The Cruel Sea (1951) (29 page)

In the evening, the family circle round the fireside had a touch of unreality about it. Ericson sat in his usual armchair, reading or talking: Grace knitted busily at one end of the sofa, and young John, miraculously adult sat puffing a shiny new pipe at the other. Opposite Ericson, in the other armchair, the old lady did the crosswords and impressed her will on them all. Grace’s mother had mellowed a little, Ericson decided, but not much: she still tried to rule the roost, she still behaved as if she were the only grown-up in a houseful of children. It was lucky that he himself was home so seldom, and that he had
Compass Rose
to retreat to when things got on his nerves. For the old lady, spider-like, was not going to move now – that was obvious: she was installed for the duration, and the household had to be regrouped round her, in a way which the captain of one of His Majesty’s ships-of-war could hardly accept as natural.

Part of the unreality lay in their conversation: they talked of everything but what was uppermost in their minds, the force which had brought them all together and might separate them again at any moment – the war. Both Ericson and his son, indeed, were ready enough to talk of it, but before the women they were curiously shy: sitting round the fireside, they remembered enough of the job they were sharing to know that it could not be put into fireside words. When they did come anywhere near the subject, it was simply to chaff each other in the traditional Royal and Merchant Navy rivalry: the only things that could be mentioned about their partnership were frivolous variations on the surface – the different helm orders, the different rates of pay, the things that mattered least of all. And then, breaking in on their talk, Grace would say: ‘I’m sure it doesn’t make any difference how fast a corvette can go. You all have to go along together, don’t you?’ And the old lady, scratching away at the evening paper, would mumble: ‘What’s a word of eleven letters meaning “futility”?’ and the whole family would unite to solve this major problem . . . So they sat on, night after night: two men, two women, closely bound, yet far apart: feeling the weight of war, and disregarding it in favour of the lightest alternative they could think of.

Once during that meeting, Ericson and his son did talk. It was towards the end of John’s leave, when Ericson, moved by a hunger for close companionship which he could scarcely define, proposed a bus ride into the country and a long walk over the Cheshire moors. The bus took them inland, through the unlovely Birkenhead suburbs and the ribbon-development that lay beyond; and then, leaving the bus, they struck north-westwards on foot, and walked towards the sea. They walked steadily for four hours, under the warm sunshine, meeting the breeze that blew in from the Irish Sea and the Atlantic itself: their isolation, in these wild surroundings, part of an England they knew and loved, brought them close together and they talked as they might have talked at sea, sharing a watch on a calm night. They talked of the job they were doing, the matter that lay in the forefront of their minds: the things that were happening to the convoys, the ships and friends they had lost, the truth behind the statistics and the bald or misleading newspaper announcements. But it was not until the late afternoon, when they reached the north-west coast and lay on a hillside sloping to the sea, and watched, on the horizon, a line of ships heading out into the Atlantic, that they spoke at last without reservation and without shyness, acknowledging their secret feelings.

‘It’s just plain murder, dad,’ said John Ericson at one point, when they touched on the happenings of the last few months, and the fearful total of sinkings. ‘You can’t call it anything else . . . The same thing happens to convoy after convoy, only a little worse each time. How long can they go on sending us to sea, when it’s an absolute certainty that half the ships won’t come back?’

‘Some convoys get through, John,’ said Ericson defensively.

‘Damn few . . . Oh, we’re not blaming the escorts – they do the best they can, and it’s pretty good all the time. It’s just that the convoy system doesn’t seem to be
working.
You ought to hear our old man on the subject! We can go fifteen knots, any time we like, and yet we have to jog along at seven and eight knots, stuck in a convoy for three weeks on end, a sitting target for the U-boats.’

‘You’re still better off in a convoy, instead of steaming independently. The figures prove it.’

‘It doesn’t feel like it, when those torpedoes are flying round, and the only signal you can get from the Commodore is “Maintain convoy speed” . . . And watching ships and people that you know, being blown up or sunk or bombed, every time you put to sea. Sometimes I feel as if—’ He paused.

‘What, John?’

‘Are you ever afraid, dad?’ The young face, an unformed version of his own, turned towards Ericson anxiously. ‘Really afraid – trembling, I mean – when you know there’s going to be an attack?’

‘I think we all are . . .’ Ericson lay on his back, staring at the blue and gold sky, speaking as casually as he could. ‘I know that I am, anyway. The only thing is to show it as little as you can – because it’s catching – and to try and do your job as well as you would if you
weren’t
afraid.’ He examined a sprig of heather with great attention. ‘There’s nothing much in being afraid, John: if a man tells you that he isn’t, on our job, he’s either a liar or such a cast-iron bloody fool that he’s not worth talking to.’

‘I get the needle pretty badly sometimes.’

‘Well, you’re not a liar, at least.’

They both laughed. There was between them now a closeness, a trusting confessional honesty, which they had never reached before.

‘I think of you a lot, dad, when I’m at sea,’ John went on after a pause. He too was staring at the sky, which with the approach of evening was losing colour swiftly. On the far horizon, the line of sea and sky began to blur as the sun dipped towards the water. ‘Particularly when I see those corvettes chasing round the convoy. They’re so incredibly small . . .’

‘There’s something to be said for being a small target.’

‘There’s something to be said for ten thousand tons of solid ship underneath you, in an Atlantic gale.’

‘I think of you, too, John.’ Ericson, cherishing the moment of intimacy, the first since childhood, hardly knew how to phrase what was in his mind. ‘We’re both doing the same job, and we know the sort of job it is, and I can’t help being anxious about you. Anxious and – proud of what you’re doing. When I was your age, I hadn’t got anything like as far. So just take care of yourself, won’t you? – I want to be able to celebrate the next Armistice properly . . . We must think about catching our train, John, or your grandmother will be on the warpath again.’

John grinned as he got to his feet. ‘She’s a terror, isn’t she?’

‘She certainly keeps us all in order, yes.’

‘Oh, it’s all right for me,’ said John, grinning again. ‘I’m not the captain of
my
ship.’

In the garden of the small house just outside Liverpool, Ferraby played with the baby. The baby, a girl, was now six months old: pretty, gurgling, crawling unsteadily, and answering her name – Ursula – with an ecstatic bubbling noise. Ferraby loved everything to do with being a father, from wheeling the pram out in the afternoons to preparing a bath at the exact temperature: even to be woken up in the middle of the night was an acceptable part of fatherhood, establishing his connexion firmly. But most of all he liked simply to be with the child, watching her, talking to her, feeling her minute fingers curling round his own. He felt no need for any more exciting kind of activity, these days: his whole leave was passing in this simple and tender fashion, and he would have chosen nothing else. But now, as he played in the sunshine, holding the warm body, touching the soft petal skin, his thoughts were far away: his thoughts were of steel and storm, the ugliest thoughts in the world.

Such moods and such thoughts came in waves, and he could not now control them. At any time of the day or night, his mind would go back to
Compass Rose,
and the way his leave was running out, and what would take the place of this respite, which must soon come to an end: sometimes, as now, the contrast between terror and tenderness, the extremes of his two lives, overwhelmed him with its futility. At one and the same time, he felt the sweetness of the present, here in the garden, and the threat of the future that lay out in the Atlantic: he felt that he could only face one of them, and it was not the future – the future was too hard and too evil, and he hated it with all his soul.

He no longer told Mavis anything of this, though sometimes he told the baby.

Now, as he sweated with his thoughts and his prophetic fear, the baby, gurgling again, crawled to the edge of the rug and fell gently on to her face in the grass. The swift wailing changed magically as Ferraby picked her up and held her close to him. Mavis, brought out of the house by the noise, checked her step and stood watching them, a smile on her face. Bless his heart . . . It was lovely to see Gordon so relaxed and so happy.

Young Baker said: ‘Yes, mother – I’d love to,’ and went upstairs to put on his collar and tie. It was the fourth time he’d been out to tea with his mother that week; but she enjoyed it so much, she got so much fun out of showing him off, that it was impossible to say ‘No’ to her. There was nothing else to do, anyway.

As usual, he was spending his leave at home, in his mother’s small house in a Birmingham suburb. For the first few days it had been fun to be fussed over, to enjoy the good cooking and the undoubted comfort of his mother’s housekeeping, to be the male centre of a soft feminine flutter. But soon this had begun to pall: he could not help realising that this was not the sort of flutter he wanted, nor quite the sort of softness either . . . Baker was nineteen years old, a shy, anxious-to-please young man whose normal instincts, as yet ungratified, were somewhat heated by his predilection for the more furtive brands of
erotica:
he collected the pin-up girls from
Esquire
and similar publications, he subscribed to ‘art’ magazines, he even possessed, hidden under a pile of shirts in his wardrobe, a series of postcards which recorded the athletic aspects of love in unusual variety. But so far, no one had appeared in support of these daydreams: the only girls he met at home were the approved daughters of his mother’s friends, selected, it seemed to him, for their inherent wholesomeness, and his only feminine contact at Liverpool was a Wren in the Pay Office, who was much too interested in her career to spare any attention for a sub-lieutenant, and met his tentative advances with a smile as thin as his single stripe . . . So he spent his time ashore, and his leave periods, balanced between hope and despair: hope that somewhere, just around the next corner, was the girl he so much wanted, and despair when the next corner proved inevitably bare. It was so unfair: other people had girls, and did all sorts of things with them: even in the cinemas there was a maddening activity in the back row: only he, it seemed, was still waiting for the right one to come along, to ease his futile longing.

From the foot of the stairs his mother called out: ‘Tom! It’s time we started,’ and he put on his coat and prepared to go down.

Another tea party . . . But you never knew: perhaps, this time, the girl would be there, and she would smile and they would recognise each other instantly, and somehow they would get away from the crowd and she’d start to do the most marvellous things to him, and it would happen at last.

There
was
a girl there, as it turned out, but she was terrible: awkward, sallow, flat-chested – no sort of help at all. He could not even imagine himself kissing her . . . They sat round in a formal circle, drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches: Mrs Keyes, Mrs Ockshott, Mrs Henson, his mother, an old chap who was somebody’s husband, the girl who was somebody’s daughter, and himself in the place of honour – the young naval officer snatching a brief hour of peace between fearful voyages. The conversation, indeed, ran on something like these lines: on such occasions, his mother made obvious efforts to draw him out, and the simplest course was to play up to her and lay it on as thick as possible. It was easy to expand in this uncritical atmosphere.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, munching, ‘it’s so rough that we can’t put anything on the table at all. We eat things straight out of the tin, or just go without.’

The ladies clicked their tongues sympathetically, and his mother said: ‘Fancy that!’ in fond horror. He caught the girl’s eye fixed on him admiringly. But she was so ugly . . . She was sitting with her knees apart, he observed, exposing the kind of safety knickers which you sometimes saw in advertisements, with elastic round the thighs. No good at all . . . He took another sandwich.

‘Yes,’ he went on recklessly, ‘I remember the steward bringing some corned beef up to the bridge for me. It was the first food I’d had for – for two days. The funny thing was, when it arrived I just couldn’t eat it. Exhaustion, I suppose.’

‘Fancy that!’ said his mother again. And then: ‘Tell us about that man who was drowning, Tom. You know – when you went overboard in the storm.’

‘Oh – that . . .’ The girl, though still looking at him, had now closed her legs. You’re welcome, he thought, and passed his cup for some more tea. ‘It’s nothing much,’ he began, marshalling his thoughts rapidly. ‘But one night, when the Captain called for volunteers . . .’

He made the story into a good one – almost too good, if the face of the only other man in the room was anything to go by. But the women lapped it up: and the ugly girl was positively hypnotized by everything he did and said. He enjoyed the admiration while it lasted, but on the way home he relapsed into boredom and frustration again. What did those old cows and that awful girl matter? He was just throwing the stuff away . . . He really wanted to tell these stories sitting by the fireside, with a different kind of girl –
the
girl – resting her head on his knees, and looking up at him, and not minding when his hand moved gradually down under the top of her dress.