Her Victory (21 page)

He couldn't read with his mind on the spin and half-way round the ratchets, even
Our Mutual Friend
and only a third through the tale. His bald dome with border of reddish hair shone with raindrops on the window glass. He saw his face and didn't much care that he considered it ugly, especially the wide, somewhat flattened nose, broken while boxing and again in a shindig with one of the crew as second mate.

The train ran through darkness and he cupped his hands on the glass to look at stars in the clearing sky. The stars are dead but give light, yet never quite dead because they guide us at sea. Not everything is death. Not all is without purpose, not even me, though I'm damned if I know at the moment what it is.

In spite of a few trips around the islands of Central America his face was pale. Beer-smelling breath bounced, so he pressed the black flake into brown straw between his fingers and filled his pipe.

There was no one to think about except his aunt, who had lived in a large flat in Madeira Square. He had first climbed the stairs at fourteen, to stay a few days after she had written to the orphanage that she was his aunt and had better see him. He felt he had climbed more steps in that building than he ever had at sea, and wondered how she had managed as a woman of eighty. Age must find strength, ashes of heart and muscle proving that all isn't over by a long shot. On his last visit he adjusted his cap, and pressed the bell which he remembered had been sticky as if someone had previously called with jam on their fingers. Most were elderly people, and the stairs smelled of dog and cat piss rather than of cooking food.

But she could see the sea from her lounge windows. ‘I got your Marconigram, so knew you were on your way. Probably saw your ship as I was having breakfast!'

At the end of every voyage there was no one else to visit. As a young man he had dreaded seeing her though called just the same, but got berths that kept him longer and longer away. Then he wondered and worried as she aged, and tried not to be more than three months absent, expecting every sight of her to be his last. Each time she kept him a full minute at the door as if to remind him that if it weren't for him she would still have a sister, and he should never forget it.

At the first visit from the orphanage, she had been in her forties, a big old woman trying to frighten him. She had always kept him waiting, yet he never missed seeing her when ashore, which puzzled him often enough, except there was no one else to call on. If she hadn't existed, any other country in the world would have had as equal a claim to be called Home as England.

In the Western Approaches he would get the Sparks to send a telegram via Land's End Radio, as if such personal signals were vital for the ship's navigation, or part of his own safety precautions. He didn't know why, but the closer he came to shore the more he knew there was no option but to visit her. When on watch he allowed himself to think of nothing but the ship, so he was happy not knowing. Otherwise he slept, or listened to music in his cabin on the hi-fi system Clara had given him, one of the birthday gifts since he first went to sea, each preceded by a greetings telegram telling him what to expect. Wherever he was, the message and the package always found him, and during the war they waited at the company's office.

2

At fourteen, stiff in his orphanage clothes and smelling of his own strong soap, he had stood in her large sitting-room among plush furniture, pictures and knick-knacks, and a cage of bright yellow birds that never stopped calling and whistling. He had wavy gingerish hair and soft brown eyes, a few freckles on skin that was otherwise pale. He couldn't look directly at her, his cowardice remembered yet at the present time understood.

She sat in an armchair, and left him standing for half an hour. The tall pendulum clock which told him so was the only object he felt humanly close to. The birds talked to the room and to each other, and the woman who was supposed to be his aunt would never speak at all, so it seemed, though she looked at him.

Beyond the bay of the big second-floor window where she made him stand (and he wondered afterwards, remembering the way she was looking at him when he had the courage to glance at her, whether it hadn't been some sort of plan) he could see a sheet of grey flat water down the square and across the promenade which seemed to lift like a hillside as if some barrier on the beach was stopping it rushing into the streets and destroying the town. The sight was scary, but there was nothing else worth looking at. A wide high sea expanded across the world with no land beyond. He stared as long as he thought his eyes were not getting crossed, hoping that when he turned back to the clock at least another minute would have gone by.

The water was the English Channel. He knew it from geography, and that France lay on the other side, but he imagined the sea went right to the South Pole across thousands of miles of ocean that got dark at night and had shining stars over it. There were lit-up ships there, liners, merchantmen, tankers and tramp steamers, and when you got to the ice you would find men fighting with giant whales as in
Moby Dick
, and when God wasn't
for
them He was
against
them, and from within the hidden nine-tenths of an iceberg lurking underwater, He rose up to destroy men in order to show them His power while Jonah sat in the whale's mouth and looked on in awe yet wondered whether to come out and take a chance on life.

The favoured victims struggled in a fearful sea of grey waves. There was daylight but no sky. The only colour was blood when harpoons struck and the sea monster struggled and died, or the great ice-saw of an iceberg's side ripped the life out of ships and men, as in the grey engravings of a ‘Penny Dreadful' yarn. He watched it from the window, then opened his eyes wider to see whether or not it had happened, and saw only the calm sea and, some miles out, several steamers. The superstructure on one ship was so high he thought it a white building on the coast of France. He made up his mind during that half hour what course his life would take, and he knew he would never alter it.

He would go to sea. With neither father nor mother, he would become a sailor and live on a ship.

‘Did you hear what I said?'

‘No, Aunt Clara.'

‘I said don't they ever let you sit down at that orphanage? You can sit down, if you care to.'

He chose one of the hardest chairs, as if a sailor wouldn't want anything softer. ‘They do at meals, and in class.'

‘
Not
on that one. It isn't strong enough for a big boy like you.' She pointed to a sofa whose curved legs, he said to himself, looked as if they wouldn't support his big toe. But he did as he was told, sitting stiffly in his walking-out suit, and enclosed within his own carbolic whiff, at which she wrinkled her nose. ‘We shall have to do something with you.'

He glanced at the window, thinking she meant with his life, and that this was the reason for his excursion from the orphanage. ‘I'd like to go to sea, and be a sailor.'

‘Yes, you
would
. Just
wouldn't
you?' Her voice was so angry that he felt crippled by his mistake. She saw it, and smiled for the first time. ‘I meant that we shall have to do something with you after tea. There's a concert on the pier. Would you like to go?'

He didn't care, but knew he must say yes, which was what she wanted him to say. Therefore, he wanted to say it. The maid brought in tea, with biscuits and chocolate cake, and fish-paste and cucumber sandwiches.

‘Don't gobble,' Aunt Clara said. Her most stinging words came quietly and in a nice voice. ‘You're not a turkey. Gobble like that, and I'll call you Graham Gobble!'

When he smiled, sternness replaced her amusement. He had eaten porridge and bacon at breakfast, but wouldn't say he'd had nothing since, first because he daren't, and then because he couldn't, and lastly because he wouldn't. But he stopped gobbling. He had been hungry, and you had to do something when there was nothing to talk about. He glanced again at the window, as if the only safety lay beyond, thinking he'd like to smash his way out. It was better at the orphanage, which he liked because he was used to things there.

‘So you want to go to sea?' Her anger was not yet gone.

He felt like a wall that would never be pushed down. ‘Yes, Aunt Clara.'

The boys would say: What's she like? Does she have big tits? She's an old woman, he would tell them, but the scoff was good.

‘I suppose it makes sense.' She called for the maid: ‘Eunice!'

He tried not to laugh at her name when she came in, but knew even so that he'd reddened.

‘You'd better take that cake away or he'll eat it all, and make himself disgustingly sick.'

Sarcasm ran off him like water. He didn't care what she said. They had already eaten it but for a few crumbs, which she picked up between her fingers, rolled into a ball, and pressed into the birdcage. He decided she must be having a joke in telling the maid to take the cake away or he'd be sick. ‘What makes sense, Aunt Clara?'

The maid, nearer his own age, had bobbed fair hair, and he could tell the boys about how, as she came to the table, she winked at him, and that when she was close he could smell her scent.

‘Your father was a cook on a transatlantic liner, as far as we could make out. But there was nothing we could do about it. Not that we would have wanted to. Father tried to find out, but it was a big liner.'

She must hate him, but he would take no notice. Instead of puzzling out why she forever said such things he wondered whether the maid's room was close to his. He'd have to tell the boys
something
when he got back. She came into my bed. She
did
, I tell you. He thought his parents had died when he was born. That's what he'd told himself. He hadn't known anything except that he had no parents. Now he knew that his father had been a cook on a liner. He must have been a chef wearing a white hat and an apron. His mother was the sister of this woman who was his aunt.

She pointed to a large photograph on the flat-topped piano. ‘I thought I'd better get it out for when you came.'

He walked over to see. She was certainly better-looking than the maid, or his aunt.

‘You feature her,' she said, ‘that's one good thing, except for the hair, and the
nose
. Ugh!'

Good or not, he didn't care. The woman was thinner than his aunt, as she looked across at some horses in a field. The maid had eyes that were almost closed, and a narrow mouth that couldn't open. Even when she smiled its size didn't alter, though he thought she liked him.

‘In any case, by the time you were born half the cooks had gone to other ships. She died in a hotel.'

He thought she was going to cry because her voice went low and her lips shook, so he hoped the maid would come back because he wouldn't know what to do. ‘How did she die?'

‘Of natural causes.'

She lied. ‘Why did I get sent to the orphanage?'

She would never tell the truth, but one day he'd find out. ‘Ask your grandfather,' she snapped.

‘Isn't he dead?'

‘Yes. There was no one to bring you up. Your uncle was killed in the Great War, and we couldn't be doing with you. Father died soon after. The whole business broke his heart.'

The idea was laughable, but he kept his lips firm. He didn't care what happened, or who he was. He was himself, and that was all that mattered. An oil painting hung above the mantelshelf, of an officer in smart khaki, the grey barrel of a howitzer behind. The face looked unreal, as dead as the man was dead, with dark hair and full lips and slightly protruding eyes. The oftener Tom glanced the more artificial it looked, as if he wasn't absolutely dead but only waiting for one good reason to come back to life. He would jump out of a Christmas stocking, and kill everybody with a revolver.

The teachers had been in the Great War. Cranky Dick had a wooden leg. Old Pepper-pot had half an arm gone, though he was good at throwing the stick with the other if he thought you weren't listening. The matron had her husband blown to bits and no known grave, but it was more than twenty forever-years ago. Passion Dale, they called it. Or Mons, Arrers, Wipers. Poppy Day came round and they had to stand still for two minutes. A poppy in every hat, and he always had a sixpenny big one to wear, for his uncle, he now supposed, the money every year being specially sent. And nobody had told him, but now he knew.

‘Your grandfather said he would never recover from losing John, but he did. He said the same about your mother, and he didn't.'

You've got to die some time. Everybody had. He must have died because he was old enough to die. The maid smiled from the doorway. Then she winked. He liked her for that. She put her tongue out at his aunt. That was even better.

‘And I stayed single to look after him. There's no other way in life.' Her voice was suddenly shrill: ‘If you do that again, Eunice, I'll send you away.'

Tom felt his cheeks redden, as if he had connived in the maid's prank. Clara had seen her reflection in the bulge of a shiny vase. ‘And stop your winking. There's nothing wrong with your eyes. Unless you have conjunctivitis as well as St Vitus' Dance! Go and wash the tea things.' She turned to him: ‘Can you swim?'

Those over thirteen had gone to Dovercourt for a week last summer. He had learned, with a lifebelt. ‘Yes.'

‘That's a blessing.' She stood. ‘Now wash your hands and face, then we'll get our coats and go to the pier. We shall be late if we don't hurry.'

She made him wash with scented soap. She couldn't put up with carbolic, she said. But it was all he'd ever used.

The water was pink, and seemed still to have the same ships on it as before. As if unmoving, their spring-coils of smoke were fixed for ever. There was a calmness out there, but he couldn't go yet. While laughing at the jokes, with the tide rushing in under the pier supports, and huge banks of white water flooding across the darkening shingle, one part of him pictured ships over the water of a wide ocean, with no land to be seen. His Aunt Clara would write to the orphanage and say that he should go to sea. The promise wasn't yet made, but he knew she would see it done. If not, he'd run away.