Authors: Geoffrey Household

A Time to Kill (15 page)

‘Let her go,’ Pink replied bitterly. ‘I don’t know if you’ll understand, Roger, but I hated her. Or not her, you see, but that cabin. Week after week. Alone in it.’

Fiammetta
rose to a bit of a swell, perhaps the last of the wash of some great liner far away in the darkness, and we heard the water rush and gurgle in the bilge.

‘She’ll do for a while,’ said Pink in answer to my alarmed look of enquiry. ‘There’s not too much damage. I think we could get her into port if we really set ourselves to it.’

He sounded confident, and
Fiammetta
’s engines were ticking over smoothly in neutral. I was becoming unpleasantly conscious, however, that my two boys and Pink and I were a long way from land with no boat.

‘I suppose we wouldn’t be in any serious trouble with the law if we brought her in, thanks to that’ – he tapped the vasculum in which those much-travelled ticks were still lively – ‘but, by God, it isn’t fair to stick the police and politicians with a floating morgue like
Fiammetta
, if we can get rid of her. What do you think, eh? You’re always yapping about the best service being no use without tact.’

I asked him what on earth he proposed. I wasn’t going to push my two children ashore on life-belts. He answered that it had occurred to him that we might find ourselves – if we found ourselves alive at all – with no
Olwen
and a badly battered
Fiammetta
.

‘And that, my lad, is why I didn’t secure the pram,’ he added with the proper pride that his foreknowledge of the sea always called out of him, ‘and why I told you to lash the sculls in her.’

‘We’ll never find it,’ I protested.

‘Why the devil shouldn’t we find it? Only got to look up wind. There isn’t much of it, but we may have drifted a little further than the pram.’

Pink rigged a light, and
Fiammetta
slowly cast up wind, zigzagging like a busy hound. We came first of all on our wet clothes, which we had thrown down on
Olwen
’s cockpit grating, then on a boat-hook and the cushions, and at last on the pram floating bottom up. Pink fished for her painter, and we hauled her up out of the sea, emptied her and made her fast astern.

The eastern sky now had streaks of grey and the sea was just visible, like very cold, dark pewter. Pink ran
Fiammetta
to the north, doing a cautious five or six knots. She made water very slowly, and it was plain enough that we could bring her in if we wished. I must admit that, when I thought of the four of us in Pink’s eight-foot pram, I was all for doing a hearty spell at the pump and sticking to
Fiammetta
as long as possible. Pink wouldn’t have it. He pointed out that visibility was now a good half-mile, and that at any moment we might be seen. When I wanted to argue he had to give me a real naval order.

We raided Ritter’s wardrobe for clean clothes, and wrapped the children in blankets and brought them on deck. They were breathing quite naturally, and I didn’t think it would be long before they woke up. Then we dealt with
Fiammetta
. Her bows were badly crumpled, but the main damage was above the water line. Down in the forepeak were eighteen inches of water. We hadn’t an axe, so I cut a splintered, straining plank with what was left in the magazine of Pink’s pistol. His iron bar did the rest. After that we had to get out of the forepeak pretty fast.

I lowered the children overboard to Pink – for I could hardly trust myself to stand up in that wretched cockleshell, let alone handle cargo – and we waited at a safe distance to see the last of
Fiammetta
. In five minutes she dipped the great rent in her bows under water, and in another two she was gone.

‘Where are we?’ I asked Pink.

‘If you take that little toy compass of yours and sit quietly in the stern and keep me rowing due north,’ he said, ‘we’re going to land on Weymouth sands in a couple of hours. Oh, muvver, look at them kids what’s been out fishing! It don’t seem ’ardly safe in that little boat, do it?’

It certainly didn’t. We can’t have had more than three inches of freeboard. Our fragile solitude was even grimmer in the cold hour of daybreak when the easterly breeze got up, and one could see the ranks of the waves – petty Channel waves, but all higher than my shoulders – dancing between white Arish Mell and Portland. They flicked the pram and splashed into my children’s faces and woke them up.

Jerry’s eyes opened to the sky above him, and took notice of Pink, swinging and smiling. Then he twisted himself round and looked straight into my face.

‘Daddy!’ he yelled, and tried to jump up. ‘George, here’s Daddy!’

We shipped a bucketful of water, and I held them fast between my knees.

‘Where were you? Who were those men? Where are we? Where’s Mummy?’ – the questions fell over each other.

‘Darlings, it was all a mess,’ I said. ‘We were all going out on a yacht, and then we got separated, and those dam’ fools kept you until they could find me. And I was away on a job, and took some finding. It was all rather like the war, you see.’

That phrase explained nothing to them, but meant a lot. They were too young to remember anything of the war. Yet the conversations they had overheard and the endless, curious chattering between themselves and school-fellows had given them a steadfast impression of a world full of separation and anxiety, especially of separation, which, nevertheless, was part of the family tradition and therefore not to be feared – a world inexplicable but enviably exciting, and ennobled, at any rate to children, by the simply understood virtues of duty and courage.

‘Were there bombs?’ George asked.

‘Daddy doesn’t mean that kind of war,’ Jerry explained with superiority of two extra years. ‘Daddy means that he’s had to go where he was told.’

‘I don’t like war,’ said George positively. ‘I’ve got a headache.’

I begged them to tell me if they were hurt or hungry. No, they had had a custard trifle for supper, and lots of sardines.

‘More sardines than Mummy ever lets us eat,’ George added.

Children are queer creatures. They accept pleasure so wholeheartedly in spite of anxiety. Well, may the Lord take Fallot’s catering into consideration when he comes up for judgment!

‘Nothing like a spot of bailing for keeping warm,’ Pink interrupted. ‘Now, if one of you two chaps takes the dipper and chucks the water overboard as fast as it comes in, we’ll get along fine.’

‘
I
will,’ said Jerry.

‘No,
I
want it,’ said George, and rocked the boat.

This was like old times again. I had to lay it down that each would bail for five minutes. They were not at all afraid of the sea. A grown-up awaking in the bottom of that pram would have yelled with alarm. But since Pink and I seemed to accept our position as perfectly normal, so did the children. And what was mere water, I suppose, compared to the overwhelming, long-expected appearance of a parent?

They were exasperatingly calm about their experiences. All I could gather was they had slept a lot, and that the friends whom I had sent to fetch them in my car had been kind, had even played with them when they weren’t busy.

‘Was it silly of me to be frightened?’ George asked, snuggling in between my knees while his brother bailed.

I can find no kinder epitaph for the dead. They deserve that much, and no more.

Pink’s reckoning was right. At full dawn we could see the houses of Weymouth, and when the sun rose clear of the Channel clouds we were a mile from the beach. The harsh hiss of the pram’s bows on sand was as welcome a sound as ever I heard in my life. We ran her up above high-water mark, and handed her over to the care of a man who hired out motor-boats. I don’t know whether he had dealt so long with the public that nothing surprised him, or whether his own seamanship was limited to a holiday beach. He merely said that he would have preferred something bigger himself.

I telephoned Cecily. It was thirty-six hours since she heard of me. The dead, monotonous,
yes
? with which she answered the telephone made my voice break with pity for her. I told her that I had got them, that I was taking a taxi and should be home in three-quarters of an hour. She did not reply for several seconds, but I had no need to ask if she was still there. Then came the flood of maternal questions in the warm, the eager, the beloved voice, and I found myself answering, just as if we had been caught in the rain on an early morning walk, that there was nothing which a hot bath and a good breakfast wouldn’t cure.

Pink and his ticks went straight up to London by the morning train. I sent a long wire to Roland, and that was all. I had had enough of Roland’s affairs, and I wanted Pink to tell his own story. He met, I gather, with a good deal of scepticism, and they confined him to a room in a cheap hotel during the incubation period while they fed his ticks on an unfortunate bullock. In the same week Holberg disappeared from Tangier, leaving nothing behind him but the wind blowing through his house.

After that, when the bullock and its stall and all but the skin of the attendant vets had been burned, of course I had to go to London and be interviewed by one official after another, all solemn with secrecy. My impression, for what it’s worth, was that they were far more terrified of a question being asked in the House than of familiar problems of biological warfare, and that they felt I had shown a lamentable want of tact in not accompanying
Fiammetta
to the bottom of the Channel. But for Pink, who was dealing with less conventional offices of state, nothing was too good; and he came into his own with very little help from me. He is now too thoroughly occupied ever to bother again with visionary politics. If he can manage to stay alive, I feel that he may yet retire to the boatyard he wanted, and run the local Boys’ Club and become a Justice of the Peace.

As for me, I shall never forget the joy of that first day at home, and how the wings of our mutual love folded over us and held us. After that, things didn’t go so well. I wouldn’t speak of what had happened and Cecily was worried about me and I resented it. So, though all that matters has been told, there is, perhaps, one more question to be answered. And indeed I myself, when I have watched the revival of some tragedy, have often wondered how the last man left upon the stage could bear his life thereafter.

It was the children themselves who brought on the crisis. One day, when I was too silent to be teased, they teased their mother, chanting to her
Ruthless Rhymes
which she detests and they dearly love, seeing in them no more relation to life than has a fairy story.

‘Oh, mother dear, what is that mess,’ they yelled, dancing round her, inspired and soulless imps, ‘which looks like strawberry jam?’

I screamed at them in a furious temper, and went out over the downs, ill and ashamed, and didn’t come back for hours.

Well, I suppose the dramatist merely assumed that the last man upon the stage went to his priest, and that was that. We, less simple and fortunate, have to put up with more secular authority. But, in fact, a man who has such a wife as I has little need of a psychologist. She saw what was wrong and persuaded me to tell it, and these pages are for her.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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