The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  There was another member of the staff still like me in his twenties, Mr. Betterton’s godson: Barton Cunningham. His hair was a dark, dank red, his eyebrows and eyelashes contrastingly fair, his eyes hazel, his skin very white though freckled. Was it his connection to Mr. Betterton that gave him his aura of superiority? But various gestures of his—casting his eyes up to the heavens during some little speech, or muttering some crude monosyllable under his breath after being given verbose instructions—suggested he didn’t hold his godfather in unadulterated esteem. And once, understandably irritated by some pomposity of the older man’s, he winked at me behind his back. Like Will Postgate in South London, he oversaw the sports and entertainments pages, though without Will’s amazing stores of knowledge. On my first day at The Advertiser Barton Cunningham was only too obviously trying to size me up. Over a fortnight later he appeared not yet to have done so to his own satisfaction and was consequently unsure how friendly he should be to me. Shortly after the tête-à-tête with Edmund I’ve recounted, he and I had the following conversation:

  BC: I forget what hole you were bunged up in, Bridges?

  MB: Hole?

  BC: School.

  MB: The Thomas Middleton School, Camberwell.

  BC: Can’t hear you!

  MB: THE THOMAS MIDDLETON SCHOOL, CAMBERWELL.

  BC: Somebody’s got to shout its name, I suppose. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it.

  MB: Well, you haven’t missed much.

  BC: That’s rather what I feel about my place, but you can’t not have heard of that. St. Stephen’s, Kingsbarrow. All the sons of local gentry go to it.

  MB: Do they now?

  BC: I was Victor Ludorum there in ’77.

  MB: Well, I never was that at mine.

  BC: Come to think of it, Bridges, you’ve got a connection with the Old Hole yourself.

  MB: I have?

  BC: Yes, your landlady’s old man, Mr. George Fuller BA, was a “beak” there, in common parlance, a teacher. Taught classics, Old Fulsome did.

  MB: I didn’t know Mr. Fuller was a schoolmaster before his disappearance.

  BC: Disappearance?

  MB: Yes, Mr. Fuller disappeared.

  BC: What are you talking about, man? Old Fulsome’s dead. Dead as the proverbial doornail. Didn’t snuff it till some years after I’d left the Hole, but they went and had a big funeral for him in this town, and old pupils, like yours truly, were obliged to turn up to it wearing the requisite black tie.

  MB: Well, I must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick . . . Did you like the late Mr. Fuller? Nice man?

  BC: Let me think! Did I like Old Fulsome? Was he nice? No, not particularly. Rum cove, really! Half the time he didn’t seem to be living in the same country as the rest of us. Too busy dreaming of temples and statues and pentathlons and nymphs by streams.

  MB: Yes, that I can believe from what he’s left behind in his house.

  BC: None of all that stuff appealed to me much. Except the nymphs by the streams. I like a nymph—well, a pretty one, don’t you, Bridges?

  MB: I’ve never put it to myself like that.

  BC: Aren’t you a bit of a masher then? Aren’t you walking out at present with some charming young miss from your London days?

  MB: I’m not walking out with anybody.

  BC: Well, I expect you’ve got your work too cut out fitting into an expanding newspaper like ours to go chasing after women . . .

  Wouldn’t I have been better off staying on at the South London paper, putting up with tasks which, if sometimes tedious, were never unpleasant and were always appreciated? I should have been more mindful of my extreme good fortune in having a friend like Will Postgate and, through him, access to a circle of vigorous, progressive, cosmopolitan young men, cleverer by miles than any in this . . . damned swamp-by-the-sea where a bloke like Barton Cunningham could patronise me.

  I arrived back at Castelaniene that afternoon to hear, rising from the basement, voices in earnest-sounding discussion, belonging to Mrs. Fuller and a man I couldn’t identify. Rather than become involved I tiptoed through the hall and then up the two flights of stairs to my attic story. But when I reached its landing, I saw that the door of the room opposite mine was ajar. That could mean only one thing: the Mercy Room’s new occupant had arrived. Good Lord, Edmund had been speaking not of the impending future but of today; Mr. Hans Lyngstrand (there, I’d remembered his outlandish name!) must be established here already.

  I could hardly pass the half-open door by, now could I? I gave it three perfunctory knocks before noiselessly easing myself into a room of which I’d had not even the most fleeting glimpse. (I won’t pretend I hadn’t fruitlessly tried the door handle quite a few times!) I knew the Mercy Room matched my own bedroom in size and shape, but I’d pictured it as more rudimentarily furnished than mine, as Mrs. Fuller was not using it for any money-making purpose.

  How wrong I’d been! What I saw when, after so long, I had both feet on the other side of its door made my jaw drop.

  From the rafters of the ceiling two model ships, old Spanish galleons, swung on either side of a big, long-tailed kite sporting the British red, white, and blue. On the walls various items of sporting equipment were suspended from pegs: a squash racket, boxing-gloves, a fencing helmet. On the floor, resting against the walls, were a cricket-bat, stumps, a ball for soccer, and one for rugby. The walls themselves were painted duck-egg blue; curtains and rugs, chair-cushions, and bedspread were bolder hued than their counterparts in my own room, crimson and Navy-blue predominating. On the table a magnificent stuffed Golden Eagle perched; a bookcase offered a whole set of Chambers Encyclopaedia.

  I’d entered a boy’s treasure-trove, a Chums’ Ideal Den.

  And now in the midst of all this a real boy lay, looking younger than his given nineteen years, fair head propped against a bank of pillows, and the rest of him obscured by a bright-colored patchwork quilt. There were cavernous hollows in his cheeks, and the sockets from which his eyes looked out, eyes so blue they resembled drops of water from the deepest ocean, were cavernous also.

  “Hullo,” I said, “I’m Martin Bridges, your neighbor here across the landing. And you must be Hans!” The boy nodded but looked bemused. “Didn’t they tell you that you’d be sharing this attic-floor with somebody?” I asked. A shake of the head followed. How typical of Mrs. Fuller that she didn’t think me worth even a mention! “I’m very pleased to meet you,” I told him. “I’ve just come back—from the town newspaper.”

  “Newspaper?” The word had an electric effect on the young Norwegian. He immediately hauled himself up into a semi-sitting position.

  “Yes, The Channel Ports Advertiser—biggest circulation for miles.”

  “News?” he was gasping out. “Tell me straightaway, please! Don’t think you’ve got to spare me. You have news for me, of him after all this time?”

  Hans Lyngstrand didn’t sound like a foreigner, more like a native of some remoter county of the British Isles which I had not visited. The urgency of his question took me aback. Perhaps a direct denial would be unwise for somebody in his condition . . .

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think I have.”

  “Not?” The blues in those twin caves of bone were so brilliant they alarmed me.

  “You’re talking about . . .?” I was, I realized, practicing just the kind of stalling an experienced interviewer has to use.

  “About Johnston. I’ve asked after him so many times—asked everybody who ever came to the hospital. But nobody’s heard anything.”

  “Johnston?” Hardly an unusual surname but I knew no one who bore it.

  “Yes, the American.” This was nothing short of a plea to come up with information I did not have.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I didn’t come in here to give you any news at all.”

  Hans had now manoeuvred himself into a more-or-less normal upright posture, though doing this had brought him a breathlessness not pleasant to hear. He s
miled his forgiveness of me with a friendliness that only compounded my discomfiture and sense of incongruity at being with him here in this hidden, unexpected shrine to schoolboy enthusiasms.

  After a few painful-sounding gasps he got out, “Johnston, Alfred Johnston, may not be the American’s real name. Most probably isn’t. Perhaps it just came to him when they asked him what he was called. I’m not even sure he’s American, though that’s what he always said he was. I want so much to know whether he’s . . .” I knew immediately what about him he wanted to know, and indeed, after an effortful half-minute he ended his sentence, “. . . alive or dead?”

  I saw again, as in actuality I had not, the unbeatable viciousness of the Channel at the spring equinox, wind bullying water into ferocious waves curling upwards only to crash punitively down, destroying whatever was vulnerable in their course. For hour after hour these had been this youth’s only physical reality. I stepped a few paces nearer his bed. My very movements would make clear to him I was a well-wisher; I must not stir up the poor young chap any more than I had already. Heavens! Further agitation might kill him.

  I said, “I’d like to help you with your inquiries, Hans. I happen to work on the most important newspaper in this whole Dover Straits region, and its editor happens to have asked me personally to take an interest in you and your story.”

  Hard to tell whether these words brought any consolation to Mr. Lyngstrand, because, more to himself than to me, he said, speaking rapidly, “Probably there never will be any news. But I think about Alfred Johnston night and day. He’s probably gone out of my life as suddenly as he came into it. Six of us went in the longboat with the Captain while he . . .” This time he was unable to complete his sentence.

  “I know!” I said, to make it unnecessary for him to do this painful thing. I heard the anguish in his voice, and—as if he’d shot an arrow—I felt this aiming for my own heart. Pain was something a wise fellow avoided, especially if it were another person’s.

  “I’m pretty sure Johnston was one of the three who climbed into the dinghy. But you couldn’t see more than a few inches in front of you with all the sea-spray. Every sailor’s worst nightmare. Our Captain called out, ‘The bulkhead’s gone. We must take our chance now.’ But we didn’t react immediately; we couldn’t believe it was all happening to us! And then Johnston—yes, I’m sure it was him!—shouted, ‘Stand by the boats! STAND BY THE BOATS!’ For a moment I thought it was God himself speaking.”

  There was no stopping the young Norwegian now. He was no longer in the Mercy Room but out on the tempestuous English Channel.

  “The Captain kept me fast by his side; I was his employer’s ward, you see, being godson of the ship’s owner, and he had a duty to see I survived. And me, I just did as I was told, wherever the Captain went, I went too, what he did I did also. But—yes, I’m pretty certain the three of them went into the dinghy. First Mate, Anders Andersen—Norwegian, like the Captain and me—and after him that young German who was always reading the Bible with Luther’s Commentary, Wilhelm, one of the Third Mates who usually kept watch with Andersen—and I could swear the other, clambering down after them, was Alfred Johnston!”

  He spoke these words so fast and so intently they seemed to twine ’round me like a rope, delivering fleeting images of chaos, panic, death.

  “But who was this Johnston?” I asked. Didn’t I need to understand why the man bothered the youth so?

  “Was?” He clearly attributed my use of the past tense to my knowing all along that this American was dead.

  “I meant, what was his position on board Dronning Margrete?”

  Hans was still temporarily trapped in the world he was describing; he met my question as one dumbfounded at its having to be asked: “Johnston was our bo’sun. And no ordinary one. He was not like any other bo’sun I’ve ever come across.”

  He spoke as if I too would have enough experience of the breed to be able to recognize this man’s rare qualities if he were to expand on his statement. Thank goodness I knew from the adventure yarns I so liked to read what a bo’sun (boatswain) was: a nautical non-commissioned-officer under the authority of the First Mate.

  “Perhaps,” mused Hans, almost imploring me to agree, “the two of them—Johnston and Andersen—made up their differences when they faced Death together. They talked together in Norwegian sometimes; I used to hear them. Johnston must have had a real genius for languages, don’t you think?—an American who could even read Norwegian. But he was a genius in all respects, I think.”

  “Genius, a big word! Tell me more!” I begged this unlikely stranger from the sea, so young and yet with so much life behind him. Never had I wanted to hear anything so urgently as I wanted now to hear the story of a man perhaps called Alfred Johnston (but perhaps not), perhaps an American (but perhaps not), but certainly a bo’sun even though unlike any other an experienced sailor had come across, and, it now appeared, a genius as well.

  “I might have known it! Yes, I should have known!”

  These words, spat out in fury, issued from right behind me from that gap in the doorway through which I had edged my way in. I turned around. With the late afternoon light on her high-held, silver-streaked golden head Mrs. Fuller looked more Grecian than ever—like one of the Three Fates. “The very idea!” she exclaimed. “Entering the Mercy Room before you were asked to do so! Before I had time to tell you about Mr. Lyngstrand.”

  Well, I thought, it might have been a damned sight politer to me to have done that earlier, instead of leaving me to hear about him from Edmund Hough. But then, I silently addressed her, you’ve preferred to keep so much from me, haven’t you, Mrs. Fuller? Not least this astonishing room.

  “Yes, the idea of a young lodger coming into an invalid’s quarters before checking up with the lady of the house herself!” came a reproachful half-echo of her words but in a deep male register and emanating from a dark three-piece-suited form behind her. This I rightly took to be Dr. Davies from the Royal Hospital. “Patients, Mrs. Fuller, must simply not be besieged by any Tom, Dick, and Harry unable to curb his curiosity.”

  To my surprise—and instant, intense gratitude—Hans replied, and in a stronger tone than he’d mustered so far: “But Martin”—there, he’d caught my name!—“has been so friendly, so eager to help me. I am very happy he is up here with me in this room now, and is my neighbor in this house.”

  • • •

  I ate by myself that evening, Sarah bunging down a plate of the predictable stew in front of me, with, I thought, a look more hostile than usual. Should I stay on at Castleaniene, I once again asked myself, where I’m so little appreciated or even liked? But then where else to go? And now Hans Lyngstrand had arrived in the Mercy Room, there was surely a reason for me to be living in this house.

  Beatrice Fuller put her head around the kitchen door. She asked me to join her, when I was ready, for coffee in her sitting-room.

  “I feel we have things to talk about, Mr. Bridges.”

  Aha! Quite a few of her predecessors had “felt” they had “things to talk about” with me, and invariably, only days later, I’d found myself moving on. I gloomily reflected that it’d be far harder to find acceptable new quarters in Dengate than in London. Most landladies here were intent on summer lets for which they could charge high rents, and so were not interested in year-round lodgers at inevitably more modest rates. I should have to conduct myself very carefully during coffee, perhaps be as bright and amusing as the old South London Martin Bridges had been, if I wanted—as I realized I now did—to remain here.

  Imagine my amazement when, pouring out coffee into fine china cups, Mrs. Fuller said, “I owe you an apology, Mr. Bridges. You entered my Mercy Room from honorable motives and have done poor Mr. Lyngstrand good already. For that I’m most sincerely grateful.”

  How to reply with the wind taken out of my sails like that? My hand shook as I took the cup proffered me, and I spilled drops of hot coffee onto the green felt carpet. “Oh, don’t men
tion it!” I said in as warm and hearty a voice as I could manage. “I can see just how it must have looked, me blundering into a private place without so much as a by-your-leave.”

  I had described Mrs. Fuller’s initial view of the situation perhaps too accurately, for she murmured “Exactly!” before saying, but as if still having to convince herself: “I do truly see you meant well, Mr. Bridges.”

  A winning boyish smile across the occasional table on which the coffee-tray rested might be appropriate. But looking across at her I saw that this would not do so far was she herself from smiling. Oh Lord, apologizing was just her way of beginning some pi-jaw. What would Will Postgate do in my place? Well, he’d surely maintain a level head, be a man with a manly wit. I applied myself to my coffee cup. Receiving its hot steam full in my face, I was thankfully spared the indignity of my blushes as Mrs. Fuller discomposingly continued.

  “The thing is, Mr. Bridges, I am finding you a difficult person. Not cheerful at all.” Her tone suggested a private world of sad disaffection to which I had handsomely contributed, while her words echoed closely those addressed me earlier in the day by Edmund himself. “Which is why, I suppose, I reacted as I did when I saw you with Mr. Lyngstrand, who evidently found your company enjoyable.”

  As equally evidently you yourself don’t, I silently added. And isn’t that what’s wrong here, and why I can’t be cheerful? Everything about me, even my voice with its South London twang, fails to appeal to you.

  Although I had been in not dissimilar predicaments before, and although her admission was hardly a bolt from the blue, all I could come up with was: “Sorry to hear I’m difficult, Mrs. Fuller, I don’t mean to be. I’m too much of a cockney sparrow, I suppose.” Mrs. Fuller neither agreed nor disagreed. Maybe a touch of my old inimitable humor was required. “Maybe I should take elocution lessons. There’s a lady who advertises in our paper. Which might cough up the money for ’em if it really wants me to become a Dengater and sound like one.”