Authors: Derek Beaven
‘I’m not scared.’ I took the bagged toad from my blood-red swimming shorts, and wrapped the paper more tightly about it.
Baked yellow mud, silica-bright and glazing in the midwinter sun, was ring-framed in the porthole of Penny’s cabin; guarded by soldiers – as if anyone should want it. I stuffed the toad mummy between the sheets of the lower bunk, made good, and turned to Finlay as if to agree on immediate escape. She made me stop and listen at the door for the sounds of pursuit.
‘Why don’t we stay here? They’ll never find us.’
If I recall the smells and flavours of the room, and see now the speckle of face-powder spilled on a photo frame’s corner, how is it I am at such a loss for what occurred between us in those next few moments.
Did
something occur? I have the sense of disgracing myself, of taking some foolish advantage of her willingness to delay. ‘If you show me yours’? I am ashamed. I cannot be sure what I did. Nor how she reacted. I do remember that, overwhelmed by something, I grabbed for the door handle and ran out, straight into the religious-bearded and sports-jacketed bulk of Mr Tingay.
‘Look to it there, young shaver!’ he said, like a character in a schoolhouse yarn, and gripped me by the shoulder. ‘Watch where you’re going,’ he added, as Finlay came flying out after me. ‘Mind you behave yourselves, you two.’ He bruised on past us in the narrow corridor, then turned. ‘Did you enjoy your Sunday school?’
‘Oh, yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
Finlay giggled. Then it was all right between us after all.
He paused a moment before turning to go. ‘Good. Good. Carry on, then.’
As he turned the bend of the corridor by the bathroom, I said in a loud whisper, ‘Maybe the Abos will cook him and eat him.’
But she lifted her nose preciously. ‘He’s doing good work.’ Then changed again; I was beginning to know her fickleness. ‘He’d feed a good few of the bastards.’
It is a matter of a hundred miles or so from Port Said to Suez. Not all of that held the
Armorica
in so strict an embrace as the word ‘Canal’ might imply. There comes the Great Bitter Lake, and then the Little Bitter Lake, where the water, opened out, eats back into the land. They are hardly oases, and the convoy of which we were a member plodded resolutely across them until the banks drew in again for the final run of the cut. It was not so much hot as drily unforgiving. Our throats were like sandpaper.
But at last the
Armorica
, having paused briefly at Bûr Taufiq to make contact with the shore authorities, burst in the Sunday night from her confinement, and entered the Gulf of Suez, duct of the Red Sea. And by chilly dawn she was quite back in her element, making her accustomed twenty-one knots. The Red Sea itself, almost a lake, forms part perhaps of a continuing Canal, which only reluctantly yields up its passagers through the rocky teeth of Aden, over a thousand miles to the south.
Robert’s agitation did not decrease, it merely became more diffuse. He found no opportunity to prosecute his interests with Penny, nor was he entirely certain he wished to. Perversely, after the intense awareness that had occurred between them at Port Said, he set about forbidding himself her sight. He stalked the lonelier spaces of the vessel like an outcast.
There had been a housey-housey session during the last sunlit crawl through the flat land; Robert did not attend. He was absent from dinner, too, and asked for something to be brought to his cabin. All that evening he had studied in the Festival-of-Britain-style library, with its bright distracting patterns, its modern armchairs and coffee-tables. He made notes unremittingly. The air was full of cigar smoke from a four at bridge. It hung in wreaths.
Later, despairing, he had taken down the heaviest tome on the glazed shelves and put himself to reading it – for the duration of the voyage, if necessary. So, at eleven, carrying his Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
like a millstone under his arm, he had returned to his cabin and been unfairly abrupt with Joe. Pent in the upper bunk he was acutely conscious of his cabin-mate’s laboured breathing.
At midnight through the frame of the bed he felt the exact surge of the engines picking up again to full ahead, and was reminded by the renewed rattle of the door catch of that nervous first night out of England in the Channel. How far away the small damp country felt – as recalled through the windscreen perhaps of a cramped black car, grumbling, wipers sporadically on, a cocoon of dank leather. Those number-coded arterial roads he would never see again, advertisement hoardings, urban peeling-under-cloud sunsets reduced to postcard size. He allowed the impressions to follow one another. Nothing more than fragments of imagery leaving town: concrete street lights, a woman whose bicycle had a stretched, tie-on skirt shield, depressing semi-detached houses keeping pace with the road in a double ribbon, glimpses sideways through drizzled dusk into electric-lit rooms, roadhouses, poor cafes set back, a framed miniature waitress in her cap and apron. Going north. Going nowhere; to the industrial outlands if you drove far enough. He shook off the dust of all that.
He wondered whether it was hot or cool in the cabin, whether he should reach up and adjust the little air-conditioning nozzle overhead. No. He pulled the covers around him – and then threw them off. He could have anything he wanted.
How he loathed England’s already potent nostalgia for rationing and the Blitz. It was the Blitz that had broken open the East End; everyone pretended to be a damned Londoner now. Except the actual Cockneys who came flooding out, uncomfortable, into the green fields. A whippet-skinny woman in a turban for her curlers, standing at a prefab’s door. Harlow, Stevenage, in ready-to-stain cement. The tawdry, sugary popular songs. The trash and stuffiness of television. Bicycle chains, flick-knives. How glad he was to be away.
As dawn broke in the Red Sea the Lascars put out reclining chairs on the promenade deck. Exhausted at ten thirty-three in the morning, according to his faithful oblong watch, Robert flung himself on to one of them. He judged the sun half warm enough at last to still his relentless pacings. To himself he denied it was a strategy of thrusting himself in her way without the responsibility of speaking, or even looking.
In the afternoon there would be frog racing, that ludicrous petty gambling set-up where you worked a board, painted into the likeness of a compressed frog, along the dance floor by means of a rope. He opened his telemetry manual, smashed it down on the planking beside him as incomprehensible, and took up the Gibbon:
These voluntary exiles were engaged, for the most part, in the occupations of commerce, agriculture, and the farm of the revenue. But after the legions were rendered permanent by the emperors, the provinces were peopled by a race of soldiers; and the veterans, whether they received the reward of their service in land or in money, usually settled with their families in the country where they had honourably spent their youth. Throughout the empire, but more particularly in the western parts, the most fertile districts, and the most convenient situations, were reserved for the establishment of colonies; some of which were of a civil, and others of a military nature. In their manners and internal policy the colonies formed a perfect representation of their great parent; and as they were soon endeared to the natives by the ties of friendship and alliance, they effectually diffused a reverence for the Roman name, and a desire, which was seldom disappointed, of sharing, in due time, its honours and advantages.
Midwinter in London is quite different from midwinter off Alexandria. Midwinter nudging through upper Egypt is warm, dry, not unpleasant – temperate you might say. What Robert neglected was that the
Armorica
had been forging southward all night at full speed. Midwinter off Mecca was tropical.
Robert’s dream was like a Bible story with water-colour illustrations – like those in the school Bible he had when he was a boarder, a little boy away from home. He had become very pious then, and taken to poring over the pictures for comfort. A man in a blanket sat at the roadside, with his wares laid out for sale. Robert was choosing a weapon. A woman’s husband was forcing him into a duel. Behind the Arab some Israelites, or were they Ishmaelites, pulled at the arm of a shaduf, bringing up water from a well.
Penny Kendrick was walking alone, along the bank of the Suez Canal. There was a pyramid close by; and a palm tree. In her arms she held a baby, swaddled, or mummified. She was looking for her husband. She poked about in the reeds and bulrushes every now and then. He was down there somewhere. Under the water, possibly dead. Her dress was of a filmy white gauze, pleated, gathered to her shape.
Robert was very close to her in the dream. He was almost under her beautiful white garment. He could smell her skin. He was intimate with her, yet he could see her at the same time. He could almost feel lovemaking, yes, he was sure of it, they were entwined. She was very beautiful to him, very desirable. The angled light of the stars was woven around her.
There was a terrible shudder in the water, hardly a yard from their feet. A huge crocodile, suddenly emergent, struck. He did not see the jaws, he saw the dark plates and ridges along its back snaking and lashing the water; then came the frenzy of its roll, the yellow – green underbelly, glistening and delicately put together, glimpsed in an unforgettable flash of movement.
The sky was black with a kind of unholy rain. The rain was metal. It was on fire. It was glistening, oily, like tar.
Robert was lead-lined in a coffin, among the various grave goods, the extraordinary pictures on the wall, the inscrutable hieroglyphics. He could feel how hot it was, burning, scarring, like the skin of a crocodile. His body was wide open, yet he felt nothing. There were men and women who leaned over him. They would make him pure in spirit. They held instruments, a curved knife, a hook, a soldering iron, and peered inside the cavity below his ribcage. They would take out the last of his body, his brain, his mind. Preserve him against pain and decay.
They looked scornfully at his liver. They painted the walls with his pulped innards, and kept back some of the scrapings in a dish, for him to eat. Like food in a hospital kidney dish, in a sauce. Somewhere, far away, there was an explosion, bright as the sun. Mary Garnery, someone he had spoken to over coffee, came in and placed herself in profile. A voice said, ‘She has been put in an intolerable position.’
Situated on D deck, off the foyer that led to the dining-room, were the two shops, the counter that gave access to the purser in his office, and the hairdressing salon – where Cheryl had her appointment. Lucas left them there after breakfast. Penny and Cheryl drifted about among the clothes for a while, pulling out a few of the scarves, discussing a bag or two, very expensive, kid, crocodile, finest calf and so on, until, with these informalities complete, it seemed reasonable to go and sit down together in the hairdresser’s.
‘Of course in Africa we were spared all that. I’m a sun lover. I bloom in it. Lucas had this farm in Rhodesia. Imagine, just nineteen and he comes into his own farm. His father spent all those years building it up, out of virgin bush really, you know; and he thought he’d be stuck there for life – until he met me. It was what he’d been raised to. I was up seeing some boyfriend or other. Actually we met at the VJ night dance. Couldn’t take our eyes off each other. Or our hands. Talk about virgin bush – my dear! Oops. Don’t mind me, I’m always outrageous. I can’t help it, darling. That’s how I am.’
Penny smiled and nodded. Cheryl was so easy about everything. Her little laughs and looks were like racy punctuation.
‘But for all I was crazy about him, Penny, I wasn’t going to stay being little boss country wife. There are more things in this world than watching your black boys bringing in tobacco, for goodness’ sake. And he was just itching to be off, himself. I could see that all right. I knew it – he just hadn’t told himself how bored all those acres made him until I came along.’
The hairdresser was finishing up with his client. ‘He’ll be ready for you in just a moment, madam,’ said the girl. ‘Can I get you tea?’
Cheryl nodded. ‘Thanks. We sold up, Lucas and me. Headed south. Penny, we really hit town. Haven’t stopped since. Just not the same town, my dear. Of course, you have to find the right crowd. Otherwise it can all seem frightfully stuffy, can’t it? We didn’t stay long in the Cape. Lucas met a man in a hotel and got offered something in the Gold Coast, would you believe? What we’re supposed to refer to now as Ghana, isn’t it? I can’t get used to all that, Penny, can you? White man’s grave. And white woman’s, darling. If they hate us so much, all right. We’ll pull out and see where that leaves them. We’ve tried to do our bit, God knows. Let them get on with it. Let them eat each other. That’s what I say. Rather us than the Germans. Or the Portuguese. My dear, they don’t know how lucky they are. But they won’t be told. You can’t tell them anything any more. Let them find out for themselves, then.’
She picked up a magazine, and then put it down again. ‘I kept thinking, would I be the only girl? For miles? All very well. But we were young. We didn’t care. Off we went. You know me, game for anything, go anywhere. Turned out it wasn’t much after all. But that didn’t matter. Ran into some Americans. Now they were really nice boys. And it wasn’t the money – we had enough of that. You can live so cheaply in Africa, darling.’
Cheryl made a musical, joking sigh, and rolled her eyes. She glanced briefly at the two other customers waiting.