Her Victory (23 page)

Her voice quavered out of the silence. ‘Don't you visit other people?'

That had nothing to do with it. He spoke what was in his mind. There was no other person. He had met women from Galveston to Manila, from Durban to Seattle, even saw some of them more than once, but he had no one else except his aunt because that was the way he liked it. Happiness was in moving across the waters of the world, shooting the sun and the evening star when you could see them, and plotting your position on the chart. When the ship moved and he enjoyed a smoke and thought of everything that had happened to him, or about nothing in particular, he was happy, if that's what it was called, though it had sometimes seemed that all his lifetime's journeying through the cloven wave was an effort to find the dark place he had come from.

When the ship was in harbour or calm waters he could sit between watches on a deckchair outside his cabin and, savouring the homilies while remembering the perils and rough passages, browse through the copy of the Bible given as a parting gift – or shot – by the orphanage. There were also log books and almanacks, pilot books and books of tables in the chart room, but in his cabin were a dozen paperback novels to be read on a voyage and left behind. She was right, however. He had no one else.

‘Loyalty has always been thought much of in our family,' she said, ‘but you should find a young woman and get married. I should think you've had enough of the sea by now.'

She had prised him into his career, and wanted to manoeuvre him out of it. ‘Don't you think it's respectable any more for me to be at sea?'

‘I never did,' she returned quickly. ‘You chose it.'

She hadn't married, because she had looked after her father till he died. It was too late to marry then, even if she had wanted to. The strong-minded don't need excuses. They are one big excuse for doing exactly as they like. ‘If I left the sea,' he said, ‘there'd be nothing else I could do by way of occupation.'

‘A married man is always busy.' She make-believed, to pass the empty hours and keep herself lively.

‘I shall need to earn my living for that kind of expensive life. In any case, I'm fifty. What woman wants an old salt like me?'

She snorted, and held herself from speaking, waiting for him to say more. But he wouldn't go on, believing that if he didn't pursue the topic she would not. Perhaps whatever was on her mind was already settled. That was often the way she made decisions, and why he accepted them. Her combination of loyalty and pride was a knife-edged weapon that she could walk on even in bare feet, and pull him along after her. Her hidden and unqualified assumptions had strengthened his emptiness to such an extent that those he worked with considered him hard and ungiving. He remembered how a third mate had once said so to his face.

His overnight room was always ready. She told him to go to sleep before his face fell in the ashtray. The only thing about him that she didn't seem to regard with contempt was his silence.

4

He would call at a pub by the docks, and stay an hour before walking the last few hundred yards through the gates and along the quay, a procedure which would keep him teetotal and morose throughout the voyage. The last evening ashore would blot out the effects of his leave. He'd empty his mind of any sentiment at being on land and seeing people among whom he might one day hope to live.

The more poignant the regrets the better. Walking along tree-lined London crescents of shabby houses, he noted each passing face. Even the flattest and ugliest seemed to have more life than his own, a fact which didn't strike him as remarkable, merely a point to observe. Perhaps no one felt life's heavy imprint on their own face, though he imagined that his sea experiences during five years of war had marked his features in some way or other. Yet when he passed a man of about fifty, who might also have served on a Murmansk convoy, his face seemed only to show the ordinary marks of those who hadn't been in the war at all. Faces were divided into those that showed the spirit within, and those that concealed it, he thought, unwilling to decide which case he fitted into.

The fact that he would not stay at sea had taken long enough to enter his heart, though in the making of such decisions time – and wisdom – had no meaning. Twenty or thirty years seemed little more than a few days. A day on an Arctic convoy could pass, if that was the word, like a decade without leaving any wisdom in its wake. What remained in the soul after a fortnight of such days was a further emphasis of those characteristics which had allowed him to survive without going off his head.

It was no time for the imbibing of sagacity when ships were sinking into the icy sea and their crews had no chance of being saved before the pitiless cold drew them under, and knowing that without warning your ship could be next from either subs or bombers. You battened down the hatches of your spirit and zig-zagged through turmoil. Any notion of becoming wise through such experience would have added to the dangers by spoiling your set purpose of wanting to be alive at the end of the voyage while in every way performing your duty. Whether you got hit by machine-guns or shrapnel, or somersaulted under into the cold-dark without warning, was decided by something too far off for you ever to comprehend or take advantage of. Otherwise, you were kept going by the practical considerations of your trade, and that was that.

When solacing himself in Murmansk with a bottle of vodka he recalled telling his Aunt Clara as a boy that he didn't want to go into the Royal Navy because such a fleet fought battles. There was no other word for what he had just come through except a massacre, because only a few broken and damaged ships came into port of the dozens that set out.

As he walked by the stalls of an East End market such recollections did not make him glad to be alive. They'd happened too long ago, and connected him to a shadowy self he had once been and wanted to forget.

The lack of such punctuating experiences in life would have made his progress seem like walking through a mist without landmarks. There had been too few, in any case, to prove that he wasn't. Nothing much had occurred since then. Every event that promised to be memorable had turned out to be no more than routine. If he hadn't been fifty years of age he would have hoped that something vital though in no way perilous might still happen for him to believe himself as fully alive as most people passing on the street.

When on shore he walked through whatever town he happened to be in. A rickshaw man who followed him in Penang, hoping for a fare, had refused to take no for an answer. Tom made his way to the Botanical Gardens in his own peculiar half-swaying naval stride, the rickshaw man continually pestering him to get in and be towed there. Tom hardly noticed him, nor even his own sweat from the steam-kettle heat, but finally, still unwilling to ride, he gave the man a few dollars and sent him away.

The monkeys looped their tails over a branch and swung towards him. He bought pink bananas and fed them. One claw came too close to his shirt and he was quick enough to land a blow at the head without being bitten. He laughed at his luck, as the monkey ran to the top of the tree. Then he made his way to the City Lights dance hall in town for a few drinks and a hugger-mugger embrace with a taxi-dancer, before walking as upright as was possible back to his rust-sided ship.

There was no such thing as rest. There was only sleep and work, otherwise you walked, and refreshed yourself by food and booze before going back on board. He was not shy with women but could never see himself on shore with job, wife and children. A few affairs had lasted a voyage or two, but after the third call lack of interest had been mutual, and there were no more letters. He was thankful that the one or two women he had imagined himself in love with at the time of getting his third mate's ticket had not taken him seriously.

Work, duty and the ability to endure were no self-sacrifice, since he gained as much by, them as he gave. There was no fairer bargain. Work meant a mind emptied of all possible problems, scooped clean except for those connected with the job in hand. Even on a calm day, crossing the Arabian Sea in good visibility and heading for Colombo, there was enough to observe from the bridge to prevent any of life's considerations getting a firm hold.

Towards dawn, on the surface of a lacquered sea, he could look from the stars down to the horizon for a first sight of the sun. Peace spanned his life, and surrounded him with a tranquillity that held off the forces of battle not yet unleashed. When they threatened on shore he endeavoured to walk them into the ground, to exhaust his body and stave off the night about to overwhelm him – going eventually into the nearest bar to drink his mind into such chaos that sense had no chance of alarming him.

The blue, dark sea turned choppy in the Malacca Passage. The mountains of island and mainland were covered with forest and barely ten miles apart. The ship had steamed into a zone of jellyfish whose grey shield-tops lay close together and covered the whole area from shore to shore. He had seen miles of them down the Malacca Straits, but never as many as in this narrow place. He looked through binoculars at the steep dense woods, then slowly back towards the ship across the living masses of jellyfish.

Fresh from sleep and a shower, in his laundered white uniform, he had the sensation of falling and hitting the sea in their midst, his body dissolving by the force of their electricity and poison.

He was drowning, the thrust of salt water up the nostrils and into the mouth as he corkscrewed slowly with closed eyes into the darkness. Tentacles of jellyfish wrapped around him so thickly they became a shroud he could not get out of, and he saw himself as an infant taken to the orphanage accompanied by the photographed face of his mother.

Memories struggled to get into his consciousness before vanishing with him for ever. He smelled the walls and tiles, sinks and toilets and blankets, the soap and the food, as well as the perfume and perspiration of whoever had carried him. He relived her clean clothes and salt tears so elaborately that he was threatened by a greater extinction than that of dropping overboard: a fear of the unstoppable reversal of life back to what was too painful to know about.

He perceived as many long-buried revelations from his past as he dared, part of him willing to go deeper providing the mysteries of his life would be explained; but a tighter grip on his binoculars brought him back to thoughts of duty and work, and the impossibility of making a choice which might cost so much that he would not survive to enjoy the results.

The wooden rail was sticky with his sweat and the salt sea air. He brought the binoculars to his side, and turned his gaze towards the mainland of Sumatra. A Dutch passenger ship passed close from the opposite direction. People on deck waved greetings. A white point of signal light flashed its name from the bridge telling where it had come from and its destination:
‘ORANJE – BATAVIA – AMSTERDAM'
. He read the message aloud so as to keep control of himself, each dot and dash a thumb-tack stabbing the brain to reality. The sight of the morsed light and the voice of the man on his own ship reading the words like an echo brought him back to the fringes of his ordered life. He began to sway. He fought, but his legs were weak. He was watched by Sedgemoor at the wheel.

‘All right, sir?'

He walked a few paces without falling.

‘Touch of the sun,' he called, loud and clear.

Sedgemoor knew what he was talking about. ‘Singapore will cure it, sir!'

‘Think so?'

He laughed, a belly-laugh from somewhere in Kent. ‘Cures everything, sir, me and the lads say, if you know where to go.'

He once asked Sedgemoor where he did roam on his shore leave there, and with a ferocious wink that could have boded no one any benefit, he replied that he was ‘off with the others to get fixed up with a nice orgy'.

He laughed. ‘But what about curing the cure, Sedgemoor?'

‘Don't know about that, sir. But it ain't been necessary yet, touch wood.'

5

He went up on the lift. Trolleys were pushed along the corridor by shouting orderlies who seemed to be clattering the lids of dinner-wagons or linen-tins with deliberate relish. He wondered how anyone could die peacefully in such a bedlam. Though it was day outside, the lights within were not bright enough, and the noise offended him.

A nurse saw him standing, cap in hand and holding a bunch of neatly petalled roses. ‘Can I help you?'

‘You mean to sort this lot out?'

‘More than anybody dare do.'

A sheen of dark hair showed under her cap. She had bright eyes and well-rounded cheeks. ‘I'm to see my aunt,' he told her. ‘Name of Miss Phillips.'

A little circular watch was pinned at her breast. ‘Have you come far?'

He wanted to hold her arm, or take her by the waist. The impulse was so strong that he had to step back. ‘West Indies this time. I got in this morning.'

‘Lucky you!'

He glimpsed into a ward and saw patients in dressing-gowns sitting by beds or strolling about. ‘It was work.'

‘You see all those exotic places, though.'

‘From the bridge. Or through a porthole.' He had nothing to lose, and perhaps something to gain from a state of mind which said it was immaterial whether or not he was old enough to be her father; a mood which came more frequently as he got older. A pace or two behind, he eyed her waist and shoulders, thinking how delectable she was. He caught her up. ‘The islands make wonderful scenery, especially from a distance, at dawn or sunset, say.'

‘You make me envious.'

‘That's the idea!'

A ticket on the door of a private room displayed his aunt's typed name. Clara was never a woman to be denied a place of her own. ‘How is she?'

‘Comfortable.'

They never told you anything. The hierarchy was as rigid as on a ship, beneath all the clatter. ‘Is that all?'