The Undertow (3 page)

They turn a corner in shadow and climb a flight of stone steps. The streets are busier here. Market girls pass, barefoot, carrying baskets of scarlet tomatoes and sheaves of green herbs on their shoulders, heads in determined profile. On the pavement, men in blue workclothes crouch to play dice. They glance up as the seamen pass, but then look back to their game, barely noticing.

“There,” Sully nods.

There’s a bar right up at the top of the street. It’s painted green; its windows are dark. Spiteri’s.

“C’mon,” Sully says.

They march on up towards it. Their footfalls echo back from the quiet buildings. They reach the door. William slows his pace, lets the others filter in ahead.

“Watcher waiting for, Hastings?”

“I’m not …” William says. “I’m going to …” He gestures out along the street, up ahead. See the city. Buy a postcard. Write home to my wife.

Sully jerks his head at the dark doorway. “They sell postcards in here.”

Of course they don’t. And up along the street there is a flight of stone steps, and a carriage clattering along the street above, and an archway that opens onto darkness, and a whole city just aching to be seen. But William can’t afford to put Sully’s back up. He steps up to the doorway of the bar. Sully grins.

“I’ll just have the one.”

“Course, son. Course.”

It’s dark; it smells of dungy foreign cigarettes and old wine and spice. William’s heart lifts at the strangeness of it. Mr. Spiteri waddles over, arms open, pretending to remember Sully, happy to be introduced to the new hands, calling them his boys, ushering them across to a huddle of chairs round a circular table at the back. His apron is long and stained and his belly is as big and round as a horse’s. They order the local red wine, which is cheap. Spiteri’s delighted with their order, and off on his way to get it, still talking, commending the menu. William finds himself smiling: this is not the Prince’s Head, with his dad and his workmates playing dominoes and smoking and watching him through their pipe smoke. No-one knows him here.

There are, as he’s already well aware there always are in harbourside bars, whores. They sit at the counter, in satin wraps, their legs showing right up to the calf, the bulge of flesh like a soft unfamiliar fruit. One woman turns and catches William’s eye, and he smiles instinctively in reply to her smile. He hadn’t meant to look, but he finds himself caught, until she drops her gaze and turns away. She’s pretty, in a rough sort of way. Ragged curls, bitten dirty nails. Skin like milky tea.

Not like Amelia.

He drinks. The wine is both harsh and sweet. The first mouthful makes him shudder. Sully proposes Paveley’s health; they tip back their little tumblers and empty them down their throats. Paveley is nineteen; he had his birthday while they were at sea. It makes William feel old. He is twenty-four next birthday. He is going to be a father. His job at Price’s is waiting for him, when the war is over.

The bar fills quickly, becomes dark with men and noisy. He’ll have just one more. Then he’ll go and find her a postcard. Something pretty. You can’t say very much on the back of one postcard. You can’t be expected to.

Sully tilts the bottle towards William’s glass. William nods. He watches the liquid tumble in, watches the dark level of it rise.

Mrs. Spiteri emerges from the kitchen. She carries a plate of warm pastries, glistening with oil. Mrs. Spiteri’s face is round as an apple, shiny and damp. She sets the plate down and smiles at the men as they eat, enjoying their enjoyment, and when she catches William’s eye she nods to him, asking his approval. He smiles back, nods,
It’s good
. And it is—the filling is a kind of pease pudding, spicy, peppery—and she smiles broader, and nods again, more vigorously, saying something in Maltese, and when she nods her body shakes—unsupported breasts, soft belly, no corsets on—and William drags his thoughts away from her soft giving flesh, the clear satisfaction she seems to find in others’ pleasure.

The lads are talking, but their conversation is trailing, loose-knit: they are distracted by the women at the bar, who glance round every so often to catch an eye. Then the pretty one turns round in her seat, and recrosses her legs, and her wrap slips away to show a smooth knee and a glimpse of thigh, and Sully’s on his feet, heading over to her, drink left unfinished on the table.

William watches. He shouldn’t. Sully lays his hand on the whore’s hip, on the silky wrap. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t stiffen. She just turns to him, then leans in towards him, serious, big eyes looking up at Sully’s face. He talks, confident, sure of what he’s doing. She gives him a smile, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. She slips down from the stool and takes his hand; she leads him over to the stairs.

William watches them until they move out of his line of sight. He downs his drink. He thinks he can hear them. Hear their tread cross the landing above, hear their talk, their creaking through the upstairs room. It’s not really possible, not with the noise of the bar. He wishes he could be like Sully. Just for a bit. Just for the next half hour or so. Then forget what he had done.

Paveley downs his drink, gets to his feet. He brushes his hands off on the seat of his trousers, grins to the company, and heads over to the women. The one in the mauve wrap turns towards him, and when he stands talking to her she touches his chest, laying her hand flat there as she talks to him, looking right up into his face, like she knows him. Everywhere they go, the whores can always speak English.

The two of them go upstairs. William pours himself another glass of wine.

There’s no talk now. He sits and drinks with Dwyer and Spooner. They’re all locked into their own thoughts. The women.

Then Dwyer gets up, his chair scraping back, his cheeks red. He
goes over to the bar, just touches the remaining girl on the arm. She looks round at him and smiles. She’s not a girl; she must be knocking on forty. The agreement is made briskly. He follows her to the stairs, following her broad backside in its silky wrap.

William downs his drink. There’s an ache in his belly. He wants.

Boots thunder down the stairs, and Sully bursts back to the table, stuffing his shirt into his misbuttoned kecks, grinning like a baboon.

“Be so kind,” he says, nodding to his glass, so William fills it, then fills his own glass too, and drinks it down. The wine is inky, sweet and dark, and it is not working, not softening or warming him at all.

The bar has filled up with soldiers now; a few of the Scottish Borderers and the Welsh, and more seamen off the
Goliath
. It’s full and dark and noisy.

Dwyer is engaged to be married. Earlier in the voyage, on shore leave in Simonstown, in that bar near the market, where the women with their glossy skin and their blue-black eyes lingered, a few drinks over the eighth, William had told Dwyer what he’d never told anybody else, what he only said to Dwyer because he’d thought their circumstances were similar, what he’d never dream of telling Amelia; though if he could tell her it might make her understand what the world was like and how he had to live in it now. That he’d made a promise to himself, that whatever else happened when he was away, he wasn’t going to go with a whore. He wasn’t going to bring home a disease, he’d told Dwyer, head drooping low and heavy over folded arms. Much less leave some poor half-breed bastard to starve in a foreign gutter. And Dwyer had nodded and agreed. William was just right, good man, good for him. And he, Dwyer, he’d do the same, because he had a girl at home who was worth the waiting for.
Skin like cream, skin like the finest Welsh cream
, he’d said, shaking his head, thinking of that skin and of the wedding night to come. But two bottles of rum empty on the table, and Dwyer had gone out the back with one of the black glossy women, and William had drunk on alone, chin on folded arms, tilting the glass to his lips.

Sully empties the remaining wine into his glass, and Spiteri sets down another bottle with a flourish.

Which is the difference, of course—the waiting for, William thinks. When it’s still all possibility, when it’s all still in the imagination. When you dream of plucking open those little pearl buttons on her blouse, of pulling the ribbon of her camisole bow to make it come undone, of her
breath quickening, of pushing up her skirts in creamy folds of cotton to stroke her milk-white thighs and kiss her sweet, clean, legitimate wifely cunt. Before it’s real.

He pours another glass, looks back to the bar. Sully’s whore is back. She sits on her stool, calm, unruffled, and the barman hands her a glass of something and stirs a spoonful of something into it. They chat easily; old friends. The way the satin slides over her hips, the way it hangs around her peach-soft calves. She lights a cigarette, and her lips are a fleshy mushroomy pink. At the table, Sully drinks contentedly, sucking down the wine between his teeth and leaning back in his chair, sated. He will sleep tonight, slung in the hammock above William. While William lies awake and wanting.

Sully starts to talk about this new campaign in a distant, unbothered way, like it’s going to happen to someone else. This is the swift strike that ends the conflict; that Churchill fellow is sharp, you know. It won’t take much: they won’t be expected there, in the Dardanelles. They’ll ship in the Tommies, the Tommies will have a pop at old Asiatic Annie, and Annie will run squealing like the bunch of schoolgirls that they are, and Sully, himself, is going to watch it all from the safety of
Goliath
while the guns boom out overhead and pummel anything that’s left of the fleeing enemy.

“You sure she’s safe?” William asks.

“
Goliath
?” Sully asks. “She’s sweet as a nut.”

“She’s getting on a bit.”

“Give over. She’s well-seasoned, that’s all.”

Nodding, William rolls himself a tickler, his fingers thick with drink. “Not quite got the turn of speed, though, of the newer ships.”

“Bollocks,” Sully says, swigs his wine. “Shovel faster.”

William laughs, lights his fag, making the tobacco strands flare and fall into ashes.

“Might head up to that temple in a bit,” he says.

Sully just looks at him. “Eh?”

“That building up above the harbour. You know. Saw it today.”

“Temple? No. You mean the hospital.”

“Hospital?”

“Military hospital. Left over from the Crimea. That’s what all them crates are for. Medical supplies.” He nods towards the cluster of men in their greyish-green uniforms; the pimpled pink faces of the soldier boys. “For them lot. Just in case Annie gets in a sneaky one.”

A sneaky one? Just in case? William’s eyes blink shut. The bar noise flares hard and loud, the voices, the shouts and calls and laughs and curses and coughs of the men. He thinks, the trade in carnage that must pass through this tiny island, to make them need to build a hospital like that.

He opens his eyes, watches Sully drink; expression bland, not a flicker. Sully does this: makes him laugh, makes him like him, then makes him shudder. He’s a dog. That’s how come he can do what he does and then just forget about it. A dog doesn’t think, it just does, it just is; sometimes good and sometimes bad, whatever suits it at the time. A man, a good man, doesn’t behave like that.

He loves Amelia. Of course he loves her.

But.

The stream of dark-coated men, trailing through the candleworks’ doors, and him in his dark coat walking up to join them, and disappearing into the black and white and grey, into the dark.

Hush, love, please
.

His eyes narrow, head heavy, the smoke twines around him. The scent somehow reminds him of the hooded women: they ghost past through his mind’s eye; and the market girls, their eyes skimming over him as if he wasn’t there. And the men in their blue workclothes, who played at dice; who looked up, and looked away, as if just a breeze had passed over them, a breath of air.

We’re just shadows here, he thinks. Shadows. We come and go unnoticed as the gulls.

He lifts his head and watches the whore. The pretty one. The one Sully had. The way she sits, elbow on the counter, cigarette lolling from her hand. She turns, catches someone’s eye. Smiles. William glances along her eyeline, to see who she’s looking at. It’s one of the Scots. A young lad: he stares back at her slack-jawed, hungry; hands in his pockets. There’s a rash of spots across his chin. The lad’s pasty fingers will be grubbing around in his pockets for money; in a minute he’ll be counting out the coins on his palm. William looks back to the woman. There are deep lines down from her nose towards the corners of her lips, and they deepen as she smiles.

He wants her. He can’t help wanting her.

But he can leave. Buy a postcard. See the city. Write.

She tilts her head. Runs a finger down one edge of her wrap, where it lies over the curve of her collarbones and dips down between her
breasts. He tries to think of Amelia, how he’d imagined her before they were married, when she was the girl that he was waiting for. But he just recalls the red lines pinched into her skin by stays. The way she turns her head away.

There’s a grain of guilt; a gritty nub of it. That’s all. He stubs out his cigarette.

“Give me a thing, Sul,” he says.

Sully stills his glass, looks up at him. Gives him a slow grin. “Well I never.”

“Just give me one, eh?”

“Not brought your own?”

William swallows dryly. “Please.”

Sully raises his eyebrows, reaches into his pocket, draws out a chalky disk of rubber. Skims it across the table to William, who pockets it.

“Wash it out after, eh.”

William nods, drains his glass in one swallow. He feels the scrape of his chair as he pushes away from the table, and as he stands up his head swims. He turns and walks steadily towards her. She notices him. She turns towards him, and smiles. Not at the eyes.

Upstairs it is bright. High windows with dusty white curtains. It seems strange that it is still day. She speaks in English, but her accent is strong and he is blurred with drink.

“What you want?” she asks him.

“You know.” He juts his chin at her, at her body.