The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  Always afterward she held to me as tightly as it seemed one could, clutching at me, a ferocity of clinging, sometimes drawing slivers of blood; then, more softly, all quietened, nestling into me like a child or some young animal seeking refuge, myself holding her close, close as could be, as if to furnish all the shelter and reassurance she might ever need from whatever it was she might fear. Fear of loneliness surely, fear of uncertain years ahead on this distant shore, fear that if we let go of each, the other might somehow slip away; for all of these I, too, felt for myself, holding all that warmth of her, all loneliness, all restiveness, all despair, ceasing as I did.

  All the while we had been unfolding to each other and it was at times like this I began to realize not just physically; some species of emotion I had never known: an overwhelming compulsion toward all of her; a tenderness in which lust came to be alloyed with a feeling almost spiritual of tremendous protectiveness toward her; a determination to see that no pain, no hurt should reach her. I thought then how much I liked her as a person; her mind as free of sophistry as a mind could be, garnished with a fine mischievousness; capable of cunning but not of meanness; perhaps overimpatient with rank stupidity, yet as caring a person as I had known through all our travails, sailors calmed by her very presence; her tough courageous grace; myself overtaken with that old and great apotheosis that truth and beauty were somehow indivisible, one; suddenly aware that I had never been as happy as I was at that moment. Awakening her then in some chosen way to make love again. This time . . . Only the sounds of the sea reaching us from outside the cave; our lovemaking conducted to the most widely varying accompaniments; sometimes the lowest of murmurings; sometimes, the sea making up, a wild crashing of the waves on the rocks below the ledge. Always followed, too, that lightness she had, perhaps to slide off from the intensity of what we had just done, a lightness for me as well as for herself.

  “My Jesus. What did we ever do before this. I’m like an animal in heat. But every time.”

  “A very elevated sexual quotient. You may require several men. Perhaps you should join the Arrangement.”

  “I regret that my elevated position forbids that.”

  “Your position is not very elevated right now.”

  And like a young girl talking of lollipops: “What a nice way to be awakened. Are you permitted to keep a secret?”

  “Anything said in this cave.”

  “That time—through the dark and the cold—the women. Starting at Bombay . . . down through the Sunda Sea. Stopped just like that, when we came out of it into the Indian Ocean, into the sunlight . . .”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. I once suspected. Thought I was a damned fool. All of the women?”

  “All of them. I don’t believe a single one of us had ever done it before.”

  “Yourself, too, then?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Meyer, Bixby, Garber . . .”

  “All. Every one.” She waited a moment, a faintly poignant tone: “It was a comfort. Pulled us through.”

  “I’m very glad of it,” I said.

  “It wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t this.”

  * * *

  The secret life established, back in the settlement our relationship was as it had always been. As in nothing else one has great faith, sometimes excessively so, in one’s ability to dissimulate in these matters; even so, I felt that no other knew. We had one scare. Once Silva’s fishing detail approached more northerly than I had ever known it to do, still a couple of miles away across the water, a dot resting on the ocean; we retreated into our cave. Soon the whaleboat came about, started southerly again. We did not again see it make any visible incursion that far. I never believed that she believed the reassurance she had expressed, that it would go anything like that easy for us if discovered. One of our conversations—she had given that rather self-mocking laugh she had—making mention of the Jesuit.

  “Would you believe it? He had the nerve to suggest to me his unhappiness that I was not participating in the arrangement. Even made a comment about my having such a healthy young body.”

  I took a look along her. “He was right about that.”

  “If I hadn’t been taught differently about those people when I was a child I’d have told him I would join the Arrangement when he did.”

  “I’ll explain to him that it is not entirely going to waste.”

  She was more somber. “I’ll be honest. If the women found out . . .” She took a deep breath. “They’d have such a case against me . . . well, I simply have no idea where I’d stand with them any longer.”

  I could see now real concern—deep, true concern. For myself I refused to think about it. One takes the risk: then to worry about it, one should never have taken it in the first place.

  Great sex. Yes, just that, and that enough. And equally it came to be, the simple holding quite as good as anything else, perhaps the best part of all. Saying nothing for long times. Then a curiosity each of the other, as to details, particulars in the other’s life, breaking quietly through; her head in the curve of my shoulder.

  “What would you have done if it had never happened. And you’d never read Conrad?”

  “Straight back to Berryville, North Carolina; to take over my father’s newspaper. I was smeared with printer’s ink from the time I was five; hanging around the place; working there from about nine. Setting type to start with. That was all I ever wanted.”

  “To be a small-town newspaper editor?”

  “I’d have been a good one.”

  “I believe that.”

  “I don’t know if there’s anything better to be. That and going everywhere: I would always have done that. ‘Faraway places with strange-sounding names.’”

  “That’s close to mine I’d say. Sea life. Not quite the same though. The sea more important than the places to me.”

  “But both: to go over the next horizon.”

  “Oh, yes. That was the most important part of all. To go over the next horizon.”

  I waited a moment. “One of them in the Navy being in your case . . . Well, you got what you always wanted. Combat systems officer.”

  “Not that it means anything anymore. But still I’m glad. I got the damned title if nothing else. Also to do my own refresher course aboard on them—the guns, the missiles. The missiles,” she repeated, a meditative layer in her voice, as though trying to probe a riddle. “I’m like that goddamned Chatham in that. Always fussing around with them. Checking, rechecking, making sure everything’s all right. Over and over again. God knows why.” I knew she had been spending more time on the ship. “It’s almost a relief after dealing with the women. At least the missiles don’t talk back to you.”

  “They won’t ever talk to anybody again, thank God.”

  She seemed pensive, as if that had raised a question. “So it makes one wonder what they’re still doing there, doesn’t it?” The other, rather bright tone back. “But they do get to you. I understand Chatham a little better now, I’ll say that. That high and mighty air he always carried around. Sense of such a fantastic power they give you. One gets a bit . . . well, obsessed. Très curieuse. Third year in France. Children love firecrackers? They’re never very far away in my mind. I still feel that key on a lanyard under my pillow every night in the cottage. Right through the pillow.”

  All this time I had been listening with only half an ear, much more attentive to something that had become a habit with me, a ritual esthetic, almost beautified in nature, that rather somber contemplation of her nude body as one might contemplate some painting of extraordinary beauty, in a rather analytical, dispassionate fashion, simply looking at it, not even dreaming that one could touch it, such an act being on the order of touching a Caravaggio in the Metropolitan, instant arrest by one of those alert-eyed guards always hanging so innocently about; the visualness become a supreme delight, the engrossed wonder at that great mystery of how here was the source of both an exaltation and a healing to be found nowhere else on earth, n
othing remotely competing with it; in fact here what life was all about, I was coming to believe, anything else increasingly seeming a waste of time, or at best only time to be got through in order to get to what alone was important, this sight alongside me one would have thought reserved for the eyes of angels; all this, as I gazed, inspected, seeming absolutely apart from any carnality. I thought I may have missed her last words.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.” Bright tone now half-impudent. “Just about my key being under my pillow. That’s where I keep it.”

  “You’re not supposed to tell me that,” I said, keeping my attentiveness and my concentration where they were. What long and lovely thighs, elegant, unflawed, all of a whiteness whose richness of texture seemed to reach into, tear at one’s soul in a glory almost painful, and as tangibly as that in the great painting, crowned by a flaxen diadem.

  “Delaney knows it’s there. And Thurlow knows where yours is. Anyhow what difference does it make now? If none of us has gone bonkers by now, none of us is going to.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Then turnabout.” Sensed distantly in my other fixation, something almost teasing in her voice. “Where’s yours?”

  Now what unfailingly happened in this liturgy, the esthetic, intellectual contemplation beginning to give way, or rather to announce its imminent conjunction with something quite other. When that occurred, I had discovered, the very best about to be. The guards had left the room. The impossible realization that one could actually . . . My fingers touched the inside of them, lightly as one might touch a bird’s wing, hoping it would not fly away.

  “In that breadfruit tree,” I said, rather absently, as if answering a child’s question. “Just outside my cabin.”

  She gave an abrupt laugh, itself like a child’s laugh of delight: playing hide and seek.

  “In a breadfruit tree. Just imagine. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Sunday School class.”

  Her voice came to me as from far away, strangely reflective. “Got the title. Got the control. One-half the control. We go halves? Just like this.”

  Dampish thighs now. “Shall we forget the other halves? Shall we do something about these halves?”

  Beginning to taste, slowly upward, dampness ever increasing, upward toward its source, thighs parting, the wondrous scent for which it seemed almost I had come to live merging with its identical twin, the scent of the sea reaching me from just outside the cave. Then that cry from her, words I had ever yet to make out, head buried there, the cry itself like none other I had ever heard; audible testimony to the great mystery.

  And then, another day, something that I think neither of us had counted on, something toward which I had no intention. No more did I believe had she.

  That day she had spoken from that same position we liked afterward, my head in her lap, herself looking down at me.

  “Confession time. You remember when we first did it?”

  “You mean the time you seduced me?”

  “I never noticed any great resistance. Never mind. Well, I did it because I simply had to have a man. Any man. And there was nobody else. You could have been King Kong’s first cousin. That was then. Now I want you to try being honest. Was it that way for you too? Any woman?”

  “Yes,” I said helplessly.

  “Then for both of us. That was then. Now I want you to listen. Are you listening?”

  “I’m listening.”

  I almost dreaded what I knew was coming. She was holding my face now and she pressed my head into her breasts so that, I think, we would not be looking at each other when she said it.

  “Well, that’s all changed for me. Now I could not stand anybody else, even to touch my wrist. What I’m saying is . . . I like being with you . . . I feel safe when you are near . . . I love you . . .” A small, wry and ironic laugh. “How about that, Captain?”

  I felt tears that stood in my eyes emerge, all across her naked breasts as she held me ever so tightly to them; the tears telling her that it was so with me; even though it was the last thing I wanted, knowing the endless difficulties sure to follow. Of these too, she would have known as well, known also that I was instantly thinking of them. There was nothing we could hide from each other. Her voice coming from above me.

  “You’re so great at making decisions. Well, what do we do about that one, Captain? Because you know what? We’ve let happen to us the same thing that happened to Meyer and Barker. Only we wouldn’t let them do anything about it. Where does that leave us?”

  * * *

  It was another of our days. Love suddenly grafted to lovemaking, an immense new territory instantly entered. Lovemaking vastly sweeter. But also: the cave which we had once thought ourselves so fortunate to find now seeming increasingly inadequate, not a fitting measure of what we had. So easily is man spoiled. What I wanted was to move into her cottage with her, to be with her every night, to go to bed with her, to wake up and reach out and find her. My mind took off: I wanted us to be married: Either the Jesuit or Porterfield would do to perform the ceremony; mind going that far. When I suggested all this to her, this time it was she who hesitated; for the first time, real caution making its appearance in her.

  “Let’s wait a little,” she said, her mind taking a keen look at it, that other woman, that professional naval officer, astute, attendant to a difficult problem. “Let me think. Let’s both of us think.”

  “Will the others allow it, do you mean?”

  “That’s part of it,” she said carefully. “But something else also.” She waited a moment. “Something like this: We don’t own ourselves, do we? Not completely. Not at all really.”

  How long it had been so, that we could read each other before either spoke; and words spoken, only the fewest needed to lay bare the whole dilemma; risks so numerous, quite possibly dangerous ones. All of this I now reflected upon myself, taking her point, even as she put it into words.

  “What we would lose with them. Giving ourselves something very, very special that they can never in their lives have. We can’t do that. We just can’t.”

  “No, we can’t. What do we do then?”

  “I don’t know. The cave isn’t enough anymore.”

  “It isn’t enough. It doesn’t begin to be enough.”

  “Let’s wait. Let’s think,” she said again. Came back to that thing I knew had been troubling her so. “We wouldn’t allow it for Meyer and Barker. How in God’s name can we allow it for ourselves? What would they think? Ship’s company.”

  “I’m not sure I give a damn.”

  “You can’t mean that. All right then, what would we think.” A bitter note touched her voice. “Shall we take a boat and go off like they did?”

  Something new seemed all at once to approach, to hover over us, a moment of aching desperateness. It was almost as though two loves stood facing off to each other: my love for my ship’s company; my love for her; both—I had to have both. Stood around us also, as it were gazing at us in reproach even as we made love, two young figures like ghosts: Meyer and Barker. Unspoken between us, guilt had entered that cave. Our taking what they were not permitted to take; already doing that. From outside I could hear, in one of its repertory of cadences, playing against the rocks on the incoming tide, that sea where they had gone. Then I heard another sound.

  * * *

  From far away it came, pealing, blaring over the island, its raucousness much diluted here, but its idiosyncratic pulse and timbre at once familiar to any sailor, its source as known to us as though we stood next to it: the launch General Quarters klaxon I had recently had installed on the high Lookout Tower to alert all hands, wherever on the island, to any danger that might approach us from the sea; or of other, unforeseeable emergency or peril. Sailor’s sure knowledge: It is never sounded lightly; its call instantly heeded, whatever else in progress dropped, for it had but one meaning: Harm has come calling. Wit
hout a word we scrambled out of the cave and started climbing hard up the hill to the ridge that would take us back to the settlement. Cresting it, hearing the sound much more clamorously now, the pulsating blast-pause, blast-pause pouring out insistently over the trees, reaching everywhere, the sound louder with every step we took. We were running now. At a controlled pace, knowing the distance, rating ourselves. No thought of going separately, as was our custom, we moved across the ridge, down the hill and along the stream bed. We ran on, myself outdistancing her, entering the settlement, breathing heavily, the common in front of the main dwellings filling with hands, Thurlow marching directly toward me even as Lieutenant Girard came up behind. “Captain,” he said, taking time only to give me the essential facts, myself telling off coxswains for two boats, bearers for stretchers; these, the doc, the Jesuit, Thurlow, Girard, Delaney, myself, moving rapidly down the ladders which descended from the settlement to the beach.

  We sat in silence in the boats as they took us past the apron of beach, Thurlow beside me, Delaney facing us reporting that he had been studying the plants in that area when he spotted them far below; the boats bearing off northwesterly, parallel to the forbidding cliffs which constituted the shoreline; having proceeded some distance until we were standing directly off a distinctly higher cliff with the characteristic great jagged rocks below, these now immediately ahead of us. The coxswains took us in at dead slow; no place to beach, we debarked into the shoaling water, thigh-deep at first, wound our way through underwater rocks. By the time the water had dropped to our knees we could see the crumpled forms of them up above us, come to rest a certain distance back from the sea. We scrambled with some difficulty, helping one another, up the rocks and across them; were halted by the sight.