Sea Fury (1971) (6 page)

Holt wondered whether he was going to have quite such a good appetite for his next meal.

He became aware of someone standing beside him. It was his cabin partner, the Australian. It was apparent that Grade had also seen the cook.

“Not bashful, that boy. Could have been ladies around.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t care.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t. And maybe it doesn’t pay to look too closely at where the chow comes from. I’ve seen that fat one with the gold-plated smile spitting in the stove. Right between the saucepans. I hope his aim’s good.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” Holt said. He was going to enjoy his next meal even less.

“It could be the secret of Chinese cooking.”

Holt could never make up his mind whether he liked Grade or not. The Australian was friendly enough, no doubt about that. He was talkative too; but when he talked Nick Holt got the impression that he was keeping something back, that he was not really revealing himself. Still, that was nothing to hold against the man. Why should he open his heart to a chance shipboard acquaintance? The funny thing was, though, that more often than not people did just that. There was
something about a ship that seemed to encourage intimacy, an unburdening of the soul.

But Tom Grade was resistant to the influences. In all his talk about almost everything under the sun there was
surprisingly
little about the man himself. He was like a
bystander
watching the game of life without being involved; an amusing commentator perhaps, but a little too detached, too cynical, lacking warmth.

Chin Kee fastened his trousers, picked up the empty bucket and walked away from the garbage chute. He glanced up at the promenade deck, saw Holt and Grade watching him, and grinned.

“Vellee nicee day.”

Still grinning, he disappeared through the doorway to the working alleyway.

“And a vellee nicee day to him too,” Grade said. “Now he can go and clean his fingers in the flied lice and the aplicot flitters. I bet he was born on the Yellow Liver and lan like melly hell when the Leds took over.”

“He’s right about the day though. Couldn’t ask for
anything
better. Get a day like this in England and it’d make front page news in the papers.”

“Always get nice days here, chum.”

“No storms?”

“Oh, sure, sometimes. No storms around now though. Look at that sky.”

It certainly looked a fine weather sky; a few high, gauzy feathers of cirrus, like dustings of chalk on a blue page, and the sun as fiery as a blast furnace, slamming its heat down on the ship. From horizon to horizon the sea was empty but for the
Chetwynd
;
she was alone in a vast bowl of azure water, sullied only by the black smoke that came now and then from her grimy funnel.

“I wouldn’t mind a storm,” Holt said. “I’ve never seen a storm at sea. It’d be an experience.”

“You must be joking. In this tub it could be the last experience you ever had. In this world.”

“I’d take the chance.”

Grade looked at him and shook his head sadly. “You’re crazy, chum, plain crazy. Me, I want no storms; just the nice soft air and the calm sea. Let’s make Fremantle without trouble, that’s all I ask.”

“I’d still like a storm. Not too big.”

“Now there you’re handing out a tall order. You want the right size. Trouble is, they aren’t made to order. You ask for the small fitting and maybe they send the real big one. And then watch out. One thing you’d better not do.”

“What’s that?”

“Whistle.”

“Are you superstitious?”

“Me? No, I’m not, but sailors are. Even that boozy old soak of a captain may be. So if you whistle, don’t let anyone hear you. Unless you like being unpopular.”

“I’ll remember that,” Holt said.

The boozy old soak was in his cabin pouring himself
another
glass of whisky. The cabin had once been almost luxurious, but that had been a long time ago. Now it gave an impression of shabby gentility; everything a little worn, a little faded, a little knocked about.

There was a settee fixed to one bulkhead, two armchairs, a bookcase, a threadbare carpet on the floor. On a peg hung Captain Leach’s oilskin coat and sou’wester; the desk was littered with papers, notebooks, pens, various odds and ends. On it too were Leach’s peaked cap and the framed photograph of a young woman. Across one corner of the photograph were
written in backward sloping letters the words. “To dearest Bart with all my love. Eileen.”

Leach raised his glass and looked towards the portrait. “To you wherever you are.” He drained the glass. “You bitch.”

The face that gazed silently back at him at him had a smile on its lips. It was a lovely face, with all the charm of youth and health and high spirits. Leach refilled his glass from the whisky bottle, leaned back in his chair and stared at the smiling, enchanting features that he had last seen in the flesh more than a quarter of a century ago. Sometimes he wondered why he kept the photograph, why he did not destroy it instead of keeping it there to mock him, to remind him every day of what he had lost.

Perhaps it was a form of masochism, this constant
laceration
, this daily reopening of the old wound that had never been allowed to heal. Again, as so often before, he let his mind slip back over the years to that day in the spring of 1942 when his world had fallen in ruins, never again to be rebuilt.

The s.s.
Morgan
Hall,
a freighter of some six thousand tons, was carrying a mixed cargo—canned foods, dried egg, medical supplies, barrels of lard, butter, cheese, Spam, a few Douglas “Bostons” cocooned and lashed on deck. She had loaded in Baltimore and had joined a convoy in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There were forty merchant ships in the convoy,
including
a dozen tankers, and the escort was made up of two destroyers and four corvettes.

It was to be one of the bad convoys. U-boat attacks began on the sixth day, the day they entered the Black Pit, the region
of no air cover. The first ship was sunk just after nightfall, and from that moment it became a running battle between the all too few escort vessels and the wolf pack, with the wolf pack getting the better of the exchange.

On the eleventh day the engines of the
Morgan
Hall
broke down. It was at six bells in the forenoon watch, the sky
overcast
and a bitter wind blowing from the north-east. The sea was the colour of slate except where the wind whipped the crests of the waves into foam. Captain Leach was on the bridge of his ship and he was very tired; he had spent much of the previous five days up there, snatching only an hour or two of sleep now and then, taking his meals in his hand, never getting out of his clothes. He was unshaven; he felt dirty, worn out, aching in every bone and muscle. And now this.

The
Morgan
Hall
had been near the head of the convoy in the second column from starboard. As she lost way the other ships passed her by and left her; there was nothing that they could do to help; they had their own problems of survival and the broken-down engines of the
Morgan
Hall
were not their concern.

One of the destroyers came abreast and a brief exchange of information took place by way of loud hailer from the
warship
and megaphone from the merchantman. There was no comfort for young Captain Leach; the escort, having already lost one corvette, could not afford to detach a vessel to nurse the
Morgan
Hall,
valuable as her cargo might be.

“I am sorry but you are on your own now. As soon as you have repaired the engines try to catch up. Best of luck to you.”

The destroyer moved away quickly; it was dangerous lying hove-to in those water and there was other business to attend to. Captain Leach felt very lonely after it had gone. He felt
even more lonely when the convoy disappeared from sight over the eastern horizon. For a while the smoke was visible even after the ships had vanished, but soon that faded also and the
Morgan
Hall
wallowed helplessly, strangely, even eerily silent now that the engines were no longer beating; only the smack of waves against her side, only the occasional clang of a hammer breaking the brooding quiet.

And in everyone was the feeling that perhaps they were being watched, that somewhere a periscope had broken
surface
and was lined upon them.

On each wing of the
Morgan
Hall
’s
bridge was an armoured box with a Lewis gun on a high-angle mounting; in each box was a gunner in a duffel coat. Looking aft from the bridge, Leach could see the Bofors gun on its high, mushroom-like platform, and a little further aft the four-inch breech-loader. All the guns’ crews were closed up, waiting. But what could they do against a torpedo?

Leach spoke to the mate, a lean, saturnine man with a slight cast in one eye. “We’re a sitting duck, Andy, a sitting duck.”

Mr. Blyton did not trouble to dispute the statement; it was all too obviously true. “I wish they’d hurry up with those engines.”

“They’ll do the job as quickly as they can. Their lives are at stake too.”

The mate wiped his nose on a very dirty handkerchief and looked gloomy. “It’ll be a hell of a job catching the convoy now, even if they do get them going.”

“We must hope for the best, Andy; we must hope for the best.”

In the event it was not to be a torpedo that sank them but gunfire. A U-boat surfaced fine on the port bow where the four-inch on the poop of the
Morgan
Hall
could not be
brought to bear. The U-boat’s gunnery was good; it was a simple execution. Within half an hour the
Morgan
Hall
had gone down and the thirty-two survivors were in the only two lifeboats it had been possible to launch.

The U-boat came alongside and the commander spoke to Captain Leach. He regretted the necessity of sinking his ship; he regretted also the necessity of leaving them in the boats; it was war. Captain Leach thanked him for his regrets. They parted without animosity; at least there had been no atrocities, no machine-gunnings.

The mate was in command of the second boat. In the night they lost contact. Leach was never to see Mr. Blyton again. Nearly a month later a ship’s lifeboat was sighted by a Coastal Command “Sunderland” in the Western Approaches. Captain Leach had sailed his boat some five hundred miles and had lost eight of his sixteen men from starvation and exposure. Two more were to die later but the others survived. Leach was awarded the D.S.O. In a way it was like a mockery.

Leach was tough; he refused to go to hospital; he wanted to get home just as soon as it was possible to do so. His home was at Caversham, just outside Reading, a three-bedroomed house in a pleasant residential area. He was still paying for the house.

He tried several times to get through on the telephone; each time there was no answer. It worried him a little, but he could think of plenty of reasons why Eileen should not be at home. He sent a telegram saying he was coming and caught a night train from Liverpool to London. He arrived in
Caversham
soon after midday and walked from the bus stop to the house.

There was no front gate; it had been swallowed up by the demand for scrap-iron. There were no gates along the entire length of the road, except an occasional wooden one that had
no strategic value. The railing had gone too. Leach was able to step straight off the pavement on to his own gravel drive where the weeds were growing unchecked.

The front door was under a little red-brick porch. He tried it and found that it was locked. He rang the bell. No one came. He went round to the side door, tried that too. The same result. He peered in through the kitchen window. It was all so familiar: the boiler, the wringer, the sink, the clothes horse; his home. But there was no one in the kitchen. He began to feel vaguely uneasy.

He stepped back from the house and looked up at the bedroom windows. All closed. He was about to go round to the garden and try the french windows when someone said, “Captain Leach.”

Leach turned in the direction of the voice and saw that it was Mrs. Howlett, the widow who lived in the next house. She was standing in the gap in the privet hedge which separated the two properties. The gap had been there when he and Eileen had moved in and it had seemed unfriendly to propose blocking it up.

Mrs. Howlett was a large, pink-faced woman of forty with peroxide blonde hair. Leach became aware that she was holding a door-key in her hand. He also noticed that she was looking at him with a rather strange expression, half embarrassed, half compassionate.

“You’re thinner,” she said. “Have you been ill?”

“Not ill,” Leach said. “Is that my key?”

She handed it to him, still with that same embarrassed, compassionate expression that he could not, or did not wish, to understand. “Eileen asked me to give it to you when you came.”

“Thank you,” he said.

It was the key to the front door. He let himself in and the
chill of the house struck him at once. It seemed to send a chill into his heart.

The envelope was propped up on the table in the sitting-room; the gate-legged table that they had bought in a sale in Reading. The envelope bore one word in Eileen’s backward sloping handwriting: “Bart”.

He hesitated before opening it, having a presentiment of what it might contain. Then he slit the flap and took out the single sheet of writing paper that was inside.

The message was brief to the point of brutality. But perhaps, if such a message had to be written, that was the best way, since no amount of dressing it up in sugared words could have made it less bitter.

One gets over everything! Even an incurable disease? Yes—in the grave. He would as soon get over the memory of her. As long as life lasted he knew that she would be in his mind, the wound in his heart.