Cardiff to Port Said had taken sixteen days, PollyAnna arriving there on the forenoon of 22 August. Discharging her coal had occupied another ten days, during which time the approach of war had been swift and sure. Virtually as she secured alongside on the coaling wharf the BBC was reporting Neville Chamberlain’s warning to Hitler that Britain would stand by Poland, and on the day she entered the canal – in ballast, late on 1 September – Germany invaded Poland. Due to congestion in the canal’s lower reaches it was necessary to spend a night at anchor off Ismailia in Lake Timsah, and getting underway again in the early hours of 2 September, the BBC was announcing the call-up of all males aged from nineteen to forty-one. And children were being evacuated from London and other cities, in expectation of bombing and perhaps the use of poison gas. Then on the 3rd – a Sunday, when PollyAnna had left the canal and Port Tewfik astern, and was ploughing south through a dead-flat calm in the Gulf of Suez – Chamberlain’s broadcast to the nation at 1100 GMT had told them that Britain and Germany were at war.
By way of confirmation, a U-boat sank the Glasgow liner Athenia off the Irish coast that same evening, with the loss of more than a hundred lives, including those of a number of Americans. Shaw, third engineer, commented in the saloon next day, ‘Bring the Yanks in, sure as eggs’; and the Old Man, who had a lot of friends in New York and other US ports had growled, ‘Nothing sure about it. There’s a lot don’t want in at any price.’ Sure enough, before they were out of the Red Sea, President Roosevelt had made a declaration of neutrality.
The Red Sea, as always, was as hot as hell, but the job of sluicing the coal dust out of the ship’s holds couldn’t be postponed. Gulf of Aden then, out of it between Cape Guardafui and Socotra, and from there a reach of about 1,600 miles to pass around Ceylon into the Bay of Bengal. Another thousand miles, that stretch; they’d met and spoken to a dozen or more other Red Ensign ships, and war news had been coming in continually. At such a distance from it, and getting further away at every turn of the ship’s big single screw, and still in pursuit of her normal trade, one had an uneasy feeling of having turned one’s back on it; and the BBC, one knew, wouldn’t necessarily be mentioning the worst. Ships other than the Athenia would have been sunk by this time and some proportion of their crews would have drowned; you could bet that wouldn’t have been the only U-boat on its war station in the Atlantic before the balloon went up. Which brought to Andy’s mind the one bone of contention that existed between him and his father. From Conway or Worcester, or for that matter Pangbourne, one could have gone to sea with the RN as a junior officer of the Royal Naval Reserve. It was what his father had done in 1914 and what most of his own Conway friends had opted for this time. Whereas Andy had made his mind up to stick to what he’d gone in for in the first place and been trained for, at Conway and then at sea.
His father had challenged him with, ‘What’s wrong with serving in a fighting ship, for God’s sake?’
‘Nothing at all. Happens I’m a Merchant Navy officer, that’s all!’
‘When it’s all over you could go back to that if you wanted to. Or switch to a permanent commission maybe – if they’d have you. Meanwhile, the RN needs all the sea-trained men it can get. Chaps like you, Andy!’
‘To man escorts protecting Atlantic convoys.’
‘Not only Atlantic – all the ocean routes.’
‘So who’ll man – officer – the merchant ships?’
‘Chaps who’re doing it already, lad!’
He’d stuck to his guns. ‘I happen to think it’s a job worth doing. Why I wanted to do it in the first place. I like it – enjoy it – and it feels – well, worthwhile. In a lot of ways it’s what I already am – and want to be. Basically, I suppose, a seaman.’
His mother had come into the room, heard that bit and put her oar in.
‘It’s the fighting men who get the respect, Andy.’
He’d looked at her, thinking, You’d like to be able to say your son’s an officer in a destroyer or a battleship. You’d never want to admit he’s in a tramp steamer. That’s all it is with you, Mama…
Always had been, he realised. Not that one could blame her for it: it was simply how she was. She’d gone along with his entry to Conway because cadets from there didn’t have to graduate into the Merchant Navy: there was a stage at which you could transfer to the RN college at Dartmouth, if you were up to it and wanted to; there was also an entry scheme to the Royal Air Force. And the old man could hardly have objected, having been a Worcester cadet himself, pre-1914. Although he still might have – with maybe some slight interest in social climbing under his own salt-stained skin, however furiously he’d have denied it. But he hadn’t, and there hadn’t therefore been a damn thing she could have done about it, not without insulting her husband, his background – which she must have accepted wholeheartedly – or blindly – when she’d married him. The old man must have assumed that when it came to war, or as close to war as it had come by that time, Andy would follow in his footsteps, Dad having been a war hero in ’14–’18. He’d flown airships, for God’s sake. Had started off in a minesweeper or some such, seen the navy’s dirigibles hunting U-boats in the Channel, and got himself transferred into the Royal Naval Air Service to fly those contraptions. One DSC had been for sinking a U-boat – which he’d said had been pure luck and as easy as falling off a log – and the bar to it for an operation behind enemy lines, bringing out some female spy, a Belgian girl; he’d described that as ‘the dickens of a lark’.
It was no small matter, though, this difference between them. Andy was close to his father, always had been; he looked quite like him and, generally speaking, thought like him, but on this issue he wasn’t giving way. No question of it. Couldn’t understand why the old man felt as strongly as he seemed to – unless, as with his wife, it was the social thing, the class thing. Or, to give him the benefit of the doubt, it might have been in respect of her feelings – to keep her happy and family relationships on an even keel. Which in fact Andy himself would have liked to have been able to do, but simply couldn’t. His sister Annabel, three years his junior and now training as a nurse, understood and applauded. But another exchange he and his father had had on the subject had stuck in his mind, and he often thought about it, although he wouldn’t have dreamt of mentioning it to anyone else. It was the last time they’d discussed the matter, in fact. Newly-qualified Third Mate Andy Holt face to face with Commander Charlie Holt DSC RNR, and both as it so happened in uniform – reason for this being that it had been 11 November 1938, not only Armistice Day but the twentieth anniversary of that first war’s end, and there’d been a big turnout and parades on Clydeside as well as everywhere else. And after it, at home in Helensburgh, there they were – one rather grand, the other distinctly less so. (His mother had told him he looked like a bus conductor.) But Charlie Holt’s hands grasping Andy Holt’s shoulders – close, face to face, and a slight up-angle in the contact; Andy did bear a distinct resemblance to his father, but stood a couple of inches over six feet while Charlie was only five-eleven. Charlie demanding quietly in his low, growly voice, ‘Imagine how it’ll be in the Atlantic convoys? How it was last time – when, as I’ve told you, the country damn near starved?’ A shrug of his heavy shoulders: ‘Told you often enough, I dare say. Doesn’t seem so damn long ago either. But this time it’ll be worse – most likely a lot more U-boats, bigger and faster at that, and God knows what in the way of weaponry!’
‘But convoy escorts will be more numerous and effective, too – better anti-submarine weaponry as well?’
‘Wouldn’t count on it, boy. At least not in the early stages. We haven’t a fraction of what we need. I wouldn’t go around saying this, and don’t quote me, but the plain truth is we’re going to be well and truly up against it, your lot probably worse than any. We’ll get the better of them in the end – bloody have to – that or starve, be starved into surrender, that’ll be their aim…’
‘Saying I’ll be more of an Aunt Sally on a freighter’s bridge than I would be on a destroyer’s?’
The old man let go of him. ‘Saying nothing of the sort.’ He’d turned away. ‘But it’s going to be tough all round – and if you had any damn sense at all –’
He’d cut himself short. Glancing back briefly, then away again. And to Andy’s mother as she joined them, ‘Old for his years, is this lad’s trouble. Doesn’t look it, but he is. Cat that walks by itself, uh?’ At which she’d snorted and asked them both, ‘And where does he get that from, would you say?’
That was what he’d been saying, though, and they’d both known it. Effectively he’d been telling his son that he’d have a better chance of survival in a fighting ship than he would in a merchantman. And when you thought about it, it made a kind of sense, merchant ships – or to be precise their cargoes – being the enemy’s prime targets.
PollyAnna had docked in Calcutta on 16 September. There was more awaiting them than the cargo of manganese ore; the ship was to be painted battleship-grey, obliterating her hitherto black hull and white upperworks and the blue bands on her funnel, and she was to have a twelve-pounder gun mounted on her poop, the poop itself needing to be strengthened for this and a steel gun-deck built on it. Similar things were happening to half a dozen other steamers in the port, while an Ellerman passenger-liner was being converted for service as an AMC – armed merchant cruiser. In PollyAnna’s case, painting-ship would be the first job, while she was high in the water: her deep-tanks (ballast) would be pumped out, scaling, chipping and painting would start at the waterline and be done by her own crew simultaneously with the loading of the ore, and by the time it was finished she’d be pretty well at the head of the queue for the engineering job aft – another week’s work, at least.
Andy’s father, his mother had written, had been appointed second in command of the armed merchant cruiser HMS Andalusia, 14,000 tons…
Of course he’s overjoyed. She has a four-stripe Royal Navy captain, and a team of gunnery experts, and flies the White Ensign, but most of her officers and crew are the same Merchant Navy men who were serving in her under the red one. They sign on under some special form of agreement. Does Voluntary Emergency Agreement mean anything to you? Anyway, fifty or sixty liners are being converted in this way, he tells me, in about a dozen different ports all over the world, but the Andalusia was one of the first to be taken over and it seems will be off quite soon now. I and Annabel are the only ones who are not cheering. Off where, you ask, and although I shouldn’t put it in a letter, I will, and you can tear it up when you’ve read it – better still, when you’ve answered it. Anyway, they’ll be joining something called the Northern Patrol, patrolling between the Faeroes (spelling?) and Iceland and in the Denmark Strait – wherever that is. You’d know, I’m sure. I made a few notes when he told me about it, so I could tell you when I wrote, although like everything else now it’s hush-hush. So not only tear this up, remember you don’t know anything about it until HE tells you – when you write, I mean, which I hope and pray you will do, some time in the next fifty years?
Annabel, let me tell you – also in strict confidence – has a new boyfriend. I might add, in the real navy – or something like it. She’s at home at the moment, sends her love…
During PollyAnna’s three-week stay in the heat and bedlam of Calcutta – temperature often higher than eighty in the shade, and extremely humid – Russia invaded Poland from the east while the Germans were blitzkrieging in from the west, and before the end of the month – September, still – the Germans were in Warsaw (as much as might be left of it) and they and the Soviets had formally agreed to split the country between them. And on the 17th, the aircraft-carrier Courageous was sunk by a U-boat in the Western Approaches – with the loss of more than 500 men, as well as one of the navy’s most valuable ships; and a British Expeditionary Force of something like 160,000 men had been deployed in France.
Among the things that were not known at that time – not even to the Admiralty – was that the German pocket-battleship Admiral Graf Spee had sailed from Wilhelmshaven on 21 August, slipping away into the Atlantic under cover of darkness. Her support-ship Altmark had preceded her, and the pocket-battleship Deutschland and her support-ship the Westerwald had followed a few days later.
On 20 September the loading of manganese was completed and the Anna was shifted to an inner dockyard berth for the gun-deck to be built on to her poop, and that evening First Mate Halloran invited Andy and Don Fisher to a sundowner in his cabin, then maybe a run ashore – which could apply only to Andy, since Fisher was duty officer that night. A whisky called King’s Legend was the drink; Andy had wondered often enough how Halloran could afford it – and especially the frequency of his shore-going – a mate’s pay not being all that terrific – three or four hundred a year maybe, plus war bonus, if and when that began coming through – and guessed he must have money of his own somewhere, somehow. You wouldn’t have thought he had – from his style, and so forth – but – well, his business, no one else’s, and he was a strange character in a lot of ways. Anyway, he’d given his reasons for celebrating on this particular evening as (a) completion of loading, and (b) having had a letter that day from his wife, Leila, which had bucked him up no end.
‘Don’t hear from her all that often.’ A shift of black eyes towards her portrait. Andy and Fisher looked at it too: it would have seemed churlish not to. Halloran adding, ‘Fuck it, I don’t write her all that frequent. I wasn’t looking for a pen-pal, was I?’ A wink at Andy. ‘Get my drift?’
He’d let that go; only asked – for something to say – ‘OK, is she?’
One eyebrow cocked; ‘Doesn’t she look OK to you?’
‘Looks – fantastic. Only –’
‘Only what, then?’
‘I meant her letter – well and happy, or missing you, no doubt –’
‘Want to read what she says about missing me – what she misses?’
‘Well – no – Christ’s sake –’
‘You wouldn’t believe it. Doesn’t hold much back, that kid, calls a spade a bloody spade. What’s more –’
Fisher cut in – flatly, expressionlessly – ‘What a lucky man you are.’ Making it plain he didn’t want to hear ‘what was more’. Glancing at Andy; getting a hostile stare from Halloran and ignoring it, draining his glass and putting it down close to the lovely Leila’s portrait. A nod: ‘Thanks for that. Enough for me, though. Good Scotch though it is.’ Checking the time: ‘Fact is, I’ll be getting to grips with a wad of chart corrections – which I might have left to young Gorst, but –’
‘Whisky wouldn’t help with that, you’re right. However…’ Reaching to replenish Andy’s glass and his own. ‘Next item on the agenda then – you game for a run ashore, Holt?’
What he’d planned on, obviously; they couldn’t all three have gone ashore, and he wouldn’t have wanted Fisher’s company in any case. He added, ‘Happens I know an address or two – one in particular, if it’s still there. Up to it, are you?’
‘Well.’ Andy had shrugged. ‘Why not. About time I stretched my legs.’
‘Stretch more ’n them, lad!’
Halloran must have had a tot or two before they’d joined him, Andy thought, and downtown he insisted on having a few more in a bar where they were joined by two of the ship’s wireless officers and the second mate of an Anchor Line steamer. Those three had been on beer all evening, and Andy was taking it as easily as he could – for reasons of economy as well as not much wanting to get drunk, especially in view of the evening as planned – but Halloran was well on his way, had been buying himself doubles while giving them a tedious account of how he’d come to be available for the mate’s job in PollyAnna. He’d worked mostly on tankers in earlier years – the depression years, in which there’d been twice as many merchant seamen thronging dockyard streets as treading ships’ decks – but all right, he’d been lucky, maybe hadn’t realised how lucky; he’d got his first mate’s certificate – which you needed before you could be taken on as a second mate – and then after the statutory period of sea service, his master’s ticket, which after another couple of years at sea would have qualified him for a first mate’s job if there’d been one going, but which in the tanker line when that time came there hadn’t been.
‘Case of dead men’s shoes, I suppose.’
‘You’d suppose damn right…’
The others were at most half-listening by this time, but Andy had some interest in it – having thought about tankers, off and on, and anyway he didn’t want to offend the man. He prompted, ‘So you pulled out, eh?’
‘Not just like that. Want to know where the next meal’s coming from, don’t you? The way it was then, you did. By God, you did… No, I hung on a while. I’m thirty-one years of age – you know that?’
He nodded. ‘You mentioned.’
‘So then, late twenties… But I tell you – tankers – not all beer an’ skittles. Quick turn-rounds is the worst – load and unload so quick, hardly time to dip your wick and you’re away again. What’s more, the tanker berth is bloody miles out of town, often as not – go ashore, where are you? So I’m thinking, might make a change, and so happens I get to know the marine super of Grant Shipping – Glasgow. You’d know, the tartan funnels, cargo liners? Seemed there was a future there – first mate’s berth at that, tailor-made. I go for it – wham, I got it – two-year contract. And run into a bit of good luck financially – for a bloody change… Well – cut this short, there’s a young lady I’m taken with.’ He nodded to Andy: ‘Yeah. Her. So a year back, we made it legal – she being over twenty-one –’
‘Thought she was twenty-one now.’
‘She is – end of this month she’s –’
‘Year older than me, that makes her.’
‘And I’m counting on regular employment with Grant Shipping, so seven, eight months back I moved her up to Clydeside. Greenock. She found the semi we got now – renting, mind, and it’s still an arm and a leg, but there we are – home of our own, steady job, prospects of command – looked to be, and should’ve been – and all Clyde-based. Well – steady job, my arse! Renewal of contract time, fuckers don’t want to know. Marine super’s retired, new sod don’t give a damn. I’m out, finish – rent to pay, wife to keep –’
‘Hard cheese.’ Dewar, the chief wireless officer. Pasty-faced and flabby-looking, but all right, quite a decent sort. Scotsman, bachelor, came from Crieff in Perthshire. Halloran telling him, ‘So happens by this time I’m not stuck for a bob or two, thank my stars things aren’t as they were – which I can tell you –’
‘Lucky feller, then.’ Dewar sucking at his beer, others nodding, Halloran insisting, ‘Point is, if I had still been on my uppers’ – the forefinger jabbing, black stones of eyes malevolent, tone condemnatory – ‘been finished, wouldn’t I. And what that amounts to is never trust fucking owners. Never!’ Tossing his whisky back: he’d sworn it was raw spirit but had still managed to down a few. He was blinking at Andy now: ‘On our way, then?’
They drifted out. No great surprise that none of the others wanted to tag along: Dewar catching Andy’s glance, raising his eyebrows, Andy shrugging… Halloran then starting again on how badly Grants of Glasgow had treated him; Andy cut in with, ‘Food now, eh?’
‘Bugger food!’
‘I want some anyway. Sorry, but –’
‘You bloody piking, Holt?’
‘Something to eat, that’s all,’ he added, into the mate’s glare of contempt, black eyes half hidden in narrowed sockets but still gleaming, snake-like, their darkness matching the short crinkly black hair and blue-black jaw: he never looked as if he’d shaved since yesterday. Andy telling him relaxedly – aiming for that effect at any rate – ‘First, eat. All right?’
‘If you want to duck out, sonny boy –’
‘I said, I don’t. Hungry, that’s all.’ The mate had been facing him with his fists clenched and shoulders bunched during this exchange, and he’d remembered again that someone had said – in Cardiff, it must have been – that he was a sight too ready to lash out. Even more so when stinking of whisky? Unless it was bluff and bullshit when it didn’t look to him like a walkover? He was calming now, anyway; Andy assuring himself that this was nothing to back away from. He was a stone lighter, maybe, but also younger, taller by three or four inches, had the reach and knew how to use it, had boxed for Conway against various other institutions – he’d acquired a bit of a reputation, even. Could risk insisting on satisfying his hunger therefore – hunger first… ‘How about curry? Speciality in these parts, isn’t it?’
They had beer with it. Andy had thought this might have finished Halloran off, but if anything it seemed to sober him a little. And he – Andy – paid the bill, since the mate was making no move to and it had been at his own insistence they’d come here anyway – but it left him distinctly short, and in the gharry, clopping though the dark to wherever Halloran had told the man to take them, he asked how much the rest of it was going to cost them.
It did actually matter. As a Blood Line third mate his pay was £120 a year. On top of which there was now to be this much talked-about war bonus of £10 a month – doubling that income, which would be really something – but it hadn’t actually manifested itself yet, and until it did he wasn’t spending it.
Halloran muzzily and belatedly caught on to what he’d asked.
‘You mean Queeny’s?’
‘If that’s what it’s called.’
‘Cost you fuck-all, old son. My shout – eh?’
‘No – thanks, very generous, but –’
‘You paid for the curry, I pay for the –’
The alliteration made him explode with laughter. Andy trying to quieten him down, embarrassed by the bawling of obscenities into the sweaty, odorous night, and telling him all right, but strictly as a loan, he’d repay him when they got back on board; Halloran shaking his head, guffawing intermittently and repeating that line over and over until the gharry driver pulled his scrawny old horse down from a trot to a walk and stopped at the entrance to a stucco’d building in what looked like a business section of the town. There was a sliding metal security gate and a turbanned guard who clashed it open and salaamed to them, and had clashed it shut again by the time they reached Queeny’s mahogany front door.
Queeny wasn’t Indian, she told them, she was Iranian. She wore a strikingly decorative as well as revealing sari and sat at an ornate desk in a large reception room strewn with carpets and furnished with sofas and armchairs. As Halloran and Andy entered from a curving flight of stone stairs under coloured-glass chandeliers, two male attendants who might also have been Iranian – or Indian – rose and bowed, then leant against the wall on each side of double doors at that far end, while Queeny came slinkily from behind the desk and squeezed Halloran’s and then Andy’s hands, managing somehow to stroke as well as squeeze, telling them that they were fortunate, this was so far an exceptionally quiet night; in what way might she have the pleasure of being of service? Halloran muttering, with an elbow into Andy’s ribs, that they hadn’t come to have their teeth pulled; then, having raised no laugh, staring at her down his nose and adding, ‘Two prettiest girls you got. Prettiest for me, runner-up for this sahib.’ Andy looking around and taking it all in: the decor, furnishings, the woman’s purring voice and opulent, silk-wrapped figure, and the two men leaning with their arms folded and eyes almost as dark as Halloran’s – as hooded, too. The woman murmuring meanwhile that she’d been assured – oh, many, many times – that she was by far the prettiest, while as for the skills born of experience and artistry as well as passionate nature and womanly inclination –
‘Young girls is more to my liking.’ She’d shrugged. His loss, not hers. She called some instruction in God only knew what language to the attendants, one of whom slid out of the room. Andy came back from studying a picture of naked Persian girls with a sex-crazed satyr to find that the subject under discussion now was money; Halloran had counted some out but was keeping it in his hand until he saw what he’d be offered. Queeny glancing at Andy: ‘You are paying for this gentleman also?’
‘Sure.’ A wide grin. ‘He paid for the curry, I pay for –’
He’d checked himself – open-mouthed, gazing at the girl they’d brought to him. Indian – probably – and no more than fifteen. Sweet-faced, small and tiny-waisted, with surprisingly large breasts, all of her visible through the diaphanous material of her garment. Halloran finding his voice again, grating, ‘Oh, yes. Hell, yes!’ and dropping the handful of rupee notes on Queeny’s desk. Andy had a girl beside him too, smiling up at him. Slanted eyes, skin the colour of oiled teak, full lips… ‘You come, big boy?’ She wasn’t as young as the other – which was just as well: despite that little one’s provocative physical endowment it would have felt like copulating with a child – and this one was extremely attractive – actually, more so – and there he was, slightly but not at all obviously drunk, with an arm around her now and one of hers around his waist, moving towards the double doors Halloran and his girl had gone out of.
She was heaven, this one. Truly was. All right, so he’d been very much taken with her at first sight, but it had never occurred to him that a whore in a brothel would be – could be – as she was. As – well, no other word for it – as loving. Then it was over, his time up too damn soon – his fault, mostly – and reality, the plain commercialism as clear as a bell in her bright ‘Come see me again, big boy?’ He was trying to delay it a little, telling her how terrific she was and that he really liked her, when a colossal shindy broke out in the next room or the corridor or both: a female shriek, door crashing open, Halloran roaring obscenities over the girl’s screams, then other voices too, as well as thumps and glass or china shattering. Andy’s own girl wide-eyed, rigid, seemingly in shock, wrapping herself up while pointing at his discarded clothes and squealing, ‘Hurry, hurry!’ and ‘Your friend, your friend!’ Halloran had gone for that child with his fists, allegedly; this one screaming, ‘He striking her!’ – having heard it in all that yelling, Andy assumed – not doubting the truth of it either. She – the little one – was still inside her room, although its door had been flung open and slammed a couple of times, Queeny out of it again now, wailing, Andy’s girl staying put like the other – standing orders presumably for any such emergency situation – but sending Andy out half-clothed and with his shoes in his hands, head buzzing, trousers on and pulled up, shirt flapping loose – finding himself then face to face with Halloran who had a male attendant clinging to each of his arms and his trousers around his ankles. The girl must have sounded an alarm of some kind to bring them all running, and Queeny must have left Halloran to be hauled out by these two while she’d been seeing to the kid; howling now over Halloran’s bellows of protest – indignation? – ‘I call police! You filthy man!’
Andy began, ‘Hey, Dave –’ and Halloran’d swung round, getting one arm free at that moment and stooping sideways to drag his trousers up, shouting, ‘Bitch pulled a bloody knife on me!’ The attendants had got him moving anyway – or the mention of police had – and Queeny was now out in the corridor, preceding them mostly backwards towards the reception room, counter-claiming – to Andy – that his friend had puked over the girl and when she’d tried to get away from him he’d begun hitting her; if she’d as much as touched a knife it would have been only in self-defence. Fingers to her own cheekbones, wailing, ‘Here, skin broken, so hard he strike her!’ Andy didn’t doubt this was the truth, because it was in character: Halloran looked like it, was like it. Shouting as those two quite skilfully forced him through into the reception room, ‘Who pays the fucking piper calls the fucking tune – right? Take your fucking hands off me, Sambo!’ He’d flung that one off him again and near-missed with a back-hander at the other, Andy managing to get past them then, to urge the woman, ‘Please, no police. I’ll take him. He’s just drunk, he –’
‘Yes, you take! Not come back, not ever!’ Addressing the attendants then in rapid Iranian or Bengali, Hindi, whatever it was they spoke, while Andy urged Halloran to calm down and come on, get the hell out before she changed her mind. Didn’t want to end up in police cells, did they…
‘We could take these two, easy. You and me, make fucking mincemeat –’
‘And end up in cells. Not on your life. Come on…’
Halloran panting like a dog, staring at him: getting his brain to work, maybe. He’d ceased to struggle and those two were cautiously disengaging themselves from him. You could smell vomit on his breath. So that bit of it was true. But it was a reasonable guess that Queeny wouldn’t want the police in here, especially as the kid was almost certainly under age; if in Calcutta there was such a thing as under age. She was saying something now about compensating the young lady for her injuries; Andy told her firmly – sure that he was right, that the last thing she’d want was a police doctor examining the girl-child – ‘No money. He gave you about all he had, we need some for a gharry and I’ve none at all. I’m sorry she was hurt, but –’
Halloran growled, ‘Shouldn’t’ve pulled a knife, should she. Had it under the donkey’s breakfast.’ Donkey’s breakfast being foc’sl slang for mattress. They were on the stairway by this time, lurching down with the attendants following, panting from their exertions and keeping out of range of Halloran’s fists. The mahogany door then – Andy pulled it open and one of them called through to the man on the gates to open up. This time, no salaams. Andy asked Halloran, outside, ‘She pull the knife before or after you hit her?’