She had brought with her the usual assortment of accessories: sun-glasses, handbag, paperback novel, cigarettes, lighter, cosmetics. She stretched out her legs on the extension of the deck-chair and breathed in deeply.
“The air is good mebbe?”
She looked up and was not surprised to see the mate of the Chetwynd gazing down at her. By some strange coincidence that recurred each morning, Mr. Johansen always seemed to find it necessary to visit the boat-deck when Moira Lycett was there.
“It’s better up here than in the cabin.”
“Sure. Cabins too hot. No air-conditioning. Ship too old.”
Carl Johansen was a Dane, tall and bony and flaxen-haired, with a misleadingly boyish look. There was in fact nothing boyish about Mr. Johansen except that look. He was not even particularly young, having come into the world only a year or two after Moira Lycett. Johansen’s trouble was not liquor, though he could drink with the best; it was an evil temper. He had been gaoled for assault in more than one country and once he had half-killed a seaman simply because the man answered him back. Like Bartholomew Leach, though for a different reason, Johansen had found it difficult to get employment with the more selective shipping companies. Finally he too had found his level with the Barling-Orient.
For quite apart from his unpredictable temper, Carl Johansen had another failing: women. At an earlier stage in his career he had been second officer on board a cruise liner which did the Canaries, Bahamas, Caribbean, Rio circuit. Johansen had found that job very much to his taste, but it had come to a sudden and unsavoury termination when one of the passengers complained to the captain that the second officer had seduced his wife.
Johansen had not troubled to deny the charge; it would have been pointless to do so, seeing that the husband had caught him in the act. Johansen could never understand how he had forgotten to lock the cabin door; though even a locked door would scarcely have saved him. There is not as a rule a rear exit from a ship’s cabin, and a porthole is a poor substitute for a window as a way of escape for surprised lovers.
That had been the end of cruise liners for him.
Moira Lycett looked up at Johansen, her eyes shielded by the sun-glasses. She understood the Dane very well; she could have made a pretty shrewd guess concerning the thoughts that were passing through his mind as he stood there with one hand resting negligently on the back of the deck-chair and his frankly admiring eyes taking in every voluptuous curve of her body. Not that she resented being gazed at in that way. Quite the contrary in fact. She dreaded only the day when men would cease to be attracted, cease to be moved by the desire to possess her. When that day came life would have lost most of its savour.
She liked the look of Johansen; she liked men who were lean and bony. It was Morton’s softness that disgusted her, the flabbiness that he had allowed to overtake him. She knew that Johansen was a hard man, mentally as well as physically; she was not misled by the boyish air; there was a steeliness about the pale blue eyes, a hint of ice; and the mouth had a cruel twist. He was, she thought, the kind of man who might beat a woman. She felt a secret thrill of pleasure at the idea of being beaten by Johansen.
“Why do you work on an old ship, Mr. Johansen?”
He grinned. “Why do you travel in an old ship, Mrs. Lycett?”
“You think perhaps we are both the victims of circumstance?”
“Mebbe so.”
When Moira Lycett looked at Johansen she could imagine what the Vikings must have been like. Give him the right gear and he would not look out of place in a longship, one of those fierce and brutal invaders, leaping ashore with sword and shield to murder and rape and plunder. Again that secret thrill passed along her spine, but she gave no indication that his proximity in any way affected her; she remained outwardly cool, apparently even a little bored. She gave the smallest of yawns, suppressing it with a touch of the fingers on her lips. It did not escape Johansen’s notice.
“You find life tedious, Mrs. Lycett?”
She answered lazily: “You don’t have to be so formal. My name is Moira.”
“And mine is Carl.”
“I know. And as to finding life tedious, why yes, I do. What could be more boring than a sea voyage? Each day is just like the last—and the next. The scenery never changes; nothing happens.”
“Sometimes things happen.’
“You mean the ship might hit a reef, spring a leak? That sort of thing.”
“No, Moira, I do not mean that sort of thing. I do not speak of the ship.”
“No? Of what then?”
He moved his right hand a little on the back of the deckchair, closer to her shoulder. His head bent over her and she could see his eyes and the smile curving his mouth, a smile of intimacy, of something shared.
“Things happen to people. When they want them to happen. There is no need to be bored.” He straightened up. “You understand me?”
“I understand you very well,” she said. “Oh, yes, Carl, I understand you.”
He began to laugh a little. Moira Lycett also laughed.
Morton Lycett was in the lounge playing two-handed pontoon with the Australian, Grade. There were glasses of beer on the table and both men were sweating. Two electric fans made a humming sound but did little to cool the air; they dispersed the cigarette smoke, that was all.
Lycett was a plump, bald-headed man, approaching with no delight in the prospect his fiftieth birthday. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses because, much to his annoyance, he had discovered that his eyesight was no longer good enough for reading without their aid. His cheeks looked as though they had dropped under their own weight and they hung down on each side of his jaw like the pouches of a hamster. His mouth was small, the lips slightly pouting, and he had a bristling moustache of the military type. His ears were singularly ugly, closely resembling those strange fungoid growths that attach themselves to the trunks of trees. He spoke with the clipped accents of Sandhurst and made short stabbing gestures with a stubby forefinger when emphasising a point.
“Twist.”
Grade turned up the three of diamonds.
“Twist again.”
This time it was the king of hearts. Lycett threw down his cards in disgust.
“Tough luck. Major,” Grade said.
Lycett had never been a major in the regular army; it was a rank he had held in the R.A.S.C. during the war. But he liked to use it; he felt that it gave him style; there was a certain ring to Major Morton Lycett that plain Mr. Lycett could never have. For a man in his line of business a thing like that could be important.
As to what his line of business was, Lycett avoided giving any precise information; he preferred to drop hints, alluding vaguely to international projects, expanding interests, capital investments, world trade. People were given to understand that he had a finger in quite a number of different pies, that innumerable extremely useful strings were grasped in his capable hands and that a stock market tip from him was as good as money in the bank—always supposing he could be prevailed upon to give such a tip.
“You may wonder,” he had once remarked to Grade, “why a man in my position should choose to travel in a ship like this.”
“It’s cheaper,” Grade said, looking at him from half-closed eyes.
Lycett laughed, cheeks wobbling. “You really think that consideration swayed me?”
“I wouldn’t know, Major.”
“My dear fellow, it’ll be a sad day when Morton Lycett has to count the cost of a steamship ticket—or an airline ticket either for that matter. Fact is, I like it. You can keep your Boeings, your crack liners. Give me an old boat like this and I’m happy. A ship like this has character.”
He had almost convinced himself that he really did prefer to travel in ships like the Chetwynd. That was the secret of his persuasiveness: he believed in what he was saying—at the time.
Tom Grade was about thirty-five, with hair the colour of a new copper coin, a snub nose and a face entirely covered with freckles
. Lycett said it made him feel several degrees hotter just to look at Grade’s head; it positively glowed. Grade, like Nick Holt, had joined the ship in Hong Kong. What he had been doing there was even more of a mystery than Lycett’s activities. He said he had been looking around, searching for an opening. Lycett would have imagined there were more openings in his native Australia for a man like Grade, and perhaps that was the conclusion he himself had reached, since he was on his way back.
Grade shuffled the cards and dealt. “You going to Australia on business or pleasure, Major?”
Lycett picked up his cards. “A little of both perhaps.”
“Looking for room to spread yourself?”
“You might say that. I’ll buy one.”
Grade handed him the card face downward. “Maybe I could help. Put you on to something really good. Nickel, should we say?”
Lycett picked up the card, looked at it, looked at Grade. “That’s a very useful mineral.”
“And I’ve got connections.”
“I’ll remember that.”
They played in silence for a while. Then Grade said, “Mrs. Lycett’s on deck, I suppose?”
Lycett answered him offhandedly, “I imagine so. She likes sitting in the sun.”
“You don’t?”
“Frying myself never did appeal to me.”
“Your wife is a very attractive woman, Major.”
“You think so?”
Grade said softly, “I’m not the only one who does.”
“Anyone in particular you had in mind?” Lycett’s tone was still offhand; he seemed only mildly interested. He did not fool Grade.
“Mr. Johansen seems very attentive.”
“The chief officer?”
Grade nodded.
“It’s his job to be attentive to passengers. I’ll buy another.”
Grade dealt the card. “Just so long as he doesn’t exceed his duties.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“I’ve heard things about Johansen.”
“Tell me.”
Grade told him. Lycett listened.
“What are you going to do?” Grade asked.
Lycett examined his cards. “I’ll stick.”
TWO
Forgotten People
RADIO OFFICER Victor Maggs was sitting in the wireless cabin and brooding. Maggs did a good deal of brooding. He brooded on all the things in life that had combined against him from the day of his illegitimate birth to the present time; and these things were innumerable. Always, so it seemed to him, he had been struggling against a malignant fate, with every man’s hand turned against him. The chip on Maggs’s shoulder was so big that it enveloped him completely in its malevolent shadow.
Maggs was thirty years old and looked ten years older. He had an old man’s stoop and his dry, mousy hair was thinning; already there was a bald patch on the crown of his head and an increasing area of bareness at the temples. His face was narrow, the nostrils pinched in, cheeks hollow, jaw pointed; he had the kind of prominent front teeth that give to the owner a rabbity appearance; the skin had a sickly, yellow tinge, and dotted about its surface were a number of unsightly warts.
Maggs was not prepossessing and he knew it. Whenever he looked in a mirror he was reminded of the fact and it seemed only to make him more ill-disposed to a world in which he felt at so great a disadvantage.
He hated the father he had never known and he hated the mother who had given him so little love. He knew that she had never wanted him, that he had simply been a nuisance to her. Even his physical appearance had been a cause for reproach; many a time she had yelled at him, “Ugh, you ugly little bastard. Get out of my sight; you make me sick.” Perhaps if he had been a handsome boy she might have been more kindly disposed towards him; but was he to blame for his looks? In part he had inherited them from her; in part, no doubt, from the father who had planted the seed and had not stayed to see it germinate. Freda Maggs, a short blonde woman with a voice like a coffee-grinder, had seldom mentioned him. When she had, she had referred to him merely as “That bloody sailor”. Maggs doubted whether she had ever known his surname.
Well, she was dead now, and good riddance to her. She had never done anything for him; he had had to fight for himself always; and if he had not been a tough as well as an ugly little bastard he would never have got as far as he had. Nobody had ever helped him, that was certain; plenty had tried to hold him back. Even as a qualified wireless operator he had still found difficulty in getting a job. He supposed it was his appearance again; which was all so damned unfair, because he could do the work as well as, if not better than, any of the pretty boys. So in the end it had been the Barling-Orient, and the s.s. Chetwynd, with a swine of a captain and a bigger swine of a mate, cramped quarters as hot as hell and radio equipment that might well have come out of the Ark.
Victor Maggs sat with his hands resting on the arms of the wooden chair that was all the seating accommodation there was in the wireless cabin and stared blankly at the apparatus in front of him—dials, plugs, switches, headphones. He had an impulse to take a hammer and smash it all to bits. It was so hot in the cabin; sweat beaded on his forehead and his head throbbed maddeningly. He wondered gloomily whether he had picked up some bug in Singapore and was sickening for a fever. That would be just fine with no doctor on board. There was, of course, that little foreign passenger—Menstein or some such name; he was supposed to be a doctor of some kind. If he was, he did not appear to be a very prosperous one, and he was not the sort of man Maggs would have trusted. With foreigners you never knew where you were. Jewish too, by the look of him. Still, even at that, he might be better than that half-caste steward with the Welsh name, Dai Jones. A couple of aspirins and a black draught, that was Jones’s standard remedy. God help any poor devil who broke a leg or developed acute appendicitis; you needed more than aspirins and black draughts for that sort of thing.
Maggs put both hands to his throbbing head and felt blind hatred inside him gnawing like a canker; hatred not for just one person or two but for all the rest of mankind. He felt himself to be one apart, a loner, having no friend in the whole world, nor wanting any. He hated everyone; given the chance he would have destroyed them all, every last one of them. Perhaps only some act of destruction such as that would stop the hammer beating in his head.
In their cabin Saul and Sara Menstein were conversing in low tones. It was not that they were afraid of being overheard; there was nothing in their conversation that needed to be kept secret; it was simply that they always did keep their voices low. When you had gone through the kind of experiences that the Mensteins had gone through you no longer raised your voice; you did not assert yourself in any way; if you were struck you did not strike back, for you had learnt that retaliation led only to worse persecution.
Mr. and Mrs. Menstein belonged to a race of people that had known much persecution; over the centuries they had endured it; under kings and emperors, tsars and dictators; in almost every land they had been strangers within the gates, the mistrusted, the envied, the abused, the feared, the spurned, the hated, the tortured, the martyred. When a scapegoat was needed they were there; when money was wanted, from them it was extorted; when a sacrifice was required theirs was the blood that stained the altar. Never fully accepted by the communities in which they lived, they kept to their own ways, their own customs, their own god; and thus they were all the more easily picked out for affliction.
Saul and Sara were born on the same day in the same street in the same town in Poland. Their families were well-to-do, and Saul went to the university in Warsaw and qualified as a doctor of medicine. It had always been understood that he and Sara would marry, and as soon as he had begun to practise the wedding was arranged. It was the summer of 1939; for Poland a time of menace. The happiness of the young couple was all too soon to give way to heart-rending misery.
On the First of September Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and on the Third of September Saul Menstein was cons
cripted into the hard-pressed Polish Army as a surgeon. He and his wife were not to see each other again for more than six years.
Menstein’s military career was brief. By the end of September the war in Poland was over and the bleeding carcase of the country had been ruthlessly carved up between Germany and Russia. Menstein was a prisoner and Sara was on her way to a concentration camp.
In the long years of suffering that were to follow perhaps the hardest thing of all to bear was the utter lack of knowledge each had of the other’s fate. Knowing what was happening all over Europe, it was difficult to keep alive the hope that they would ever see each other again. It was a miracle that both survived. Starvation, maltreatment, disease—these were enough to kill thousands even of those who had escaped the ultimate horror of the gas chamber. The Mensteins, with a toughness none would have suspected from their physical appearance, endured all the hardships and were spared the final solution. When the war ended they were both alive, but both ignorant of the whereabouts or even the fate of the other. In the chaos of war’s aftermath, the ruined towns, the vast armies of the homeless, another year was to pass before they were reunited.
It was in a camp not far from Essen, a miserable collection of comfortless huts, a place of waning hopes, of shattered lives, of bitter memories. Everywhere Saul Menstein went he saw despair in men’s eyes. The war was over but to countless thousands it had brought only another kind of concentration camp.
When Menstein saw his wife he scarcely recognised her. Seven years ago she had been a lively, brilliant girl with a dark, vivid beauty, glowing eyes and a skin like silk. Now she looked twenty years older, her face thin and lined, her hair lifeless, turning grey, gaps in her teeth.
But he knew that time had dealt harshly with him also; from him, as from her, youth had fled all too quickly away, leaving the dry husk of a man. He was no longer the eager young doctor of those early, ecstatic days of married life. But love itself had not died; it had been based on stronger foundations than mere physical attraction. They needed each other now perhaps more than ever.
Sea Fury (1971) Page 2
