The Novels of Beryl Bainbridge Volume 1

by Beryl Bainbridge

  On the 11th of June we weighed anchor in the Cardiff Roads and the Pilot came aboard to steer us into Roath Dock to berth alongside the bunting-decked warehouses of the Crown Patent Fuel Company. No businessman ever gives something without wanting a return. The Crown Company was supplying us free of charge with three-hundred tons of compressed briquettes of coal and bitumen, for which largesse the Owner had to smarm his way through the attentions of yet another welcoming party. He’s good at that sort of thing when he concentrates his mind; he has only to smile to set the ladies fluttering, but you can tell he finds it a strain by the way he keeps glancing over his shoulder to reassure himself Dr Wilson is at hand.

  The coaling of the ship was completed that same afternoon under his supervision. He didn’t have to be there, but I reckon he found it preferable to spending time hobnobbing with the company directors and their wives. When it was over all hands were landed for the ship to be fumigated and blown free of coal dust, after which we were invited – compliments of the management – to the second house of the Empire Theatre Music Hall. The Owner went hotfoot back to London.

  The same tedious procedure of loading and cleansing happened all over again on the Saturday, following our removal to the Bute Dock to take on board a hundred tons of steam coal. It was then that the shipwrights’ original misgivings came home to roost. The Terra Nova settled dangerously low in the water and leakage occurred in the bows. We all had to heave to, caulking and cementing the timbers. Lt. Evans warned us to keep our mouths shut in case word got round and we were prevented from leaving on time. Lashly thinks the trouble stems from the renewal-plates put in to strengthen the ship for the icepack; some bloody dockworker has used the wrong-sized rivets.

  Saturday night we were given shore leave, and I went to the house of my brother-in-law Hugh Price to join my wife Lois who had travelled up from Rhosili to say goodbye. My mother had come too, and her brother David Williams from Criccieth, now an old man, and so far gone in the head as not to know the time of day any more. It was an ordeal my mother being there, crying over me and carrying on as though our next meeting was destined to take place beyond the bright blue sky, forcing me to divide my attention between her and Lois and the baby. What with my brother-in-law’s three grown lads living at home and the neighbours popping in and out to shake me by the hand, it wasn’t long before I wished I was back on board. However delicately put, there’s always one question nobody can wait to ask, namely how does a man perform his bodily functions in a temperature below zero. You can hold yourself in your hands, I tell them, when you’re passing water, but when it’s a matter of something more pressing, no matter how you position yourself, it’s a frost-bitten bum for sure. I was beating about the bush, for that isn’t quite the way of it. There were times in the Discovery days when we did our business in our britches and shook out the turds when they froze.

  A bit of a storm blew up between me and the wife. She was pestering to know how my pay was going to come through. I could only tell her she had no need to bother her head for the next six months – after that it was a question of working out what remained in the Expedition kitty. ‘You can rest easy,’ I said. ‘The Owner has given his word that the families won’t do without.’

  ‘What use will a word be to me,’ she flared up, ‘when you and your precious Owner are thousands of miles away playing at snowmen?’

  The brother-in-law didn’t improve the situation. ‘I seen a photograph of Captain Scott’s wife in the newspaper this morning,’ he said. ‘You told me she was a good-looking woman, and by God, she is.’

  ‘I don’t know that I expressed an opinion one way or the other,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ he insisted.

  ‘I was talking about his mother, see,’ I said. ‘The Captain’s very attached to his mother.’

  The damn fool wouldn’t let it go. My Mam compounded it by nudging my uncle and shouting into his ear that I thought the world of Captain Scott. It beats me why she had to bring the uncle into it; judging by the baffled look in his drowned eyes he was having difficulty in fathoming who I was, never mind the Owner.

  ‘Not the world,’ I protested, attempting to get hold of my wife’s hand under the table, only to have her snatch it from my grasp as if she’d touched dirt. I felt I was being torn in all directions, so much so that when Hugh Price suggested we go off to the pub I jumped at it. It wasn’t as though my wife was hanging on my every word and putting herself out to make a fuss of me. On the contrary, she was looking daggers all the while I was eating my tea.

  There was a fellow in the pub who came straight up and wanted to know if it was true that the Terra Nova was unseaworthy. ‘What gave you that idea?’ I asked. ‘I read it in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘It says they’re having to use the pumps.’ I saw him off with a flea in his ear, but later the brother-in-law was daft enough to repeat what had been said in front of my mother, which set her weeping again.

  I was all for going straight off to my bed, it being the last night me and Lois would snuggle down together for three long years, but she said she had to give the baby its feed and she didn’t want me lumbering about while she was trying to get him winded.

  Hugh Price fetched the cards from the sideboard. The old uncle was laid out on the sofa; every time the coals settled, or one of us swore or thumped the table, he shouted, ‘Is that you knocking, Lizzie … is that you, cariad?’ and we shouted back, ‘Hush there, Lizzie’s long since gone to her bed’, which was no more than an arrangement of the truth, seeing his wife Elizabeth had been unravelling in the ground for the last twenty years. Once, when next door booted the cat out for the night and it let off a yowl, he sat bolt upright and exclaimed, ‘Keep still, you bugger, I haven’t finished yet.’

  I slept badly. There’s a gas-lamp directly outside the window and it casts a glow, never quite still, on a patch of wallpaper above the wardrobe. In my fanciful state it seemed the wall was shifting. Some time in the small hours the clock on the landing stopped and the silence swelled up louder than the ticking. I thought of how in the morning Hugh Price would start it going once more, and how when my heart ceased to beat it would be for ever, there not being a key invented that could wind me up again. Then I dwelt on all the bad things I’d done – the untruths told, the tomcatting around, the squandering of money, the filching of those two cigars with their two little labels tossed over the side – and there was the usual melancholy pleasure to the exercise. Such moral reflections are customary before a long voyage; I expect it’s nature’s way of preparing one for the efforts to come. A man can’t give of his best if he’s beset with worries of things left undone, words gone unspoken.

  Lying there, I tried to go along with the notion that I was a weak and miserable sinner, and yet I had only to stretch out my arm, fist clenched huge against the lamplight, to know how strong I was, how endurable. For one dangerous moment I played with the idea of waking my wife and making a confession of sorts, just so I could go off purged, shiny as a new pin. I think the last bit of nonsense was occasioned by the tune of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ suddenly popping into my head. It’s the Owner’s favourite hymn, and he used to whistle it, or leastways make the attempt, when we were trying to light the primus on the glacier. His lips were so cracked with the cold he could only manage one note in ten and he sounded like a cuckoo in spring.

  Thinking about it made me snort with laughter, loud enough for my wife to stir in her sleep. Earlier, she’d let me love her, albeit grudgingly. She complained my breath stank. It never ceases to puzzle me, that, while men and women’s bodies fit jigsaw-tight in an altogether miraculous way their minds remain wretchedly unaligned.

  I must have dozed off in the end, for the next day my wife said she’d had to clamp her hand over my mouth because I was bellowing out some name and she was feared I’d wake the baby.

  ‘What name?’ I asked, risking putting the fat on the fire. There’s a woman I bumped across in San Francisco who stays in the mind, half-India
n, half-white.

  ‘It sounded like Jesus,’ my wife said, and added, ‘Knowing you, it might have been Jeannie.’

  I saw her and my mother off on the midday train back to Swansea. I’d told them I was expected back on board at dinner-time, though strictly speaking I wasn’t required to show myself until sundown. I wanted the farewells over and done with, which was why I wasn’t very chatty at the station. I tried to be lovey-dovey; indeed I felt loving, yet they sensed I was holding myself separate. It’s hard to explain, but when a man’s within sight of sailing it’s as though he’s already gone, and the distance between him and those he’s leaving behind widens by the moment.

  My mother took hold of the baby and shooed me and Lois further down the platform, so we could be on our own for the last few minutes. It wasn’t a great success. My photograph’s been in all the newspapers and people kept coming up and wanting to pat me on the back. There was a man there with a dog no bigger than a mangy rabbit, and when it sniffed round my trousers and I cuffed it with my boot he said, ‘I expect you need all the practice you can get before you start marching with those huskies.’

  I couldn’t help laughing. A sledge-dog is part wolf, see, and will bite you to the bone as soon as look at you, and his poor brute had about as much life in it as the fur tippet my Mam drapes round her neck when she goes to chapel. My wife stalked off; I expect she thought I was laughing because I was cheerful. Then the train puffed in. My mother sat like a stone in the carriage, staring at me through the glass, the baby’s head, bald as an egg, bright against the dark nest of her shoulder. Just as the train began to move Lois bunched her fingers to her lips to blow me a kiss. Then I did feel choked. Tears pricked my eyes; my mother looked so old and my wife so young.

  The leakages in the Terra Nova were serious. By the Monday we were manning the pumps four hours out of twelve. One of the stokers, a Belgian who went under the nickname of Van Winkle, moaned that in her present condition she wasn’t fit to sail, that she’d never make Madeira, never mind Capetown, and we ought to delay passage until things could be put shipshape. He was partially in the right of it, of course, even if he is a foreigner. Given favourable winds we won’t fare too badly, but if we have to get up steam it will mean even longer at the pumps.

  Lashly and me did our best to put the Belgian right, spelling out the urgency of establishing a base before the Antarctic winter set in – being ignorant of the South he continued to belly-ache, so much so I offered to pitch him overboard. At that, dear old Tom Crean, warm-hearted as always, took me aside and told me the man had domestic problems to contend with. ‘Who hasn’t, boyo?’ I said, but I took his point.

  I felt uneasy in myself. Monday night, the ship’s company, wives included, were to muster as guests of the Cardiff Chamber of Commerce, the officers at a seven-and-six-penny dinner at the Royal and the rest of us at a half-a-crown-do further down the road at Barry’s Hotel. I had mentioned it to Lois, who’d argued she’d best get back home to look after our eldest child. It bothered me, what with our parting under a misunderstanding, that I hadn’t insisted. My Mam could have looked after the kiddies.

  I had the opportunity to ask Lt. Bowers if he was going to be accompanied, and he said he didn’t suppose so. We were still taking aboard equipment and stores and he was in his element, knee-deep amid crates of Stone’s Ginger Wine, his cap tipped to the back of his head, writing little entries in his notebook. Mr Cherry-Garrard was assisting him. The latter’s a nice enough young fellow, very anxious to please and make himself liked, and halfway to it seeing he doesn’t mind putting his hand to the muckiest jobs. He has a way of looking at you as if expecting to be struck by a fist, and might welcome it, if only to prove he won’t stagger.

  ‘I’ve already been home to say goodbye to my people,’ Lt. Bowers said. ‘My mother’s none too keen on my going as it is, so I see no call to drag her all this way just so she can weep on the quayside.’

  ‘My sentiments exactly, sir,’ I said. ‘It does no good to prolong the misery.’

  He proceeded to tell me how his sisters had knitted him a woolly jumper, and what a perfectly grand time he’d had jumping into the sea off a promontory in his back garden. He said he loved swimming and didn’t I find it the best sport in the world? ‘Captain Oates,’ he said, ‘lucky devil, is thinking of putting in a pool on his estate down in Essex … when he returns, that is. Don’t you think that a capital idea?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could feign, for to tell the truth I’d consider myself a lucky devil if I could scrub the dirt off in something larger than a tin bath in front of the fire, never mind own a stretch of water in which to play at fishes.

  I waylaid the Owner first chance I got. ‘It’s like this, sir,’ I said, coming straight out with it. ‘Begging your pardon, sir, but I’m worried as to arrangements for the wages.’

  ‘The men’s pay will come through the ordinary channels,’ he said. He sounded irritated. ‘I thought I made that clear.’

  So he had, but then, he’d also made it clear he was relying on public donations and by all accounts they weren’t as forthcoming as expected. I hated pestering him. He has very blue eyes, full of candour, and though they looked tired there was still an expression of concern in them, otherwise I wouldn’t have pushed him. ‘It’s not me that’s troubled, sir,’ I said. ‘It’s the wife.’

  ‘Then she’s no cause to be,’ he snapped, more vexed than ever.

  ‘Right you are, sir,’ I said. ‘Thank you, sir’, and walked off. I knew he’d come after me.

  ‘Look here,’ he called out. ‘Would it help if I wrote to Mrs Evans? Would it alleviate matters?’

  ‘That it would, sir,’ I replied. ‘I’d be much obliged.’

  The Owner’s shot through with gold; I trust him absolutely. There are some who might suppose the scrawling of a letter to be of little moment in the circumstances. I know differently. He has a thousand and one things to see to, and a mind so burdened with details and mathematical equations that a lesser man would sink under the weight. I daresay he wrote to Lois within the hour.

  Thus relieved, I was able to look forward to the evening. A party of us, including the Belgian, got togged up early, boots and buttons glittering like glass, and swaggered down town to the posh area around St Mary’s Street. We were treated like royalty every pub we entered. In the Prince Albert there was a photograph, taken by Mr Ponting, of the entire ship’s company lined up against the side of the Terra Nova. Being so large I was right at the back of the picture, but in the Caernarvon Castle there was one of me on my own, kneeling on deck examining one of the tents. The ship’s cat was sitting alongside, which gave it extra appeal. Crean said he wouldn’t be surprised if it got imprinted on the top of a biscuit tin, only they’d need to blot me out. The Duke of York, jumping the gun, had a damn big banner slung across the outside, advertising it as a drinking haunt of the southern explorers. The beer was on the house.

  It’s a heady feeling, being famous, and that before we’ve even taken a step. I’m not the only one among us – those of us, that is, who are in with a chance – who speculate inwardly as to whether we’ll be on that final march to plant the flag. Among the lower ranks I reckon my only rival is Lashly, seeing Crean isn’t the sort of bloke to push himself into the limelight. Like me, Lashly’s big and has the added advantage of being one of the mechanics in charge of the motorised sledges, which means he’ll be useful right up to the last slog. They’ll want someone from the ranks, mark my words, so as to avoid the accusation of nepotism. I don’t doubt there’ll be photographs at the end too, with the dear old Union Jack flapping away in the background.

  Lashly got embroiled in an argument in the Duke of York with Van Winkle. I overheard most of it, because I had an ear cocked in case the Belgian sounded off about the leaks. It had something to do with a lack of truth in daily life and people taking a drop too much and consequently slacking at their duties. Van Winkle said, ‘The neglect is there for
all to see’, and Lashly replied scornfully – or so I thought at the time – ‘It must be a burden, you being here while it’s going on’, at which I flailed out, more clumsily than in anger, biffing the Belgian on the mouth and shouting he was talking from his backside.

  I was defending Lashly as much as myself. He’s not a boozer, see, and never could be, though it’s more out of fear than conviction. As for me, I drink when I’m among those with a thirst on – how else can a man slide out of himself and shine in the general chat? For my pains, Lashly called me a bloody fool and removed himself to another table to sit with the ship’s cook.

  Later, I went off to the gents and there was Van Winkle crouched on the tiles with his arms cradled over his head. A fly was buzzing about his ears and he let it come to rest on his fingers, which is always the sign of a broken man. ‘Don’t be a soft beggar,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hurt you.’

  ‘Would that you could,’ he replied, or words to that effect.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I asked, and he moaned, ‘It’s only her who has the power to wound me.’

  It turns out he’s strapped to a wife who’s taken to the bottle after becoming enamoured of a clerk in the offices of a diamond merchant. The Belgian’s mother has written telling him the wife’s gadding out every night, leaving the kiddies to fend for themselves.

  ‘Get up,’ I said, feeling bad, and I hoisted him to his feet and helped wash the rusting blood from his mouth. ‘Jump ship,’ I advised. ‘Where we’re going the cold will snap you in two if your heart isn’t whole.’

  I was speaking hard sense. To make a miscalculation in the selection of provisions is serious enough; to pick the wrong man when there’s a lengthy voyage ahead is inviting disaster. It’s the old business of the rotten apple in the barrel. We all lean towards contamination. I had nothing against the Belgian; indeed I was sorry for him, and I daresay given an advantageous turn in the weather he would have tacked safe home. As things stood, I have no guilt about my subsequent interference, him in his present volatile state being every bit as dangerous as a spark in the vicinity of a powder-keg.