The Cruel Sea (1951) (49 page)

‘Look out,’ he said fearfully. ‘You’ll have me over.’

‘There’s room for both of us,’ said Carslake roughly, and pulled the wood underwater again.

‘There isn’t . . . Leave me alone . . . Find another piece.’

It was the darkest hour of the night. Carslake swam slowly round to the other end of the plank, and went to work with his hands to loosen Rollestone’s grip.

‘What are you doing?’ whimpered Rollestone.

‘I saw this first,’ said Carslake, panting with the effort to dislodge him.

‘But I was
on
it,’ said Rollestone, nearly crying with fear and anger. ‘It’s mine.’

Carslake pulled at him again, clawing at his fingers. The plank tipped and rocked dangerously. Rollestone began to shout for help, and Carslake, shifting his grip, raised an arm and hit him in the mouth. He fell off the plank, but immediately started to scramble back on to it, kicking out at Carslake as he did so. Carslake waited until Rollestone’s head was clearly outlined against the dark sky, and then raised both hands, locked together, and struck hard, again and again. Rollestone only had time to shout once more before he was silenced for ever. It was the darkest hour of the night.

But the murderous effort seemed to weaken Carslake. His body, hot for the moment of killing, now grew very cold; when he tried to climb on to the plank, he found that he was too heavy and too awkward in his movements, and he could not balance properly. Presently he rolled off it, and sank back into the water, breathing slowly and painfully. The plank floated away again, ownerless.

Some men just died: Sub-Lieutenant Baker, Stoker Evans, Lieutenant Morell; and many others. These were the men who had nothing particular to live for, or who had made so fundamental a mess of their lives that it was a relief to forfeit them.

Baker, for example, found no terror in death that he had not already suffered, in full measure, during the past week. Ever since
Compass Rose
sailed, he had been wandering round the ship under a morbid load of guilt, alone with a shameful fear which the passing days had disgustingly confirmed. He knew nothing about venereal infection, and he had no one to turn to; indeed, he was only guessing when he diagnosed the swollen and painful organs, and the soiled underwear, as symptoms of what, in the happy past, he had learned to call a ‘dose’ – the cheerful joke of the cheerful man-of-the-world . . . But as the days went by, he could no longer be in any doubt of what had happened to him; it had meant a week of trying to avoid human contact, a week of increasing pain, a week of infinite degradation and terror. On the night that
Compass Rose
had been hit, he had already been prepared to end his life by his own hand.

In the abandoning of the ship, he had swum about for some minutes and then found a place on Number Two Carley; but the slow drying of his body after he had climbed out of the water had been horribly painful. He had fidgeted and altered his position continuously, without relief, for several hours, and finally, driven to desperation, he had slipped off the raft and into the sea again. The icy water was agreeably numbing . . . He had begun to welcome the increasing cold as it ate into his groin, and the feeling that this loathsome and hated part of his body was at last being brought under control. He died as quickly as would any other man who welcomed the cold, at a moment when a single degree of temperature, one way or the other, could make the difference between a bloodstream moving and a bloodstream brought to a dead stop.

Stoker Evans also died for love: indeed, there had been so much of it, in one form or another, in his life, that it had long got out of hand. By this stage of the war, Evans had acquired two nagging wives – one in London, the other in Glasgow: he had a depressed young woman in Liverpool, and a hopeful widow in Londonderry; there was a girl in Manchester who was nursing one of his children, and a girl in Greenock who was expecting another. If the ship went to Gibraltar, there would be a couple of Spanish women gesticulating on the quay: if it went to Iceland or Halifax or St John’s, Newfoundland, some sort of loving or threatening message would arrive on board within the hour. All his money went to meet half a dozen different lots of housekeeping bills, or to satisfy affiliation orders: all his spare time in harbour was spent in writing letters. He was rarely inclined to go ashore, in any event: the infuriated husbands or brothers or fathers who were sure to be waiting for him outside the dock gates, were not the sort of welcome home he relished.

Evans had arrived at this deplorable situation by a fatal process of enterprise. He was not in the least good-looking; it was just that he could never take ‘No’ for an answer.

But recently there had been a new and more serious development. Just before
Compass Rose
had sailed, the two official ‘wives’ had found out about each other: the ship had in fact only just cleared harbour in time for him to escape. But he could guess what would happen now. The wives would combine against the other women, and rout them: they would then combine again, this time against himself. He saw himself in the police court for breach-of-promise, in the dock for seduction, in prison for debt, in jail for bigamy: he could imagine no future that was not black and complicated, and no way out of it, of any sort.

When, towards three o’clock in the morning, the time came for him to fight for his life against the cold, he felt only lassitude and despair. It seemed to him, in a moment of insight, that he had had a good run – too good a run to continue indefinitely – and that the moment had come for him to pay for it. If he did not pay for it now – in the darkness, in the cold oily water, in private – then he would have to meet a much harsher reckoning when he got home.

He did not exactly surrender to the sea, but he stopped caring much whether he lived or died; and on this night, an ambiguous will was not enough. Evans did not struggle for the favour of life with anything like the requisite desperation; and that potent region of his body which had got him into the most trouble seemed, curiously, the least determined of all in this final wooing. Indeed, the swift chill spreading from his loins was like a derisive snub from headquarters; as if life itself were somehow, for the first and last time, shaking its head and crossing its legs.

Morell died, as it happened, in French, which was his grandmother’s tongue: and he died, as he had lately lived, alone. He had spent much of the bitter night outside the main cluster of survivors, floating motionless in his kapok life jacket, watching the bobbing red lights, listening to the sounds of men in terror and despair. As so often during the past, he felt aloof from what was going on around him; it did not seem to be a party which one was really required to join – death would find him here, thirty yards off, if death were coming for him, and in the meantime the remnant of his life was still a private matter.

He thought a great deal about Elaine: his thoughts of her lasted as he himself did, till nearly daylight. But there came a time, towards five o’clock, when his cold body and his tired brain seemed to compass a full circle and meet at the same point of futility and exhaustion. He saw now that he had been utterly foolish, where Elaine was concerned: foolish, and ineffective. He had run an antic course of protest and persuasion: latterly he had behaved like any harassed stage husband, stalking the boards in some grotesque mask of cuckoldry, while the lovers peeped from the wings and winked at the huge audience. Nothing he had done, he realised now, had served any useful purpose: no words, no appeals, no protests could ever have had an ounce of weight. Elaine either loved him or did not, wanted him or could do without, remained faithful or betrayed him. If her love were strong enough, she would stay his: if not, he could not recall her, could not talk her into love again.

It was, of course, now crystal clear that for a long time she had not given a finger snap for him, one way or the other.

The bleak thought brought a bleaker chill to his body, a fatal hesitation in the tide of life. A long time passed, with no more thoughts at all, and when he woke to this he realised that it was the onset of sleep, and of death. It did not matter now. With calm despair, he stirred himself to sum up what was in his mind, what was in his life. It took him a long and labouring time; but presently he muttered, aloud:
‘Il y en a toujours l’un qui baise, et l’un qui tourne la joue.’

He put his head on one side, as if considering whether this could be improved on. No improvement offered itself, and his slow thoughts petered to nothing again; but his head stayed where it was, and presently the angle of inquiry became the congealing angle of death.

Some – a few – did not die: Lieutenant-Commander Ericson, Lieutenant Lockhart, Leading-Radar Mechanic Sellars, Sick Berth Attendant Crowther, Sub-Lieutenant Ferraby, Petty Officer Phillips, Leading-Stoker Gracey, Stoker Grey, Stoker Spurway, Telegraphist Widdowes, Ordinary-Seaman Tewson. Eleven men, on the two rafts; no others were left alive by morning.

It reminded Lockhart of the way a party ashore gradually thinned out and died away, as time and quarrelling and stupor and sleepiness took their toll. At one stage it had been almost a manageable affair: the two Carleys, with their load of a dozen men each and their cluster of hangers-on, had paddled towards each other across the oily heaving sea, and he had taken some kind of rough roll-call, and found that there were over thirty men still alive. But that had been a lot earlier on, when the party was a comparative success . . . As the long endless night progressed, men slipped out of life without warning, shivering and freezing to death almost between sentences: the strict account of dead and living got out of hand, lost its authority and became meaningless. Indeed, the score was hardly worth the keeping, when within a little while – unless the night ended and the sun came up to warm them – it might add up to total disaster.

On the rafts, in the whispering misery of the night that would not end, men were either voices or silences: if they were silences for too many minutes, it meant that they need no longer be counted in, and their places might be taken by others who still had a margin of life and warmth in their bodies.

‘Christ, it’s cold . . .’

‘How far away was the convoy?’

‘About thirty miles.’

‘Shorty . . .’

‘Did anyone see Jameson?’

‘He was in the fo’c’sle.’

‘None of
them
got out.’

‘Lucky bastards . . . Better than this, any road.’

‘We’ve got a chance still.’

‘It’s getting lighter.’

‘That’s the moon.’

‘Shorty . . . Wake up . . .’

‘She must’ve gone down inside of five minutes.’

‘Like
Sorrel.’

‘Thirty miles off, they should have got us on the radar.’

‘If they were watching out properly.’

‘Who was stern escort?’

‘Trefoil.’

‘Shorty . . .’

‘How many on the other raft?’

‘Same as us, I reckon.’

‘Christ, it’s cold.’

‘Wind’s getting up, too.’

‘I’d like to meet the bastard that put us here.’

‘Once is enough for me.’

‘Shorty . . . What’s the matter with you?’

‘Must be pretty near Iceland.’

‘We don’t need telling that.’

‘Trefoil’s
all right. They ought to have seen us on the radar.’

‘Not with some half-asleep sod of an operator on watch.’

‘Shorty . . .’

‘Stop saying that . . . ! Can’t you see he’s finished?’

‘But he was talking to me.’

‘That was an hour ago, you dope.’

‘Wilson’s dead, sir.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes. Stone cold.’

‘Tip him over, then . . . Who’s coming up next?’

‘Any more for the Skylark?’

‘What’s the use? It’s no warmer up on the raft.’

‘Christ, it’s cold . . .’

At one point during the night, the thin crescent moon came through the ragged clouds, and illuminated for a few moments the desperate scene below. It shone on a waste of water, growing choppy with the biting wind: it shone on the silhouettes of men hunched together on the rafts, and the shadows of men clinging to them, and the blurred outlines of men in the outer ring, where the corpses wallowed and heaved, and the red lights burned and burned aimlessly on the breasts of those who, hours before, had switched them on in hope and confidence. For a few minutes the moon put this cold sheen upon the face of the water, and upon the foreheads of the men whose heads were still upright; and then it withdrew, veiling itself abruptly as if, in pity and amazement, it had seen enough, and knew that men in this extremity deserved only the decent mercy of darkness.

Ferraby did not die: but towards dawn it seemed to him that he
did
die, as he held Rose, the young signalman, in his arms, and Rose died for him. Throughout the night Rose had been sitting next to him on the raft, and sometimes they had talked and sometimes fallen silent: it had recalled that other night of long ago, their first night at sea, when he and Rose had chatted to each other and, urged on by the darkness and loneliness of their new surroundings, had drawn close together. Now the need for closeness was more compelling still, and they had turned to each other again, in an unspoken hunger for comfort, so young and unashamed that presently they found that they were holding hands . . . But in the end Rose had fallen silent, and had not answered his questions, and had sagged against him as if he had gone to sleep: Ferraby had put his arm round him and, when he slipped down farther still, had held him on his knees.