Acts of Mutiny (15 page)

Robert had dreamed badly. It had been a fretful night.

‘Sleep all right?’ Joe had said, returning from the toilet. With his mouth still full of toothpaste, Robert gave a lying, thumbs-up sign.

‘I’ll give you a few pointers. You ought to know one or two things about how to conduct yourself in Australia, Bob. Gestures with the thumb, for example. Slightly different connotation down there, don’t ask me why. It’s not just a matter of hitching a lift, or all the best and a jolly good show. All right?’

Robert grunted and returned to the sink.

But Joe warmed to his subject. ‘One other thing. The root.’

‘The what?’ Robert mopped his mouth, and, having rinsed his toothbrush and shaving equipment, straightened up.

‘The root. See, Bob, the Aussies are easy-going blokes, friendly and so on. Really friendly. They like their beer and they stick by their mates. But they don’t like the English. I mean they don’t like the recent English.’ He jerked his thumb very significantly in the direction of the ship’s stern. ‘And do you know why?’

‘No.’ Robert groped: ‘Convicts? Being shipped out in irons?’ But of course that was a century ago. He wondered, looking at Joe’s expression, if he had blundered into an unforgivable. ‘The root of it all?’

Joe relaxed into a grin. ‘You mean the stain? Of course, you’re right, Bob. Someone should have told you, though. Glad you brought it up here, with me. Never mention the stain, whatever you do. Never, never, never. By buggery. But the root, that’s something quite different … The sheilas.’

‘Sheilas are women, yes?’

‘Exactly. You know what sheilas are. You don’t know what the root is.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Joe.’

‘Root is what sheilas are for. Root is what you’d call fuck.’

There was a pause. ‘I see.’

‘It’s called that—’

‘Root?’

‘Yes. It’s called that, in my opinion, Bob, for a peculiarly Australian reason. Shall I go on?’

‘I suppose you’d better.’

‘It’s completely underground and in very short supply.’ Joe roared suddenly with laughter. Robert found himself laughing too. ‘But here’s the catch, Bob. This lot in the stern.’ He gestured again.’
You
lot, I should say. You make-a-new-life-for-yourself folk – because although you’re getting this all paid for, mate, you’ll find you’re in the same back end of a boat when you get there –
you
lot have views on the root which don’t fit in with that oddly beautiful and arid thing, the landscape down under. Do I make myself clear?’

‘No.’

‘The Pommies breed, Bob. Understand? The Pommies come and they all live together, and they breed. They have women, and they’re always pregnant. There’s always kids and mess and women’s stuff. You can see it. You can almost see it happening. It’s all too visible. And you can hear it, if you walk too close. If you go to where the bloody Pommies cluster together. Bloody shrieking out. It’s the root too blatant, not in the spirit of the root, Bob. At least the Eyeties and the Greeks and Hungarians and whatever can be kept out of sight; and whatever they do, they don’t do it in English. Get it?’

‘OK.’

‘Good.’ He laughed.

Robert laughed, astonished that somewhere in the world the English were seen as sexual.

‘Oh, and one other thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘Australians don’t have wet dreams … or anything in that kind of line. They don’t need them, you see!’ He hooted with laughter again.

Robert allowed himself to chuckle. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better get down to my studying again.’ He picked up a book. Any book.

‘Aah, let it go, mate. I’m only giving you the drum.’

‘Well, I think I’ll go and look at the papers.’

‘Come back after brekker. We’ll take my chessboard to the library. Say, six moves each and I promise I won’t say another word.’

Mortified, Robert escaped.

Now, looking directly astern, he saw a stub-shaped mark, past the city, furthest away of all. It poked up like a blurred matchbox from the waste of brown grit right back near the Med – they had passed it on their way in. It was the plinth of the de Lesseps statue, set up to greet ships from Europe. The portrait itself had been smashed off after the Anglo-French invasion. Robert had discovered the fact for himself. Russell had not mentioned it; nor had the ship’s guide sheet. So it was the one sign of a moment of Whitehall panic. A disgraceful incident, not really admitted as such – more generally referred to as a fiasco. Everything all right now. Everything back to normal. Everything except Berlin cooled off – and that never cooled off. I should be enjoying myself, Robert thought.

But what would she expect of him, physically, if they should ever … He muttered out loud, ‘Don’t be bloody stupid.’ He tried to fix his mind on the post-breakfast entrapment Joe had contrived. Despite his loathing for chess, and his lack of expertise, Robert had grown intensely irritable at the thought of another losing position. He found himself preoccupied – with what, he did not quite know. The board’s ivory problems nagged at his attention. He liked her hair especially; it was shortish, like a soft, fresh cap, framing her face.

Could he only summon up the courage, he would like to explain to someone – about Penny, of course; to Cheryl, possibly, if he could get her early enough in the day. Or to some man on board, maybe, who did not have ‘Made in England’ stamped on his heart. Curiously, it might have been Joe, if he had not snared him into this ridiculous duelling.

Robert sighed. He felt something of the movement under him at last, a tremor of the lagoon. The propellers were biting harder. He wondered if he would have to defeat Joe to stand any chance with her. Superstitious thought, locking horns, getting nowhere. That was wearying. He was crazy to think of it. Crazy.

It was not long before the ship slipped quietly between the low piers just proud of the water, and into the entrance to the Canal proper.

She had two children, for God’s sake. If he had only found an honest chum on board of the same age and in the same condition, as lovers in plays and stories always did. But he had not; and was debarred from contracting one by the illicit nature of his passion. If he were a rogue, or an American, to be meddling with other people’s wives. Even a lathered cad, like that awful man in the bar. But he was not. With his class and background, there were no models, except love itself – whatever that was. In the night it had been his whole body, trying to get his attention, to shout to him: Penny Kendrick! Her! Nobody else! And he was shouting back: Impossible!

And what did
she
feel? What on earth was the meaning of the beautiful regard she bathed him in? For looking and seeing had done it – and that delicious soft smell she had about her. Not words – they had said very little to one another. It was what they had left out and given over to the subliminal nuances of the body, surely. Or he would not be feeling like this. Did she know she was doing it? Did she do it to everyone? Who could forget the gesture of the brass box? Or the moment when she turned to him without fear at the shock of that sudden knife fight? Or the indescribable elevation in his heart and the constriction in his throat when they walked back together past the gully-gully man?

Joe came down the steps and joined him. ‘Nice day. A penny for ’em.’

While Robert’s back was turned, an Arab had silently taken up a place on the foredeck, between the winches and the parked lading booms. Either that or he had been there all the time, unnoticed. He had spread out an array of dark, intricately tooled leatherwork – two whole saddles, assorted knives, swords, boots and whips. In the midst of his wares he was sitting down, waiting, swaddled in a blanket against the sun, or the early cold; and arched over by an immense pale sky. The lagoon and the flat land beyond him had begun to give light back, now that the last of the morning mist was lifting.

‘What’s on your mind, Bob?’

‘Nothing.’

A few flies gathered, and would settle on the skin where the perspiration beaded.

In the British papers that had come on board there was the news of the Russians’ latest success in space. They had turned a rocket into the first artificial planet. It was launched ‘in the direction of the moon’, and was now circling the sun. Within a month or so he would be decoding its progress on instruments. Among the progresses of other things. And there would come a time soon when rocket weaponry could be called down precisely upon any terrestrial target. Possibly from space. Possibly by him.
Black Knight
and
Skylark
had both been tested at Woomera – a modest but slightly triumphal note in the paper.

Robert found himself imagining how the Air Force must have come in on just such a morning, and filled this very place, in a few moments, with explosions. A column of water, a column of fire, deafening reports, splintering, screams. The neck of the Canal had been completely blocked with the burnt-out steel of ships – such as this one. It was frighteningly recent.

‘What
are
you wearing?’ Finlay Coote stood before me at the head of the outdoor stairway down to the foredeck. I had on a Hawaiian shirt. On a lurid pink background there were tropical beach and margin-of-the-jungle scenes in vibrant greens, blues, greys and floral reds. It had a silky wetness about it as though recently painted. It had been presented to me in our terraced house near Woolwich. I could never have worn it there. But in the ambiguous cool heat of the Canal zone that morning, Erica had thrust it towards me and I had complied. Moreover, I had teamed it with my blood-red swimming shorts, around which I had fastened the snake-clip belt from school. On my cropped and Brylcreemed head was the tasselled fez, the result of a bargain struck with a bum-boatman; on my feet, grey socks and cut-work sandals. I held a small horsewhip I had bought from the Arab. A man had said some of the whips contained hidden swords – you would find out when you snatched at the handle. They were thin, deadly things, like a scorpion.

‘Is that your mum’s blouse?’

‘Mr Chaunteyman gave it to me. In the Coral islands the men all wear them.’

‘You’re mad. You look a real dill. Where’s your father? Is he dead?’

I had met her yesterday, through Penny. Today her hair was freed from its braids and held back with an Alice band. She wore a pale mauve top and immaculate white shorts. Her thin legs made her just taller than me.

‘No. Mr Chaunteyman’s taking us. He’s my dad’s commanding officer. They’re Navy friends. Only he’s from America with the real cowboys and Indians, actually. You have to go where the service says. United States Navy. So he’s taking us and my mother says it’s right for us to go.’

The salt sands of Egypt lay all about, guarded by towel-headed sentries. We could just see one now, standing not fifty yards away on the bank. The Canal fitted so tightly around us that it was itself invisible from our vantage. We were a dream of a ship slipping through land. Every now and then, beside us, there came into view a parked jeep, or the odd military house. And, far beyond the concrete strip of road which accompanied us, across empty and intervening miles the colour of mud, it seemed there were always two dhows minutely rigged, sailing the shimmer of the desert.

‘It’s idiotic. You just look mad,’ Finlay said again.

‘I don’t.’

‘You do.’

‘All right. I don’t care. I like it.’ She hurt me, but I brushed it off. ‘I’m going down to look at the Canal. Are you coming? We might see some pyramids.’ I showed her my whip.

She said, ‘All right. Have you seen Penny this morning?’

Yesterday, as the ship closed with the coast of Egypt we both became Penny’s friends. I recognised Penny: the distraught woman who came out of that bathroom during the storm. She began to take us under her wing. Today at breakfast I had been enraptured again with her long legs, her pretty skirt, her waist, her soft bosom and lovely face, kind, and momentarily frightened by my appearance – until she relaxed it into a smile.

Yesterday, after we saw the squid, she played some card-games with us in the main lounge, took us up to the boat deck to try deck tennis, and, between the lifeboats, talked to us about the sea. Then she hurried off through the port doorway, when a man, and after him a woman, came into view at the far end from behind the protection of the smokestack’s central housing. Finlay and I had bathed in her attention.

‘Yes. I’ve already seen her.’

We stood, hanging over the starboard rail as near the bow as passengers were allowed. We could watch the cut of the dirty green water, and the trouble of its wake from the tanker ahead of us in the slow queue. On the planking just at our backs a few grown-ups under the foremast were haggling with the Arab.

Finlay spoke again. ‘What toys have you got?’

‘On board? Couple of guns. This.’ I held out the whip again. ‘What you?’

‘My jigsaws, Andrea my doll, colouring book, cards, writing-paper, my nurse’s outfit, my three small koala bears that fit together … er, board-games compendium, French knitting. That’s all I was allowed. Mummy said there wasn’t room for much else and it’s only for five weeks. Oh, and gummed coloured-paper shapes and some Japanese paper flowers that you put in water and they open. We got them in Singapore on the way out. But I’m not going to do them till we get back to Melbourne and I can put them on the window-sill in my bedroom. Oh, and my ballerina musical box. And my doll’s clothes and hairdressing things. And I’ve got just four of my best story-books.’