by Weldon, Fay
‘Of course,’ she said, presently, in a small voice. ‘Darling, I love you, and every morning at eleven-thirty I’ll think of you and you’ll think of me.’
‘Two minutes to eleven-thirty, for two minutes. Every day a Remembrance Sunday,’ he said. ‘I must go now. I’m not supposed to be ringing you, really. It’s just that I left – well, you know – all Navy and no man, and I want you to know the man always wins, and darling—’
‘Yes?’
‘If Thompson does actually ever catch a rabbit, make sure he gets worm pills. Tape as well as round: dogs pick them up if they hunt. Remember? It was in the book.’
‘I’ll look after Thompson,’ she said, and meant it, and he said, ‘I love you. I’ll see you in three months. Well, roughly three months,’ and put the phone down, leaving her to wonder if the reminder about the pills had been the real purpose of the call.
Timmy went on board, into the belly of leviathan, and joined the captain and the first officer on the bridge.
‘Now we can get on with the fast cruise,’ said the captain, reproachfully. That was as far as reprimand ever got. He was careful of his officers’ feelings. They were to be a long time together beneath the sea. He had a beard so full you could hardly tell what his features were, and bright, bright blue eyes; a gentle manner and a reputation, even amongst submariners, for eccentricity.
‘Sorry, Alec, sir,’ said Timmy. ‘I’ve never been last on board before,’ he added in his defence.
‘You’ve never been married before,’ said the captain, but whether that compounded or excused Timmy’s failing was not made clear. Those who captain Polaris submarines have to keep abreast of the private lives of their crew. They have, after all, to watch for signs of instability. There is a lot at stake.
The countdown for the fast cruise had begun, when Ratings Percival and Daly appeared to say there had been a mishap of which the captain should be at once informed.
‘Some of the exotic veg, sir, aren’t on board,’ said Percival. ‘We have no aubergines, no fresh chillies and no fresh ginger.’ The captain turned a concerned face towards his crewmen. ‘Of course, sir,’ said Rating Daly, ‘we have powdered chilli and powdered ginger: that’s stock issue. But I know how keen you are on the fresh, and it doesn’t solve the aubergine question. The pimentos, courgettes, celeriac and so on came on board by crate okay, but the order clearly wasn’t made up properly.’
‘Chilli powder and fresh chilli have nothing in common at all,’ said the captain, seriously discomposed. ‘Only fools think they have.’
‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said Percival.
‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said Daly.
‘The root of the trouble is, sir,’ said Jim, the first officer, pouring oil on troubled waters, as was his habit, ‘that down in Stores they’ve only just about caught up with the mushroom as an exotic vegetable. Fresh ginger and so forth is way beyond them.’
But the captain just stared gloomily at Ratings Percival and Daly as if it were all their fault.
‘And we hadn’t even left port,’ Percival complained later to Daly. ‘I knew then what kind of tour this was going to be. Never allowed near the galley for the men’s food, for hamburgers and beans, because the officers have commandeered it for sweet-and-sour pork with hot chilli sauce, or worse. It will all end in mutiny, not to mention ulcers.’ But that conversation came later. Now another thought struck the captain.
‘Olive oil?’ he asked, over the murmur of warming engines. ‘Some left by Crew No. 1, sir. Two litre bottles.’
‘Not enough,’ said the captain and closed down the engines.
An urgent approach was made to Security and in about an hour Zelda, Jim’s wife, drove up to the dock gates with a couple of crates, which Security checked. They prodded ginger and peered into chillies, and nodded and let them through.
‘This isn’t alcohol?’ they enquired, opening up one or two big plastic containers full of green liquid.
‘It’s olive oil,’ said Zelda crossly, in her fluty officer’s wife’s voice.
She wore a headscarf decorated with ponies’ heads and had rather large, brilliant teeth in a long thin face. She seemed to know what she was doing.
‘Taste it,’ she said, and made them; they put their fingers into the liquid and sucked and shuddered. Olive oil! Their wives still fried in lard, and used Heinz Salad Cream on the salad.
Polaris submarines are dry. No alcohol is allowed on board. To be drunk in charge of a submarine is an offence. Stores did let Captain Alec’s crew take cooking wine with them, on condition that it was used in cooked dishes, never uncooked. Heating sends off alcohol in vapour, they explained. Thus sherry could be used in soup, so long as that soup was simmering when the sherry was added; but never in cold trifles. The regulations were strict.
Timmy left the boat to collect the crates.
‘Where’s Jim?’ asked Zelda. ‘Why did they send you?’
‘You know what it’s like,’ said Timmy, embarrassed.
‘I know what he’s like,’ she said. ‘And more than one set of goodbyes in one day he just can’t face.’
‘That’s about it,’ said Timmy.
‘Never mind,’ said Zelda. ‘I’ll just have to say goodbye to you’ – and she kissed him long and passionately on the mouth.
‘Hey, hey,’ said the security man, uneasily. ‘That man’s got to be celibate for the next three months. You should think of that.’
‘It’s just for old times’ sake,’ said Zelda, and Timmy looked flushed and self-conscious.
‘Mind you look after Meg for me,’ said Timmy. ‘And not for old times’ sake.’
‘I’ll look after her,’ said Zelda.
‘And do be discreet, Zelda,’ said Timmy. ‘And make sure she looks after Thompson.’
‘Bloody Thompson,’ said Zelda. ‘Always licking one’s toes in bed.’
Timmy went back inside, and the hatches were finally battened down, and the rumble of the fast cruise began. Presently Polaris slid away from its dock. Halfway down the estuary it submerged, and was gone.
A knock came on Meg’s door as she sat on a clean, smooth patch of floor, doing yoga exercises. She had a small bony body, no-nonsense straight hair and a wide brow and a straight nose and rather thin lips. She had always wanted to live in the country. She’d been a fabric designer who thought she should have trained as a potter but might one day write novels, and had assumed she’d marry some country craftsman. Then she’d bring up her children (when she had them, which she would) without the aid of television or yellow additives in the food, and so forth. And now here she was, married to a man about whom she knew very little, except that she was addicted to him, body and soul, so that his profession and his politics and his social values meant nothing. And all she knew was that her chest ached from lack of him; and she had a pain where her heart was.
Yoga was part of her plan for self-improvement, put into action ten minutes after Timmy’s phone-call, when she had stopped crying. Three months to achieve physical perfection, perhaps learn a language – certainly get the house in order. She would dedicate the time to Timmy.
She’d tried the telephone and found, as Timmy had predicted, that the line was now dead. Presumably it would come to life in its own good time. She didn’t mind; the sense of being looked after for her own good was reassuring. It was like being a small child again, with parents at the ready to curb one’s follies.
The postman rang the doorbell. Meg opened the door, holding Thompson back by his collar. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘He’s all bark and no bite. He might knock you down by accident but never on purpose.’
‘That’s always good to know,’ said the postman, who was an elderly Scotsman. He rolled up his trouser leg to show a papery grey shin marked with livid patches, which he claimed were the results of dog bites. ‘If he adds to these,’ he said, ‘you’ll be getting no more letters up here, and that’s certain. You’ll have to come down to the Post Office, forbye. Recorded Delivery, sig
n here.’
He settled himself for a chat, balancing against the doorpost, but occasionally shifting, the better to balance against Thompson.
‘You ought to keep the door properly latched,’ he said. ‘There’re prowlers about.’
‘Up here? Surely not!’
‘Everywhere,’ he said. ‘It’s the unemployment and Christmas coming, and worse. A young woman like yourself, your husband off—’
‘How do you know he’s off?’ Meg was startled.
‘First Crew’s back, that’s why. He’s Second Crew, so he’s away. It’s not difficult.’
‘It’s supposed to be secret,’ complained Meg, but he was more interested in the letter for which she signed. It was in a brown envelope.
‘That a bill?’ he asked, following her into the kitchen.
‘I don’t know,’ said Meg. ‘It’s for my husband, not me.’
‘You’ll have to open it,’ he said. ‘You’re married to a sailor now. I’ve got to get on. There’ll be a big collection down at the Base. The minute the husbands go the wives start writing. It calms down after a week or so. I’ll come up here whenever I can. You’re too isolated, you know. But you can always drive down, I suppose, for a cup of tea and a chat.’
‘I don’t drive and I don’t much care for chats,’ said Meg stiffly. She closed and latched the door after him, but then regretted her rudeness. She would need friends: the buses that passed on the hill road, below the cottage, came only once a week.
She put on another jersey because the wind was suddenly cold, and looked around the cottage. She realised that there was no real means of heating it through the winter, and wondered why it was that Timmy was so impractical, and why she had left all this kind of thing to him, knowing him to be so.
Thompson started barking. The milkman. She opened the door to him. She had always presumed that up here milkmen didn’t just put the bottles on the step and leave, as they did in the city, and she was right.
‘You’ll be wanting less milk,’ he said. He was even older than the postman, and wheezed. Perhaps Security vetted all visitors to the house, in the husband’s absence, in the interests of domestic felicity?
‘Will I?’
‘With your husband off. Before we had the Base at least we knew where we were. Now it’s chop and change all the time. Three pints one day, six the next. It’s the goodnight cocoa. Navy men get a taste for cocoa, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’ she said, coldly.
‘So you’ll be all alone up here for three months! Only the sheep for company, forbye. Pity you don’t have kiddies.’
‘I’ve been married for less than a year.’
‘I’d get on with it, all the same,’ he advised. ‘All the Navy wives do. The way I look at my work,’ he went on, ‘is as a Welfare job. Someone for the lonely wives to talk to. Does that dog bite?’
Thompson was sniffing round the old man’s knees. ‘Only barks,’ said Meg.
‘Pity. He’ll need to do more than that. Prowlers about. Have you got stores in? What are you going to do when the snow starts? I don’t come up here in the snow, you know. Couldn’t even if I wanted to. No one’s going to send a snow-plough just for you.’
Snow? It was almost impossible to imagine the landscape white. She had never seen it so.
‘I’ll dig myself out,’ said Meg. She came from the city, where snow meant an awkward mush, not the implacable enemy country-dwellers know it to be.
She shut the door on the milkman and his aged crabbiness and went upstairs. She sat back on the bed and lost herself in an erotic haze and thought about Timmy, while Thompson grinned at her, as if he knew and sympathised with the tenor of her thoughts. She felt Timmy’s presence near her. She looked at her watch. It was thirty-one minutes past eleven. Sea-lag, she thought. The telephone pinged slightly and when she lifted the receiver she could hear the dialling tone again.
‘Hi,’ she said, to whoever no doubt listened.
Again she had the feeling that she was known, noticed, that they were on her side, and the ping had been a whisper from the watchers to say, ‘He’s off, he’s safe, all’s clear! Now watch, and wait, and one morning in the New Year, or even earlier, you will hear him whistling up the frozen path, and we will have him home to you. We, the listeners!’
It was quite a sensuous feeling: a lying-back on strong, supporting arms. She replaced the receiver, smiling.
Polaris lay on the bottom of the loch and waited for the Routine from Base that would tell them where to go and how to go, and when. On the bridge, Timmy puzzled rather closely over the charts.
‘Anything the matter, Mr Navigator?’ enquired the captain.
‘We don’t want to end up in the Black Sea.’
It was a joke.
‘Let alone up the Yangtze River, sir!’ remarked Jim, who’d been reading about Red China in the papers. Security would have liked the crews not to read the papers, or only Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, but the liberty of the individual in the West had to be respected, or what was everyone struggling for?
‘That’s for the politicians to decide,’ said the captain, sternly. ‘But I’m glad to hear you making a joke, Mr First Lieutenant, so early in the patrol. We’re usually halfway round the world before you so much as smile. Is it the land that depresses you, or the sea?’
‘The land, I think, sir,’ said Jim.
Submariners are like artists, thought the captain, regretting his question. They’d really rather live alone, outside the married state, in order to pursue their vision in peace; yet they find the unmarried state lonely and sad. To have to feel guilty as they plunge seawards to what they really love, to see wifely tears flowing and hear their children’s sobs is intolerable. But to have no one to care, to mark the difference between sea and land, is equally dreadful. Normal submarining, the captain knew, suits best the very young man: the man with parents who both love the child but look forward to his absence. Then all get the best of all possible worlds, with the added spice of a little danger, but not too much. Alas, on Polaris it was different. This was submarining-plus! How could you trust a young unmarried man with the future of Moscow, London, Sydney, Peking and so forth? You couldn’t. They were too emotional. Down on Polaris every major city in the world was targeted: the co-ordinates ready and waiting. For the time might come (who knew what the future held?) when one of their own cities might have to be taken out, for good strategic or even peace-making reasons. It took a mature and steady man to recognise such necessities.
Timmy stared at the charts and wondered why they were so misty. He would have liked to have talked more to Jim about the land/sea divide but felt inhibited, as he so often was, with Jim, since having the affair with Zelda. A man, it seemed, could not sleep with his best friend’s wife, however secretly and with however good intention, and still look him in the eye. Now that Timmy was himself married he could see more clearly just how great a folly and disloyalty the affair had been. He wished to apologise to Jim; but couldn’t, of course. All the same, the fact remained: he was fond of Zelda, and could see that Jim was somewhat cavalier in his attitude towards her. For form’s sake, and certainly in Zelda’s presence, Jim should at least pretend to prefer life on shore to life at sea.
Under sea. Timmy wanted to be back in bed with Meg, with Thompson under it. Perhaps the mistiness was tears? He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.
‘Oh my God, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought my wife’s glasses.’ There was a short silence.
‘Well,’ said Jim, ‘Yangtze, here we come!’
‘It’s all right, Alec, sir,’ said Timmy. ‘It’s not too bad. I may get headaches, that’s all.’
‘Seeing with her eyes,’ said the captain, ‘while she sees with yours. Love’s young dream. Don’t let it happen again.’ He softened the rebuke by returning to more rewarding subjects. ‘How much peanut butter did we bring on board?’
‘Two gallons,’ said the first lieutenant.
‘I hope it’s enough,�
� said the captain. ‘Many Indonesian dishes use quite large quantities of peanut butter. It is a country where food is eaten with the hands, and so a thicker consistency is needed.’
Presently the Routine from Base came through. The captain threw a switch or two, and the control board which linked with the nuclear reactor at Polaris’s heart glowed warmly, as the mighty engines sucked its power and started up, and minutely vibrated the waves on the far-off shore where the children played, and bounced a grain of sand or so from here to there.
Polaris moved down the Irish Channel and out into the Atlantic. Down in the galley the captain pounded cumin seed and coriander and chilli to make a paste in which to coat a chicken. Jim peeled and diced and blanched baby white turnips preparatory to freezing. They brought fresh vegetables on board and prepared and froze them in the great freezer themselves, not trusting shore-men to do it properly. (There is no shortage of power on a nuclear submarine – lots of light, lots of hot water, lots of cool and elegantly recycled air. The crew swore the air smelt badly of garlic, like a French train on a school trip, but their officers denied it, hotly.)
The captain poured oil from Zelda’s plastic can into a jug and thence into a pan. He meant to fry mustard seed in the oil, letting it sizzle for a few moments, then pour it over finely grated carrot, adding lemon juice, salt and pepper, for a simple but interesting salad to serve with the chicken. But the oil spattered in the pan.
‘This isn’t pure olive oil,’ complained the captain.
He investigated and discovered that, beneath a thin top floating layer of olive oil, there was nothing more or less than white wine.
‘That was very irresponsible of your wife,’ he said sternly to Jim. ‘You, me and Mr Navigator here are an Attack Team, not a musical comedy act.’
But he didn’t pour the wine away; instead he put the canister up on a top cupboard, out of harm’s reach.
While they were eating a Routine came through to say that Russian submarines were operating in their vicinity.
‘When are they ever not?’ yawned the captain.
But they took their plates through to the bridge and watched the lights on the radar screen, and listened to the bleeps as the leviathans from the other side neared and all but brushed them, and paused, and passed, in companionable fashion.
