Acts of Mutiny (5 page)

‘I wouldn’t pretend to have the answer. At all. Oh God.’ Then: ‘It’s just very, very … I don’t know what. In there,’ he gestured to the cabins, ‘it’s like a ship in one of those films.’ He shouted over the weather. ‘Too swashbuckling for me, I’m afraid! That’s why I’m staying out here as long as I can. The sight of what’s actually doing it to you makes you feel slightly less ill.’ His looks belied the assertion. ‘But I do agree. It is the noise that’s maybe the worst of it. It’s the absolute cream on the custard. Sorry!’

They shared a tight smile: another attempted joke and the tasteless mention of food.

‘Sorry. But if it
were
just the movement … Well, that’s what every sailor sings about, isn’t it? It’s as British as … I don’t know, Trafalgar Square. And being British we
ought
to be able to cope. That’s what they keep telling us. And if this were a little old battler – with the salt-caked smokestack, et cetera – you’d expect it. But this is huge, and up to date. The latest thing. And cinema liners don’t lurch, otherwise Fred and Ginger could never have danced a step; kissing would have been right out.’ A plunge. ‘You need a level base for that sort of carry-on. I believe.’ He hurried on. ‘It actually sounds as though the damn thing’s going to break, doesn’t it; and nobody warned you, or sang about that.’

Penny nodded cautiously and turned her head. Another sting of spray. She noted with surprise that in all his chatter he had actually caught her own earlier thoughts – about the sound – and voiced them.

He took out his cigarettes, looked at them, met her eye, grinned ruefully, and then put them away again. ‘Ugh. Funny thing. No comfort there.’ They stood, volunteering nothing further for a while, riding it out, watching the intricate variations with which the sea and sky were confronting them. Then she remembered his opening remark.

‘I’m afraid I didn’t quite understand what you said at first. Something about it being difficult to get away?’ Shouting again as the wind tried to snatch the words from her mouth.

‘Oh yes. Difficult to get away from England. Won’t take you to her heart but won’t let you go. Horrible old spider, in fact. She wants the blood out of a man. Sorry.’ He apologised again. ‘I’ve probably said something unforgivable. Perhaps you’re incredibly patriotic and terribly sad to be leaving. I don’t know. It’s just the way I feel.’

‘I am sad. To be leaving one’s home. For good. Don’t you think?’

‘I’ve no regrets. Honestly. A grasping, petty and superstitious land infested with churches. But then I consider myself a scientist – for whom God can’t strictly be said to exist.’

‘I see. And not a very poetical description, either.’

‘I probably shouldn’t be saying this. Probably socially quite beyond the pale; I can never tell. They pull everything out of shape.’

‘What?’

‘Churches. I mean the map, even. Wherever you go. That’s the one good thing about the view here; not a steeple in sight.’

‘My. You do have a chip.’ She felt herself put about. His words provoked a longing for railway lines, green fields, and, indeed, the needle spire of Chelmsford cathedral which had always been visible from her bedroom window at Galleywood.

‘I’m sorry,’ once more excusing himself, ‘I’ll shut up. Bad taste to call religion into disrepute, I know. Digging myself deeper. I shouldn’t have forced my opinions on you. You’re probably a devout something or other and I’ve offended you for ever. Probably the weather.’

Just after the lowest point of the downward plunge, one could sense the very moment when gravity came back through the soles of the shoes.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about the weather. I wonder if people can ever get used to this.’

Then she laughed again. ‘I don’t mind hearing someone’s opinions.’

Peering past her, he considered the swell ahead. He pointed. ‘Here comes something!’

An irregularity in the pattern: ridges too close together; big ones, brimming, high and innocent. The ship went down in front of them as usual, and then rose significantly higher; higher, and poised. An exceptional wave began its course almost casually along the length of the water-line under them. It passed where they stood and became a huge fulcrum somewhere about the neighbourhood of the dining-room. Then the dive. The bows went right under. A rush of tide and foam sluiced off the fore-deck and drained around the tubes, bollards and hatches not so very far beyond them.

‘God,’ she muttered audibly in the moment of slack that followed – as sometimes they did when the ship seemed not to know what it would do next.

‘The seventh wave. Isn’t there something about the seventh wave? You see, I had a hunch England wouldn’t make it easy to get out. At least this much of a fight convinces me I’ve taken the right route!’

Yes, it was nice to talk to someone. She had not talked to someone, a personable young man, in fact, in her own right since … ‘I’m going out to Adelaide,’ she said firmly.

‘Oh, really? Me too.’

He was nice to talk to … Since her marriage. She had no idea. How nice it was to be spoken to as herself. Then, helplessly, from her clutch on the stanchion: ‘I’m joining my husband, you see.’

‘Ah, yes. And leaving your mother.’

‘I suppose I should be getting back to my cabin.’ She touched the place on her cheek where the wind felt almost like a bruise. The cold. And not just her cheek. Really, it got through coats and layers. It limited the time you could stay out. Or perhaps the main lounge again, Mrs Piyadasa.

‘Must you? There’s a man in mine.’

‘A what?’

‘A man. The man I share with.’

‘You have to share?’

‘Yes. Don’t you?’

‘There is another bunk. But it’s empty.’

‘You must have more clout than me. My other bunk is full of a seasick man. It’s pretty disgusting.’

‘I didn’t realise people
had
to share. I mean except families. Heavens, I should hate that.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘For four or five weeks, cooped up with someone you’ve never met.’

‘Yes. I keep wondering who I should have tipped, or rung up beforehand. That’s the trouble, not having the right connections or the absolute know-how. I’m sure if I did offer someone money he’d just look at me – it would be the wrong bloke.’

‘Yes,’ said Penny. ‘But he’d just look at you and then take the money.’

‘Exactly.’ He laughed. ‘I’m sorry, sir. The ship’s full. There’s nothing I can do. But thank you very much all the same.’

This laughter in the face of the sea – Penny felt slightly uncomfortable, though – over and above the discomfort of the storm, which in all truth she had briefly forgotten. But she could put no name to the feeling. She waited. She thought the man was virtually bound to ask her about Hugh next. A man would. For all sorts of reasons.

So she pre-empted him. ‘We haven’t been introduced. Penny Kendrick.’ She held on and stretched out her free hand.

‘Robert Kettle.’ He clasped hers during the transition from suspension to effort, and then drew back to his place at the rail. ‘Both “K”.’ He smiled.

She smiled back. But the ‘K’ was Hugh’s name, of course. ‘My mother owns a preparatory school in Essex. That’s where I grew up – among lots of little boys away from home.’

‘I went to one of those once,’ he said. ‘Always marching and doing drill. Present arms with miniature hockey sticks. But not for long. My parents couldn’t afford to keep me there. We weren’t really in the right league, financially. I suppose they were making a desperate bid for social—’ He failed to finish as once more the spray surprised him.

‘Oh, I see.’ Then she realised why she had felt uncomfortable. It was the way they had linked themselves through the character of an inevitably corrupt purser, or accommodation officer. It reminded her of the little boys at the school; how they sought to cope with life away from home by such creations. Everyone outside their world was an articulately structured joke. Poor little devils. One thing her mother’s school had taught her was that she did not want her boys to go away like that. And yet that was where they were now, her boys, and she was here in the midst of these unlooked-for waves talking to an unlooked-for Robert Kettle, who would probably see the point and then apologise. But I didn’t mean it like that, she found herself protesting. I didn’t want it to happen like this. This is just temporary.

And she thought of all her furniture down there in the hold, their bed and their books, and her poor violin, and the Finch-Clarks’ enormous cat in its cage.

‘Hey, be careful with that, kid!’ Mr Chaunteyman had given me half a crown and told me to keep his service revolver dry on deck. He was an American, Navy too – though he never wore uniform. We were going to Australia with him, Erica and I. That much was clear. I had the gun strapped to my waist. It weighed me down on my left. I had pinned on my sheriff’s star and wore my cowboy hat, which the wind now thrummed at somewhere behind my head. The cord threatened a strangle, but I would not take it off.

I had turned one side of the brim up to the crown with a safety pin, Australian style. Failing anything to serve as an authentic tin visor I was Ned Kelly in mufti, on his boat. I had stalked the heaving promenade deck for twenty minutes looking for people to shoot: possibly one or two of the Commies I had heard about from Mr Chaunteyman’s lips. Luckily the other children were not in evidence. Then I had fetched my raincoat and come forward here.

I too thought the ship would soon shake to pieces. Images of my life ran appropriately before my eyes. Scenes of home – containing unfortunate further images of death. Such scenes, for example, as had welled once from the open experiment on top of our wireless when I was little. My father placed a stout board to support the metal frame; the cathode-ray tube perched in its own scaffold. We drew the drapes across the french windows and clicked the knob. And were transfixed by scintillation.

The television was the great metal granny of all knots. But I was warned off. My father tended it jealously, as a household god. Through its face our English future brightly spilled; with its back parts he had sole communion. The private glows and buzzes, the electron lens, the HT circuit – ‘twenty thousand volts, boy, all right?’ – the decoders, oscillators, transformers and valves remained a mystery to me.

It was unhealthy, and suffered intermittent snowstorms. In the midst of them I watched cowboy fantasies:
The Mystery Riders, Roy Rogers
, or
Renfrew of the Mounties.
North American corpses were two a penny. During weekends he set up a mirror and stood behind it, twiddling, tuning, testing, to attain that fullness, unstable as the grasshoppers on Bostall Heath, of which the contraption was capable. And then one Sunday he unclipped his Avo meter. He put down his insulated screwdriver with a grunt of satisfaction. Now the confusion was of real sea, and genuine weather. A poor, monochrome vessel was beam-ended on the Goodwin Sands; it rolled back and forth inside the screen, endlessly, helplessly.

The horror rose to my lips. ‘They’ll be all right?’

‘Two of them were saved. But the captain always goes down with his ship.’ My mother’s look assumed a glassiness as she said it. I had not seen her face so before.

Thus I realised early that there might occasionally flood in a loss which was unendurable. The skipper of the
Enterprise
had given his body to the waves; he breathed in lethal sea water as surely as I drank my National Health orange juice.

My mother’s cousin ‘went down with the
Hood
’, but to that bare phrase my small imagination could attach no picture at all. I put death in a far-off quarter, snow-bound, snow-blinded, epitomised solely by that other terrible captain: Scott of the Antarctic, whose recovered boat-coffin clung to the Embankment by Tower Bridge, and whose bereaved son painted snow-tormented birds in the screen of our television.

Then one evening Erica took me to a slide-show talk given by Sir John Hunt. It was at my school in Bostall Lane. The conqueror of Everest was some years happily returned. But Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing stood on the snowcap screen against a glare of magenta-blue, still planting the Union Jack. And after that I was reassured; for there was no undiscovered place upon the globe, no unexpected continent, able to surge in, disaster-filled, cannibal-fretted, sacrifice-plagued, species by man-eating species. Death was a thing of the past, and I learned to sleep by blocking it out. Until this ocean, and this storm. My beliefs heaved and bucked under me.

Regarding the Atlantic, though, I knew my father and grandfather had led charmed lives. It was Erica who had told me. Both career seamen, they were survivors of the two world wars. My grandad missed Jutland, being fortunately on weekend leave when his ship rushed hooting out of Chatham. He had already retired, and was only hooked back out of honourable discharge because there was a crisis. The worst shock he got in the war to end all wars was from a streak in the phosphorescence. Too paralysed to sing out – a potentially capital omission – he stood watch in his trance as the tell-tale slice closed and closed, aimed dead at the engine-room below him. Against the intimate torpedo there is no defence. Desperate small-arms fire would be as useless as prayer. Only at the last minute did the streak turn miraculously away, and he caught a glimpse of its dorsal fin in the moonlight; though not of its hammerhead sneer.