Underhill had wagged a forefinger: ‘Ah. Certain to reach the top, then.’
Nobody had argued: it was more of a truism than a joke. Rogerson cast a friendly glance at Nick: ‘How does that place you, Nick? Are you going to the – er – top?’
Nick had taken the question seriously. ‘Doubt if I’ll stay on at all, when the war ends.’ This had been the opening of a discussion about what any of them might do when the Navy no longer needed them, or they the Navy, and eventually it was agreed they’d team up and start a shipping line. Between them, they had the talents: Underhill from the Merchant Navy, Rogerson’s rich family to provide the capital, Wally Bell with his knowledge of the Law, Elkington’s father some kind of city merchant. Nick, they decided, could be chairman… ‘After all, you’ll be a blooming baronet by that time, won’t you?’ They laughed: ‘Just what we need, a baronet!’
He’d told them he thought his father might live forever. Sir John Everard had survived so many battles – from somewhere in France. He was still a brigadier, though – which was odd, when one thought of majors who’d become generals by this time. Nick never heard from him. He wondered sometimes what would happen when the fighting stopped; whether Sarah, having enjoyed several years of freedom from that cruel, overbearing bastard, would find it possible to submit to living with him again. In most ways, and for her sake, one hoped she wouldn’t. And one saw, day after day, the hospital ships arriving, stretcher-cases flooding into the Marine Station here. One read the casualty lists and the ‘Roll of Honour’ in The Times. In the latter part of this year of 1917 nearly half a million men had died in the ‘push’ that had been swamped out at Passchendaele. And yet: he frowned, tried to clear the subject from his mind. There were enough things here to fill it with, and it was healthier not to allow that kind of speculation. The matter of inheritance had nothing to do with the way one’s thoughts ran: but one was left all the same with a sense of guilt – as if it did have.
* * *
He found some paper-work to clear up; and listed the jobs that had to be seen to tomorrow. Then he and Cockcroft had a rather early supper-served in Hatcher’s absence by Leading Steward Warburton, the captain’s steward – and after it he decided to go ashore for a walk. He had a vague idea of strolling along the Marine Parade and having a nightcap in the First and Last, the tiny windowless pub quite near the admiral’s house and offices. It had no windows because a hundred or two hundred years ago it had been a Revenue Officers’ depot for seized contraband, and windows would have added to their security problems.
There was quite a swell running in the harbour; even in this inner basin its effects were noticeable. Mackerel was sawing up and down against the timber catamarans which held her off the wall; the gangway lurched with the ship’s movements, its foot scraping to and fro across the stones. He stood on the jetty for a minute, watching it; Dover really was a rotten harbour, in anything like rough weather. And he wanted no accidents for Wyatt to come back to. He warned the sentry, ‘I think it’s likely to get worse, if anything. Make sure you keep the breasts and springs adjusted. If you’ve any worries on that score, let Sub-lieutenant Cockcroft know at once.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
He set of northwards, to cross the bridged gate of the Granville dock. This was drifter territory: the stubby little craft lay everywhere, singly and in pairs, or in trots of three and four. There’d be another sixty or seventy of them at sea, on barrage duty. From these in harbour, nets and other gear were spread on the jetties for repair and overhaul. And there was a smell of fish: which there should not be, because it was U-boats they were paid to look for nowadays, not plaice! He decided he wouldn’t, after all, go along the Marine Parade; he’d turn inland here, to Snargate Street, see if he could find the backroom bar that Skipper Barrie of the Lovely Morning had called his club. He was unlikely to be there, unfortunately; McAllister had predicted at least a week in hospital for him.
In hospital yacht, actually. There were three of them for naval casualties: Lord Tredegar’s Liberty, Lord Dunraven’s Grainaigh – with his lordship still in command of her – and Mr White’s Paulina. To one of the three Skipper Barrie had been carted off when Mackerel had docked two days ago.
Rounding Granville dock, Nick turned left, with the larger Wellington basin now on his right. Following his nose out through Union Street brought him into Snargate Street; and a short way down to the right, where Fishmongers’ Lane led off, stood the gaunt pile of the Fishermen’s Arms. Sailors were loafing round it and leaning against its dirty walls. Some were already more than cheerful, while others looked as if they’d no money left and were plainly less so. There were no women on the outside, but Nick saw a few inside as he pushed his way into the crowd. A Mackerel stoker spotted him, and bawled something to shipmates at the back of the room; a leading seaman came shoving through the throng – grinning, swaying, spilling beer.
It was McKechnie, a Glaswegian who was coxswain of the whaler. Black-haired, ruddy-faced, blue-eyed.
‘Will ye tak’ a glass wi' me an’ my mates, sir?’
‘It’s a kind suggestion. But I’ve come here to meet a friend.’
‘Och, she’ll not fret if ye tak’ just one first, sir!’
The killick’s friends were gathering round. Nick gave in. ‘A half-pint, then. Thank you very much.’ McKechnie, fighting his way towards the bar, told a disapproving-looking Petty Officer, ‘Yon’s m’ first lieutenant. Best officer I’ the whole Patrol. I’ll flatten the face o’ any man as says he’s not.’ Nick, divided between gratification, surprise and embarrassment, heard a hoarse voice shout somewhere behind him, ‘Good ol’ Lanyard!’
For a moment, he didn’t get it. Then it sank in. Lanyard had been the destroyer he’d served in at Jutland. Was that what they called him?
‘Thanks. Thanks very much indeed.’ The beer slopped over his hand as McKechnie thrust it at him. ‘Here’s a happy Christmas to you all.’
Cheers, applause. Men were trying to jostle their way through, but the Mackerel: shouldered them away. Nick told them after a minute, ‘Look, I do have to go and find this friend of mine… No, Carr, as it happens it’s a he, not a she – that drifter skipper we picked up… Look, d’you mind if I buy – pay for a round of drinks? If I leave this with you?’
He was offering McKechnie a ten-bob note. The Leading Seaman pushed it back into his fist
‘No, sir. God bless you, but—’
'Oh, come on! Carr, you take it.’
‘Well, sir—’
He fought his way through the throng and round the side of the bar. There was a low doorway: he went through it: and found himself in a stone-floored passage. A choice of doors confronted him, and a smell of cooking: fish… The drifter-men’s stock-in-trade: did they swap fish, perhaps, for their beer? Nick tried the nearest door, and he’d guessed right: the dozen or eighteen men inside could only be either trawlermen or drifter crew. Among them, one girl: he was staring at her through the floating layers of pipe-smoke when a stocky figure reclining at her side turned and stared at him.
‘So ye found me, lad!’
Skipper Barrie was in an armchair with his leg up on a bar-stool; a single crutch was propped beside him. He was lying back with his hand on a glass that rested on the raised thigh, and a pipe between his teeth. The girl, blonde and pretty, in her early twenties Nick thought, seemed to be looking after the old man like a nurse. Except she had a glass in her hand too.
‘Come on in with ye, my friend!’ Other faces, shading from mahogany-brown to brick-red and most of them unshaven, grinned at him ogrishly from out of the clouds of smoke, and the girl, right there in the centre of it all, made him think, Beauty and the Beast… Well, she wasn’t exactly a beauty, not as one would use the term elsewhere, and they weren’t beasts, just sailormen. Barrie announced, in a voice like a shower of rusty scrap-iron, ‘This is the feller pulled me out of the drink and had me use his cabin. Let me borrow his clothes, an’ all!’ Nick was shaking strong, horny
hands left, right and centre; they were hands that had spent years grappling with wet nets an ice-cold seas. Barrie told him, ‘Now here – meet Annabel. Annabel, she’s – why she’s my own little girl, my little darlin’…’ She was smiling up at Nick, putting a hand to Skipper Barrie’s mouth to check his flow of words: Nick hadn’t found it easy to hear exactly what he’d said, in all this bedlam of talk and laughter – noise came not just from this bar but the other one as well, and men were singing in there now. Nick asked the skipper, ‘Your, daughter?’ He had her hand in his: an incredibly small, soft hand, after the succession of vast fishermen’s paws he’d been grasping: it was like holding something warm and living like a mouse or a bird, you didn’t want to hold too tight and hurt any more than you wanted to release it and have it fly away. Laughter and guffaws shook the whole room: Barrie was shouting. ‘Aye, my little daughter Annabel… Listen now, my precious: this is Lieutenant Everard, as won fame and glory at the Jutland battle. Hear me? Brung his destroyer home single-handed, half wrecked and full o’ dead an’ dyin’ men: destroyer by the name o’ Lanyard, ye’d ’ve read it in the newspapers…’
Nick would have liked to have shut him up, but the skipper was gathering an audience round him, shouting more loudly to gather others too. The girl hadn’t said a word: her hand was still in Nick’s, oddly enough, and she was smiling into his eyes as he stooped over her. Barrie roared, in the direction of the bar, ‘Bring my friend a drink. What’ll it be – rum?’
‘No – beer, please.’
‘Pint o’ the horse here, Jack!’
‘Aye aye!’
‘Holdin’ hands wi’ him, are ye, darlin’?’
Applause, back-slapping. The girl – he’d let her have her hand back now – turned a chair round with her foot, and patted it. She had very wide-set, pale-blue eyes and a generous, full-lipped mouth; her nose had a slightly rounded end to it, a sort of blob that finished it off, but somehow it suited the rest of her face, the friendly and outgoing nature which he read in it. He didn’t see the tot of rum someone poured into the tankard of beer on its way over to him.
‘Here’s health, a quick recovery, Skipper.’ Funny taste, that first mouthful had. He sat down beside the girl. ‘You’re from Tynemouth, then?’
‘If you say so.’ She laughed. Barrie leaned across her and hit Nick on his shoulder with a fist like a brick. ‘She’s a looker, eh?’
‘Indeed she is.’
‘Well, drink up!’
‘How’s the leg now?’
‘Told ye I’d be hoppin’ round!’
‘Yes, you did.’ He drank some more beer. Barrie shouted, ‘You’re our guest here. Private club, this is. Drink up, an’ have another.’ The girl asked him, ‘What’s your first name?’
‘Nick. I think Annabel’s a lovely—’
‘Here’s to us, Nick.’ She raised her glass, and drank, with her eyes on his. Strangely enough, he wasn’t in the least embarrassed; he felt he knew her and he knew he liked her, there was an immediate, ready-made rapport between them. She was rather, he thought, the ‘Brickie’ type: only less giggly. Her hand touched his where it rested on the arm of the wooden chair, between them; she leant closer, until her mouth almost touched his ear: she asked him, ‘Do you like me?’
It was an extraordinary question to be asked, he thought, right out of the blue like that. But there wasn’t any problem answering it. He nodded. ‘Yes. Enormously!’ Her eyes smiled, and her hand squeezed his; she was still leaning towards him and he wondered if she knew that she was showing rather a lot of bosom. Bosoms, plural. In a place like this, with only men – and not exactly a drawing-room lot, at that – around her… He realised that he felt protectively-inclined towards her. She asked him, ‘D’you think I’m pretty?’
He nodded. ‘Pretty’s not the word. You’re lovely!’
‘You’re not bad yourself.’
He was astonished. Not exactly embarrassed: no, not at all embarrassed, just surprised… She was so – unusual. How and where, he wondered, had Skipper Barrie brought her up, and where was her mother now? He’d emptied his tankard, and Barrie had gestured, pointing, and one of the others had taken it to the bar and brought it back full again. Barrie was telling the story, somewhat exaggerated, of Lanyard at Jutland. The girl had been handed a new drink too; Nick asked her what it was.
‘Eh?’
Leaning close again, smiling with her lips apart. From behind her shoulder, Skipper Barrie winked at him. Nick repeated his question; she told him, ‘Gin. Only to keep the cold out, mind. And that’s my ration now, I never have no more than two.’
This beer wasn’t bad, when you got used to it. But it was strong stuff; Nick felt quite light-headed. He told Barrie, shouting through the din and narrowing his eyes against the swirls of smoke, ‘I can’t stay long. Have to go back aboard, in a minute.’ He told Annabel, ‘Might take a walk first, to clear my head. This beer’s got Lyddite or something in it.’
‘What’s Lyddite?’ She’d glanced at some man behind him, then back at Nick. ‘What’s Lyddite, when it’s at home?’
‘Explosive. They make it down the coast there, at a place called Lydd.’
She leant forward, waited for him to lean halfway and meet her; she murmured, with her face so close it actually brushed his. ‘I could walk with you, if you like.’
‘That’d be splendid!’
‘Truly? You’d like me to?’
‘Like? Why, I’d—’
‘I could show you where I live, if you’d like that too?' Skipper Barrie broke in: ‘Now drink up there, Lieutenant, lad!’
‘No more, thanks. Very kind of you, very kind indeed, but—‘
Annabel told her father, ‘He’s taking me for a walk.’
Barrie stared at her, then at him. Stubble-faced, and eyes red-rimmed: one didn’t have to guess how he was spending his convalescence. What of the girl, though, did she have to sit with him all the time? The skipper laughed suddenly, and slapped his thigh: ‘So that’s how it goes, when a man’s laid up?’ He pinched his daughter’s ear-lobe; she squawked, slapping at his hand as she wrenched herself away. Nick assured him, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take great care of her.’ That, for some reason, practically brought the house down; Nick realized they were all pretty well half-seas over. There was a glass – a small one – in his hand, in place of the empty tankard; how this one had got there he had no idea, he’d just looked down and there it was. He sniffed at the dark liquid in it: neat rum. Just that one sniff was enough to make his eyes water. Skipper Barrie boomed, ‘Don’t smell it, lad, drink it!’ Nick would rather have poured it on the floor. He was already muzzy, and it was an effort to keep things in focus. All this smoke didn’t help… He shook his head.
‘Kind of you, but—’
The girl interrupted his refusal. For a moment he’d thought she was going to kiss him, her mouth came so close to his; she urged him, ‘Do drink it down. He’ll be upset if you don’t. Fresh air’ll see you right, and when we get to my room I’ll make you some nice strong tea.’
Funny sort of evening. Particularly when one had only come ashore for a breath of air in the first place. He waved the little glass at Skipper Barrie: ‘Happy Christmas!’ The girl was watching him, and smiling at him as if she was pleased with him. He remembered – next morning, as he fought against a combination of physical sickness and mental shock – exactly how she’d looked at that moment; and then he’d been leaving with her: he could recall the vociferous farewells of Skipper Barrie and his mates, and then, on the way out through the other bar, Leading Seamen McKechnie and his friends greeting them with cheers and jokes about the differences between ‘he-friends’ and ‘she-friends’; it was all extremely friendly and Annabel was laughing, enjoying it, clinging to his arm, but the whole feel of it was vague, clouded with smoke and the taste of rum and the roar of voices in the low-ceilinged room. He remembered telling McKechnie that Miss Barrie was the daughter of the skipper they’d rescued, and McKechnie’s look of surp
rise; at about that point, when they were halfway across the room with the crowd of sailors opening to let them through, the town’s air-raid alarm started up. A familiar sound, by this time, for the shoreside people: four short blasts and one long one, over and over again, from the siren on the Electricity Works; McKechnie told Nick, swaying like a palm-tree in a tornado and with a pint glass clutched in his tattoo’d fist. ‘Ye’ll likely lose her, sir. She’ll be doon the women’s shelter!’
The biggest air-raid shelters in the town were here in Snargate Street; the caves at the back of the old Oil Mills had been equipped with benches to hold thousands of people in complete safety from the Gotha bombers, with hundreds of feet of solid chalk above their heads. But it was true: they’d segregated the sexes, there were caves for men and caves for women. A very proper place, was Dover, under the eagle eyes of Lady Bacon and Mrs Bickford, wife of the general up at the Castle.
Annabel told McKechnie. ‘You’re mistaken. We’re off to the Girls’ Patriotic Club.’
Bellows of amusement… Nobody was taking any notice still of that siren as its last scream died away. The Girls’ Patriotic Club was run by a Miss Bradley, and its club-room was over Bernards the grocers; its purpose – heartily approved of by Lady Bacon and Mrs Bickford – was to keep young ladies off the streets. Off Snargate Street in particular. Nick had had enough of the crowd and the din, he felt a strong need of air; he cut into the chat with ‘We’re going to take a walk along the Marine Parade.’ He nodded to McKechnie: ‘Goodnight.'
Sixty Minutes for St George Page 5
