Acts of Mutiny (25 page)

‘This is the old way, boy. This is the Navy way. Bite on this. Chew on the pain. Hot as you can bear it.’

I will not remember.

‘Not a word to your mother. Bright little chap like you. Keep you safe from sharks and shipwreck. Make you a man.’

This is one of my bad dreams. I will not remember …

‘Just you and me, Ralphie. Don’t tell a soul. You’ll drop the both of us in jug.’

Anything to take my mind away. I think of the South China Sea, the typhoons, seaspouts, the swordfish and narwhal. Old family stories …

‘You and me. It’s in the blood.’

I think of the two great Capes, of Horn and Good Hope. Of the shoals and schools and angelfish. I think of Penny and coral.

‘Dirty little whore.’

I think of the squid and the great whale locked together. I think of the one line of the Bible I know by heart: I
am that leviathan whom thou hast made to take his pastime therein …

So we are here at last. And I must remember, whether I like it or not. Everything is hard and clear: the bookcase-escritoire, the two bronzes on the mantelshelf, the useless piano,
The Fighting Temeraire
, the jar that says White Petroleum Jelly, and, from my point of view now at this minute, here on my elbows with my bare backside pointing up at the picture rail, my father unrolling the flex on his soldering iron.

I
KNEW THIS
airport before the office I work in was even dreamed of. My father brought us out once by train, and bus – for the day. Erica and me. To watch the planes. It was a great excursion, across the whole of London stretched east to west. A clutter of buildings stood here by the roadside, and, where a loose stick fence enclosed the gravelled observation plot, we ate our sandwiches and waited. On the green an occasional aircraft taxied. They were so unwieldy, they bumped along the Tarmac – I had not imagined. The largest had three fins. Its propellers whined in dark circles. Half-way across the field it sat up, then climbed slowly into the air above the houses. He held my hand.

There is a cigarette and a cup of coffee ready. I have worked my night-shift. Now the computer glare softens as grey seeps through the Venetian blind. Over Terminal One a rim of winter light shows. The only movement is the main control tower’s scanning dish. They are bringing in the planes to the runway just behind the buildings. The jets hunker down and then drop out of view.

The dawn itself is astonishing. The sky has a herring-bone, of which the eastern quarter is gold. But there are carmines and greens high above on the cloud wisps, as if down from a blue plumage is caught falling. And the reach is a vast arch; where the string of planes, three, four of them, queue gold-silhouetted, landing lights on.

The sun is erupting like an angel. From his outstretched arms hang seabird’s quills. His sword is fire.

My department has run satisfactorily for another night. There will be a couple of shivering dark-skinned men waiting for me in the interview rooms before I finish. They will be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure – until turned away. I see at the gates a vast stream of desperate people edging towards my desk. They are the measure of my life, my patriotic duty.

I am at a turning point. Plain family stuff: my father’s heart attack, his funeral; all those lovers on the high seas. That was what I could offer you at the start. And surely even now this appalling flash upon the inward eye – that moment in the ‘best’ room – is some trick of the bereaved mind. It throws me into uncertainty, where there is no comfortable chart room for the spinning of yarns, and where the one other tale of myself I could recount – of the Falklands War and the bold dash of my shipmates – is swamped. I cannot tell you the lengths to which I would go to cancel out that image: me and the voice of my father.

Everything is tainted by it. Everything that was fought for. The service I had been led to think was in some way pure – and I did think some part of me had a veteran’s pride, though who knew why we were down there in the South Ad-antic; and who had been supplying them with arms all that time? The fleet stole into the Sound under cover of night, miraculously undiscovered. Beneath the stars the great white ship lay in San Carlos water like a ghost in the moonlight. The men she carried waited to be disembarked; waited also for whatever air attack the enemy would throw at us. As attack they must. She was so defenceless, like a huge white target, but for the cover it was our duty to provide.

Because on the shores of Falkland Sound none of the Army’s anti-aircraft weaponry had yet been deployed. Protection would be a matter of the outdated missiles we carried and a sharp-shooting effort from machine-guns and small arms on deck. Quite the old story.

The attack came as soon as it was light. Oddly, unexpectedly, it was in the shape of a single fighter on routine patrol, who, no doubt astonished at the flotilla that lay beneath him, attacked and ran. He got in some rocket hits before skimming off over the mountains towards Port Stanley with everything we had loosed after him. The Argentinians had seemed lulled, drowsed, unaware for so long – now they would know exactly what was down here at the entrance of the bay. And would deduce that it was this morning they must throw their entire force at us from the air if they were to have any hope of winning. Since
Belgrano
had locked up their navy this was the moment of their only remaining chance. It was therefore kill now or be killed.

Yes, I was there. This memory is still like the hull of some fellow passager, glimpsed now, and then lost, and then briefly visible again in the foul wind-blown fogs so dreaded by mariners. But I mislead you: the day of the battle itself was clear, cold and bright – hard as an etching plate; it is just the recollection of it that falters.

And from that first attack there is on the one hand the sense of eternal waiting, of elevated vigilance; the stomach tense, the routines gone through a thousand times – the pure abandonment, if you like, of concentration. The worst will never happen but must always be anticipated. It is tangible, it is real. This is no exercise. Death is almost certain and we know its shape and size; we know its engine speeds and its precise capabilities. We have learned its firepower; yet it never comes.

When it is upon us, all hell is, proverbially speaking, let loose. I can tell you, father, grandfather, this too lasts for ever, even though technically it is over in a matter of seconds. The Daggers, Pucaras, Skyhawks are always up there, incoming, attacking, and the rockets are going up in a rush right next to me, always.

I know nothing more with clarity. The rest is the nightmare, and has that quality. I have on my flash-suit, and am choking. There is total darkness except, in the next instant, the torch of two of my shipmates on fire. I have no idea how I got out of
Ambleside.

Every time now, what remains is simply the endurance of heat, and my father’s voice saying again and again, ‘Tell me. Tell me, then. Only tell me when you can’t bear it no longer, and then you’ll be nicely warmed up. Won’t you, boy?’ And I have to judge the moment when it is manly and acceptable to cry out. I always cheat. I have to judge the moment that he won’t guess. I always have to be on my guard and alert – so preoccupied, so attuned to the nature of his threat – to determine when the heat reaches the acceptable degree and he will turn it off and begin. Which was the same thing on the destroyer, about cheating and not cheating, and overcoming my fear finally so that when it was burning with the bomb, missile, torpedo, what have you shoved right inside it, it was the same thing, the same dilemma … and in my cheating I consented all the more to the contract, and bound myself to him for ever. The binding is the forgetting – which is also feeding.

There. I have said it, untied the knot.

But it is too shameful to be true. Just my imagination – I have made it all up. How I should like to be transported out on the instant, away from all I have got myself into, away from Carla. Who keeps herself to herself, who has rearranged her shifts so as not to coincide with mine. I long to be out of it. But I am cast adrift by my own telling, amid wind and weather with this creature of the deep. I must dive where it dives, and you with me. Nothing is as it was: the world is changed, and I see it from this moment through watered eyes.

The next morning Penny thought she would drown with feeling. The surface of the sea was lit up with desire. She hung out to watch the bow wave like the children. She understood foam, mingling flame and ocean, which had always stood for love. She grasped, by the bold weakness in her stomach and the tremblings of her legs, how such a seemingly evanescent assembly of droplets – which, transparently, was all it was – could support the whole weight of the
Armorica.

Where the ship drove, the water clung and gave itself up to lightness. But beneath that embrace’s white there were angles from which the ocean was always an unfathomable green, and yet others from which it stretched away hard, dazzlingly opaque as polished blue stone, black, white, grey, yellow, aquamarine – of course. At once transparent and dazzlingly opaque. How utterly beautiful were the water’s brilliant scales, its strings and loops and spangles, how generous the sea was with its skin.

She turned, expecting to see Robert standing behind her, or just descending the stair from the promenade deck. She expected to see him everywhere. The ship’s white steel was like a photographic paper on which he was bound any minute to develop. Her blood had turned to transient foam. The surfaces of the ship were clear and sharp in the tropic brightness and desire clung about the shine of things – handles, white-painted steelwork, the furniture, the mirrors, rails. Desire slipped and slid on polished tops. Everything was real, and unquestionable, and at the same time awash, aflame.

She wandered through the observation lounge, then out and all round the promenade deck among the navy-blue-shorted old men doing their laps. If her route was identical to theirs, her perception could not have been more dissimilar. Why, the sturdy vessel carrying us all was transparent with Robert Kettle. It multiplied him. It bubbled with him. How should they have any idea of that?

This delight it was her duty to renounce.

She went in. ‘I think I need to talk to someone,’ she said to Mary Garnery over the iced-tea table. ‘Do you mind?’

Mary shrugged. ‘Why should I mind?’

‘I don’t know. You look … You’re sure you don’t mind?’

‘It’s about Robert Kettle, I suppose.’

‘You know?’

‘Not so hard to fathom, shouldn’t you say?’

‘But … What should I do, then?’

‘What do you want to do?’

Mary’s directness took her back. Penny had hoped to think of her as becoming a special friend. She hesitated. ‘Wanting’s not the point, is it?’

‘You’ve got him, Penny. What are you going to do with him?’

‘I’m married.’

‘So you have two men, now.’

They sat down on the same settee in the main lounge. Penny stood her glass on the teak table in front of them. She had two men, now. She made clear sense of the other woman’s new manner towards her.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Mary said. ‘He and I happened to dance together. Shouldn’t we? It was nothing.’

‘Nothing? I’m so sorry. You always look so calm. So untouched.’ Penny faltered.

‘What are men to me,’ she stretched each arm, one at a time, pulling back the beige linen of her jacket to reveal mere covered bones, ‘when the metaphorical chips are down?’ Then she made Penny a wry smile with pressed lips.

‘I didn’t think …’ Penny hung her head, like a child suddenly.

‘Just because I … Never mind that. Tell me about it, then, if you want.’

‘No. I shouldn’t have spoken.’ Penny took her glass and made to get up.

But Mary laid a hand on her wrist. The iced tea spilled over. It just missed the printed pleats of her skirt.

‘Oh …’

Mary found a paper napkin in her bag. She mopped the base of the glass. ‘Do stay. I didn’t intend to be offhand. Why don’t you tell me. Yes. Tell me everything.’ Her style was disconcerting. ‘I should so love to hear.’

And then Penny, confused, felt she had to comply. ‘Yes. You’re absolutely right. I have my husband. And now there’s this. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Forget about him. That’s what they say in the films.’ Mary mimicked the actressy voice, and laughed. ‘You must forget him, dear.’

It was a very unnerving laugh. ‘How can I? There are two weeks more. Two and a half. We shall be in each other’s company. We’ve tried avoiding each other, though we didn’t know it. But now it’s a firm thing. It’s here. On board. I can’t deny it.’

‘A firm thing, is it?’ Mary’s smile was sardonic, the lips pressed tight again. ‘Then you’d better use my cabin. There’s a good double bed. In which I am like a mere reed.’

‘How dare you.’

‘Oh come, now,’ Mary said. ‘You expect me to be pleased?’

‘I thought I might talk about it with you. As a friend.’

‘What is there to talk about? Talk it over with your priest. That’s what we were brought up to do.’ Now Mary went through the gathering up of her bag. The conversation was being closed.

‘But I don’t know what to think about it. Heavens, I hardly know what to wear any more.’ Penny looked at her newly varnished nails. How foolish they looked.

‘Married woman or painted lady.
Which twin has the Toni?’

Mary did not wear lipstick. Her features were hollowed and striking. Her nails were natural. She stood up in her cream slacks and her expensive blouse under the beige jacket thrown casually on as if an afterthought. She was assured. Despite the calculated hostility, Penny still felt she wanted to ease Mary of her sardonic mask, loosen the pull of the brown hair scraped back under its band.

‘Mary, I wish you might have …’ She looked again at her nails. ‘I thought you would …’

‘Let me know what you decide,’ Mary said. ‘About clothes, for example. And whether you intend to include the spectacles. They are so original.’ She walked out toward the port deck.

Damn you too, Penny muttered to herself. She was duly rattled; her oceanic sense of a few minutes before had become an anchor sinking inside her. She took herself off, back to the starboard side. I am all froth and folly, she thought. Love has made me ridiculous. My judgement is addled.

But she was not long in the sea’s face again, sunned and breeze-whispered, before the enchantment returned. Its folds were oriental, sensuous as silk.

She consulted the Reverend Mr Tingay. She and Hugh had always been church-goers.

She told him she was troubled about a friend. Mr Tingay appeared buoyed up, with his broad expanse of clerical black under his tropical linen jacket, his broad beard afloat on that, the straining waistline, the great thighs inflating the tops of his black trousers. He balanced on short goat legs. He wore sandals in which he pumped his socks slightly, lifting one after the other, as if just treading the water out of them. She could feel him oozing sea lust; keen to engage her on the troubles of her,
ahem
, friend.