the bed, looking down at him. She put her hands up, linking them behind her head. Then she bounced a little on her toes, and laughed at his eyes on her bouncing breasts. ‘Well?’
‘You’re beautiful.’
‘Really think so?’
He got off the bed. She touched him: ‘Next time, you’ll be well.’
Memory came in spasms. Underneath glimpses of last night, the constant thought of Sarah, his father’s wife. Young enough to be his father’s daughter, certainly, but still – to think of her – or have thought of her – like that… He told himself, I don’t: it was a dream. That bang on the head: and obviously they put something in the beer… Sarah: distantly he heard her quiet, pleading tone between his father’s angry, drunken shouting echoing through Mullbergh’s cold stone corridors: waking, hearing that, feeling the racing of one’s own heart, the misery for her sake, the loathing… Then the night she’d screamed: he’d rushed down, found her bedroom door with its top half mashed in and his father in a rage which faded to a sort of baffled shame when he saw Nick: and Sarah’s tear-streaked face, her voice telling him ‘It’s all right now, Nick. Truly. Go on back to bed.’
Cockcroft said, ‘Lucky the captain’s up in London. But there’s bound to be the most frightful fuss, I’m afraid. The Military Police brought about a dozen of our chaps aboard, and they know the names of others who were in it, and that there was an officer involved!’
‘God…’ His head was spinning. ‘Look here, I’ve got to sleep, I’m no good like this. If I can get a couple of hours with my head down before—’
‘If you’d tell me what’s to be done? Or perhaps it’s Pym you ought to tell. But—’
‘Mr Gladwish wants a signal made about changing one of his torpedoes. If the ready-use lockers are dry – you know we scraped and painted them out – the GM can see to refilling them. But the important thing is stores. I made a list-or started one… But see the cox’n, he’ll know what – ’
‘All right.’
‘Stores is the important thing. In case we finish the boiler-clean tonight – ’
‘They say they’ll be done before that. They did a night shift – came crashing on board at midnight, and another lot took over about six—’
‘What! I mean – why?’
‘Heaven knows. What with one thing and another it’s been a fairly hellish twelve hours, I can tell you. You realize I’ve had to put the defaulters in your report?’ Cockcroft’s long arms flapped hopelessly. ‘Anyway, you sleep. I’ll see the cox’n.’
‘And fresh water. Ask the Chief Stoker—’
‘Right. You turn in now. If anyone asks I’ll say you’ve got a touch of flu. I’ll give you a shake at noon – that do?’
It wasn’t Cockcroft, though. It was Wyatt.
‘Everard!’
There was a constant hammering and clattering overhead. Wyatt’s small, furious eyes bored at him across the little cabin. ‘Cockcroft informs me that you have influenza. Is that the case?’
Bulky, aggressive, filling the cabin doorway… Nick, even before he was fully out of sleep, out of a nightmare in which he was frantically trying to find Sarah while Mullbergh closed in on him, stone walls squeezing in on either hand and the ends of passages turning into dead-ends so that you turned and tried to run the other way with the narrowing passages trapping your feet, holding your ankles and cold terror everywhere – terror for Sarah more than for one’s own predicament: the dream’s content faded into confusion and in its place he had the certainty that Wyatt knew at least something of last night’s riot.
‘Well, is it?’
‘All Cockcroft knows is I’ve been sick, sir. He may have assumed it was flu.’
‘In fact it was – what?’
Nick slid off his bunk.
‘I’ll be all right now, sir.’
‘Oh? Do you really think so? That you’ll be all right?’ Nick waited. He thought there was an element of satisfaction as well as anger in his captain’s attitude. ‘Listen to me, Everard. You remain in this ship and as my first lieutenant for the time being for one reason only – that I’m unable to replace you before we sail. I’ve tried to, and it’s impossible; they’ve larger matters to attend to, in present circumstances…’ A hand rose, pointing: ‘You were in some bar-room last night, brawling over a tart’s favours?’
‘No, sir!’
‘The Provost Marshal’s made it up?’
‘He’s been misinformed, sir, by the sound of it. I went to meet Skipper Barrie – the man we picked up from the Carley float – at his invitation. He had his daughter with him. I was in her company when a man – a trawlerman, I think – accosted her. Then—’
‘All right, Everard. That’ll do.’
Nick stared at him. Wyatt said, ‘I don’t wish to hear about it.’ He turned, hands clasped behind his back, stared out through the starboard-side scuttle. ‘It’s possible you were too drunk to know what was – ’ He shrugged, without finishing the sentence. Nick saw light reflected from the harbour’s surface flashing in his narrowed eyes. ‘Possible. The matter will be dealt with – ashore – on our return. I should say a court-martial is the likely outcome. In my view it is an extremely squalid business, and I want no part in it… What I have to say to you is simply this: that we are coming to immediate notice for sea, and we are in the process – ’ he glanced upwards, at the upper deck where the noise was coming from – ‘of converting for a minelaying operation. We shall fuel, embark our mines and sail as soon as that work is finished. Clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Wyatt turned from the scuttle.
‘Very well. Get shaved and properly dressed, and resume your duties as first lieutenant.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Nick slid off his bunk. Wyatt paused in the doorway, filling its whole width, looking back him.
‘How could you have been such a damned fool, Everard?’
He looked as if he was really trying to understand: or as if he wished there could be some hope of understanding. Then he’d shaken his head, dismissing the effort as futile, and turned away, and the curtain had fallen back across the doorway.