Polaris

The dog was called Thompson, a name without significance, except that Timmy’s nephew, aged ten, had named him so. It was an innocent, respectable name. Thompson was a springer spaniel: a strong, handsome, long-haired creature, silky brown and white and full of powerful, unnamed emotions. ‘Never seek to tell thy love,’ misquoted Meg, from Blake, trying to stare Thompson out, ‘love that never can be told—’ And Thompson stared back at Meg, and seemed to be weeping. It was Meg who dropped her eyes.

The dog Thompson loved Timmy as a man loves another man, and the man Timmy loved Thompson as a man loves a dog. That, Meg decided, was the cause of Thompson’s distress.

‘He’s perfectly happy,’ protested Timmy, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. ‘That is just the way dogs look at their masters. There is nothing unhealthy in it.’

They were plastering and painting their first house, their first marital home, on the hills above the naval base where Timmy was stationed, there where the cold North Sea meets the sandy Western Scottish shore, there where Polaris dwells. They were using white paint; no frills, just a bleak beauty, a background. That was what they both wanted. Security insisted they put in a telephone, otherwise they’d have gone without that too. They needed only each other. The telephone was in and working before anything else, before even the electricity cable arrived to link them to the mainstream of the world.

Now they mended and smoothed and renovated, making good what had gone before. The shaggy Scottish sheep came to stare at them through gaps in the old stone walls, where once windows had been, and soon would be again. The sheep made Thompson jump.

‘Silly beast,’ said Timmy fondly. ‘He’s afraid of them. He only understands southern sheep.’ Yet he expected Meg, also transplanted from south to north, to be brave.

Meg and Timmy prayed that it would not rain until the roof was watertight, and God answered their prayers and sent a long hot dry summer, heather-scented. And Meg and Timmy sawed and hammered and twisted pipes and made love when the spirit moved them, which was often. Down at the Base the other wives trotted in and out of each other’s nice new bungalows, with papered walls in pretty pinks and greens, and said that Meg was mad; but no doubt time would cure her, as it had cured each of them in turn. Time, and experience and winter. A cold lonely winter or two, with Timmy away, and she’d move down to the Base, for the company and the coffee and the moral support.

‘I’ll never be like them,’ Meg told Timmy, of course she did. ‘I’m different. I married you, I didn’t marry the Navy.’

‘You’ll have Thompson for company,’ was all he said, ‘when I’m away.’

‘Oh, Thompson!’ scorned Meg. ‘Scratching and bouncing and fussing! All feeling and no brain.’

‘He’s just alive,’ said Timmy. ‘He can’t help it.’

‘I’d rather look after a brain-damaged child than a dog,’ said Meg. ‘Any day! At least you’d know where you were.’

‘You wouldn’t rather,’ Timmy said, his face not loving and laughing at all but serious and cold, just for an instant, before relaxing again into its pleasant ordinariness.

Her own, her lovely Timmy! How could she be afraid of him? He was handsome in the way heroes are handsome – broad-shouldered, big-framed, blond and blue-eyed – and had made her, who was accustomed to being always slightly delinquent, somehow not quite like other people, into the heroine of her own life. Timmy had given her a vision of perfectibility. He had married her. But she wished he didn’t have a beard. If she couldn’t see his mouth, how could she properly judge his feelings? Perhaps his flesh was warm but his bones were cold?

Timmy’s beard and Thompson! Well, she could live with them.

She had had lovers more temperamental, more experimental, more – if it came to it – exciting than Timmy, but none who had made her happy. He moved her, she tried to explain to him, into some other state. He changed her in his love-making, she said one morning as they puttied glass into window-frames, into something that belonged to somewhere else, somewhere better.

‘Perhaps it’s the somewhere else you say Thompson comes from,’ he said, joking, no doubt because her talking about intimate and emotional matters made him uneasy. But she chose to take it the wrong way, and didn’t talk to him for a full six hours, banging and crashing through their still fragile, echoing house until he dropped a hammer on his toe, and made her laugh and she forgave him. Her anger was a luxury: both understood that and thought they could well afford it. Her little spats of bad behaviour were a status symbol of their love.

They made love outside in the yellow glow flung back from the old stone walls as the sun set.

‘Never let the sun go down on thy wrath,’ said Timmy. Sometimes he said such obvious things she was quite shaken; phrases that merely flitted through her head, and out again, Timmy would give actual voice to. She thought perhaps it was because she’d had more experience of the world than he. He’d spent a long time under the seas, some six months out of every twelve, since he joined the Navy as a cadet.

Besides, he’d been to a public school and a naval college and only ever mixed with the same kind of people; she’d been to art school and had a hard time with herself in one way and another, brought up by a mother she never really got on with: without a father. Timmy took life simply and pleasantly and did as he wanted, without worrying, and was generous. She worried and was mean: she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t throw away a stale crust unless there was a bird waiting to eat it, whereas Timmy would pour milk down the sink, if the sink was nearer than the fridge and he was tidying up. She had to save, he to spend. But in a sense it didn’t matter: between them the opposites balanced out. His prodigality and her frugality, caught steady on the fulcrum of their love.

Thompson slept under the bed, and when they made love at night would be both jealous and fascinated. He’d roam the room and shuffle and lick their toes.

‘Dogs shouldn’t be in bedrooms,’ said Meg.

‘Love me, love my dog,’ said Timmy, and she found she’d been waiting for him to say it for a long time. Once he had, she settled down to put up with Thompson, third party to their marriage, the fixture under the marital bed. She even bought flea powder down at the PX on the Base, on one of their weekly trips in. And a special comb for Timmy’s beard.

In the Autumn Timmy must expect to go on his tour of duty on Polaris. Three months on, three months off, more or less; sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. Security demanded uncertainty. But Meg could not believe it would ever happen. Timmy would say things like:

‘You’ve got to take a driving test before the Autumn, Meg,’ or,

‘I have to have at least the kitchen finished before I go,’ and she would somehow wonder what he was talking about. Her father had died when she was six. The death had been expected for a year, but how can a child expect a thing like that?

Timmy made her read a book about the care of dogs, and said, ‘My brother used to take Thompson when I was away, but now I’ve got you he’s your responsibility.’

But then September did come and the first cold wet day, and they lit the fires in smoky chimneys, and marvelled that the roof was rainproof and the walls windproof. The phone rang at six the following morning and Meg woke from sleep to hear Timmy saying, ‘Aye-aye, sir’, and she thought it must be a dream, but the space beside her in the bed became cold, and she saw Timmy, lean and naked, dragging out the suitcase from beneath the bed, and he put on a blue shirt and navy socks, and she saw, or thought she saw, Timmy put a pistol into a kind of shoulder harness which he slung over the shirt, and then a navy woollen jersey over that. Could one imagine such a nasty, arid, deathly black metal thing as that pistol? Surely not! And all of a sudden Timmy looked like one of his nephew’s Action Men, the one with the beard. She thought his movements had become jerky. She closed her eyes. Timmy bent and kissed her.

‘You can’t go!’ she cried, in panic. ‘You can’t!’

‘Someone has to,’ he said.

‘What, blow up the world?’ she demanded.

‘Darling,’ he said patiently, ‘stop the world from blowing up. If you wanted to have this conversation you’ve had four months to do it. It isn’t fair to start it now. I have to go.’

‘But there has to be more notice than this!’

‘There can’t be,’ he said. ‘Security.’

His face had its carved look again, but elevated from the simple planes of the child’s toy to the more complex and serious kind one might see on a monument to the dead, at the entrance to a War Graves Cemetery, where the rows of simple white crosses stand as such a dreadful rebuke to the frivolous. ‘Look after Thompson for me,’ he said, and left, closing the door between himself and the dog, and of course himself and her, but she felt that Thompson came first. She watched from the window as Timmy bounced down the stony path on his bicycle into the valley fog, and vanished into the white nothingness of the rest of the world.

Timmy left his bicycle with the security guard down at the docks. It was padlocked next to Rating Daly’s new lightweight eight-speed racer, and the security guard undertook to oil it at weekly intervals.

‘Hurry up, sir,’ said the security man. ‘They’re waiting to do the fast cruise: said they needed their navigator.’

Polaris submarines, before setting off to sea, which they like to do at unprecedented times and unexpected states of tide, need to test their engines by running them at full speed. But so that the whole coast can’t tell by the sudden rumble that a Polaris is on its way out, the engines are fast-cruised just for the sake of it, from time to time. A rumble in the water, the quivering of the sea and sand where children play, may mean something, but equally may not. No one wants to think about it too much.

There are five British Polaris submarines: these compose Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. They have a home base. They have to have that in the same way that people have to have beds. They are very large, like whales. They can’t be hidden, so they try to be unexpected. In theory each Polaris slips in to home base every three months or so, under cover of dark, usually in the early morning. First Crew goes home silently, by bicycle or car. Second Crew, warned by a single phone call, eases itself from its bed and is on board with as little fuss as possible. Security would like to keep the crews secluded in barracks for maximum secrecy, if only they could. But you can’t push submariners more than a certain way, or who’s going to choose to be one? Polaris’s crew have to stay sane; and it is common wisdom that the way to stay sane (at least for men) is to have lots of sex and lots of children. So they have to put up with married men, and though they prefer them to live on Base (as second best to barracks) if they insist on living with their wives in crumbling crofters’ cottages on the bare hillside they put up with that too. It just makes a little more work.

Instead of hurrying on board Timmy asked if he could use the telephone in the security hut to call his wife.

‘Just married, aren’t you, sir,’ said the security man enquiringly, and dialled the number himself. But he used a coded number from a list he held. He took no chances. Only then did he hand over the instrument.

‘Meg,’ said Timmy, ‘how are you?’

‘I’m in bed,’ said Meg, ‘and Thompson’s on it, not even under it, and he’s licking my face.’

‘Look after yourself,’ said Timmy, ‘and think of me every morning at eleven-thirty.’

‘I’ll think of you all the time.’

‘Make a special effort at eleven-thirty – it’s a quiet time on board – and I’ll try and pick up the signals.’

‘Is it allowed?’ asked Meg, not without bitterness. ‘Isn’t telepathy a breach of security?’

‘It depends,’ said Timmy, in all seriousness, ‘on what you do with the information received.’

‘Where are you calling from?’ asked Meg.

‘Somewhere,’ said Timmy. ‘But there’s a grey wharf and a shiny wet bright sea. Has the mist cleared up there?’

‘It has,’ said Meg, and she looked out of the window on to a pristine day resting over autumn hills, and felt her sense of loss and anger subside. All the same, she said, crossly, ‘I think all this security business is nonsense.’

‘It’s only for a few hours every now and then,’ said Timmy. ‘And we shouldn’t be talking about it.’

‘I don’t care who’s tapping this phone,’ said Meg. ‘The way to confound the tappers is to overwhelm them with detail! And what’s to stop me ringing my cousin whose friend works in the Russian Embassy perhaps, and weeping on her shoulder and saying Timmy’s just left me for his tour of duty?’

‘My dearest,’ said Timmy, cautiously. ‘Two things. First, we’ll lie about on the bottom of the loch for a while, before actually moving off, and secondly I expect you’ll find you can’t make outgoing calls on our phone, at least for a little while. It’s for all our sakes. You want me home safely, don’t you?’

That silenced her.

‘Of course,’ she said, presently, in a small voice. ‘Darling, I love you, and every morning at eleven-thirty I’ll think of you and you’ll think of me.’

‘Two minutes to eleven-thirty, for two minutes. Every day a Remembrance Sunday,’ he said. ‘I must go now. I’m not supposed to be ringing you, really. It’s just that I left – well, you know – all Navy and no man, and I want you to know the man always wins, and darling—’

‘Yes?’

‘If Thompson does actually ever catch a rabbit, make sure he gets worm pills. Tape as well as round: dogs pick them up if they hunt. Remember? It was in the book.’

‘I’ll look after Thompson,’ she said, and meant it, and he said, ‘I love you. I’ll see you in three months. Well, roughly three months,’ and put the phone down, leaving her to wonder if the reminder about the pills had been the real purpose of the call.

Timmy went on board, into the belly of leviathan, and joined the captain and the first officer on the bridge.

‘Now we can get on with the fast cruise,’ said the captain, reproachfully. That was as far as reprimand ever got. He was careful of his officers’ feelings. They were to be a long time together beneath the sea. He had a beard so full you could hardly tell what his features were, and bright, bright blue eyes; a gentle manner and a reputation, even amongst submariners, for eccentricity.

‘Sorry, Alec, sir,’ said Timmy. ‘I’ve never been last on board before,’ he added in his defence.

‘You’ve never been married before,’ said the captain, but whether that compounded or excused Timmy’s failing was not made clear. Those who captain Polaris submarines have to keep abreast of the private lives of their crew. They have, after all, to watch for signs of instability. There is a lot at stake.

The countdown for the fast cruise had begun, when Ratings Percival and Daly appeared to say there had been a mishap of which the captain should be at once informed.

‘Some of the exotic veg, sir, aren’t on board,’ said Percival. ‘We have no aubergines, no fresh chillies and no fresh ginger.’ The captain turned a concerned face towards his crewmen. ‘Of course, sir,’ said Rating Daly, ‘we have powdered chilli and powdered ginger: that’s stock issue. But I know how keen you are on the fresh, and it doesn’t solve the aubergine question. The pimentos, courgettes, celeriac and so on came on board by crate okay, but the order clearly wasn’t made up properly.’

‘Chilli powder and fresh chilli have nothing in common at all,’ said the captain, seriously discomposed. ‘Only fools think they have.’

‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said Percival.

‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said Daly.

‘The root of the trouble is, sir,’ said Jim, the first officer, pouring oil on troubled waters, as was his habit, ‘that down in Stores they’ve only just about caught up with the mushroom as an exotic vegetable. Fresh ginger and so forth is way beyond them.’

But the captain just stared gloomily at Ratings Percival and Daly as if it were all their fault.

‘And we hadn’t even left port,’ Percival complained later to Daly. ‘I knew then what kind of tour this was going to be. Never allowed near the galley for the men’s food, for hamburgers and beans, because the officers have commandeered it for sweet-and-sour pork with hot chilli sauce, or worse. It will all end in mutiny, not to mention ulcers.’ But that conversation came later. Now another thought struck the captain.

‘Olive oil?’ he asked, over the murmur of warming engines. ‘Some left by Crew No. 1, sir. Two litre bottles.’

‘Not enough,’ said the captain and closed down the engines.

An urgent approach was made to Security and in about an hour Zelda, Jim’s wife, drove up to the dock gates with a couple of crates, which Security checked. They prodded ginger and peered into chillies, and nodded and let them through.

‘This isn’t alcohol?’ they enquired, opening up one or two big plastic containers full of green liquid.

‘It’s olive oil,’ said Zelda crossly, in her fluty officer’s wife’s voice.

She wore a headscarf decorated with ponies’ heads and had rather large, brilliant teeth in a long thin face. She seemed to know what she was doing.

‘Taste it,’ she said, and made them; they put their fingers into the liquid and sucked and shuddered. Olive oil! Their wives still fried in lard, and used Heinz Salad Cream on the salad.

Polaris submarines are dry. No alcohol is allowed on board. To be drunk in charge of a submarine is an offence. Stores did let Captain Alec’s crew take cooking wine with them, on condition that it was used in cooked dishes, never uncooked. Heating sends off alcohol in vapour, they explained. Thus sherry could be used in soup, so long as that soup was simmering when the sherry was added; but never in cold trifles. The regulations were strict.

Timmy left the boat to collect the crates.

‘Where’s Jim?’ asked Zelda. ‘Why did they send you?’

‘You know what it’s like,’ said Timmy, embarrassed.

‘I know what he’s like,’ she said. ‘And more than one set of goodbyes in one day he just can’t face.’

‘That’s about it,’ said Timmy.

‘Never mind,’ said Zelda. ‘I’ll just have to say goodbye to you’ – and she kissed him long and passionately on the mouth.

‘Hey, hey,’ said the security man, uneasily. ‘That man’s got to be celibate for the next three months. You should think of that.’

‘It’s just for old times’ sake,’ said Zelda, and Timmy looked flushed and self-conscious.

‘Mind you look after Meg for me,’ said Timmy. ‘And not for old times’ sake.’

‘I’ll look after her,’ said Zelda.

‘And do be discreet, Zelda,’ said Timmy. ‘And make sure she looks after Thompson.’

‘Bloody Thompson,’ said Zelda. ‘Always licking one’s toes in bed.’

Timmy went back inside, and the hatches were finally battened down, and the rumble of the fast cruise began. Presently Polaris slid away from its dock. Halfway down the estuary it submerged, and was gone.

A knock came on Meg’s door as she sat on a clean, smooth patch of floor, doing yoga exercises. She had a small bony body, no-nonsense straight hair and a wide brow and a straight nose and rather thin lips. She had always wanted to live in the country. She’d been a fabric designer who thought she should have trained as a potter but might one day write novels, and had assumed she’d marry some country craftsman. Then she’d bring up her children (when she had them, which she would) without the aid of television or yellow additives in the food, and so forth. And now here she was, married to a man about whom she knew very little, except that she was addicted to him, body and soul, so that his profession and his politics and his social values meant nothing. And all she knew was that her chest ached from lack of him; and she had a pain where her heart was.

Yoga was part of her plan for self-improvement, put into action ten minutes after Timmy’s phone-call, when she had stopped crying. Three months to achieve physical perfection, perhaps learn a language – certainly get the house in order. She would dedicate the time to Timmy.

She’d tried the telephone and found, as Timmy had predicted, that the line was now dead. Presumably it would come to life in its own good time. She didn’t mind; the sense of being looked after for her own good was reassuring. It was like being a small child again, with parents at the ready to curb one’s follies.

The postman rang the doorbell. Meg opened the door, holding Thompson back by his collar. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘He’s all bark and no bite. He might knock you down by accident but never on purpose.’

‘That’s always good to know,’ said the postman, who was an elderly Scotsman. He rolled up his trouser leg to show a papery grey shin marked with livid patches, which he claimed were the results of dog bites. ‘If he adds to these,’ he said, ‘you’ll be getting no more letters up here, and that’s certain. You’ll have to come down to the Post Office, forbye. Recorded Delivery, sign here.’

He settled himself for a chat, balancing against the doorpost, but occasionally shifting, the better to balance against Thompson.

‘You ought to keep the door properly latched,’ he said. ‘There’re prowlers about.’

‘Up here? Surely not!’

‘Everywhere,’ he said. ‘It’s the unemployment and Christmas coming, and worse. A young woman like yourself, your husband off—’

‘How do you know he’s off?’ Meg was startled.

‘First Crew’s back, that’s why. He’s Second Crew, so he’s away. It’s not difficult.’

‘It’s supposed to be secret,’ complained Meg, but he was more interested in the letter for which she signed. It was in a brown envelope.

‘That a bill?’ he asked, following her into the kitchen.

‘I don’t know,’ said Meg. ‘It’s for my husband, not me.’

‘You’ll have to open it,’ he said. ‘You’re married to a sailor now. I’ve got to get on. There’ll be a big collection down at the Base. The minute the husbands go the wives start writing. It calms down after a week or so. I’ll come up here whenever I can. You’re too isolated, you know. But you can always drive down, I suppose, for a cup of tea and a chat.’

‘I don’t drive and I don’t much care for chats,’ said Meg stiffly. She closed and latched the door after him, but then regretted her rudeness. She would need friends: the buses that passed on the hill road, below the cottage, came only once a week.

She put on another jersey because the wind was suddenly cold, and looked around the cottage. She realised that there was no real means of heating it through the winter, and wondered why it was that Timmy was so impractical, and why she had left all this kind of thing to him, knowing him to be so.

Thompson started barking. The milkman. She opened the door to him. She had always presumed that up here milkmen didn’t just put the bottles on the step and leave, as they did in the city, and she was right.

‘You’ll be wanting less milk,’ he said. He was even older than the postman, and wheezed. Perhaps Security vetted all visitors to the house, in the husband’s absence, in the interests of domestic felicity?

‘Will I?’

‘With your husband off. Before we had the Base at least we knew where we were. Now it’s chop and change all the time. Three pints one day, six the next. It’s the goodnight cocoa. Navy men get a taste for cocoa, don’t they?’

‘Do they?’ she said, coldly.

‘So you’ll be all alone up here for three months! Only the sheep for company, forbye. Pity you don’t have kiddies.’

‘I’ve been married for less than a year.’

‘I’d get on with it, all the same,’ he advised. ‘All the Navy wives do. The way I look at my work,’ he went on, ‘is as a Welfare job. Someone for the lonely wives to talk to. Does that dog bite?’

Thompson was sniffing round the old man’s knees. ‘Only barks,’ said Meg.

‘Pity. He’ll need to do more than that. Prowlers about. Have you got stores in? What are you going to do when the snow starts? I don’t come up here in the snow, you know. Couldn’t even if I wanted to. No one’s going to send a snow-plough just for you.’

Snow? It was almost impossible to imagine the landscape white. She had never seen it so.

‘I’ll dig myself out,’ said Meg. She came from the city, where snow meant an awkward mush, not the implacable enemy country-dwellers know it to be.

She shut the door on the milkman and his aged crabbiness and went upstairs. She sat back on the bed and lost herself in an erotic haze and thought about Timmy, while Thompson grinned at her, as if he knew and sympathised with the tenor of her thoughts. She felt Timmy’s presence near her. She looked at her watch. It was thirty-one minutes past eleven. Sea-lag, she thought. The telephone pinged slightly and when she lifted the receiver she could hear the dialling tone again.

‘Hi,’ she said, to whoever no doubt listened.

Again she had the feeling that she was known, noticed, that they were on her side, and the ping had been a whisper from the watchers to say, ‘He’s off, he’s safe, all’s clear! Now watch, and wait, and one morning in the New Year, or even earlier, you will hear him whistling up the frozen path, and we will have him home to you. We, the listeners!’

It was quite a sensuous feeling: a lying-back on strong, supporting arms. She replaced the receiver, smiling.

Polaris lay on the bottom of the loch and waited for the Routine from Base that would tell them where to go and how to go, and when. On the bridge, Timmy puzzled rather closely over the charts.

‘Anything the matter, Mr Navigator?’ enquired the captain.

‘We don’t want to end up in the Black Sea.’

It was a joke.

‘Let alone up the Yangtze River, sir!’ remarked Jim, who’d been reading about Red China in the papers. Security would have liked the crews not to read the papers, or only Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, but the liberty of the individual in the West had to be respected, or what was everyone struggling for?

‘That’s for the politicians to decide,’ said the captain, sternly. ‘But I’m glad to hear you making a joke, Mr First Lieutenant, so early in the patrol. We’re usually halfway round the world before you so much as smile. Is it the land that depresses you, or the sea?’

‘The land, I think, sir,’ said Jim.

Submariners are like artists, thought the captain, regretting his question. They’d really rather live alone, outside the married state, in order to pursue their vision in peace; yet they find the unmarried state lonely and sad. To have to feel guilty as they plunge seawards to what they really love, to see wifely tears flowing and hear their children’s sobs is intolerable. But to have no one to care, to mark the difference between sea and land, is equally dreadful. Normal submarining, the captain knew, suits best the very young man: the man with parents who both love the child but look forward to his absence. Then all get the best of all possible worlds, with the added spice of a little danger, but not too much. Alas, on Polaris it was different. This was submarining-plus! How could you trust a young unmarried man with the future of Moscow, London, Sydney, Peking and so forth? You couldn’t. They were too emotional. Down on Polaris every major city in the world was targeted: the co-ordinates ready and waiting. For the time might come (who knew what the future held?) when one of their own cities might have to be taken out, for good strategic or even peace-making reasons. It took a mature and steady man to recognise such necessities.

Timmy stared at the charts and wondered why they were so misty. He would have liked to have talked more to Jim about the land/sea divide but felt inhibited, as he so often was, with Jim, since having the affair with Zelda. A man, it seemed, could not sleep with his best friend’s wife, however secretly and with however good intention, and still look him in the eye. Now that Timmy was himself married he could see more clearly just how great a folly and disloyalty the affair had been. He wished to apologise to Jim; but couldn’t, of course. All the same, the fact remained: he was fond of Zelda, and could see that Jim was somewhat cavalier in his attitude towards her. For form’s sake, and certainly in Zelda’s presence, Jim should at least pretend to prefer life on shore to life at sea.

Under sea. Timmy wanted to be back in bed with Meg, with Thompson under it. Perhaps the mistiness was tears? He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.

‘Oh my God, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought my wife’s glasses.’ There was a short silence.

‘Well,’ said Jim, ‘Yangtze, here we come!’

‘It’s all right, Alec, sir,’ said Timmy. ‘It’s not too bad. I may get headaches, that’s all.’

‘Seeing with her eyes,’ said the captain, ‘while she sees with yours. Love’s young dream. Don’t let it happen again.’ He softened the rebuke by returning to more rewarding subjects. ‘How much peanut butter did we bring on board?’

‘Two gallons,’ said the first lieutenant.

‘I hope it’s enough,’ said the captain. ‘Many Indonesian dishes use quite large quantities of peanut butter. It is a country where food is eaten with the hands, and so a thicker consistency is needed.’

Presently the Routine from Base came through. The captain threw a switch or two, and the control board which linked with the nuclear reactor at Polaris’s heart glowed warmly, as the mighty engines sucked its power and started up, and minutely vibrated the waves on the far-off shore where the children played, and bounced a grain of sand or so from here to there.

Polaris moved down the Irish Channel and out into the Atlantic. Down in the galley the captain pounded cumin seed and coriander and chilli to make a paste in which to coat a chicken. Jim peeled and diced and blanched baby white turnips preparatory to freezing. They brought fresh vegetables on board and prepared and froze them in the great freezer themselves, not trusting shore-men to do it properly. (There is no shortage of power on a nuclear submarine – lots of light, lots of hot water, lots of cool and elegantly recycled air. The crew swore the air smelt badly of garlic, like a French train on a school trip, but their officers denied it, hotly.)

The captain poured oil from Zelda’s plastic can into a jug and thence into a pan. He meant to fry mustard seed in the oil, letting it sizzle for a few moments, then pour it over finely grated carrot, adding lemon juice, salt and pepper, for a simple but interesting salad to serve with the chicken. But the oil spattered in the pan.

‘This isn’t pure olive oil,’ complained the captain.

He investigated and discovered that, beneath a thin top floating layer of olive oil, there was nothing more or less than white wine.

‘That was very irresponsible of your wife,’ he said sternly to Jim. ‘You, me and Mr Navigator here are an Attack Team, not a musical comedy act.’

But he didn’t pour the wine away; instead he put the canister up on a top cupboard, out of harm’s reach.

While they were eating a Routine came through to say that Russian submarines were operating in their vicinity.

‘When are they ever not?’ yawned the captain.

But they took their plates through to the bridge and watched the lights on the radar screen, and listened to the bleeps as the leviathans from the other side neared and all but brushed them, and paused, and passed, in companionable fashion.

‘I wonder if they’ve discovered food,’ said the captain.

‘I shouldn’t think so, sir,’ said Jim, who’d once been on a school trip to Leningrad, and been made sick by soused herring.

‘Then what do they do all day?’

They couldn’t remember themselves what they had done, in the days before they’d discovered the soothing art, and had dined on hamburgers like anyone else. But now the weeks were filled with a sense of purpose; and, indeed, accomplishment.

Two weeks passed. Thompson and Meg settled down to a state of truce. She tried to keep him out of the bedroom entirely, while he tried to get into the bed, and they compromised with under the bed. Now that Timmy was away Meg noticed the landscape. She watched the winter closing in, suddenly and crossly, like a shopkeeper closing up before a football match. Slam, slam! Down came the shutters, out went the sun, up sprang the wind, and life retreated, muttering, underground, leaving the hills lean and sinewy and blank. Even the slugs went from the kitchen cupboard. She missed them. How was it possible to miss such disgusting slimy things, which clung to damp walls in dark and unexpected places? She was obliged to conclude that it was because they were, simply, alive and of the animal not the plant kingdom, and had some kind of blind purpose and vague will which carried them into the rockiest and most inhospitable places, where even plants could not survive. They were life, carrying their message into the world of non-life.

Sometimes she was glad Timmy wasn’t there. She would have muttered something about missing the slugs and he would have looked quizzical and she would have turned pink and felt silly. Some knowledge simply had to be borne alone: that was one of the penalties of being human. The suggestion was, inasmuch as one had the power of speech, that there was a sharing; but of course there wasn’t. It was a pain that the slugs were spared. Thompson, on the other hand, was spared nothing. His suffering was the worse because, observing that humans talked to each other, he believed they would exchange notes on the wonders of the universe. He was wrong in this, but didn’t know it. Meg and Timmy’s real conversation, real agreement, was wordless and in bed. No wonder Thompson liked to be under it.

The bus was taken off for the winter months. Too few people used it. Meg cycled down to the Base – a half-hour journey going in, two hours back, uphill – to the library, and asked the librarian to find her a book on the life-cycle of slugs. The library had in stock many reference books on crocheting and knitting and jam-making and upholstery and Teach-Yourself-French and First Steps to Philosophy, but there was nothing on slugs.

‘You can always try slug pellets,’ said the librarian. ‘The slugs eat them and simply deliquesce.’

‘But that’s horrible!’ said Meg.

‘I expect it is, when you think about it. The thing is, don’t think about it. Simply do it.’

Meg met Zelda outside the library. Zelda swooped on her and embraced her and said she must come in for coffee. Wasn’t she going mad up there on her own? Meg was looking rather odd, said Zelda. Meg was wearing jeans and an old navy jersey of Timmy’s. She felt protected in it. Zelda was wearing pink jeans and a pinker sweater, and a fashionable grey wool scarf tied as a shawl, and many gold bangles and rings.

‘In what way odd?’

‘You have a funny look in your eye,’ said Zelda, ‘as if you were pregnant.’

Meg thought.

‘When I went to take my pill this morning,’ she said, ‘I found I had four left and yet I was at the end of the course.’

They went to Zelda’s warm, pretty bungalow, with its picture windows and squared-off walls. Thompson had to stay outside. He wailed, but Zelda was ruthless.

‘So you’ve missed four pills,’ she said. ‘That means you want a baby. It’s your unconscious.’

‘I don’t want a baby,’ said Meg. ‘I want Timmy.’

‘I don’t want a baby either,’ said Zelda, ‘but I’m having one. I only found out this morning. Think of it, Jim won’t know for another two months and two weeks. Give or take a day or two, for Security.’

‘But you can tell him through the Family Telegram system,’ said Meg.

‘They only pass on good news, not bad,’ said Zelda. ‘Bad news waits until the men are back on shore.’

‘I suppose your good news and Jim’s good news aren’t necessarily the same thing,’ said Meg.

‘Exactly,’ said Zelda. ‘But that’s marriage, isn’t it?’

Meg thought in her heart, not mine and Timmy’s, it isn’t.

It was eleven-forty-five and Meg had forgotten to think of Timmy. His thoughts had been flashing all around her but she hadn’t noticed. She’d been thinking about the deliquescing of slugs.

At that moment Thompson discovered Zelda’s lavatory window ajar and squeezed himself in, bending a hinge or so, and bounced into the living room. He threw himself on Zelda.

‘Why does he go to you?’ asked Meg, puzzled.

‘Because I’m the owner of the house,’ said Zelda crossly. ‘And he’s trying to get into my good books. Couldn’t you have left him at home?’

She aimed a kick at Thompson with her little gold boot and he howled. Meg felt protective of him at once and said she must be getting back.

‘I don’t know much about dogs,’ said Meg, as she got on her bicycle, ‘but is Thompson extra-specially intelligent?’

‘He’s extra-specially mad,’ said Zelda.

The next day Zelda rang Meg and asked her to dinner that very evening to meet Tony.

‘You can’t say no,’ said Zelda, ‘because your engagement book is empty.’

‘I don’t even have one,’ said Meg.

‘That figures.’

‘Who’s Tony?’

‘He’s the spare man, dear. There’s always one about. He’s a PR man: he deals with the press round here. His wife’s away in New Zealand – she always is – and if she isn’t she doesn’t understand him. He mends fuses and walks dogs and all the husbands trust him. Some sensible woman put the word about that he’s queer, which is why his wife’s always away, but of course he isn’t. He’s very nice and funny and he might cheer you up.’

‘It’s very kind of you, Zelda, but I don’t think I’ll come.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t think Timmy would like it.’

‘I don’t actually think submariners are very possessive men, or they wouldn’t be away so much, would they?’ It was an argument hard to refute. Meg tried to think her way round it, but failed.

‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much, Zelda, I’d love to come.’

Down on the bottom of the Indian Ocean Polaris kept the meal-times of the ships on the surface. Dinner that night was multinational – home-made ravioli done by Jim, who was so good at fiddly dishes; Persian chicken – the kind stuffed with ground mixed nuts and simmered – produced by the captain; and a French tarte aux poires, prepared by Timmy, who could produce a more delicate confectioners’ cream than anyone aboard. Timmy kept his watch on home time, in order to keep his eleven-thirty appointments with Meg.

When Meg got down to the Base that night she had to push her way through an angry Peace Movement crowd, milling about in the mud with banners and effigies of broken nuclear missiles, like broken phalluses, held aloft. They let Meg through easily enough. She was wearing jeans and an anorak and was riding a bicycle: she seemed near enough one of their own.

‘Take the toys from the boys,’ they chanted, and Meg thought of the two faces of Timmy, the bouncy, grinning little boy, and the cool, grave features she sometimes glimpsed, that of the man within, and wondered which of them it was she loved, and knew it was the man, who half-frightened her. She had fun with the little boy, and played sexy games with him, but love was reserved for the man, and the man, indeed, was dangerous.

She disliked the women for not understanding this: she thought they weren’t adult women at all – just angry little girls in grown-up bodies, which they hated. She was glad that she’d brought a dress and some heeled sandals with her. She’d stuffed them crossly into a carrier bag before she’d left, cursing Zelda’s social pretensions, but now she felt pleased with herself. The dress was of fine wool, navy, with white flowers embroidered around the neckline. She’d been married in it.

‘What’s making you so angry?’ asked Zelda, once Meg was inside and changing.

‘What do these women want?’ demanded Meg.

‘Peace,’ observed Zelda. ‘I always thought you were rather their sort.’

‘Then you thought wrong,’ said Meg shortly. ‘I don’t want anything to do with it. Timmy and I just want to be left alone. He’s a navigator: all he does is steer ships about by the stars.’

‘There are no stars under the sea,’ said Zelda. ‘It’s more complicated than that. Timmy is cleverer than you think.’

‘If the Navy chooses to put him on Polaris, that’s their responsibility. He’s still just a navigator,’ Meg persisted. ‘A kind of timeless person.’ And indeed, she saw Timmy as one of the heroes on Odysseus’s boat, underneath a starry Grecian sky, steering between Scylla and Charybdis. She’d met him at a party. ‘And what do you do?’ she’d said. ‘I’m a navigator,’ he’d replied, and she had hardly heard. Her heart had gone; she had given it away, and that was that. She was like a child: she would not ask more, for fear of finding out more than she cared to know: of having to do what she ought, not what she wanted. A little girl who would not look down at her shoes before school, in case they needed cleaning.

‘Darling!’ said Zelda, pouring them both rather large gin-and-tonics. Dinner was ham salad and baked potatoes, and already on the table – except for the potatoes, which were keeping warm on the heated Hostess trolley. ‘Darling, your husband is one of the Attack Team. There are three of them on Polaris. The captain, the first officer and the navigator. With a little help from the captain, your husband and mine could finish off the world. Didn’t he ever tell you?’

‘They wouldn’t want to finish off the world,’ said Meg, presently, taken aback. Timmy had never told her this.

‘You know what men are,’ said Zelda. ‘They just love to obey orders. And if the Routine comes through from Base, “blow up Moscow, or Hanoi, or Peking”, that’s what they’ll do. They’ll sit down and push their buttons at the same time and whee! Off go the missiles as programmed. Men have no imagination, you see. One million, two million dead. It’s only numbers. And women and children have to be sacrificed to the greater good. Well, we all know that. My father was a doctor; I know better than anyone. He looked after his patients, never us.’

‘But the order won’t come through,’ said Meg.

‘It hasn’t so far,’ said Zelda, glad to see Meg shaken out of what Zelda saw as a virtuous complacency, and pleased to shake a little more. ‘But I suppose it must one day. If one owns a pair of nut-crackers one tends to crack nuts. But you knew all this when you married him; you can’t complain now. When I meet those Peace Women I just push my way through them, shouting, “The Ruskies are coming, the Ruskies are coming.” That makes them crosser still. Well, you have to laugh, don’t you?’

‘Not really,’ said Meg.

‘I do,’ said Zelda. ‘And at least when we’re all nuked out of existence by the Ruskies – this whole country is just an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the USA: their forward line – our husbands will be safe enough. They can stay below for ever. We must take comfort from that.’

‘Zelda,’ said Meg, ‘why don’t you go and join them outside?’

‘I don’t have the right shoes,’ said Zelda. The doorbell rang: it was Tony, the PR man.

‘Tony will make you feel better,’ said Zelda. ‘He’ll explain that we’re all perfectly safe and our men are doing a grand job saving the world from itself, and protecting British women and children, and that those women out there are well-intentioned but misguided dupes of the Russians.’

Tony was as lean as Timmy was broad, and his nose hooked and aquiline and his charm very great. He looked into Meg’s eyes as if he were looking into her soul, and valued it deeply. He looked past her body and into her mind, and liked it, and made her feel comfortable. She realised that she had never felt quite comfortable with Timmy, and wondered why.

‘I can see Zelda’s in a naughty mood,’ said Tony. ‘I hope she hasn’t been upsetting you. One has every sympathy with the women outside: and yes, they are misguided, because nuclear weapons are a deterrent – they prevent wars, they don’t cause them – but I wouldn’t go so far as to say the women are dupes of the Russians. I am no “Reds under the Beds” man. Those women out there are brave and intelligent and have their point of view. We have a different point of view because we know more. We have more facts at our disposal.’

‘You are employed by the Admiralty,’ said Zelda, ‘to say exactly that kind of thing. To pour any sort of oil on any sort of troubled water you happen to come across. Have some ham salad. Don’t you think Meg is pretty?’

‘Yes I do,’ said Tony, ‘and Zelda, couldn’t I go into the kitchen and whip us up some spaghetti bolognaise? You know I hate salads.’

‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ said Zelda. ‘You know where everything is.’

Thompson growled when Tony rose: that was unusual, thought Meg. Thompson’s sins were usually those of over-enthusiasm rather than ill-temper.

After supper Tony insisted on driving Meg home, with her bicycle on his roof-rack.

‘I’ll be perfectly safe,’ she said.

‘Good heavens, no,’ he said. ‘You might get raped by a Peace Woman. I’d never forgive myself. I’m perfectly respectable, aren’t I, Zelda? Tell her I’m perfectly respectable.’

Zelda duly told her. Meg gave in, glad to be spared the long ride uphill, glad of the comfort of his smooth white car; uneasily conscious of the benefits money could buy.

They passed through the encampment of makeshift tents where the women had settled for the night.

‘Everyone has to make a living,’ said Meg sadly. ‘And almost no one’s occupation is guiltless, I suppose. Just think, Timmy might be an Arms Salesman. Now they’re really wicked.’

‘These women live off the State,’ said Tony. ‘The wretched tax-payer supports them.’

Tony had another face, too, thought Meg, just as Timmy did. When Tony was off-guard, the all-embracing, all-forgiving urbanity deserted him: she could see the impatient dislike shimmering beneath; a dislike of long-haired lefties, strident feminists, anti-blood-sport nuts, and so forth. She disliked them too, but somehow in a different way. She wanted to change their minds, not root them out. Were all men like this? Pretending to be civilised, but wanting in their hearts nice clean sudden final solutions? The drama of destruction?

She had a vision of After-Armageddon: the missiles flying through crevices in clouds over crowded seas; the hills black and poisoned; the stuff of nightmares. She’d had such nightmares before she’d met Timmy. She’d assumed they were some kind of symbolic reflection of her own inner state, her own fear of sudden, awful events. Her father dying. Sudden, awful, the end of the world. But if everyone had a vision of the end of the world, wasn’t that dangerous? Mightn’t it then come true? Wasn’t it better to keep the mind on what was kind and pure and hopeful? If one acknowledged the devil one gave birth to the devil. She believed that. She thought that was why she so resented the Peace Women. They were bringing Armageddon nearer, not keeping it away. Perhaps she was pregnant? How could she bring a baby into this world? But then again, how could she not? One had to affirm one’s faith in the future, and affirm it, and affirm it, and affirm it.

Tony had his hand on her knee. How long had it been there? It was a pleasant hand, warm, sensible, and full of expectation.

She moved it gently away.

‘No, thank you, Tony,’ she said. ‘I love Timmy.’

‘Of course you do,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘And so you should, a nice girl like you.’

She wasn’t sure she wanted to be a nice girl. He suggested she admire the landscape. It occurred to her that Timmy never suggested she admire anyone or anything other than himself, or his handiwork.

Tony asked to come in, but she said no, and he acquiesced, again pleasantly.

He offered his services in any way she liked.

‘Anything un-innocent,’ he said. ‘Just say the word. But if I have to put up with the innocent for the pleasure of your company then I will. Mend fuses, fix shelves, lay lino: I’m the original Mr Fix-it. I’ll even take the foul hound for walks.’

They lingered on the doorstep. He said he was a woman’s man. He said he couldn’t get on with Navy men, because they had no conversation. They could exchange information and tell jokes and swap prejudices, but they didn’t deal in ideas. And now he had met Meg he wouldn’t easily let her go. He had to talk to someone.

‘There’s Zelda,’ said Meg.

She called Thompson and went in and shut the door, and looked at the bare rough decent walls and the plain deal table and was glad to be alone.

‘I hope Zelda and Meg get together,’ said Jim, the first officer. ‘They ought to be friends. I’m afraid your Meg’s going to be rather lonely up there on the hills.’

They themselves were under the polar ice-cap: it was a fairly edgy place to be. The radar man never liked it, and Rating Hoskins lay awake in his bunk at night (local night) worrying about what would happen if they set off a missile when they happened to be under some ice mountain. Would the initial thrust be enough to force it through, or would it turn, as in some children’s cartoon, and destroy the destroyers?

‘She has Thompson to keep her company,’ said Timmy.

He felt the touch of Meg’s thoughts. She was laughing. He looked at his watch. It was eleven-thirty, Greenwich Mean Time. That night he dreamt that Meg was taking Thompson for a walk in the woods of his childhood.

Meg, indeed, was taking Thompson for a walk, but out on the hills. Thompson had recovered from his fear of sheep since Timmy had gone, and now showed a desire to chase them – only strong words and a stern face prevented him. If she tried to put him on the lead he pulled her along over the rough ground, so she would stumble and fear for her ankles. She had to contain him by force of will alone. She thought that Tony was a good deal more controllable than Thompson.

Even as the notion occurred to her Thompson was off over the brow of the hill and though she yelled for a good five minutes he did not return. A cold wind had got up: the hills were hostile. She did not belong here. She thought she would leave Thompson to find his own way home. He was more part of the elements than she was: leaping and bounding into the chilly blast, exhilarated. The thought that he was Timmy’s dog, and she was responsible for him, oppressed her. She could see down to the harbour below, and the docks and the grey sea, and the slow movement of the toy cranes, and on the next fold of hills the Base itself, with its squared-off roads and pretty bungalows and the thin tracery of the high wire fence, and outside it a kind of muddy unevenness, presumably where the Peace tents were pitched, or slung, or whatever they were. She was too far off to make out detail.

It’s nothing to do with me, she thought, let them get on with their games, and leave me out of it. Leave me to love my husband, and walk my dog, and get on with my life. And she ran bounding down the hill.

By five that evening Thompson had not returned and the postman, delivering an envelope marked with many red bands, said, ‘A farmer will have got that dog with a gun, forbye. Out there worriting sheep again.’

‘He doesn’t worry sheep,’ Meg said.

The red bands induced her to open the letter and she found inside notification that Timmy’s Visa Card had been withdrawn for non-payment of dues. She discovered that they owed the Company £843.72 and at 12½% accumulative interest, too. Timmy had told her to use the card to buy wallpaper, paint, carpets and so forth. She had used it the day before, down on the Base, to buy groceries, finding funds in the joint account she shared with Timmy running low. Timmy’s monthly salary had not for some reason shown up on the balance.

Meg shivered. Cold had somehow got into her bones. She put on more jerseys and piled wood on the fire – though stocks were surprisingly low – but kept opening the door to see if she could see Thompson bounding home, which of course she didn’t.

Night fell. No Thompson. Meg telephoned Tony and wept over the receiver.

‘I’ll come right up,’ he said.

Thompson arrived home at the same time as Tony. He stood at the door laughing and panting and dropping and picking up a dead rat, for the death of which he expected to be congratulated.

‘I hope he hasn’t been worrying sheep,’ said Tony. ‘They shoot dogs for that round here.’

Tony removed the rat from Thompson’s mouth, made Meg look for worm pills and thrust one down Thompson’s throat. Then he told Meg what to write to Visa and gave her the number of the Families’ Officer on the Base who looked after the financial affairs of the wives while their husbands were away. He claimed that submariners were notoriously impractical in money matters and, indeed, in most domestic matters.

‘Their minds ebb and flow in tune with the mighty currents of the deep, I expect,’ said Meg. ‘Their wives have pathetic little sharp foamy wavelet minds. All detail, no grandeur.’

‘Not so pathetic,’ said Tony.

He put his hand into something he called a soot box in the Rayburn flue and told her the chimney needed sweeping, and he would send a man up to do it, and to fix a cowl to stop the smoke blowing back when the wind was from the north.

He told her he would bring up stores from the Base so she could sit out a snowstorm: otherwise they’d have to send a helicopter to fetch her down and she wouldn’t like that, would she? And neither would he. He for one would like to see someone make a go of living independently, outside the Base. The Navy owned too much of people’s souls: it had no business to.

He said he’d lend her a television set, and she said she didn’t like TV, and he said oh she would, she would. By the time the New Year was here, and her husband back.

He said he expected nothing from her. He liked to be of use. He was a solitary kind of person, really. So was she. Let them both circle each other for a time.

And he went away, leaving Meg warm and comforted and stirring inside. She tried to remember what Timmy’s face looked like, and was not able to. It was as if the presence of another man in the croft, his coat hanging on the back of the chair, seeing to things, doing things, had somehow driven out the lingering feel of Timmy.

‘Did you know,’ said the captain – they were back up in the Pacific now, and coral less of a problem than ice, though still tricky – ‘that we nuclear submariners outnumber the blue whale? American, Russian, Chinese by the hundred! We’re the rarity – the ones with the GB plates. Every city in the world with a missile pointed at it. Our five just provide extra cover for the major capitals: a drop of wine in the child’s glass, to stop him making a fuss, to make him feel grown up.’

‘Ours not to reason why,’ said Jim. ‘Ours just to do and die—’

‘Only we won’t be doing the dying,’ said Timmy. ‘That’s for those at the end of our doing.’

Men get meditative at the bottom of the sea. On some days even haute cuisine fails. Rating Hoskins played good guitar, but only knew peace-songs from the sixties; which made everyone maudlin.

Meg said to Tony, ‘The trouble with Thompson is, he acts as if I were his sister, not his mistress. He doesn’t respect me.’

‘I don’t act as if you were my sister,’ said Tony. He was in bed with Meg. He had just got in; for warmth, he said. The man who came to sweep the chimney said the whole thing was about to fall down and the fire mustn’t be lit until he’d come back, which he would do the following day, with materials to rebuild it.

Cold had struck afresh into Meg’s bones. The Families’ Officer had explained to her that nearly all Timmy’s monthly salary cheque was bespoken on Credit Purchase arrangements, mortgage payments and so forth. There was next-to-nothing left over for daily living; and she, Meg, had been living like a spendthrift, buying cream when top-of-the-milk would do, sending letters first-class, buying wallpaper when whitewash would serve. He would advance her money, of course, against Timmy’s next salary. The Navy, he said, believed in looking after wives – and frequently had to. Naval pay was designed to keep single men in beer, not married men in homes. But where was it all to end? If only Meg would agree to sell the croft and come and live on Base, she’d find the living more economical. Meg told the Families’ Officer she’d think about it. Tony said he’d pay off the Visa, and they wouldn’t tell Timmy. Meg agreed. Meg crept into bed not caring whether Tony followed.

Tony did follow, with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you spent most of the last three months in bed with Timmy.’

‘Not necessarily in bed,’ said Meg. ‘It was warmer then – outdoors was always very nice and we grew fond of under the kitchen table, except for Thompson.’

‘When it suddenly stops,’ he said, ‘it must be very hard.’

‘Of course it’s hard,’ said Meg, crossly.

He had all his clothes off. Meg had taken off her jeans, for comfort’s sake, but had her other clothes on, the usual vests and body warmers. (And winter not even truly started.) She was in bed for warmth and comfort, nothing else.

‘I wish you wouldn’t act like some kind of servicing agency,’ she said, shaking off his enquiring hand. ‘For all I know you’re put in by Security to keep me happy.’

‘Security don’t want people to be happy,’ he said. ‘Merely silent.’

‘It’s much the same thing,’ she said, ‘when it comes to wives.’

And she sat up and accepted the proffered champagne.

‘You aren’t really Security?’ she asked, fascinated and a little alarmed.

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘How paranoid you are. Would they really go to such lengths for the simple wife of a simple navigator?’

‘They have to occupy themselves somehow,’ said Meg. ‘And he is one third of an Attack Team: that is, one fifteenth of Britain’s Independent Nuclear Deterrent.’

‘Is he really Attack Team?’ asked Tony. ‘How do you know?’

‘Zelda told me,’ said Meg.

‘Ah, Zelda,’ said Tony. ‘Zelda would never go to bed with a man wearing a body warmer and a thermal vest.’

‘Well, you’d know,’ said Meg. He did not deny it.

He removed her body warmer and thermal vest.

‘I haven’t said I will,’ she warned him. ‘You got into this bed on your own account. I didn’t ask you in.’

‘You didn’t get out of it either,’ he said. ‘A man takes these little hints to heart. You have lovely nipples. Pinkish. Much nicer than Zelda’s.’

‘I wish you’d be serious,’ she complained. ‘How am I going to survive this life? How can Timmy afford to leave the Navy, if he doesn’t try and save?’

‘Dear heart,’ said Tony, ‘I am serious, and Timmy doesn’t want to leave the Navy.’

‘Oh yes he does.’ She covered her breasts with the sheet.

‘Consciously perhaps, but not deep down in his subconscious, where it really counts.’

Meg believed him and her hand lost its will. The sheet dropped. There was a noise at the door, a scraping sound, and the fragile catch gave way. Thompson lumbered in and lay beneath the bed.

‘That’s it,’ said Meg. ‘Please get out of this bed, Tony.’

‘Why? He can’t talk,’ said Tony.

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ said Meg.

So Tony got out of bed and dressed, forgetting his tie. Thompson dragged that under the bed and chewed it a little, having been deprived of his rat, and needing some small revenge.

Meg felt quite fond of Thompson, for having rescued her. At the same time the rain had started to fall, and the ground around the croft, disturbed by months of building work, had turned to mud. Whenever Thompson went out, which seemed to be every fifteen minutes, he took shafts of expensive hot air with him; and when he came in, clouts of mud. He would run upstairs to the bedroom and shake himself there. If she tried to keep him in, or out, he would holler and bang like a naughty child until she let him out, or in. She was plastering and papering the kitchen and it was, because of Thompson, taking twice as long as she had estimated.

Meg’s mother- and father-in-law came to visit and admire and sympathise – they were the nicest and remotest of nicest remote people – and she suggested they take Thompson away with them. They seemed surprised, even – had they been a little less nice – a fraction shocked.

‘But he’s company for you. And protection!’

He is disorder, Meg longed to reply: he is distraction and debacle. He is expensive – 75p a day to feed – he is dirty, and what’s more, he is Timmy’s. And Timmy, she longed to say, having the uncomfortable feeling that somehow they had shifted the whole responsibility of their son on to her, is yours more than mine. It was you two, after all – and she knew she was being childish – who thought Timmy up.

She smiled sweetly and made drop-scones on the stove which, thanks to Tony, roared warmingly and cooked beautifully and was no trouble at all except when Thompson lay too close to it, filling the air with the smell of singeing dog hair. They went away, patting Thompson.

Four more weeks and Timmy would return. Perhaps even in time for Christmas!

‘I bet you know when Second Crew’s coming back,’ she said to Tony, when she met him down at the Base, outside the library. But he only shimmered a smile and said to ask Zelda. She didn’t see much of Zelda. She thought Zelda to blame for practically pushing her into Tony’s bed (or rather Tony into hers). She was sorry for Zelda’s husband, Jim, that nice, simple, beaming man. Wives ought to be virtuous: it was a kind of magic which kept disaster away.

The Peace Women struck camp and moved off, and she felt the magic had worked. When Tony came to help her tile behind the kitchen sink and ran his hand up the back of her jumper she slapped him down very hard, so that tears came to his eyes.

‘I didn’t expect quite that,’ he complained. ‘You’re so unpredictable.’

‘I don’t sleep very well.’

‘You know the cure for that.’

‘It’s not that. I think I have cystitis or something. I keep having to get up in the night to spend a penny.’

‘You’re pregnant,’ he said, and took her down to the doctor, who confirmed the diagnosis.

‘I wish it was my baby,’ said Tony. ‘I love babies. But now I’m going south, for a month or so.’

Meg phoned Zelda to tell her the news.

‘Should I tell the Families’ Officer?’ she asked. ‘Then he could send a telegram.’

‘No point,’ said Zelda. ‘They’ll be back in a few days. And he’ll be in a bad temper. They always come back cross. Be warned.’

Timmy stepped out on to firm land, which rocked beneath his feet, and breathed rich cold air which stunned him. It seemed to him that no time at all had passed since he had gone on board. He had two quite different lives. One up here, one down there. It was safer down there, longing for ever for journey’s end. He took his bicycle from the security shed. It had been kept well-oiled, he was glad to see. Zelda was waiting for Jim and as Timmy cycled past she said, ‘Meg’s pregnant,’ and he whooped with – what? Pleasure, surprise, shock? – Or just the strength of life in this clean cold unfetid place? He stopped at the Base wine shop to buy champagne. When he got home Meg was in bed and asleep and he got in beside her – as did Thompson, half-mad with ecstasy. Thompson, Timmy observed, had put on weight. Meg couldn’t be giving him enough exercise.

‘Champagne in bed,’ said Meg. ‘We’re supposed to be saving. It’s unbearably extravagant.’

That hurt him.

‘Of course I’m glad to see you home.’ She shouldn’t have said it: it made it sound forced. They had made love furiously and fast and were left uncompanionable and dissatisfied.

‘You’ve put on weight,’ she said next, and shouldn’t have. ‘And you’re pale.’

‘It’s just that the rest of the world is over-coloured,’ he said, retreating, wanting peace, and the gentle lilt of expected life. Just the captain, Jim and himself.

‘What do they give you to eat under the sea? Baked beans and corned beef?’

‘More or less,’ said Timmy.

‘I made us a nice cottage pie,’ she said. And then: ‘Put your head on my tummy. All that life going on down there!’

‘It doesn’t feel any different,’ he said, and shouldn’t have. ‘I’m glad you forgot your pills,’ he added, to make things better.

‘How much did the champagne cost?’ She returned to the theme of his extravagance. She wished he’d go away again.

‘I think you should have trained Thompson to stay out of the bedroom,’ said Timmy. ‘He’s not a poodle or a lapdog; he’s a gun dog.’

‘I love him being in here,’ said Meg. ‘I even like the sound of him scratching his fleas.’

‘Fleas?’ said Timmy in alarm.

‘All dogs have fleas.’

‘Not if they’re properly looked after.’

It was intolerable. Meg shrieked and Timmy shouted. She said she was going home to her mother: he said he was going back to sea. She said she’d have a termination and he said good. When both had voiced exhaustion and outrage, and Thompson had stopped pattering and whuffling and fallen asleep with a dribble of saliva drying on his jowls, Timmy laughed.

‘Sorry about all that,’ he said. They went to bed and to sleep, twined, then woke up and made love again, in a calmer way, and seemed able to resume their life where they had left off. Except not quite. Timmy was alarmed at the consumption of fuel for the Rayburn and said the new chimney was responsible: she shouldn’t have had it done. He said she’d have to keep the damper in and she said ‘then it smokes’ and he said ‘nonsense’ and she said ‘allow me to know my own stove’ and he said ‘but I installed it’ and she said ‘badly’ and then he laughed and they both stopped, and kissed.

‘I’m not supposed to upset you,’ confided Meg. ‘The Families’ Officer said so. Save him from worry: for the sake of the Navy, for the sake of the country, for the sake of the world. He didn’t mention for your sake, or mine. But that’s what I’m thinking of. See my smile? Set fair for you?’ And so it was, until the last day of the leave.

Then, when Timmy had been home for nearly three months, Thompson, cross no doubt because he’d been put on a diet and run off his feet, dragged Tony’s tie from under the bed and laid it by Timmy’s face as Timmy did his press-ups.

The telephone rang as Timmy stared at the tie. He answered it, listened, said ‘yes’ and put the receiver down.

She said, ‘is that them?’ and he said ‘yes’ again and went on staring at the tie. It was late March. It had been a mild winter, with very little snow. Tony had not been seen, nor mentioned by anyone, except as the person who’d recommended the builder who’d done the damage to the chimney. Timmy had had to rebuild it. They’d spent Christmas with Timmy’s nice remote parents, and the New Year with Meg’s vaguely reproachful mother. Meg was six months’ pregnant.

‘How did that tie get there?’ asked Timmy.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s very dusty.’

‘How long has it been there? About six months? You were on the pill. How do women get pregnant when they’re on the pill? You got pregnant after I left, by a man who wears a green tie with red stars on it. Christ!’

Meg laughed, from shock. She shouldn’t have.

‘And now you’re laughing. No wonder. You have my income, is that it? But you don’t have to have me!’

He had on his hard cold face. Meg felt her own grow hard and cold.

‘Is your objection to the quality of the tie?’ she asked. She did not deign to defend herself.

He did not reply. He was packing his few things. The gun was under his arm. Perhaps he’ll shoot me, she thought, and part of her hoped he would.

‘Nothing’s been right since I’ve been home,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Now I understand why.’

‘You must ask the doctor,’ she said. ‘He’ll tell you.’

‘How can I ask the doctor? I’m going away for three months, now, with this to think about!’

Meg wept. Thompson howled. Timmy stamped and banged and departed.

‘But I’m pregnant!’ she called after him, weeping.

‘Complain to its father, not to me,’ he called back, and was gone. She waited for him to telephone from the dock, but he didn’t. She went up to the hills and sat there and watched and presently saw Polaris glide away out of its dock and sink beneath the water halfway down the loch. Thompson laid his bony chin upon her knee and pressed, and the next day she found a bruise there. She bruised easily, now that she was pregnant.

‘“Truly the light was sweet,”’ misquoted the captain, at the periscope, ‘“and a pleasant thing it was for the eyes to behold the sun.” You see these lumps on my eyelids, Mr Navigator? Cholesterol spots, they say. According to the MD I have to cut down on animal fats. You were first on board this time, Mr Navigator. Have a good leave?’

‘No, sir,’ said Timmy.

Meg went down to Zelda’s, piteously. Zelda was bright and very pregnant. She had new doorbell chimes, ‘Pling-plong,’ they went, when you rang. ‘Pling, pling, plong.’

‘Woodland bells!’ cried Zelda, in triumph. ‘Jim thought I’d like them. Well, that’s the way it goes! Work together, live together, think together. What’s the matter with you, red eyes? No, don’t tell me. You had a row with Timmy and he walked off with a harsh word on his lips.’

‘Yes. Several. Whore. Adulteress. That kind.’

‘And you won’t see him for another three months! Never mind. It always happens. You get used to it. What was it Jim said this time? I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. Something perfectly horrid. Ah yes, they want me to help out at the library but Jim said if I took a job I’d grow a worse moustache than I have already. Statistics show career-women grow moustaches. What do they do down on that boat of theirs – study statistics?’

‘But Zelda,’ Meg wept, ‘supposing, supposing – supposing something happens to Timmy and those are the last words he ever said to me.’

‘You’re very egocentric,’ said Zelda. ‘You should be thinking of him, not you. Mind you, he’ll forget he ever said them. Men do. They have no memory for insults given, only those received. Did you say anything terrible to him?’

‘No.’

‘Then that will be next leave. Jim and I take it in turns. It’s the strain, you know. Bad-tempered when they go, bad-tempered when they get back, and a little bit of peace in the middle. Is it worth it?’

The pling-plong of the woodland chimes sounded and Tony came into the hall.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’

‘Hi,’ said the women, cheering up.

It was late spring. The cold wet weather continued unseasonably into April. A few daffodils came up on the hills, but were paled and shredded by the winds, and if the birds sang no one stood about to hear. Meg stayed in the croft and continued to regard herself as a married woman, and to believe what Zelda had said. She was tempted to storm around Tony, shower him with gusts of blame and torrents of reproaches, but somehow it was all too grave and grown-up for that. She had to be still, for the baby’s sake. It was an easy pregnancy: she was fortunate.

Thompson grew more excitable, less controllable. He actually caught rabbits now, and came back bloodied, as if he too had reached man’s estate.

It’s all the men’s fault, thought Meg. All the bombs and the missiles and the schemes and the theories and the rival forms of government, and they make believe that the way to solve things is to see who can blow each other up best: all male, male and angry and mad.

If the Peace Women had still been there, she thought, she would have joined them. You couldn’t in the full flush of early sexual love, but you could later on: you could chant with the rest of them, ‘Take the toys from the boys.’ Oh yes, easily.

In the middle of April a strange thing happened. It was on a morning that had dawned so clear and still and fine that there was no mistaking winter had ended: and Meg could see that for weeks now, hidden by the windy, unseasonable veil, the spring had been preparing for its surprises. The trees, which only the day before had seemed lean and black, could today be seen to be plump and hazy with fresh green leaves. Peonies had sprung up where she’d thought there was nothing but brown earth: and there were pansies and polyanthus underfoot. Meg stood on the doorstep, her face raised to the warmth of the sun, and knew that summer and good times were coming. Thompson sat on the path and did the same. She saw now that every branch seemed to have a bird upon it; and a row of starlings sat on the dry-stone wall and that they too had their heads turned towards the warmth. And where the wall had crumbled to the ground sat a rabbit, perfectly still, and behind that a sheep, quietly staring in at her. The cat – borrowed from Amanda down at the library to keep the mice population down – jumped from the path to the windowsill, and sat there, and one or two of the assembled company twitched a little, but quickly settled again. It was as if all living creatures united in their pleasure in the day, in their relief that the hard times were over and the knowledge that good times were coming; and that all, in this, were equal and understood one another.

Thompson was the first to break the unnatural peace. He yelped and barked and shot after the rabbit. The sheep trotted off, the birds rose squawking, the cat disappeared into the bushes after them. The normal rules of kill or be killed reasserted themselves. It seemed, at least in the animal kingdom, a kind of game, to which everyone consented.

Meg blamed Thompson. When he came back from his chase, leaping and prancing and slavering, she hit him and shouted at him and chased him through the house, shrieking. Then she was ashamed of herself. Thompson crawled under the sofa and growled when she came near, and when she put her hand beneath it to make friends he snapped at her.

A little later the telephone rang. It was one of the local farmers, asking her to keep her dog under control. He was running the profit off his sheep. If it went on, he’d have to shoot him.

‘It’s not my dog,’ said Meg, feebly. ‘It’s my husband’s, and he’s away. He’s in the Navy.’ She thought that might soften his heart.

‘Aye, I know all about that,’ said the farmer. ‘And I know you’re pregnant, and I’m sorry for you, lass. But what are you Navy folk doing up here on our land? You’ve got your own world, you stick to it. Your dog’s your luxury. My sheep are my necessity. That dog’s an untrained working dog, and there’s nothing worse. He’d be better off dead.’

After that Meg kept Thompson in the house, or took him for walks on a lead, and in her heart Thompson and Timmy became the same thing, the same burden.

Down below the China Seas Jim said to Timmy, ‘What’s the matter, old man?’

‘Nothing’s the matter,’ said Timmy. He was surprised Jim had noticed anything: he saw himself as a bright clear day, sunny and smiling. The black clouds rolled and swirled about the edges of his unconscious, but with an effort of will he kept them back. Blue skies, smiling at me!

‘If it’s Zelda,’ said Jim, ‘don’t worry. I know all about that. These things happen. It’s all over now. Zelda doesn’t like me being in the Navy. It’s a half-life for a woman. They have a right to something more. So she has her revenge: then tells me. I don’t blame you, old man, and I don’t blame her.’

Timmy counted the sentences as Jim spoke them. Nine. He’d never known Jim say more than four in a row before. He was moved by a sense of the importance of the occasion, and presently felt a burden had gone from him he didn’t even know he had been carrying.

‘I wonder what the time is at home?’ he said.

The captain consulted a dial or so.

‘Eleven-thirty in the morning,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘Because that’s my time for contacting Meg,’ he said.

‘Telepathy?’ asked the captain. ‘The Ruskies do it all the time. I suppose we shouldn’t lag behind.’

Timmy listened in, but felt no answering call from Meg, and felt at once lost and vulnerable and said, ‘I suppose there are many innocent ways a man’s tie could get to be under one’s wife’s bed,’ and the captain said, ‘Quite so.’

‘I blame myself, sir,’ said Timmy.

‘That’s the secret to it all,’ said the captain. ‘Let’s drink to that!’

‘Drink, sir?’

‘Life is sweet,’ said the captain, ‘and a little white wine won’t do us any harm.’

He took down from the back of the shelf one of Zelda’s two canisters of white wine.

‘But, sir,’ said Jim, ‘it’s bœuf au poivre for dinner, with green peppers, not black, the way it ought to be. Shouldn’t we be drinking red?’

‘Desperate times, desperate measures!’ said the captain, opening one of the canisters of white wine. Then he pricked his finger with a needle and let a drop or two of blood fall inside. ‘Here’s to universal brotherhood!’ he said. ‘And to all our faults!’ The blood barely discoloured the wine so he added some drops of cochineal as well. ‘We’ll leave it a rosé,’ he said. ‘Compromise, that’s the thing.’

The midwife knocked upon Meg’s door and found her sitting grimly on a chair, Thompson’s lead wound round her wrist, and Thompson sitting at her feet, unwilling, and chafing and wild-eyed. He barked at the midwife, and strained to get to her, not to attack, but to welcome her in.

‘I should let the dog go,’ said the midwife. Meg did, and Thompson leapt forward and the midwife went towards him instead of cringing back, as most people did when faced with the noisy, welcoming Thompson, and thus managed to keep her balance. Presently Thompson calmed.

‘How long had you been sitting like that?’ she asked.

‘About an hour,’ said Meg. ‘But I know his moods. If I let him out when his eyes look like that, he goes straight after the sheep, and then he’ll get shot.’

‘It might be the best thing,’ observed the midwife.

‘Timmy would never forgive me,’ said Meg, who had begun to weep. She was seven months’ pregnant. She lay on the bed while the midwife felt round her belly.

‘You didn’t come down to the clinic,’ said the midwife, ‘so I thought I’d just pop up here to see if all was well, which it is.’

She took a casual look round the kitchen shelves to see if there was any food, which there was. But she still wasn’t easy.

‘Hubby away, I suppose,’ she said, ‘being Crew No. 2. And we mustn’t ask when he’s due back, must we?’

‘No, we mustn’t,’ said Meg. ‘And he couldn’t be fetched back, even if I were dying. Not that he’d want to be fetched. He might miss the end of the world, and he wouldn’t like that.’

‘Can your mother come and stay?’ asked the midwife.

‘She doesn’t like dogs,’ said Meg shortly. ‘And she doesn’t like Timmy, and she doesn’t like the Navy, and she told me this would happen and I said let me run my own life, Mother. And I don’t think she likes me either, come to think of it.’

‘What about your husband’s parents? You don’t seem to be in a state to be left alone.’

‘I hardly know them. What I do know, I don’t like. It’s mutual, I think.’

‘Isn’t there somebody who could take the dog?’

‘The dog is my responsibility. I’ll see it through if it kills me.’

‘Your legs are very scratched. Why is that?’

‘Because I was taking Thompson for a walk. He pulled me through some bushes.’

‘Put him in kennels.’

‘Timmy would never forgive me. Perhaps I should go into kennels and Thompson could have the bed all to himself. Until Timmy comes back. Then they’d share it and be perfectly happy. He only married me because he needed a kennel-maid.’

‘I think I’d better ring the doctor up,’ said the midwife. ‘I can’t leave you in this state.’

‘I’m not in a state,’ said Meg, weeping copiously. ‘I was only trying to entertain you. Pow! Three schoolboys with their fingers on the trigger. It’s all so funny!’

The midwife made Meg take a tranquillising pill, and Meg asked for a few extra for Thompson, but the midwife wouldn’t oblige. She said she’d return later with the doctor and Meg was to stay where she was.

But after the midwife had gone for half an hour or so, Meg gave in to Thompson’s whinings and snappings and put him on the lead and took him for a walk. Thompson walked sedately for a little but then started pulling and tugging, and finally wrenched the lead right out of her hand – or perhaps she just gave up holding it – and was off after a rabbit. She stood on the brow of the brackeny hill and looked down to a slight valley and a wooded culvert and then the hill rose again and on the opposite slope were sheep. She saw Thompson’s small shape pelting downhill: she watched him lose the rabbit in the undergrowth of the valley, and then saw him emerge the other side and stand for a while, watching the sheep.

‘But I knew this would happen,’ she said aloud. ‘It was bound to happen.’

And the sheep scattered as Thompson leapt amongst them, biting and yelping, and she saw a man with a gun coming over the top of the hill. She waved her arms and yelled and started running, but watched the gun being raised and pointed and saw a little puff and then heard a crack, and Thompson had jumped in the air and fallen, in slow motion, and the sheep spread out, away from the centre of the scene, as if interpreting some formal dance routine. And because she was looking at the farmer she didn’t watch where she was going, and tripped, with her foot in a rabbit hole, and fell; lost consciousness and, regaining it seconds later, felt a dreadful pain in her side and an even worse one in her head, for which she was totally responsible. She was manufacturing hate, and rage, and pain; all by herself, with enormous energy.

The farmer was putting his coat beneath her head. She felt her eyes cross and wary and her mouth pulled up in a sneer. He said something which ended, as so much did in these parts, ‘forbye’; and then his face had gone and so was he, and if she turned her head – her body being pinned by so much pain – she could see where Thompson lay. His skull was partly gone; bits of shredded flesh stuck to something which was white and presumably bone, and also bits of a kind of grey badly wrapped parcel, which was presumably brain; the seat of all Thompson’s troubles.

She was glad Thompson was dead. She hoped the baby was dying too, and then herself. She wanted the world to end: if she could have ended it then and there she would have. Pressed the button, finished it all. Ashes and dust and silence. The thought was so strong it seemed like an explosion in her head: not a sharp decent crack, like the one which had shattered Thompson, but a kind of reddish rumble, which presently carried consciousness away with it.

Zelda bent over her; she was in an ambulance. The midwife was there, too. She was knitting a white scarf with red stripes – as best she could, for the road was bumpy. An ambulance attendant studied his nails.

‘What is Timmy going to say?’ reproached Zelda. ‘Poor Thompson!’

‘Oh, shut up, Zelda,’ said Meg, automatically.

‘Is she coming round?’ asked the midwife.

‘She’s being very rude,’ said Zelda. ‘Is that the same thing?’

‘What happened?’ asked Meg.

‘Acute abdominal pain for no apparent reason,’ said the midwife. ‘It happens sometimes. Don’t worry, the foetal heart’s strong and steady: so’s yours.’

‘Did I dream it?’ asked Meg. ‘Is Thompson dead?’

‘Thompson’s dead,’ said Zelda. ‘What is Timmy going to say? You should have put him in kennels, Meg.’

‘Don’t persecute the wee lassie,’ said the midwife.

‘It’s the best thing for her,’ said Zelda. ‘I know her backwards. Look! It’s brought the colour back to her cheeks.’

Meg wept for Thompson.

‘I thought I’d blown up the world,’ she said, presently. ‘I’m glad it’s still here.’

‘Takes more than you, dear,’ said the midwife.

‘Three of us like me, and we might,’ said Meg, ‘all too easily,’ but the midwife didn’t take the reference. Zelda did. Zelda said, ‘Well, I’ll have no talk of the end of the world in front of the children. So far as I’m concerned their fathers are guarding our shores and protecting our future, not to mention paying the rent, and to say anything else is negativism. Women for the Bomb, that’s me!’

‘You’ve been seeing too much of Tony,’ said Meg.

‘I just hope,’ said Zelda, ‘that when my baby’s born it manages to look like Jim. So now you know.’

Meg spent the rest of the day in the Base hospital and in the evening they sent her home by ambulance. She kept thinking she saw Thompson, out of the corner of her eye; but when she looked fairly and squarely he wasn’t there. But his spirit lingered around the house, on the stairs and under the bed; and every door and window-frame had been scored by his strong claws.

The next morning Meg spoke to him seriously.

‘Thompson,’ she said, ‘you’re here and yet you’re not here. You’ll be off soon, I expect. Did you die for a purpose, to teach me a lesson? I feel there is something to be learned. I wish I knew more clearly what it was. I know I wasn’t grateful for what I had, and I should have been. I expected a humble, grateful, easy animal, who would consent to be loved, who could be controlled; and instead I had you. I wanted for a husband the projection of my own fantasies, and instead I had Timmy. No wonder he fought back. I thought it was other people who were angry and violent, not me; but it wasn’t so. It was me as well. It’s never them, is it? It’s us.’

And she was silent, and seemed to hear Thompson’s patient, heavy breathing.

‘Thompson,’ she said, ‘take your spirit out of here, and go to the bottom of the sea, where the big silent ships glide in and out, and tell your master I’m sorry.’

Down on Polaris two Routines came through. One was from the Family News Service. The captain put it in a folder and said nothing.

‘I know it’s for me, sir. Is it Meg? Is she all right?’

‘Perfectly all right.’

‘Then what is it, sir? Is it Thompson?’

‘Custom is, my boy, to keep bad news to the last day of the tour. Since there’s nothing one can do about it—’

But Jim told him.

‘Thompson was shot by a farmer. He’d been worrying the sheep.’

Timmy was silent for a while. The smell of chicken à l’ail – chicken stuffed with twenty heads of garlic, and simmered in stock – filled the galley and indeed the rest of the boat. It was a comforting smell.

‘Poor Meg,’ was what Timmy said. ‘Poor Meg! All alone up there without even a dog to keep her company. At least I’ll be home for the birth.’

‘I think I’ll just about miss Zelda’s,’ said Jim, thankfully. ‘I’m not much good at childbirth.’

The second Routine was from Operations Base and told them to make for home at all speed. The captain passed the news on to the Engine Room and opened the second canister of Zelda’s wine and again he added a little blood, in the interests of universal brotherhood, and a little cochineal: they drank, and Jim carved. The cooked garlic cut and tasted somewhere between fresh young turnip and good potato. They savoured that, and the good red wine. It was half past eleven. (Dinner had drifted earlier and earlier, through the tour. Hunger seemed to gnaw more anxiously as the weeks passed.)

‘“Go thy way, saith the preacher,”’ quoted the captain. ‘“Eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart, for God now accepteth thy works.’”

Timmy, it being time, thought of Meg and heard a dog barking. It was so firm and real and loud a noise he looked round for its source.

‘Sir,’ said Timmy, ‘do you hear a dog barking?’

‘I hear no barking,’ said the captain. ‘How could I? We are under the sea.’

But whether it was the agreeable sound of the banana and rum fritters frying; or the richness of the red forbidden wine – or perhaps indeed the spirit of poor murdered Thompson touched him – at any rate, presently the captain said—

‘You know, if a Routine came through to push those buttons, I wouldn’t! What, and lose all this?’