Last Writes

by Catherine Aird

  The others ignored him. The third mate turned to the cabin boy. ‘Here lad, what else did the man say?’

  ‘That we shouldn’t use words like ransom,’ said the boy.

  ‘And what, pray,’ asked the third mate sarcastically, ‘should we say instead? Please and thank you?’

  ‘We should call it a release fee.’ The cabin boy looked really frightened now. ‘Not ransom.’

  The third mate gave a great guffaw, while the captain asked if there was anything else they should be thinking about.

  ‘Subscribing to Lloyd’s Register of Shipping,’ said the lad. ‘Or any website that tells you which ship is making for where.’

  He was answered by a chorus from the others: ‘Radar’s better.’

  ‘Even when they zigzag.’

  ‘I was never very good at books.’

  ‘We’d have to pay for it.’

  ‘I get their drift, though.’ The captain sounded quite pleased with his pun. ‘But what we do need to know is how to get better prize money and more often.’

  The cabin boy piped up again. ‘That was another thing. They said we shouldn’t call it prize money any longer.’

  ‘If,’ began the first mate hotly, ‘they think I’m going to talk about bonuses with them being so unpopular now that it’s what bankers get …’

  ‘Variable pay,’ said the cabin boy succinctly. ‘That’s the in word now.’

  ‘Two words,’ said the third mate.

  ‘Anything else?’ the captain asked the lad, not unkindly. ‘Might as well hear it all while we’re about it.’

  ‘The competition …’ said the lad, nervously looking round at them all.

  The crew fell silent. Only the captain felt able to say something and that after a long pause when he murmured, ‘The Shanty Gang.’ Then he turned back to the cabin boy. ‘Did you mention the Shanty Gang to them?’

  The boy hung his head. ‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘At first they weren’t sure what we could do about the competition.’

  ‘Nor are we,’ said the first mate crisply. ‘Short of making the Shanties fly the Skull and Crossbones, that is, and they won’t do that.’

  ‘Then,’ the boy piped up again, ‘after they’d thought about it for a bit, they suggested what we should do was to warn other shipping about the Shanties. Their radio people will think the warning is coming from an official source and they’ll move into our patch to get away from the Shanty Gang.’

  ‘Nice,’ said the first mate approvingly. ‘I like it.’

  ‘Why didn’t we think of that?’ asked the third mate. ‘It’d have saved your course fees.’

  The captain, sensing implied criticism, told the boy to go on.

  The lad was struggling with an unfamiliar word. ‘They said we should be mortising … no, amortising, that’s it – amortising each year.’

  ‘Sounds nasty,’ said the first mate.

  ‘Is it catching?’

  ‘We haven’t got a fever flag,’ muttered the third mate. ‘It got the moth.’

  ‘It’s putting some money aside each year to buy a new boat when this one gets old,’ explained the boy.

  ‘That proves that they don’t really understand our business,’ said he with the giant chip on his shoulder.

  ‘No need for whatever it was you said, boy,’ the captain came back swiftly. ‘We just keep one of the ones we’ve captured.’

  ‘There’s a nice little schooner I’ve been keeping my eye on,’ said the first mate. ‘It does a regular run to Lasserta. We can pick it up whenever we want, can’t we?’

  The boy swallowed. ‘Then they said we should be doing some projections.’

  ‘That’s just what I say.’ The ancient mariner stirred. ‘They should never have done away with bowsprits.’

  ‘Not that sort of a projection, Grandpa,’ said the first mate.

  ‘Put him in the scuppers until he’s sober,’ began the third mate.

  The boy hurried on. ‘But most important of all they said we should have an exit strategy. You know, make a plan about what to do when the going gets nasty.’

  ‘Scarper,’ said the third mate.

  ‘Scuttle,’ said the first mate.

  ‘Take to the boats,’ the second mate chimed in. ‘The little ones, I mean.’

  The boy frowned. ‘They did mention something about lifeboats but I don’t think that’s what they meant.’

  ‘Not our sort of lifeboat,’ said the captain, nodding. ‘I’ve heard about them.’

  The boy swallowed and then said in a voice scarcely above a murmur, ‘They said there was something else we could always do if the going got tough.’

  ‘When the going gets tough the tough get going,’ chanted the second mate. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said the boy uneasily.

  ‘Come on, tell us what it is.’

  ‘Surrender,’ the boy whispered.

  Into the shocked silence which followed the word, the second mate eyed him up and down and then said, ‘Never. What you’ve got to understand, pretty boy, is that whatever they told you on that course this is a rough trade …’

  There was the slightest of squeaks as the lad hit the deck in a dead faint.

  OPERATION VIRTUAL REALITY

  The colonel had never dealt in such trifling matters as New Year Resolutions before but he’d taken one earlier this year and he had every intention of keeping it. It was never to spend a Christmas with his son and daughter-in-law ever again.

  There was nothing wrong with his son except that he worked too hard and was given to doing his wife’s bidding without complaint. The colonel’s late wife, Mavis, had never ordered him about in the way that Peter’s wife did. Of course he, the colonel, had naturally always done what Mavis wanted but that was different.

  Quite different.

  The festivities last Christmas at Peter and Helen’s house had been a real penance. The noise and the confusion and the cold had been almost unbearable. The house itself was cold because his daughter-in-law, who was cold in other ways as well, was bent on saving the planet: the colonel suspected it was a way of cutting down on the heating bills. The food was awful, too, because Helen was a vegetarian and only served flesh and fowl with a visible repugnance as a concession to old established custom. The colonel, who had endured something only a mouthful short of starvation in a prisoner-of-war camp and had taken a resolution at the time never to go short of a good meal ever again, had tackled turkey cooked by an unpractised hand without pleasure.

  Worse than the food and the cold though had been the parties given there: for friends on Christmas Eve and for neighbours on Boxing Day. Disparate groups as they were he still didn’t know which collection of guests had been the least likeable. Both were noisy and comprised people he neither knew nor liked. Some of those there on both Christmas Eve and Boxing Day couldn’t hold their drink. This was something the colonel had always viewed with displeasure in the mess and in civilian life afterwards.

  True, he liked a whisky himself in the evenings but that was all. The colonel only ever drank in moderation and never swayed about like those people did, clutching their fourth drink, skin glistening, boasting to complete strangers about their latest successful deal or the defeat of a rival. Not that the colonel didn’t know all about defeat. He did. He’d been in Crete in May, 1941, which had been a defeat all right and was when he’d been taken prisoner.

  So once back in his own home he began to plan his strategy for next Christmas. The first thing he had been taught as a young subaltern was that strategy came well before tactics. His strategy now was that he was going to say that he was going away himself next Christmas and therefore couldn’t go to his son’s house for the festivities.

  He wouldn’t actually go away, of course, because all he really wanted to do was to stay in his own home in peace and quiet by his own fireside with a decent whisky within arm’s reach.

  He would pretend to go away.

  That was it.

  Remindi
ng himself of the old army maxim that time spent in reconnaissance was seldom wasted, he set about deciding where he would say he was going. Marrakech was his first thought – the image of the souk there had always appealed – although Switzerland beckoned, too. In his mind he soon discarded both putative destinations – Marrakech because it would be pretty obvious that he was just going away to avoid Christmas with Peter and Helen, and Switzerland because everyone would be bound to insist that it would be too cold in winter for a man of his age. He toyed briefly with the idea of saying that he was visiting the West Indies but thought it would be too long a flight to seem plausible.

  The ideal destination came into his mind one evening as he was going up to bed. Climbing the stairs took no little effort and a lot of concentration these days and he marvelled as he did so each evening how quickly he had scaled some high ground near the regiment’s position near Rethymnon on Crete in 1941.

  Not now.

  Now every individual stair had to be negotiated separately, the physiotherapist’s advice to put his feet on each tread as if it was new ground echoing in his mind as ever.

  He often wondered how quickly he would scale his own staircase these days if he was being shot at as he was at Rethymnon. It would probably, he thought wryly, loosen up his arthritic hips better than anything the doctor gave him.

  That was it, he thought, as he got to the upstairs landing, panting slightly. He would tell everyone he was going to go to Crete. And not for a holiday. He would say he was aiming for the military cemetery at Suda Bay to visit Peter’s grave. That was the Peter after whom his son had been named; the Peter who had been killed at his side; the Peter who had been his best friend.

  Nobody could argue with that.

  Satisfied with his strategy, he went happily to bed. Tactics, which came a long way after strategy, could wait until the morning. Next day he started to scan the advertisements for holidays in Crete, noting the name of any firm who specialised in that destination. He found two or three and sent off for their brochures, enjoying a frisson of excitement that he hadn’t felt in years.

  He duly studied the options in glorious colour presented by the tour operators, finally selecting a tour that left on Christmas Eve and was scheduled to come back the day after New Year. That should do him nicely. He noted all the details carefully and committed them to memory, which was what he thought of as ‘military precision’ although for the life of him he couldn’t see why the two words had ever come together. Not after the landings in Crete.

  Then he left the brochure around in a conspicuous position should anyone call.

  The first person to do so was the vicar. That cleric asked in his usual airy way if there was anything he could do for him, expecting the usual answer of ‘Nothing, thank you’.

  ‘There is, actually,’ said the colonel this time. ‘Could you get your son – he’s computer literate, isn’t he? – to find out the flight number of this tour for me?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Vicar readily. ‘He’ll enjoy doing that. Have a good trip, won’t you? I take it you’re quite sure you’re really up to that sort of thing these days? The years take their toll, you know.’

  Mrs Beddoes was not so easily convinced that he was. Mrs Beddoes came in and did for him twice a week, doing his shopping and washing. She checked up, too, on the home-delivery company which brought him a hot lunch every day. ‘I’ll cancel your order for the days you’re away,’ she said, giving him a dubious look. ‘And the milkman.’

  This was something he hadn’t bargained for and, applying his mind to the problem, he started to secrete food in corners that Mrs Beddoes didn’t clean too often. This brought the prisoner-of-war camp back to his mind very quickly. It was what they had done when a man was planning a break-out. The places, though, where little parcels of food could be secreted away in a camp regularly searched by hostile guards were different from those in a house only dusted intermittently. Nevertheless he gave his mind to the problem in proper military fashion and soon caches of food were being hidden away by him in improbable places.

  ‘I’d better stop the newspapers, too,’ Mrs Beddoes said before bustling back to the washing machine.

  The colonel’s son was not easily converted to the thought of a journey to Crete in midwinter.

  ‘Of course I understand, Dad,’ Peter said when he was told, ‘but are you quite sure you’re fit enough?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ said the colonel firmly. ‘And if I should happen to die over there, don’t you worry.’ His voice quivered a little. ‘I shall be among friends if I do.’

  ‘We’ll miss you at Christmas,’ said his son awkwardly. ‘Helen will be really disappointed and so will I.’

  ‘If I don’t go now, it’ll be too late,’ mumbled the colonel. ‘Your mother would never let me go there, you know. She was worried that it might bring it all back.’ Mavis – his dear Mavis – had waited long years for him in war and would never have his peace of mind disturbed by revisiting the scene of that unhappy campaign.

  ‘Fair enough,’ conceded Peter in the end. ‘Now, what about you letting me take you to the airport?’

  ‘Not on Christmas Eve,’ retorted the colonel crisply. ‘Too many bad drivers about. Besides I’ve already fixed up a taxi. Both ways,’ he added hurriedly.

  ‘I’ll have a note of the flight number, though, Dad, just in case.’

  The colonel handed it over with an inward smirk. He’d always thought that they ought to have had him in Intelligence in the war and his masterminding of this little campaign proved it. He felt a warm glow of victory over his daughter-in-law who had somehow been subconsciously transmogrified into the enemy.

  The person who wasn’t at all sanguine about his going to Crete was his doctor.

  The colonel, who had got used to a series of army doctors, (whom he had always mentally categorised as no good as soldiers in the army and no good as doctors in the civilian world), had been surprised by how well he had taken to the young woman who had looked after his Mavis so well when she was ill and dying.

  ‘What’s this I hear about your flying off somewhere without asking me?’ she said when he went to the surgery for his routine check.

  One of the things that being in action had taught the colonel was who to trust. He gave her a straight look and told her the whole truth, pledging her to secrecy.

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ she smiled. ‘Your heart’s in no state for an air trip. Stay at home and keep warm. And don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.’

  He trotted home happily and went over his plan for the hundredth time, thinking it through for possible snags as he struggled upstairs every night. ‘I’ll fool ’em all,’ he said to himself time and again.

  It was a week later when he realised he had been basking in a false sense of security. He had forgotten all about Bob and Lorraine Steele. They were the good neighbours who lived opposite the colonel’s house. They had a long-standing arrangement with him that unless his curtains were drawn back by nine o’clock in the morning that they would alert his doctor.

  Reminding himself that the Duke of Wellington had also encountered unexpected reverses in his many campaigns and had not been daunted by them, the colonel applied himself to thinking of a way round this.

  When he went away in the ordinary way to his son’s house he left the curtains drawn together and the lights on a timer that switched them on when darkness fell. If the curtains remained open all the week – he could hardly draw them nightly if he wasn’t supposed to be there – he would not be able to put a light on in the evening without being seen and that would never do either.

  If the curtains remained closed all the time he was away – his usual practice – then he would have very little light in the day. He thought about this for a while and decided that creeping about inside the house in the half-dark in daytime and having electric light in the evening was the better option.

  Breathing more easily again, he sat back and reviewed his plan. Logistics cam
e some way after strategy and tactics but he thought he had that side of things properly buttoned up now. With some satisfaction he decided that he had covered all eventualities and that it would defeat the enemy nicely.

  In the way of all military master plans he had given his a name. He was pleased with that, too. It was a phrase he’d picked up from the television: ‘Operation Virtual Reality’.

  It was three days into his seclusion that proper reality set in. One morning as he was coming down the stairs with only half the light he was used to, he stumbled and fell headlong to the floor, hitting his head hard.

  And no one knew.

  Not, that is, until the day after he had told everyone he was due back home.

  And that was too late.

  END MATTER

  Miss Millicent Pevensey pushed her food about on her plate without enthusiasm. And, when she came to think about it, no wonder. A famous cookery writer had once declared in print that the first bite of a meal was taken with the eye and now she had found out for herself – the hard way – how right that particular author had been. The trouble was that these days she could no longer see the plate on which the food had been served, let alone the meal itself or even – sad to say – read cookery writers any more either.

  Miss Pevensey was blind.

  So she couldn’t taste the first bite with her eye any longer. Either eye, actually.

  The consultant ophthalmologist had been very kind when he broke the news that this was going to happen to her. ‘You’ve got the wrong sort of macular degeneration,’ he had said.

  ‘Like the wrong sort of snow,’ she had commented tightly at the time.

  ‘I’m very much afraid so,’ he said, grateful that she hadn’t broken down.

  So now she had physically to take her first bite of the food from the plate before she could even decide what it was she was eating – and that in spite of some officious carer announcing that it was Irish stew once again. Actually it was nearly always Irish stew. Before taking her first mouthful, though, Millicent Pevensey had to establish the whereabouts on her plate of each of the constituents of the meal. And, if the main one was meat, to locate the gravy as well as the vegetables.