All The Nice Girls (11 page)

Although the Reverend Godfrey had left his mark on the Navy the service had also stamped him. His sermons had not changed since the days when he had pitched his voice to carry to the last rank of a thousand sailors formed up on the quarterdeck. The regular St Giles congregation of four elders, seventeen elderly ladies and Dagwood were quite accustomed to their pastor’s admonishments from the pulpit on the moral dangers of consorting with loose women and indulging in strong liquors. On the first Sunday he attended, Dagwood had been gripped with emotion when, to the text James 3:10- ‘Out of same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren these things ought not so to be,’ he and the seventeen elderly ladies had been harangued on the subject of swearing on the messdeck.

Indications of the Reverend Godfrey’s long association with the Navy abounded in his church, not only in the ship’s bell used as a stand-by font and the Sea Cadets’ colours laid up behind the choir stalls, but also in his Standing Orders which Dagwood saw pinned to the vestry door.

‘Vicar’s Standing Orders,’ Dagwood read. ‘Short title V.S.Os.’

‘Fifteen minutes before the start of the service, the Verger will report to the Curate: ‘Church ready for service.’

‘This report will be taken to mean:

1 Hymn sheets and hassocks issued.
2 Altar candles burning brightly.
3 Emergency candles tested and correct.
4 Hymnboard reading hymns for the day.
5 Crypt bilges dry.
6 Trim on the font.
7 Lectern voicepipe cocks checked open.

‘Ten minutes before the start of the service, the Organist will report to the Curate: ‘Organ and choir ready for service.’

‘This will be taken to mean:

Organist and choir closed up and correct.
Main organ ready Group Up.
Blower running on all bass and treble pipes.
Choir stalls secured for service.

‘Five minutes before the start of the service, the Curate will report to me:

All hands on board.
Main door shut and clipped.

‘On receipt of these reports, and being in all respects ready for service I will take up position in rear of the convoy and give the order: - ‘Let go forward, let go aft, start the voluntary!’

‘The service will then begin.’

That, thought Dagwood, should cover it.

It was not until he had shaken hands with the Reverend Godfrey after the service and was on his way back to his car that Dagwood thought again of Patricia MacGregor. He had summed her up as the Snow Maiden but he had done nothing to try and thaw her. He had barely spoken to her. Dagwood made up his mind to change that. Patricia MacGregor was something of a challenge. He stopped at the farm to ask Molly if he could use their telephone.

‘Of course you can, Dagwood,’ Molly said. ‘Any time you want to, just come across. Are you getting on all right over there? We never hear anything so we assume everything’s all right.’

‘I brought up a lot of stuff from home,’ said Dagwood, ‘so I’m pretty well fixed now.’

‘Well, just say if you need anything. The telephone’s in the hall.’

Patricia answered it herself.

‘ . . . I just thought I’d ring up and say how much I enjoyed lunch yesterday,’ Dagwood said to her.

‘That’s all right. We were very glad to see you. You must come again.’

‘I’d like to very much, but in the meantime how would you like to come and have a meal with me?’

‘You mean at your digs?’

‘No, no, I’ve got a flat.’

‘Oh.’

‘At least it’s not exactly a flat. It’s actually a tithe barn.’

‘You mean, come and have dinner with you at your tithe barn?’

‘Yes,’ said Dagwood. Put like that, it did sound an unlikely sort of proposition.

‘That sounds lovely. When would you like me to come?’

‘What day suits you?’

‘I don’t do very much here ...’

‘I’ll bet you don’t,’ Dagwood said to himself.

‘. . . Any day would suit me.’

‘How about Wednesday then?’

‘Yes, I think that’s all right.’

‘Would you like me to come and collect you?’

‘No, I’ll drive myself over in the car. Where do you live?’

‘At Watson’s farm. It’s ...’

‘I know where that is.
That
tithe barn. Have they made it into a flat? I’d love to see that.’

‘Well, Wednesday evening then. About seven thirty.’

‘Lovely.’

Dagwood put down the receiver with a feeling of disappointment. She had been polite, but nothing more. There had been no sign at all that the iceberg was beginning to melt. Dagwood had a sudden premonition that perhaps this particular iceberg would require more heat than he was able to generate.

However, there were artificial aids. Daphne appreciated the problem at once and produced two bottles of dark Burgundy. The wine was a glowing red, hot and rich like the blood of martyrs.

‘There you are, love,’ she said. ‘Two pints o’that and she’ll roll over and show you the promised land.’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Daphne.’

‘You know what I mean, love.’

The butcher in the village also had an accurate grasp of the situation. ‘For two, sir?’ he said, when Dagwood came into his shop on Wednesday evening.

‘Yes, please.’

‘Steak, sir?’ said the butcher, giving his knife a preliminary sharpen.

‘Wait a minute!’ Dagwood remembered something he had read in a women’s magazine. Steak by itself was mortally dull. How about shush kebab? ‘Just give me one piece of steak. And a piece of liver. And kidney and some sausage. Two bits of bacon and can you chop the whole lot into small pieces?’

‘What’s this, sir, Irish stew?’

‘Shush kebab. I’d better have a couple of skewers too.’

‘I’ve only got metal ones, sir. Now if you’ll take my advice, there’s a hazel bush in the hedge just at the back of your barn there. You cut a couple of straight pieces from that, whittle of the bark, sharpen the ends and you’ll have two fine skewers. Makes the meat taste a lot better, sir.’

‘What a splendid idea!’

‘That’ll impress her, sir.’ The butcher winked.

With shush kebab, the grocer warmly recommended rice. ‘Dead easy to cook, sir, and just put in some frozen peas and bits of cooked ham chopped into cubes. Add a bit of saffron to colour it and there you are.’

‘Right,’ said Dagwood. ‘I’ll do that.’

One more logistical requirement was supplied by Chubb. Chubb was a gipsy and a moucher. He had no job, but lived, literally, off the land. If it suited him, he dug a ditch, sharpened a saw or ground a lawn-mower blade. If it did not suit him, he did nothing. He made a very comfortable living throughout the year selling daffodils, fern plants, honeysuckle, watercress, mushrooms and blackberries in season to housewives. He also had understandings with some shopkeepers, supplying moss to the florist, bulrushes to the tailor and heather to the butcher. Chubb always knew before anyone else where the best plants grew, where every bird nested, and where the largest fish fed. He could also supply rabbits, hares and chickens, if he felt like it. Chubb was answerable to no man and gave Dagwood to understand that it was he, Chubb, who was doing him, Dagwood, a favour in providing primroses and daffodils to decorate the bam. Molly distrusted Chubb, but Dagwood, who did not have the country-born suspicion of gipsies, recognised that he was probably the most valuable acquaintance he had made in Oozemouth.

The last requirement to melt the iceberg was heat, actual physical heat. Dagwood remembered how cold the Admiral’s house had been once they moved out of the drawing-room. Dagwood stoked up his stove until the back thrummed and glowed with heat and he had to take off his sweater as he skewered the pieces of meat, laid the table and looked out the tapes for the tape-recorder.

When Dagwood was ready, the whole tithe barn was warm; the corks had been drawn and the wine was taking deep breaths in the kitchen; the table was lit by three candles in a holder Dame had presented; and the tape-recorder was ready to play soft music. Dagwood had two hours and ten minutes of ‘Eine Kleine Smooch Musik’ on tape, an amount he estimated should be sufficient to complete the count-down. Looking round him, Dagwood considered that for a first night he had not made at all a bad job of it.

Patricia arrived at precisely half past seven. Dagwood was both pleased and chilled by this fact. Pie was pleased that she had thought it worthwhile to arrive on time but he was chilled by the sheer cold efficiency of it. He had no doubt that if he had asked her to arrive at twenty-nine and a half minutes past the hour she would have done just that.

‘What a nice room,’ Patricia said, as Dagwood took her coat. ‘And lovely and warm! ‘

Dagwood’s arrangements went off with precision. The candles cast an intimate light over the minestrone soup (from a packet) which was palatable though lumpy but, as Dagwood pointed out, minestrone was supposed to be lumpy. Patricia complimented Dagwood on his shush kebab. Dagwood did not spill anything, nor did the candles drip. The tape-recorder ground manfully away at its task of setting the mood. Logistics-wise, Dagwood told himself, we’re hot.

But on the personal level the evening did not prosper so well. Like many another logistics wizard before him, Dagwood was in danger of being defeated by personalities. The food, the wine, the music, the girl, all were there but the mixture did not coagulate. They talked in general terms of Oozemouth and the people in it. Patricia asked Dagwood politely if he was enjoying Oozemouth. Dagwood replied politely that he was having the time of his life. They talked of her father.

‘Daddy’s still mad about submarines,’ Patricia said.

‘It’s something that gets under your skin if you don’t watch it,’ said Dagwood, already wondering if he should use the eternal stand-by of submariners when entertaining women- the story of how he escaped from six hundred feet during the war bringing the injured Captain and all the confidential books up on his back. There were many variations in the story but all were of the generic type derisively referred to as - ‘there was I, upside down at a hundred feet, and nothing in me glass’ stories.

‘About a year ago a lot of submarines were running aground,’ said Patricia. ‘Every day there seemed to be something in the newspapers about it. I had to get the doctor to come and see Daddy because I thought he was going to have a stroke. Daddy runs the Submarine Old Comrades’ Association in Oozemouth. There are a lot of old boys living round about who used to be submariners and they all knew Daddy in the old days.’

‘Does he go to the Reunion?’

‘Oh yes, of course he does, when he gets his diary at the beginning of the year it’s the first thing he writes in it. He goes every year. I don’t know what he does while he’s away but it always takes him a week to get there and back.’

Dagwood told Patricia of
Seahorse
’s commission. He told her of the sudden crazes for strange clothes while the submarine was at sea, of the stokers’ fashion for sombreros and moustaches and the torpedomen’s six-shooters and sheriff’s stars. He told her of the riot which broke out in the petty officers’ mess when the Electrical Artificer, a man of erudition, had looked at the Sunday roast meat and vegetables and remarked to the Coxswain, who was suspected of being a secret bible-puncher, ‘Hebrews thirteen, eight, Coxswain.’ The Coxswain had looked up the verse and seen that it was ‘Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and for ever.’ Dagwood told Patricia of the minutiae of life on board, of the uckers games, the football matches, the brass plaque ‘The Smallest Room’ screwed on the door of the wardroom heads, the ketchup specially issued to submarines (Dagwood had never met it anywhere else) which had the evocatory label ‘Take Lots Of It With Everything.’ He told her of the day The Bodger thought he had appendicitis and was nearly operated on by the Coxswain and the First Lieutenant, of the day the Electrician’s pet monkey electrocuted itself in the motor room, and of the day they held a Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in the fore-ends of the submarine.

Patricia listened with polite attention but Dagwood knew that he was being boring. He realised it early but the knowledge only served to make him worse. Nobody can be as boring as an Englishman entertaining a woman; only an Englishman would have the effrontery to burden her with the trivia of his daily life. Dagwood endeavoured to become more intimate.

‘But how about you, what do you do with yourself, living out there?’

‘I do the cooking and the shopping and look after Daddy.’

‘But how about dances and things?’

‘We go to the Hunt Ball every year. Daddy enjoys it.’

‘But don’t you?’

She looked at him as though he had prodded her. Then she shrugged. ‘They’re quite nice. You meet all your friends.’

‘Any particular friend?’

She looked straight at him and said, ‘No.’

Dagwood decided that the time had come to cut the dialectics and get to grips. ‘Come here,’ he said.

They kissed emotionlessly. Patricia submitted as though Dagwood were pinning a lifeboat flag on her lapel.

‘I wish I was a man and could just order someone to kiss me,’ she said.

Dagwood’s heart gave a jump. A hit, a palpable hit. Was this the first crack, the first tiny rivulet starting on the glacier face which would in due course send the entire mass sliding abandonedly downwards?

‘You seem very calm about it, anyway.’

‘Oh, I knew you’d do that sooner or later.’

‘Oh did you?’ Dagwood muttered grimly. He shook his head like a fighter in trouble on the ropes, took one last draught from his glass, and went to work. He kissed her mouth, her neck, her eyes and her forehead. He kissed her tentatively. He kissed her interrogatively. He kissed her tenderly. He kissed her roughly, harshly. He caressed her with his fingertips and explored the inside of her mouth with his tongue. He tried short affectionate pecks, interspersed with appreciative sighs, then leaning back as if to look over his handiwork. He tried long full kisses on the mouth, kisses so sustained that Dagwood himself was at last forced to disengage for fear of suffocating. He built up combinations of kisses, like a skilful but desperate in-fighter. He kissed her cheek in Morse code - kiss kiss long pause, long kiss pause until he had spelt out U.B.I.T.C.H.