The Man who Missed the War (24 page)

Putting a hand on his shoulder she hoisted herself unsteadily to her feet. ‘O.K.! Race you to it!’

Undressing, though they had few things to take off, they broke no records, but staggered about bubbling with laughter at their own and each other’s difficulties in getting out of their clothes.

By the time they had stripped they had forgotten all about their race and stood for a moment face to face swaying slightly, while the bright moonlight silvered their naked bodies.

Gloria raised her hand to her throat. ‘Me necklace,’ she muttered. ‘Can’t go in wi’ me necklace. Help me—take it off.’

As Philip approached her she suddenly lifted her arms. ‘Mush’ kiss you!’ she declared. ‘Never kissed you for me necklace. Dear Boy! Happy Christmas!’

They swayed together. Philip’s arms went round her body as hers locked round his neck. When his lips met hers he found that they were moist and parted. He had never kissed a girl that way before. That kiss and the feel of her golden satin skin pressed close against him did something inexplicable to him. In a single instant it had sobered him of the alcohol but filled him with a new, different drunkenness aroused by her. His clasp tightened about her till she gasped, then suddenly they lurched, lost their balance and fell.

Neither of them was hurt or even cried out, and his grip upon her hardly relaxed as they rolled over until, somehow, they were lying among the mattresses and cushions on which they had sat during dinner.

For a few minutes they hardly spoke except for his murmurs of her name between their even more violent kisses. Once she cried out and suddenly began to fight him off from her, but a moment later she was making half-sobbing, half-laughing noises and kissing him again.

Gradually they became quieter until they were lying there motionless, still clasped in each other’s arms. But they were now beginning to feel the delayed effects of the rum. For a time Philip tried to fight down his rising nausea, then, with a muttered ‘Sorry’, he simply had to break away and lurch to the side of the raft in order to be sick.

When he returned he found that she had left their couch on a similar errand, as he could see her crouching in the distant corner of the deck, and there was no doubt that she was being very ill.

On her return he wanted to speak to her but could think of nothing to say. Both mentally and physically he was feeling frightful. He would have given anything now for what had happened not to have happened. It had all been totally different from what he had expected and, except for the first kiss and the feel of her in his arms at the beginning, bitterly disappointing. He wondered how she felt about it and, much as he dreaded
entering on a discussion of the subject, by an effort of will he forced himself to invite one by looking up at her and saying: ‘Well, how are you feeling?’

‘Like hell!’ she muttered, avoiding his eyes; and turning away she began to rearrange her own mattress. Next moment she flopped down on it with her back towards him, and burst into tears.

He went over, knelt down beside her and laid his hand on her shoulder. He wanted to explain that he had not meant to make a mess of things and that he was terribly sorry if he had hurt her. But the words simply would not come, and with her head still buried in the pillow she threw up an arm to thrust him away.

Feeling more miserable than he had ever done in his life, he lay down himself, but the alcohol was still working on him, and, although the sea remained calm, as soon as he closed his eyes he felt as though the raft was not only heaving under him, but going round in circles as well.

Somehow he got off to sleep but only to wake in the dawn with the immediate knowledge that something had gone very wrong and that his head was aching as though someone had hit it with an outsize in sledgehammers. Between pulsing throbs of pain the memory of all that had occurred the night before flooded back to him.

He went over the side for a swim, but evidently his moving had aroused Gloria, as shortly afterwards she, too, came in; but directly she saw him she looked quickly away and swam off out of sight round the corner of the raft.

After his dip he felt slightly better and, in spite of a nasty headache and evil-tasting mouth, decided to tackle Gloria at the earliest opportunity. Immediately she climbed out on to the deck he said:

‘Look here! It’s no good our being stupid about what happened last night. I’m terribly sorry. …’

‘So it’s sorry you are!’ she cut in sarcastically. ‘ ’Tis easy enough for the man to be sorry, but that doesn’t give the girl back what she’s lost, does it?’

‘Really, I
am
most terribly sorry, and it wasn’t altogether my fault. You kissed me first, you know.’

‘And what if I did?’ she flared. ‘If all men were like you not a girl in the world would be safe at Christmas-time the second she’d a mind to thank a guy for giving her a present.’

‘But hang it all!’ he protested. ‘I swear to you I didn’t mean to. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it if it hadn’t been for all that damned rum I drank.’

‘What’s that?’ Before, she had been sullenly angry, but now she glared at him with blazing eyes. ‘Have you the nerve to sit there an’ tell me I’m so unattractive that ‘tis drunk you have to be before you’d make a pass at me! By the Holy Saints, it’s true though! ‘Tis the first time you’ve been drunk in all these months, and ‘tis the first time you’ve ever … Oh, for the shame of it—I could drown myself.’

‘Oh, hell!’ exclaimed Philip, standing up. ‘I’ve said the wrong thing again. I didn’t mean that at all.’

The blood had drained from her face. Very quietly she hissed: ‘I hate you. I … hate … you!’ Then she turned, lowered herself into the well and went into their old sleeping-place, where she remained for the rest of the day.

Philip, with a bad hangover adding to his other worries, spent a wretched morning. He cooked himself lunch and offered Gloria some, but she refused it. In the afternoon he slept and awoke feeling only a little better. In the early evening she came on deck munching some biscuits and sat there for a while, but she would not speak to him.

He mooned restlessly about, wondering how long this distressing state of affairs would last. For the time being at least he was cured of all desire to sleep with Gloria, and, so far as he could judge, he would never wish to do so again; but he did wish she would take a reasonable view of things and be civil.

They both went early to bed, and just as Philip was falling asleep the thought entered his mind that it needed only two or three days like that which had just passed for the two of them, compulsorily confined together as they were, to reach such a degree of hatred that one of them would murder the other. And Gloria, lying only a few feet away from him, was thinking exactly the same thing.

It was perhaps the naturally extreme antithesis for the equally unreasoning passion which they had shown for each other the
previous night. But neither of them could be expected to recognise that; all they could do was to hope that something would occur to break the ghastly tension which it was beyond their powers to break for themselves.

Something did happen. They awakened the following morning to find that, after a journey of nearly five months, the raft had beached itself during the night on the shores of Africa.

Gloria woke first, and her excited cry roused Philip. From the observations which he took every few days he knew that for some time they had been drifting almost parallel with the northwestern coast of Africa and between forty and fifty miles from it; but he had not checked their position since Christmas Eve, and it was now December the 27th. In the past three days a current must have carried them shorewards, and the fact that they had not seen any coastline on the horizon the previous evening was accounted for by its lowness.

For as far as they could see on either side the foreshore sloped gently upwards to a ridge of low sand-dunes which were unbroken by any signs of human habitation or even a group of palm trees. It was very far from being the kind of landfall of which they had dreamed so often, but after all these weeks afloat the fact of the raft having beached itself was a tremendous event.

It had grounded on a spit of sand and, now that the tide was rapidly running out, had begun to tilt a little. There were still a hundred yards of gently lapping wavelets between the raft and the beach, but the water was both clear and shallow. On a common impulse Gloria and Philip slipped over the side and splashed ashore.

Shouting and laughing they ran side by side along the beach, then up the nearest sand-dune to its crest. The prospect was not by any means alluring. It was just sand-dunes and yet more sand-dunes until the yellow distance melted into the pale blue of the early morning sky.

‘What a mighty lonely spot,’ said Gloria in a hushed voice,
when she had regained her breath. ‘What part of Africa would we be in, Boy?’

‘This is Rio de Oro,’ replied Philip, ‘and it belongs to Spain. The Sahara Desert runs right up to the sea here. In fact, thousands of years ago, when the Atlantic was quite a bit higher than it is now, the whole of the Sahara was a great inland sea joined to the ocean, and this strip of coast was part of the sea bottom. That’s why it’s one of the most desolate spots in the world.’

‘How far does this empty bit go?’ asked Gloria.

‘Rio de Oro stretches for about eight hundred to a thousand miles, and to the south of it there’s another six hundred miles of the French West African coast which is much the same. The nearest fertile country is Morocco to the north and Senegal to the south.’

‘But doesn’t anyone live in these parts at all?’

‘Oh yes. There are a few small towns and villages dotted along the coast. It may mean a day or two’s walking but we’re bound to strike human habitations sooner or later.’

‘The Saints be praised for that!’ sighed Gloria with relief. ‘But, d’you know, I’m feeling slightly seasick?’

‘Yes. The ground seems to be going up and down, doesn’t it?’ Philip laughed. ‘It’s only because we’ve been afloat so long. We’ll soon get used to it again.’

They returned to the raft for breakfast and afterwards studied Philip’s atlas. Gloria was appalled to see that in the irregular triangle of yellow marked Rio de Oro only two places were shown: Kedda, about a third of the way down it and about thirty miles inland, and Villa Cisneros, a port considerably nearer to its southern border. Philip said he thought that they had landed somewhere to the south of Cape Bojador.

The observation that he took proved him to be correct and he worked out that they were about a hundred and twenty miles from Kedda. The sun was now scorching down on them and, as Philip pointed out, they would be mad to undertake a march of that distance in such terrific heat without very careful preparation.

They were too excited to sleep, but rested in the shade during the afternoon and carried a picnic supper ashore in the evening. During their weeks at sea they had seen many fine sunsets but few to equal the glory of the one they watched from the African
shore that evening. Soon after the sun had gone down, however, they were startled by an uncanny rustling and clicking in a patch of large bleached conch shells near which they were sitting.

Philip flashed his torch on the patch, and they were alarmed to see among the white shells a score of black, spidery-looking bodies. It was a company of land-crabs which had evidently been attracted by the picnic meal.

At the sight of them Gloria screamed, but the crabs did not scuttle away either at the sound or at the flashing of the light. They remained there motionless, staring with a quiet menace. Then, after a moment, some of the nearest ones began to advance, making swift little rushes forward.

‘Quick!’ gasped Gloria. ‘Back to the raft, Boy! Back to the raft!’ And she fled down the shelving beach into the water.

Philip remained only long enough to grab up the picnic things before following her; and, as he ran, it filled him with considerable perturbation to think that the difficulties of their journey along the coast would be enormously increased if each night they had to protect their stores—and perhaps themselves—from similar companies of big crabs.

On the following day the preparations for the trek to Kedda, or any village in that direction, were begun, and the work entailed was considerable.

From some of the sails they fashioned a simple low tent, to shelter them from the blistering sun during the midday heat, and two large knapsacks in which to carry their supplies. Then they had to make a careful selection of foods combining nutritious value with lightness of weight, and to distil an extra quantity of fresh water. At last everything was ready, and early on the morning of January the 1st, 1940, they took a last look round the raft, every corner of which they had come to know so well, and went ashore.

The going was not easy as the additional weight of the heavy packs seemed to make their feet sink into the soft sand, and every now and again they had to cross a patch of broken conch shells, which meant that they had to pick their way in order to avoid stumbling or bruising their feet.

From ten o’clock until three in the afternoon they rested, blessing the forethought which had led them to provide them
selves with a tent, then went on again till eight o’clock, when they called a halt for supper and the night.

With occasional intervals for rest they had been on the move the best part of eight hours, and, in spite of the modest pace forced upon them by the sand, Philip felt that they must have covered twenty miles at least. Yet all day they had come across no sign of human habitation. Mile after mile of the same flat, sandy coastline had opened up before them as they rounded the headland of each long shallow bay, and only on three occasions had the prospect been enlivened by groups of stunted palms clinging precariously to life among the sand-dunes.

Unaccustomed as they were to any exercise other than swimming, they found that the long trudge had played havoc with the muscles of their legs; but once they were able to unload their packs the very thought that they were not going any further that night temporarily dissipated their tiredness, and as the sun was going down they cheerfully set about the preparations for their evening meal. Yet they were only halfway through their supper when the thing that Philip had been fearing happened; he caught the sinister click and rustle that told him as plainly as if he could see them that some land-crabs were coming out of their holes.