Lycett took the cigarette from his mouth. “I’ll say this for you, old girl—you’ve still got one hell of a fine figure. You certainly have.”
She seemed to become aware of his scrutiny for the first time. She turned and looked at him with undisguised contempt. “Which is more than one could say for you.”
He flushed, stung by the retort. “Perhaps there are others you find more acceptable.”
She did not answer. She merely turned away from him again and continued the interrupted cleansing of her skin.
Lycett pursued the subject “I said maybe there are others. Well?”
“I heard you.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“Are there?”
“Work it out for yourself. It was your idea.” She began to dry herself on the towel.
“You’re a bitch,” Lycett said.
She ignored the insult. She did not wish to get into a slanging match with Morton; it was too hot. There was an electric fan fixed to the bulkhead above the upper bunk, but it was not working. She moved across the cabin and reached up for the switch. Lycett leaned over and pressed his mouth against her thigh.
“You can stop that,” she said.
“I thought it was an invitation.” His tone held the suggestion of a sneer.
She tried the switch. The fan did not move. She stepped back out of range of Lycett’s still questing mouth.
“Now that thing’s gone wrong. Can’t you do something about it?”
“What do you expect me to do? Mend it? I’m not an electrician.”
“You don’t need to tell me that. Can’t you complain to someone? It’s up to the captain to look after the comfort of passengers surely.”
“I’d say that particular department was the mate’s pigeon.” He looked at her slyly. “Why don’t you tell Mr. Johansen about it?”
“Why me?”
“I thought you were on good terms with him. Maybe he’d be more likely to see to it if you asked him. Nicely.”
She had finished drying herself and was dressing. She pulled on a pale blue cotton dress and zipped it up. “I’m not asking Mr. Johansen or anybody else. I should think you could at least do that.”
“All right,” Lycett said. “I’ll see about it.”
She finished dressing, gave a touch to her hair, then walked to the door and opened it.
“Where are you going now?” Lycett asked.
“For a walk in the park.” She went out of the cabin and closed the door behind her.
“Bitch,” Lycett muttered. He took another cigarette and lit it from the butt of the old one. “Damned bitch.”
But she was a lovely bitch all the same. And she was still his wife, his and nobody else’s. Not Mr. confounded Johansen’s, not any other man’s aboard this filthy, stinking boat. Only his. They had better remember that. All of them.
He drew smoke into his lungs and watched it drift away from his mouth and spread itself on the underside of the bunk above. A cockroach came out of the woodwork. Lycett watched that too. After a while he stretched out his arm and crushed the cockroach under his thumb. It made a cracking sound and a kind of yellow juice came out of it, as though it had been a ripe fruit. Lycett wiped his thumb on the bed-cover and left the pulped remains of the cockroach where they were. Maybe that was how he would deal with anyone who got in his way. Maybe.
The cigarette end glowed as he drew more smoke into his lungs.
THREE
A Storm Called Jessie
MOIRA LYCETT had been only seventeen when she married Morton. She was the daughter of a solicitor in a small East Anglian town; an only child. The R.A.S.C. unit in which Lycett held his commission happened to be stationed in a camp of Nissen and wooden huts a few miles outside the town shortly after the end of the war in Europe. Major Lycett, still a young man and with only the earliest indications of a tendency to corpulence, was not at all unattractive to women. He had, moreover, a fluent tongue and a way of giving the impression that he had been to public school and Sandhurst.
In fact he had been educated at a secondary school in Birmingham and had at the outbreak of war been working as a junior clerk in the office of a wholesale ironmonger. In the army he had seen his chance to move up in the world. After a year in the ranks he had applied for a commission, had been passed by the selection board and had been sent to an Officer Cadet Training unit in Wales. There he had begun to shed the last remains of his Birmingham accent and to cultivate the speech style of the upper classes.
It was at a dance in the town’s ancient guildhall that he met for the first time the girl who was to become his wife. Moira Heston was scarcely out of adolescence; she was captivated by the dashing young major, while he for his part was attracted by the unstudied charm of this very beautiful girl who so obviously saw him as he wished to appear—gay, brave, handsome, gallant, sophisticated; in fact a perfect cavalier. It was she who made certain that they would see each other again: she invited him to her father’s house to meet her parents. With only the smallest hesitation, Lycett accepted.
Mr. Heston was a shrewd man in his early fifties. Lycett sensed at once that this little sharp-eyed lawyer neither liked nor trusted him. Heston asked pointed questions about Lycett’s background, his prospects. Lycett answered evasively and turned on the charm. It did not work with Mr. Heston but it was highly successful with his wife, a fluffy, blonde woman with a ridiculously girlish manner and a high-pitched giggle that obviously grated on her husband’s nerves.
Mrs. Heston welcomed Lycett effusively. “Our dear girl has told us so much about you‚ Major. I assure you, you have quite captivated her heart. Now that I have met you I can understand why.”
Heston shook hands without warmth, as though performing an unpleasant duty. Mrs. Heston confided to Lycett later that her husband would of course have been in the Services himself but for his health.
“He has heart trouble. The poor dear man has to be very careful. Such a worry to us all.” She gave a sigh which might or might not have been genuine.
There could, however, be no doubt about the genuineness of Mr. Heston’s heart trouble: eight months later it had put him in the grave and possibly altered the entire course of his daughter’s future. Had he lived he would almost certainly have refused to give his consent to the marriage that was arranged with scarcely decent haste after the funeral. Mrs. Heston did not refuse her blessing; indeed she went into raptures when Moira told her that Major Lycett had proposed.
“That dear, dear boy. How splendid. There is no one I would rather have for a son-in-law. No one. I am sure you will both be very, very happy.” She dabbed a tear from her eye and gave a little sniff. “It will be a consolation to me in my bereavement to know that my darling daughter has found such a wonderful husband.”
She herself was not to be a widow for long. Six months after the marriage of Morton and Moira she had become the wife of a recently divorced auctioneer who carried her away to Newmarket and out of the young couple’s lives for ever.
The war was over and Lycett was out of the Army. He would have liked to have stayed in, for he delighted in wearing his military uniform with the major’s crowns on the shoulders, and the pay was not to be sneered at. Unfortunately, however, he was under something of a cloud. Certain irregularities in mess accounts had come to light, a profitable little fiddle in which Lycett and a certain lieutenant were involved. He avoided a court martial only by refunding some five hundred pounds, which he borrowed from Mrs. Heston on the understanding that the sum would be repaid as soon as he had sold a number of shares that he held in I.C.I. Mrs. Heston might as well have given him the money, for the shares existed only in Lycett’s fertile imagination, and she was never to see her five hundred pounds again.
The result of this rather unsavoury business was that Lycett now had no hope of retaining his commission. The army dispensed with his services without regret and he found himself once more a civilian with a young wife whose tastes were as e
xpensive as his own and a mother-in-law from whom, now that she was about to re-marry, he could hope for no further assistance.
From that time forward Lycett had lived more or less on his wits. He dabbled in one thing and another, never holding a steady job, using his charm, his glib tongue and the army background as weapons in the battle for money. To get money he was not above using practically any method, and that he had escaped going to gaol was due as much to good fortune as anything else, for he had been involved in a great variety of rather shady operations. He had steered very close to the line separating legality from illegality but had always got away without any serious collision with the law.
Things had, however, become more and more difficult as he grew older and the personal charm became somewhat tarnished. He had tended to lose his touch also. He had come a cropper on a deal involving surplus army stores and had landed in the bankruptcy court. As an undischarged bankrupt his activities were severely limited; there were too many things he could not do. He decided that the time had come to get out of the country and try his luck overseas.
Unfortunately, he was without funds, and no shipping company was likely to give him a passage for himself and his wife in return for anything as nebulous as a promise to pay when he had made his fortune abroad. In this dilemma he turned, with no great hope, to his mother-in-law.
To his surprise the move proved successful. The auctioneer, when shown Lycett’s begging letter, came to the conclusion that the cost of two one-way steamship tickets was a small price to pay for the privilege of being rid of this plausible rogue. He was quite certain that it was only a matter of time before Lycett, if he stayed in England, found himself in the criminal courts. Which would be very unpleasant for anyone related to him, even if only by the ties of marriage.
“So he wants to go to Hong Kong. Best place for him. With any luck he’ll stray across the border and be picked up by the Reds. Anyway, he’ll be off our backs.”
“So you think I should send him the money?”
“In the circumstances, yes.”
Lycett had picked Hong Kong because the colony seemed to him the most promising area for the exercise of his peculiar talents. Plenty of Chinese had made themselves a pile, so why not an Englishman? Moira had no confidence at all in his chances of striking it rich anywhere in the world; she was thoroughly disillusioned; but Hong Kong at least offered a change of scenery and she raised no objections to the project.
“It’s as good a place as any other, I suppose.”
Moira Lycett’s disillusionment had begun very soon after the honeymoon. She had been immature when she married Lycett, but she matured quickly. Long before she was twenty she was perfectly well aware that the real Morton Lycett was something very different from the romantic hero she had, in her early innocence, imagined him to be. From the first there had never been any feeling of security. True, there were periods when the money seemed to be rolling in and they lived in style; but these were always succeeded by bad times, living from hand to mouth in scruffy lodgings, wearing last season’s clothes, sometimes even going hungry.
And yet she had stayed with him, though she herself might have found it difficult to say why. It was not that she loved him; indeed she doubted now whether she had ever really done so; she had been infatuated by the mask, but the mask had slipped long ago. Nor was it a sense of loyalty that held her; she owed no loyalty to a man who had so misled her when she had been too young to know any better.
So perhaps it was simply fear; fear of being on her own, of being forced to fend for herself. She had never been trained to earn her own living; she had no skill in shorthand or typing, no particular talents; and though, with her undoubted physical attraction, she should not have found any great difficulty in discovering another man willing to support her, she was too indolent, and indeed lacked the courage, to make the break.
As for going to live with her mother, that was out of the question. It would have been too humiliating, and even if she had suggested such an arrangement she might have met with a rebuff. She had never got on well with her stepfather, and though her mother might possibly have been agreeable, he would undoubtedly have vetoed the suggestion.
Thus, against all the probabilities, she had stayed with Lycett through good times and bad, despising him more and more as he became physically less attractive, and no longer troubling to disguise her contempt.
Lycett, for his part, knew that he needed her. In spite of the contempt, which stung him more than he cared to admit, he had to have her there beside him. In all his uncertainties there had been this one person to whom he could turn, not for advice, nor for help, but simply for a kind of reassurance. Her mere presence was enough to give him that. And physically, of course, he had never ceased to be attracted to her.
Perhaps in his own peculiar way he even loved her.
He lay on the bunk, letting the smoke drift from his mouth and thinking back over the past. He had come a long way from the wholesale ironmonger’s office, but whether the journey had been worthwhile was another matter. He had had his successes, but add up the whole account and what did you get? Failure.
There was no blinking the fact: he was a failure. Even Hong Kong, where he had gone with such high hopes, had turned out to be too hard a nut to crack. Those Chinese businessmen were no fools; they knew how to look out for themselves; too true, they did. Eighteen months he had stayed in the colony, scraping up a bit here and there, but never anything really big. It had been time to call it a day and pull out. Hong Kong was too crowded; everyone trying to make a fast million and working all hours to do it. That was the trouble; they were all too much like beavers; they had no time to stop and listen to a man like him. What he needed was a bigger territory, somewhere less cramped, somewhere he could spread himself, make full use of his talents. Australia.
He lit another cigarette and thought about Australia.
Soon he had brought himself to a more hopeful frame of mind. It was ridiculous to think of himself as a failure when there was so much opening out in front of him, so many opportunities. Australia was a big country with infinite opportunities for a man like him. Why, already he had made a start even before getting there. That young fellow, Tom Grade, could be useful; he had an uncle with big mining interests—nickel, so he said. There was a load of money in nickel. He would certainly continue to cultivate Grade, and eventually some of that money might dribble into his own ready pockets.
Lycett wheezed out more smoke and felt decidedly more cheerful. The future was not all black, not by a long chalk.
He was sweating. The cabin was too damned hot. Maybe he had better do something about that fan. One of the engineers would probably be the man to fix it.
He rolled off the bunk and reached for a shirt.
* * *
Nick Holt was leaning on the rail at the after end of the so-called promenade deck. About all the promenading you could do on board the Chetwynd was to walk round and round the accommodation; up the starboard side, cross over, down the port side, cross over again; repeat until tired. Holt had done his stint for the day and was resting. He was indulging in the pleasant pastime of watching other people work.
On the afterdeck half a dozen dark-skinned seamen were busy with chipping hammers and scrapers, cleaning the rust off the winches. Holt wondered why they troubled; there was so much rust on the Chetwynd that it would have been a mammoth operation to chip and scrape it all—and then the ship might have fallen apart.
The dungarees of the seamen hung on their small, lean bodies like rags, and the sound of their chipping hammers reached Holt’s ears like the pecking of a flock of metal-beaked birds. He could see scales of rust as big as saucers falling to the deck, leaving the ironwork pitted with shallow depressions like so many outsize pockmarks. Two other seamen with paint pots and brushes in their hands, were dabbing the scars with red oxide.
Further aft a T-shaped iron pipe, thrusting up from the poop, belched black smoke. Holt knew that this smoke-pipe c
ame from the crew’s galley, and even at that distance he could detect the spicy odour of curry.
Meals for the passengers and officers were prepared in the galley amidships where two Chinese cooks exercised their skill, and at that moment one of them stepped out through a doorway just below where Holt was standing. This was the second cook, a tall, thin young man named Chin Kee. The head cook was older and fatter, with more gold-filled teeth in his head than Holt had ever seen. His name was Min Tung, and when he smiled, which was often, it was like the opening of a treasure chest.
Chin Kee was wearing loose white cotton trousers and a cotton jacket; his feet were bare except for a pair of wooden-soled sandals held by single straps. He was carrying a bucket of garbage in his right hand, and as he walked the sandals made a clicking noise on the iron deck. There was a garbage chute in the bulwarks; Chin Kee tipped the contents of the bucket down the chute and leaned over the side to watch the swill splashing into the sea. Then he put the bucket down, opened his trousers and relieved himself in the scuppers.
Holt wondered whether he was going to have quite such a good appetite for his next meal.
He became aware of someone standing beside him. It was his cabin partner, the Australian. It was apparent that Grade had also seen the cook.
“Not bashful, that boy. Could have been ladies around.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t care.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t. And maybe it doesn’t pay to look too closely at where the chow comes from. I’ve seen that fat one with the gold-plated smile spitting in the stove. Right between the saucepans. I hope his aim’s good.”
“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” Holt said. He was going to enjoy his next meal even less.
“It could be the secret of Chinese cooking.”
Holt could never make up his mind whether he liked Grade or not. The Australian was friendly enough, no doubt about that. He was talkative too; but when he talked Nick Holt got the impression that he was keeping something back, that he was not really revealing himself. Still, that was nothing to hold against the man. Why should he open his heart to a chance shipboard acquaintance? The funny thing was, though, that more often than not people did just that. There was something about a ship that seemed to encourage intimacy, an unburdening of the soul.
Sea Fury (1971) Page 4
