Acts of Mutiny (9 page)

Robert believed in the deterrent.

He said the next morning, ‘It’s not that I don’t admire the Bertrand Russells, the Canon Collinses of this world.’

‘What?
The
Bertrand Russell? The philosopher? What’s he been doing?’

‘The Ban the Bomb marches. They march to Aldermaston and so on. Where they make the … well, I don’t know which part of the bombs or what exactly they do make there, because it’s so secret …’ He felt it was his business to know but not to disclose – but then he really had been told nothing. The industry was compartmentalised, its units sealed, the best form of secrecy. The left hand never knew what all the other left hands were doing.

‘Aldermaston! I was brought up in Tadley. What’s all this about Aldermaston?’

‘I don’t even know where it is, to tell the truth. I only know they march there, the Aldermaston marchers.’ And suddenly, at the newspaper picture in his mind of the young people of his own generation with their duffle-coats and courage, becoming friends, lovers even, he was moved and sad. ‘Those are the headlines; and the newsreel pictures. Nobody mentions where it is, as such. They assume it’s common knowledge – which of course it is. Even signposted; though not in big lettering: “This way to the nuclear …” Well, of course not. Reading way, isn’t it?’

‘Course it bloody is! Bloody Reading way. Here’s me down under for the best part of my life, Bob, having to tell
you
where Aldermaston is. But now you’re telling me that’s where they make them. How long’s that been going on? I thought it was Cumberland or somewhere safely in the wilds. Just turn your back and they’re at it. That was down the road from us when I was a nipper, Alder-bloody-maston.’

Robert wanted to justify himself; to show that he was not just another white-coated yes-man who rattled along doing very nicely on government research, while washing his hands of the ethics. He did question. He did feel enormous reservations about, yes, England again. England at the root of it all, almost. Bloody-handed, clever England. He wanted to shout, ‘I’ve read Spengler and Marx! I play the piano!’ But he would merely have made himself ridiculous.

‘The Russians are stockpiling nuclear weapons. What’s the alternative? Human nature, I suppose; that’s at the root of it all. No one can afford to back down. Nobody likes it, but nobody wants the world to be incinerated. Blown to smithereens. I don’t. What’s the alternative, Joe, once two sides have got the damn things?’

Joe churned in the lower bunk and asked him to fetch the basin again. Robert got down and did so.

‘Don’t ask me, mate. I’m just one of the poor bloody infantry.’ He retched uselessly and painfully over the bowl. ‘In Australia it’s a different matter, anyway. How would you like fall-out clouds drifting over your back yard? My bloody back yard. They do, you know. Or did. Drift. Maybe your papers don’t run those headlines. Don’t want to know. They wouldn’t care, would they? Of course they wouldn’t. Whack! The black cloud. Whack! That island up the coast from Perth, Monty-something. Whack! Maralinga. No risk at all. No risk to Westminster, more like. It just happens to be right where we live. And quite a lot of us don’t like it, no matter for Bob bloody Menzies.’

So Robert was left tarred as an apologist for the arms-race lunacy; even by this voyage going out to further it.

The steward knocked and came in with Joe’s tea.

‘Thanks, old sport.’ Joe fished for a coin on the locker top beside him and handed it over. ‘Out of hours, mate. Appreciate it.’

‘Thank you very much, sir.’ The steward left.

‘Good bloke, that.’

Joe’s forearm appeared to be tattooed, so that the finish of something mostly covered by pyjama sleeve and dressing-gown cuff could be seen on his wrist. Robert wondered idly what it was of.

‘Sailors!’ Joe gave a laugh. ‘Trouser pirates. Couple of pulls of merchant seaman we used to ask for at the bar, just to wind the poor joker up.’

‘Oh,’ said Robert.

‘It’s your move.’

At last there came a time when the
Armorica
turned her back to the wind, and Robert could anticipate the Med. Now, on the way in, the acute flexing of seascape seemed so mundane as to be beyond comment. Everyone had grown used to the bad weather. They had all worked out ways of shortening sail, as it were. It had become routine to cross even the smallest interior spaces as if at one minute you were scaling Everest, and the next leaping off.

The wind eased. On the unabated swell they were running eastwards now, level with Gibraltar. The creaking and groaning sounds lessened slightly, and the following motion was different: longer, less aggressive. He had begun to find exhilarating the sudden compression of the ship’s lifts, and the remarkable weight loss next, by which he could cross the assembly area in only four or five strides. As the children did. Indeed, he felt like a boy again, and looked gingerly around to check that no one had seen the excitement on his face, and, once, when the space was momentarily empty one morning, the wheeling of his arms.

A link with Penny had forged. Imperceptibly, out of nothing, amid all these fantastical comings and goings it had taken shape. He knew it. She must know it. They had flashed signals in each other’s eyes. Surely they had. She kept appearing in his thoughts, would not be displaced. He imagined the entwining of her legs. She was a mermaid.

‘We’ll be docking at Gibraltar only to refuel, I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen.’ The Chief Officer made the announcement. ‘And that’ll be tonight. As you’ll all be aware, the conditions have been somewhat exceptional, we don’t mind saying so, even us toughened old salts.’ He laughed. ‘We don’t often find ourselves in forty – or fifty-foot seas on this run. More like Cape Horn, to be honest.’ He grinned again at the few people gathered round the board marking the mileage of the ship’s daily run.

So at least they were admitting it, Robert thought. Once he grasped that they had weathered a storm which the crew also had struggled to cope with, then the large number of breakages, the several days of slips and spills and sliding became indexes of their courage, rather than of their own mere landlubberliness. He recalled his conversation with the steward of the Verandah bar. And felt better about it. In all probability the
Armorica
would not turn over now, for all the extra demands that had been made on her tanks. They would make it.

The Chief Officer continued. ‘To be perfectly frank I don’t recommend Gib in both the middle of winter and the middle of the night.’ The small group, which included Penny, responded with a polite chuckle, while the deck moved under them as usual. ‘We’ve lost several days, you see, and shall have to make up for lost time. As to disembarking procedure …’

But Robert’s attention became diverted because Penny spoke separately in an undertone to her neighbour. ‘Not so long ago I’d have given almost anything to set foot on dry land, but if it’s just during the small hours, I don’t see the point either. Do you? It would just be nothing at all.’

‘We shan’t be going,’ the neighbour replied, a woman called Mrs Burns who had once, with her husband, shared Robert’s table for dinner. Since the storm, she had been absent. He suspected she had been able to eat nothing at all.

‘It would be like, I don’t know, Eastbourne in the blackout springs to mind,’ Penny said. ‘I think I’ll concentrate on a good night’s sleep. Picking up the pieces almost. I just hope my violin’s safe; hasn’t broken loose, or been crushed by some huge thing that has. I wish there was some way I could look.’

‘Oh? Do you play?’

‘Less than I’d like to, what with my young family. It was possibly going to be a career, but I’ve had to give up all that. Probably wouldn’t have come off. Still …’

Robert made himself turn away. He went off through the double doors to get a Scotch, and resolved to resume his schedule of work, swell or no swell, Joe or no Joe. And anyway, Joe was up now, and going about his business.

In the main lounge there was a large decorative mural showing what had been explained as an Armorican scene. A party of lords and ladies in medieval costume looked at the sea from the rocky coast of Brittany. A sailing cog ploughed the distance. The painted waves, with their tender, painted crests, looked all too easy. It was a naive offering.

Allowing himself to be swept towards the other end, he braced himself against a pillar, and then sat down on the piano stool. He opened the keyboard, rested his fingers idly on the keys, but did not press them down. From a nearby table, three older ladies, heavy with pearls and in severe grey perms almost identically decayed, dared him to play. Duly annoyed, he moved off again.

She was a mermaid, of course, and he would probably make a fool of himself, as he had done some years before. The signs were the same. It was the close, tempting fit of mutual attraction within a cluster of people all getting to know one another. And surely, surely there
was
some indefinable link between them, in the air. But it went together with the absolute
impossibility
of their clashing circumstances. The more he discovered about her, the more he was drawn to think of her. The more he learned about her world, the less it offered any firm ground where they could meet.

Yet here they were, in the same bewitched boat. Why should it be that when there were plenty of ordinary, nice, pretty women about the towns and cities of England, he must eschew them? He supposed there must be some cause; but did not wish to discover in detail what grubby quirk it might turn out to be. Probably to do with a nasty-minded God, and better left untouched. He would study. He must just take care not to ruin everything, the whole future. Four weeks or so of the high seas, then Adelaide and up to Woomera, a corner of untillable soil named after the aboriginal word for a spear-thrower, because the military used it to launch guided missiles into the very centre. To see how well they worked; how well the tactical armaments of the deterrent might deter. There he would attend the tracking station, looking up at the stars with radio equipment, tracking … who knew what exactly? And on this basis he would build a new life for himself, a better life than the grubby, rainy, pompous, clapped-out little island of his birth could offer.

Scotch in hand, he stood outdoors from the bar on the promenade deck with his back to its cold steel wall, looking out as he had grown so accustomed to. The interminable ridges stretched off into the north, grown oily, now, under a darkening afternoon sky. Penny Kendrick swam in them, holding her beautiful violin in front of her breasts and slinking her hips to the deep like a wild sonata. Sharks swam with her, nuzzling her side, rasping her lovely belly with their sandpaper skin. ‘Damn!’ he said aloud. ‘Damn!’

The Med had an altogether different feel to the Atlantic; it flattened as it warmed. One day, morning was open like a dish, a glazed Greek wine bowl, and as shallow. Though this was midwinter, Penny had the strong sense that not so very far away – maybe just out of view on either side – coastal people were sitting out, drinking coffee, eating olives.

Past Crete the light hardened and clarified. The sun became an active agent. It was as if the cord in a slatted blind above them had been pulled. She found herself unprepared, having cast her predictions of the voyage according to the south coast of England – not her own childhood, but seaside holidays in Devon with Hugh after the war, and with the boys, when they came along. She had expected blue: the air was white, the sea very dark, and reflective as broken glass.

Clutching her straw bag, in which she had placed, on top of a thin layer of odds and ends already there, her compact, her great aunt’s pince-nez, a French edition of de Beauvoir’s
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
, her journal, her cigarettes, and her pen, she made her way to the forward saloon, the observation lounge.

High nautical windows set tightly together in a continuous strip wrapped right round from port to starboard. Sitting close to them, where the chairs were laid out together, Penny could look down over the nursery and the enclosed play-deck area for little ones, on to the whole of the bright foredeck beneath her.

Once the storm had passed its height two or three days before, and she had learned that they might not all die but could endure sitting down to consider the next hour as well as the next wave, she had found the prospect far brighter here. More recently she had come to read, or write, or simply to watch the nose dipping and rising, gently enough now, as it stitched through sky to horizon, and back, and back again. It was quite hypnotic. Pure light poured in from the sky, and whelmed up from the water surfaces. It was like being inside the faceted eye of some fabulous ocean-going insect, homing to Arabia.

There was an Australian couple who had decided to take her under their wing: Clodagh and Russell Coote. ‘Penny. How
are
you this morning?’ Standing at the bar, drinks in hand, they were looking for where they should place themselves. ‘Let me get you something,’ Russell asked.

‘Coffee would be lovely,’ said Penny. ‘Russell, thank you. Are you sure it’s not my turn?’

‘Nonsense.’ Russell nodded to the barman. The Cootes were both tall and fine-featured. Clodagh tended to fragility. She wore a belted dress, white, with a print of large flowers – the sort of casual success which cheap fashions tried to imitate, achieving only cheapness. Penny was slightly in awe of them both, and wished to resist the feeling, but was unable to find any means of doing so. She was intrigued by them. The power of other people: her reading of de Beauvoir had amazed her, stirring up forbidden political emotions. She had not yet quite perceived herself as a dutiful daughter. With the assured couples around her, she thought constantly of everything she was leaving behind.