Horse Under Water (19 page)

‘What do you want to know?’ he said.

‘I don’t know what it is that’s missing until I hear it; if there are any bits you don’t want to tell me, miss them out.’

‘Very cunning,’ said Tomas, ‘the gaps tell you more than the story in between.’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’m the Attorney-General travelling incognito with a Japanese tape-recorder under my toupee. Or it could just be that you are a little on the paranoiac side.’

Fernie sipped at the big glass of whisky I had given him.

He said, ‘Do you remember the Spanish Civil War? Do you remember the newsreels? Dead horses, wounded babies.’ He removed a fleck of tobacco from his lip. ‘Frightened, I was so frightened. People like you don’t understand. Do you?’ he said. He wanted a reply.

I said, ‘As long as you don’t say it’s my lack of imagination.’

He went on staring into space and smoking. ‘That was this same Spanish Civil War that H.K. said you were a hero of?’ I said.

Fernie Tomas nodded. For a moment I thought he was going to smile.

‘Yes, I was there. There are times you’re so frightened of something that you have to make it happen sooner. I was just someone who wanted to come to grips with my trauma. Everyone I knew
who had volunteered had gone to fight for the government; so I went to fight for Franco just to be different. They posted me to an Italian unit. I was with General Queipo de Llano’s second division at the fall of Malaga. Kondit thought I was
defending
Malaga. He liked it that way so I never disillusioned him.’

‘You didn’t like it?’ I said.

‘Yes. I used to lie on the beach watching the cruisers
Canarias, Almirante Cervera
and
Baleares
come up to bombard Malaga. It was just like an exercise, a crash and a puff of smoke and then after a couple of hours they would clear off down the coast again for dinner. It was pretty. Nice clean boats. Nice impersonal fight. No view of what you are hitting. No one trying to hit you. It was a gentleman’s war. When we got into Malaga … well, you’ve seen a town after bombardment.’

‘Who hasn’t nowadays?’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said Tomas. ‘I remember …’, but he didn’t go on. It was as though he were dragging it out of a crystal ball. ‘I remember,’ he said again, ‘the last time I saw my old lady. I got compassionate leave because our house was bombed. The old man died of his injuries and my mother was living in the kitchen with a tarpaulin rigged across the ceiling. She didn’t want to go to a rest centre because of “all the happy times she’d had there”.’

‘Happy times.’ He shook his head as he remembered. ‘It was a slum, and she’d worked herself half to death there. She kept saying that they’d
taken the old man to a hospital in “a proper ambulance, not one of these A.R.P. things”, she said, “it was a proper ambulance”. Well, that’s what Malaga was like; dead, swollen horses and a smell of brick-dust and drains.’

I could see that in some curious way the destruction in Malaga and London had fused into one, and he wouldn’t be able to sort them out. I remembered how, when he was arrested, he had said that it was all the same war. I wondered about that.

‘When I came back I joined the British Fascist Movement. I met Mosley in person. He’s a much misunderstood man, that Mosley, dynamic and honest. All the really Machiavellian supporters of the B.U.F. had seen the war coming for years and they buried themselves deep in the Conservative Party. Half the boys that give you your orders from Whitehall and gave us all those rousing anti-Nazi speeches were kicking themselves rotten that they didn’t have a nice big armament factory in Germany. But we were simple-minded idealists. Later, the war, and more especially the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had changed our minds. I stopped trying to understand it. I went into the Navy as a telegraphist and then got a commission …’

‘Was that difficult for you?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Tomas, ‘anyone who bought a pipe, a pair of pyjamas and walked around with Penguin books about Paul Nash was singled out as officer material.’

‘No, I meant difficult on account of your having been so political.’

‘If they’d kept out the politicals in 1940 there wouldn’t have been enough recruits to man a dinghy. The only English people who knew the slightest thing about fighting a modern war were the people who had been in Spain.’

‘Yes, I suppose you are right,’ I said.

‘I went to
Prince Arthur
at Brighton and became a naval officer in four months. I loved it. You spend a long time with the same people inside a small ship. You get to know every nut and bolt of the ship and every nut and bolt of the crew. When the boat is sunk it’s worse than being divorced after a happy marriage. You lose your home, your personal gear, your friends are dead, wounded or posted. You have nothing left. After the second time in the drink I wandered around the London pubs for twelve days hoping to see a face I recognized. I decided that I couldn’t go through that again. I volunteered for the submarine service. If you get sunk there you stay down. But before I ever got near a submarine I found myself in Scotland, messing around with frogman gear.’

Tomas asked for a cigarette. After lighting it he said, ‘You don’t want to hear about frogman training?’

‘Just tell me what you think is interesting.’

‘You are a funny sort of bastard.’

‘Touché,’
I said.

‘I had orders to report to the depot. Everything had gone wrong that Thursday; the bank manager was gunning me for a lousy £12 and the MG had plug-trouble on the Great North Road – you remember what motor spares were like during the war – and this fat swine in the garage where I stopped was fiddling some petrol for two blokes with Boston haircuts and a van full of tinned fruit. I hung around fuming, but he told me I should be grateful for one of his precious spark plugs. “I reckon it all goes to you blokes in the services nowadays,” he said, as though we were living on the fat of the land. “Yes,” I said to him, “it must be a tough war back home, listening to Itma and knitting socks,” and then these other two got nasty and after some words he said he didn’t want any money for the plug, so I left. I can remember every minute.

‘It was from that time that I began to feel afraid of the deep water. I was quite O.K. diving in daylight or near the surface, but I couldn’t bear working with the thought that under me there was just darker and darker depths of water until you were just swallowed up.’

Fernie Tomas shouted to Augusto to make sure he didn’t forget the engine temperature, and Augusto said he wouldn’t.

‘You don’t know what it’s like on a midget,’ said Tomas. It was a plain statement of fact. I didn’t. ‘Imagine that you’ve crossed the North Sea inside the bonnet of a motorcar, jammed against the
engine. You dress yourself in underwater gear. Much more incredible and inefficient than modern equipment. You dress in a space much smaller than a telephone booth, and then clamber through the flooding chamber, which has a nasty habit of going wrong and leaving you jammed in a tight-fitting coffin. But you may be lucky; the hatch cover isn’t jammed or fouled so you can crawl out into the ocean. You walk along the top of the midget submarine – it’s not much wider than a plank and getting narrower and narrower as you move forward. The pointed bow upon which you are finally balancing is bumping with great metallic crashes against a vast anti-submarine net which stretches as far as you can see in every direction. The rungs of the net are nearly as big as a steering wheel and you hold on to one to steady yourself as you wield the cutting tool. All the time the skipper keeps the motor running so that the bow will continue to nudge the net, but the deck grinds and grates and perhaps a flow of fresh water throws the buoyancy out, or rain makes it even darker than before. Your metal boots slip off the tightrope you are on.’

Tomas rubbed his arm and shivered. ‘I had a recurring nightmare in which I slipped off the deck and fell into the bottom of the sea.’ He shivered again. ‘So of course it happened. I grabbed the net as the submarine slid to one side. The motor had failed and the current swept it back out of control. I was alone in the sea hanging on to the net.’

Tomas rubbed his forehead and took a stiff drink. I poured him another. He said nothing until I said, ‘What did you do?’

‘I climbed up the net rung by rung.’ Tomas’s white hands clasped the blanket. ‘I held on to the top of the net until a German boat came along in the morning to check it. They told me afterwards that they had to prise my fingers away from the metal to get me into the boat. I was the only survivor of the force that attacked. They gave me food and I slept the clock round in the local navy barracks. I could only speak schoolboy German, but it was enough to hold a conversation. On the second day I had dinner in the German officers’ mess, and I supposed I’d had a few extra drinks to celebrate being alive. In the normal way I would have been sent to a P.O.W. camp and there the matter would have ended, except for something one of the officers said at dinner that night.

‘Two bodies had floated up under the port screws of the big cruiser. They had tried to move them but there was no diving unit within a hundred miles. He said there was no option but to run the screws. He hoped I’d understand. It wasn’t a thing a sailor liked to do, he said.’

Tomas sniffed and swirled his whisky around in his glass. ‘I said that if they would give me my equipment back and recharge the oxygen cylinder I’d have them up in a jiffy. Everyone in the mess said what a sense of comradeship that showed – that I would do that to retrieve my friends’ bodies
for a ceremonial burial, which the German Navy would be honoured to give them.’

Tomas looked up at me; I hadn’t smiled.

‘It’s easy to be cynical now and see it as a put-up job, but at that time the propaganda pundits had got us all acting like the cast of a British film. You know what I mean?’

‘Don’t I just,’ I said.

‘Anyway, they had a couple of Kriegsmarine officers accompany me and they said could they use the apparatus. I wasn’t keen about that. They didn’t press it. They were professionals, just as you’re a professional. They knew what sort of process getting information really is.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘collecting information is like making cream cheese from sour milk. If you squeeze the muslin bag to force it – it’s ruined.’

‘Yes, that’s the way it went; they collected their information drip by drip, and all the while I was living in their officers’ quarters and had a servant and good food and they were telling me not to hurry and perhaps I would like to be sure that there were no other bodies near by. After they’d had a big funeral with lots of stuff about fellow-sailors challenging the mighty ocean deep and all that, I was sent down to Cuxhaven to a P.O.W. unit. The food was ghastly and I was treated like a convict. One night, when I was feeling as low as it’s possible to get, one of the German officers that I’d stayed with in Norway visited me, together with a man named Loveless.’

‘Graham Loveless?’ I asked. It was Smith’s nephew.

‘Yes,’ said Tomas. ‘I told them that I had been a member of the British Union of Fascists. They said that if I joined the Legion of Saint George (what was later called the Britische Freikorps) they could arrange that I lived with German naval officers. They said that I would only be called upon to use the underwater equipment to save life or property or against our mutual enemy – the sea.’

Tomas looked at me and shrugged.

‘And you fell for it?’ I said.

‘I fell for it,’ said Tomas.

‘Then you met Giorgio Olivettini?’

Tomas didn’t fall into the trap; he walked into it slowly and deliberately. He looked at me and said, ‘Yes, I saw him soon after that. He told you?’

I tried a simple lie. ‘I guessed,’ I said, ‘when I saw you on the U-boat the night Giorgio died.’

‘That was you, was it?’ said Tomas. ‘Yes, I sometimes did a night swim for pleasure.’

I knew he was lying. He had obviously been out doing his heroin-delivery service that night, but I said nothing.

I poured a drink for both of us; the whisky helped Tomas to relax. He finally said, ‘It was a Moray eel.’

I offered him some ice from the refrigerator. ‘It was a Moray,’ he said again. I put a cube into his glass and two cubes into my own. ‘It was a
Moray,’ Tomas screamed as loud as he could scream, ‘a Moray, do you hear?’

‘O.K.,’ I said.

‘They tear you to pieces. Huge Moray eels as big as pigs, they have teeth like razors. They terrify me. There are thousands along this coast, many of them eight feet long. They live in the rocks as a rule, but these were living in the cracked pressure hull.’

I remembered the gashes across Giorgio’s body. Perhaps it was true. Tomas began to speak quickly. ‘He was a lieutenant when I first met him. The Wehrmacht had a pretty low opinion of the Italian armed forces, but these frogmen were different. Everyone hung on their every word. It was funny really. Giorgio was the only person that understood what a farce the whole bloody war was. We both fought on both sides. He had a German medal and an American medal.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said.

‘Yes, I saw him presented with a German Eagle Order of Merit with star.’

He picked up his drink and sipped at it. ‘He was a fabulous underwater man.’ He drank some more. ‘Kill him, I couldn’t have killed him. You can’t imagine a trapeze man pushing another trapeze man off the wire, could you? Well, it’s like that.’

‘Tell me about the period immediately before V.E. Day,’ I asked him.

‘You know my real name, so you have read the court martial?’ asked Tomas.

‘It doesn’t give a clear idea,’ I said.

‘Loveless was a big man with the Germans,’ Tomas said. ‘People said that when the Germans won the war they’d make Loveless the Prime Minister of England. When Loveless said to me that it was all up, I knew it was all up. It was his idea to go to Hanover. I wanted to go farther south to the sector where the Americans were advancing, but Loveless said if we went to Hanover we wouldn’t have to worry any more, so I went. There was a Wehrmacht Archive Unit in Hanover and Loveless had got permission to examine certain of the documents.