Oriental Hotel

by Janet Tanner

  Don’t go! she wanted to say. But she said nothing, only nodded again, mutely willing him to be quick, to come back soon.

  He squeezed her arm lightly and winked, a small, intimate reassurance. It turned over something deep inside her and she was almost startled that she could still feel the pull of his attraction at a time such as this, when mere survival was paramount.

  Then he was gone, disappearing into the m’lée.

  Left alone, the panic threatened once again but she mastered it, standing with her arms folded around herself to keep them from trembling.

  ‘Are you all right, lassie?’ a burly seaman with a thick Glaswegian accent asked.

  ‘Yes. But what’s happening? Do you know …’

  She never got any further. The seaman had turned away with a startled oath; she followed his gaze, looking out across the clear blue sea, and gasped as she saw the white track of a torpedo rapidly approaching the ship.

  She tried to ask, ‘What is it?’ but her lips were too dry to form the words and she was answered unwittingly by the Scots seaman’s shout of horror.

  ‘My God! Another bloody torpedo!’

  As if mesmerised she watched its progress. Speeding through the water with the relentless determination of a shark who has tasted blood. The starboard guns barked, making her jump and scream aloud, and she guessed they were firing at the torpedo in an attempt to explode it. But still it came on, a dark messenger of death, and her eyes followed as it disappeared beneath the bridge. Breath caught in her throat then and she stood transfixed with horror, waiting through those seemingly endless seconds for the inevitable explosion.

  When it came, prepared as she was she screamed again as the whole ship shook around her and then lurched violently.

  ‘Christ, that’s it!’ the Scotsman yelled above the mounting din. ‘They’ve made bloody sure of us this time!’

  The panic exploded in her then, searing and destructive as the torpedo itself. Wildly she looked around. Chaos had erupted once more as the ship tilted crazily beneath their feet, shouts and screams filled the air and the order ‘Abandon ship!’ rippled over the decks in a swelling tide. Hawsers creaked as the lifeboats were prepared for lowering, a tannoy blared unintelligible orders and men jostled in their haste to get to their boat stations. But Brit was not amongst them.

  She turned about, straining crazed eyes. Where on earth was he? Why didn’t he come back?

  ‘Come on, lassie, into the boat!’ The Scottish sailor’s hand was on her arm, urging her forward, but she wrenched away.

  ‘I’ve got to find Brit!’

  ‘Not now you haven’t. Come on!’

  ‘I don’t know where he is!’

  ‘Are you going by yourself, or do I have to carry you?’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ Impatiently she shook herself free, darting off along the deck in the direction Brit had taken. For a moment nothing mattered but finding him; every terrified atom of her being was crying out for him. Brit! Don’t leave me! Brit – I’m so afraid! For God’s sake, where are you – where are you?

  The ship was listing as water poured into a gaping hole in the hold; her sandals slithered on the sloping decks.

  ‘Brit!’

  The first lifeboat was lowered. She saw it drop out of sight over the side, heard the splash as it hit the water. Another followed; the gear jammed; men suspended out from the side of the boat clung on to the gunwales, swearing and shouting confused instructions to those still on deck.

  ‘Brit – Brit!’

  A hand caught her arm, relief leaped in her, she turned and cried out her disappointment as she saw it was only the Scottish sailor.

  ‘Little fool! Do you want to get yourself drowned?’

  ‘Let go of me!’

  ‘Will you get into this boat! I know it’s not ours, but that doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘In!’

  Her eyes ached, her throat ached, her whole body was too weak to resist. A lifeboat nearby was about to be lowered, half full; almost without knowing how she got there she found herself in it, the Glaswegian sailor beside her. In those last nightmare moments before the boat deck disappeared from view she searched the now thinning crowd, but nowhere could she see the distinctive figure in RAF uniform. Her stomach fell away with the fast and jerky descent; then they were in the water, rising and falling on the swell and a distance was opening up between them and the ship.

  ‘Come on – hurry it up – she’s going!’

  The cries all around her hardly made sense. Going? Who was going?

  Then, as she looked back towards the Maid of Darjeeling she knew.

  ‘Oh God!’ she whispered, going cold.

  Men still scurried like ants on the crazily sloping decks, but the water was close, too close; with a sense of horrified inevitability she saw the Maid sink still lower until a swell lifted and dropped it and the sea swept suddenly over the deck, taking men and equipment with it.

  Her hands flew to her mouth; above them she watched with horror-stricken eyes as, with a movement that was almost dignified, the shattered hull slowly upended and slipped soundlessly into the oil-stained blue depths.

  For a moment or two after the initial rush of water there was complete and utter silence as if to pay tribute to the ship’s sudden end. Then all hell broke loose once more and the silence was broken by screams and shouts for help.

  There was debris on the water where the ship had been before – empty oil drums, bits of wreckage – and men were swimming for the boats, catching at anything that would float. One, bare-footed with trousers rolled up, sat on an upturned painting punt, another clung to a splintered wooden spar.

  Elise’s lifeboat closed in again to take swimmers out of the water, some wounded, some black with oil; soon it was so overcrowded that the officer in charge gave the order to pull away.

  ‘No more, or we’ll go down ourselves!’

  There was one boy half in and half out of the boat and Elise, terrified he might be turned away and left to drown, grabbed his hand, hauling with all her strength until someone else came to help her. Then the boat was pulling strongly away, leaving behind the wreckage and the struggling men.

  Numbed with shock, she sat staring back at the sea that had borne the Maid of Darjeeling such a short time ago and which had now closed over her funnel for ever. Everything she had brought with her from Cairo had gone down with the ship – her clothes and jewellery, the few things her mother had left her, even her toothbrush and comb. But it was not of her possessions she was thinking: it was of Brit.

  The panic she had felt when searching for him on board the stricken ship was gone now, replaced by a shock-induced stupor and an aching sense of loss.

  He didn’t come back, she thought heavily, and now she had no idea where he was: whether he was alive, in one of the other boats, or whether he had been one of the men scurrying on the sloping wet decks. Or whether, in fact, he had never re-emerged from below …

  At the thought she sobbed softly, but was almost surprised by the depth of the pain that seared her.

  A little while ago she had wanted him selfishly, because she was afraid. Now, with growing amazement, she realised there was far, far more to it than that. She wanted him now because to see him was the only way she could be reassured he was safe; to have him here was the only thing that would fill the aching void that had opened up inside her.

  It wasn’t possible that someone she had met – and disliked – such a short time ago should have become so important to her. Yet it had happened. It wasn’t possible for such caring to grow unnoticed – but it had done so. Now the single most important thing in the world was that he should be safe.

  Beneath the swelling restrictions of her lifejacket, her hands met; pressing them together, Elise began to pray as she had never prayed before.

  The sea was wide, blue and strewn with debris. In the midst of its vastness the lifeboats bobbed; the two which had been launched from the starboard sid
e now manoeuvred close together and, some distance further off, the three from the port side in a cluster with two or three rafts.

  Even now, with the chaos subsided and a stillness settled over the unforgiving ocean, Elise could hardly believe what had happened. The horror of her rough awakening, the stark, heart-stopping fear, the awesome sight of the Maid of Darjeeling slipping from sight with that relentless slowness – all of it belonged in a book or a film which time and again played before her eyes in a sequence of vivid and unavoidable scenes.

  How long would it take for the news to reach Hong Kong? she wondered. And would Gordon realise it was her ship that had been torpedoed? If he did, he would have to live through agonising hours – maybe days – before he knew she was safe.

  How would he take it? Calmly, without a doubt. She never remembered seeing Gordon over-emotional about anything. But his face would take on a closed look, so that his eyes seemed to disappear into a hollow beneath his brow, and the creases would reappear between nose and mouth – always a sure sign that he had not had even his customary five hours sleep. And he would work, burying himself in his study or going to the factory, making sure he was never far from the end of a telephone but using the business as he always did as a panacea for all ills.

  And what about Alex? Would Alex know? Gordon would keep it from him as long as possible, she was sure. But Su Ming might not be so good at keeping up a front. Chinese she might be, born in the inscrutable East, but she had all the inherent honesty of her people and would probably be so distressed on Alex’s behalf that she would be unable to hide it.

  Then again, they might not even realise I’m involved, Elise thought. I don’t know whether I’m on an official Ministry of War Transport passenger list. Brit arranged everything.

  Brit!

  Her thoughts came full circle and the consuming anxiety for his safety that lay heavy inside her all the time rose to the surface again like a ball in a pond.

  Dear God, let him be safe! I’ll do anything, anything, only let him be safe …

  ‘Hey, lassie, are you all right?’

  The thick Scottish voice made her jump – she had been alone in a world of her own. She turned to see him looking at her; as she saw the concern written into the leathery lines of his face, her throat thickened with tears.

  ‘We’ll be picked up soon. We’re not far from land here, and we had ample time to send out a distress message. The worst is over, not a doubt. Even if the sharks should come, we’ll be safe and sound in this wee boat.’

  The sharks! She had forgotten the sharks and barracuda.

  ‘Don’t look so worried, bairn. We’ll be all right, I tell you.’

  Because we are in a boat. But Brit might not be. If he got away from the Maid of Darjeeling he could be in the water. And if he is, the sharks will come …

  She tried to fight back rising nausea, but the thought was so horrific it had the power to claw at the corners of her mind even when she turned away from it. And after the torpedoing, anything was possible. The nightmare was real and she was living it.

  ‘Aw, lassie, lassie …’ The seaman took her hand between his weathered brown ones, at a loss to know how to comfort her. ‘You shouldn’t be travelling about on your own.’

  ‘I’m not … I wasn’t …’ She broke off, knowing that his next question would be to ask who she had been travelling with, and she had no idea how to answer him. What was Brit to her? First someone who had helped her, but for whom she had felt nothing but contempt; then a man who had stirred her senses and latent emotions whilst still infuriating her. Now …

  She thought of him as he had looked the first time she saw him, his thick dark hair and hazel eyes, his face, strong though not quite handsome, his sensual mouth. And the same nagging desire tugged at her, blending with the anxiety.

  Why had he gone back to his cabin, she wondered suddenly. To fetch something, he had said – yet he had insisted she left everything behind in his haste to get her to the safest place on the ship.

  She stared out across the ocean, trying to think, but her brain seemed fuddled and unable to escape the constant circling anxiety. Hadn’t he said he was carrying despatches? She rather thought so. But given his inbuilt hatred of authority and bureaucracy, she would not have expected him to risk his life for them. If he had, they must be very important – vital, in fact. Nothing less would be worth dying for.

  Something tickled her cheek; putting up her hand she felt it was wet with tears. He could not be dead, she wouldn’t believe it. Somewhere out there he was still alive, because anything else was unthinkable.

  The hours passed; strange, timeless hours while the North-East Monsoon skimmed them silently back towards Ceylon. But the other cluster of boats, away on the skyline, remained as distant as ever and the men beneath the fluttering yellow bunting were as indistinguishable as had been the black ant-men on the decks of the sinking Maid.

  Rations were passed round: malted milk tablets, biscuits and boiled sweets to which a thirst-quencher had been added. She ate automatically and everything tasted like cardboard in her mouth.

  To try to cheer her, the Scottish sailor who had befriended Elise began to tell her stories of his tenement home in Glasgow and his fun-loving family – a crowd of larger-than-life characters who, it seemed, celebrated every one of life’s minor triumphs with enough drinks at the local to give them what he described as ‘ a skinful.’ Under different circumstances Elise would have been fascinated by the colourful tales; now, grateful as she was for his kindness, she soon gave up the struggle to concentrate and began to wish only that he would be quiet.

  With time so meaningless it came as almost a shock when dusk began to fall. This morning, when the nightmare had begun, she had not thought much about rescue, perhaps because she had taken it for granted that it would come. Now, faced with the prospect of a night in an open boat, she began to wonder, remembering how vast the ocean seemed at night and how one could steam for days at a time without seeing another vessel. There was little point, she thought, in using the battery-operated lights on their life-jackets with no one near to see them; all the same, she put hers on like the others and drew comfort from the small red stars glowing in the dusk.

  Exhaustion was overcoming her now. Her eyes felt heavy and it was an effort to keep her head erect; with increasing regularity it dropped on to her chest and though the jerk brought her back from the edge of sleep, each time it took longer for her to summon the energy to lift it again. Soon her neck and shoulders were stiff and aching, but she was too weary to move, too weary to do anything but slide down against the solidly reassuring body of the Glaswegian sailor.

  ‘A ship – look – a ship!’

  Beneath her lolling head the broad chest heaved and shuddered so that for a moment, still half asleep, she thought the earth was quaking. Then the shouts, taken up by half the men in the boat, pierced the thick cotton wool that seemed to stuff her head and she opened her eyes to see a smoke signal sear the sky with a brilliant slanting trail.

  A ship!

  ‘Where – where?’ She sat up, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes with the back of her hand.

  ‘Over there.’ She dimly saw a dark silhouette on the skyline. ‘Let’s hope to Christ it’s one of ours. We’re giving them enough notice we’re here.’

  Sharp fear transfixed her as she remembered the talk of raiders machine-gunning survivors in open boats.

  ‘When will we know?’

  ‘Soon enough.’

  There was no note of comfort now in the rough voice. Elise sat hugging herself with her arms to keep from trembling as hand rockets followed the smoke signal into the sky, showering stars across the velvet blackness.

  Slowly, relentlessly, the dark shape emerged from the darker background, making the sea shimmer silver as it moved. Slowly the details became discernible, and as they did so the mood of tension that had followed the first delighted shouts erupted to an uproar of triumphant hollering.

  ‘One of o
urs!’ ‘We’re saved, lads!’ ‘One of ours!’

  She seemed to crumple as relief replaced the hard core of tension and her breath came unevenly as she watched the ship come nearer and nearer still – a dark, ugly tramp steamer made beautiful just by being there.

  ‘Now didn’t I tell you it would be just fine, lassie?’ The Scottish sailor was laughing delightedly, as lit up by relief as he had ever been after a Saturday night’s drinking in Sauchiehall Street. ‘And our boat’s the first to be evacuated, see!’

  She nodded, but already relief was being overtaken by apprehension and sick dread. All day she had been holding on to the hope that Brit was in one of the other boats. But when theirs had been emptied, all the others would be picked up too. All the survivors of the ill-fated Maid of Darjeeling would be taken on board this dirty little tramp steamer. If Brit was amongst them – wonderful! But if he was not …

  The steamer was alongside now, ladders and nets dropping to their eager hands. Unsteadily Elise stood up. Her legs, cramped from the long hours in the lifeboat, almost let her down, but there were plenty willing to help her aboard, where a blanket was placed around her shoulders and someone urged her to come below.

  For just a moment she hung back, looking over her shoulder at the other cluster of lifeboats to which the steamer would go next. If Brit was there she wanted to know it at once. But if he was not there … She shivered convulsively. If he was not there she could not bear to look at the rows of faces and not see his amongst them.

  She allowed herself to be led below and gratefully accepted a mug of coffee laced with brandy. The fumes rising to her nostrils reminded her at once of times of sickness when she had been a child and then, by association, of the whisky Brit had given her the night John Grimly had died.

  Anxious tension prickled along her veins again and she looked up, watching the steady stream of survivors coming down the companion way – men from her boat and the one alongside it, whose faces had become familiar to her during the long day.

  Then the throb of the engines told her the steamer was slowly moving towards the other boats and her heart seemed to rise into her throat. As the first of the new arrivals came down the companion way she bent her head, afraid to see, but the temptation was too great and she watched over the rim of her mug as they poured down, falling over one another in their eagerness to reach rest, safety, medical attention – and that welcome hot drink laced with brandy.