Making Shore

by Sara Allerton

  I sat on my clenched fists, my legs and buttocks so tightly squeezed together that I felt the pain in my stomach.

  ‘No.’ I paused and suddenly, the strange, deeply sickening sensation of dislocation that comes with no food, dehydration and bludgeoned hope settled cold across my bowels. It is the chronic kind of fear that takes up residence inside you, quickening your mind and darkening your soul. You stop noticing it’s there until the balance of your circumstance shifts again slightly, one way or another, and fear spurts out of every pore, corrupting your behaviour and drying up humanity. You are simply afraid in entirety and nothing, nothing can allay it. My mouth went slack, saliva-less. For a second, I felt his fingers tightening again around my forearm, as if he were here, pricking my conscience, steeling my resolve. The hair on the back of my neck prickled.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I looked up at her bowed head. Her hair really was a mess. ‘No, he didn’t.’

  There was silence. She shook her head quickly as though shaking off my lie, as though trying not to let it in.

  Then: ‘He must have talked to you. About me. On ship? On the lifeboat? You were his friend,’ she coaxed. Somewhere, on some other airwave, every single nerve in her body was shrieking, high-pitched and searing, ‘please!’

  ‘Look,’ I said, switching her off, looking away towards the waitress, the umbrella stand, the door. ‘I don’t quite know what it is you want to hear but…’ I put my hands up and apart, attempting careless ignorance, affecting not to understand. Hesitating, I glanced back up towards her and winced at the raw, expectant hope inscribed on every muscle in her face. I tried to lick my lips.

  ‘But I can’t tell you… Joe…’ Striving to swallow, I closed my eyes and the haggard image of his face, burnt onto the backdrop of my mind, appeared before me, forcing me to look once more into his eyes. Wide and bloodied, charged with all the fixed ferocity of passionate intent, they bore into me, they willed me on.

  ‘He talked about a lot of people. He was popular… you must know that. But I’m sorry, I don’t remember that he mentioned you… or any other girl…’ My voice trailed away and, putting my elbow on the table, I covered my mouth with my hand that I might hide the next words from her. I tried to clear my throat. ‘… In particular,’ I said.

  It was the best that I could do.

  For a minute, we both stared dumbly at the tiny, poisonous seed of doubt I’d cast down between us, a seed that, however obliquely, implied if not casual indifference then worse, whispered infidelity. It unfurled before our eyes and took root.

  She looked up at me sharply and after a moment, sat back in her chair. She stared at me and as I watched her, I saw hurt catch fire and crackle across her features. Her mouth formed a little ‘o’ and, as her face flushed dark with heat, she turned it from me.

  Then she laughed. A high, shallow laugh that had no truth behind it and I noticed that she shut her eyes in its delivery. ‘Any other girl …? In particular? What does that mean?’ She shook her head, ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Look,’ I said, stage quiet, trying to stifle the alarm her rising voice aroused in me. ‘I can’t tell you anything much more than…’

  ‘He told me he loved me. When he left. I believed him.’ Effectively her ace, she threw this across the table at me, interrupting, almost snarling. Protecting herself, protecting him.

  Shrugging as carelessly as I could, I folded my arms. ‘He said a lot of things. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, he talked about a lot of… people.’ I leaned towards her quickly. Get it said. Get it done. He said make sure. He told me to make sure.

  ‘You know what he was like. Couldn’t hardly ever shut him up most of the time. He’d been at sea a lot. And sailors… well, they get a reputation, don’t they?’ May God forgive me. I closed my eyes and my teeth in voluntarily clenched. ‘All I am saying is, don’t waste your life using him as your yardstick. He wasn’t worth it. Do you understand me? I haven’t any message for you because… well, because from the way he talked… it just didn’t seem to me that there was anyone… I just don’t think that he could have been entirely…’

  My gaze, which had become so assiduously preoccupied by every other minute detail of the room, the other diners and their tables, the plates of food arriving at them – everything in fact, other than that which most demanded it – inadvertently slid at that moment back towards her face, and my eyes were caught and inextricably held by the agony of understanding I saw hardening in hers.

  Appalled, ashamed, disabled, I could not say it. The word, which would have unequivocally encompassed all that he had wanted me to say, started and then stalled at the back of my throat. Faithful. It would not come. I could not do it. I could not. To denounce as faithless and unworthy the man who I had found to be possibly the most faithful of all men and to do it before this woman with her huge and faithful eyes – it was worse than base. It was a violation from which my spirit recoiled.

  But she had seen my struggle, and her puckered face, already so reduced and gaunt with grief, creasing every moment further with incredulity and with pain, crumpled suddenly with comprehension. Intuitively swift, she had glimpsed at what it was that I had meant to say and innocent still, quite probably ascribed my inability to speak to some misguided attempt at chivalry. I had not said it but what I did not say had been enough. Though I had not quite done what Joe had asked of me, I had clearly forced her up against the conclusion he had wanted her to make. I did not need to say any more. Had I struck her, it would have pained her less. She stared at me, her preposterously beautiful eyes fixed upon my face, stupefied.

  At last, her hands were still.

  How long we might have sat there was anybody’s guess. Neither one of us could quite believe the implications of my silence and each, frozen in our separate grief, seemed incapable of ending it. We must have made a desolate tableau but since neither of us moved and the café was slowly emptying, the waitress took it upon herself to crash in and clear away our plates. She was big and clumsy and she clattered across us roughly. Nobody spoke, but all the while, without moving, Maggie held me in her great, dark gaze. Finally, the waitress lumbered off.

  Abruptly, Maggie looked away, as if suddenly she could no longer bear to look at me.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said flatly.

  But there is a fundamental, nonetheless self-destructive flaw in the makeup of many of us that can brook no such close assault. For no matter what we may know to be incontrovertibly true about a person, when another casts aspersions on that truth, self-doubt will settle itself around the edges of that knowledge and begin its insidious work. Gradually, so very gradually, its whispering tendrils weave their way in and around until even the purest supposition, undermined by suggestion, time and re-hashed memory, is strangled.

  Even as she said ‘I don’t believe you,’ I heard the uncertainty in her voice and saw the imprints of fleet-footed doubt make tracks across her face.

  She got up to go and as she turned away I stumbled to my feet and, reaching out my hand towards her, blurted ‘You have beautiful eyes. He said that about you. I remember now.’ I had to give her something. Surely he would have allowed me that. I couldn’t let her go and have her think him entirely without honour.

  She stopped but did not turn back.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, very gently, as if she were speaking from some far-off place. ‘You have been kind.’ There wasn’t the slightest trace of irony in her voice.

  My eyes misted over. I have trouble with that these days. That and sleep. By the time I had blinked it away, she was gone.

  I sat back down. Her green gloves lay listless on the table. She had left them behind.

  CHAPTER 2

  KNOWLEDGE

  At nineteen, I was sure about a lot of things. I knew that I was good-looking in a mischievous kind of way, and I knew that girls liked me. I could be funny. I knew that I was bright and that I was stubborn. I meant to learn. I was sure that there was more for m
e than Courtauld’s nylon factory. I wanted more. And I knew that the sea was promise, it was graft but it was a multitude of places I had barely heard of. But most of all, without being wholly conscious of this thought, I knew that my body was strong, invincible, and I immortal. Death was not for me. Not yet at any rate. The sea and I, we had some parity – we were limitless, we were infinite. Its grace and charm enchanted me.

  I began to long to be off. At fourteen, already desperate, I begged Father to come down to the docks with me to try to persuade some skipper, who had already told me nay, I was but a bairn yet, to take me on. Father had come but the captain had shaken his hoary head again and refused me even as a cabin boy. Father, secretly relieved, cuffed me affectionately and told me I’d best make myself into someone useful if I wanted to go with them. So to get me where I yearned to be, I went to the radio school on Friar Street.

  I worked hard. Courtauld’s became a means to my end rather than the end itself, and by taking the two-till-ten shift, I could be in Friar Street all morning. By seventeen, I had my Post Master General’s Certificate, albeit The Special, which, attainable in less time, was the Merchant Navy’s quick-fix response to the sudden dearth of young and qualified recruits. There was a war on, and above all they needed bodies.

  I proudly presented myself at the Marconi Offices in Lime Street in Liverpool and was assigned aboard my first vessel. Third radio officer on the Empire Tide. I could scarcely contain myself.

  My life became all I had wanted it to be. It didn’t much matter to me where we were headed. The world was what I wanted. As far as I was concerned, Calcutta was as exotic as New York, Ceylon as fascinating as the southern tip of Africa, and I drank them in. Life aboard ship in the midst of war struck me only as a great adventure. And it struck me too that I had become a man. I was needed. The crews relied on me to decode the messages from across the airwaves that would keep them out of danger, that would keep them all alive. Had I stopped to think about it, those dangers were uncomfortably real. If I had been older, if I had known what I know now and if I had had any concept of the responsibility with which I had been entrusted, I might not have walked so tall, nor slept so soundly.

  There was no doubt that the merchant navy was playing an important part in the war effort. For our island country, the cargoes we carried across the seas were not only crucial to the survival of those at home but enabled our armed forces to continue their objectives effectively in Europe. Packs of German U-boats patrolled the waters and torpedoed indiscriminately, their aim to create as much disruption to our purpose as they could. In consequence, radio officers were assigned listening watches only, as transmissions from our ships would certainly be picked up by the prowling wolfpacks and our convoys systematically destroyed.

  My mother saw the danger, and her worn, worried face, forced into a taut smile, accompanied my thoughts at least until I reached the docks for each departure. Then excitement always took a hold of me and I forgot. Besides, it wouldn’t ever be my ship.

  As usual, there were a few men waiting in the Marconi offices when I arrived according to my summons in July 1942, and I sat down to join them. Behind the desk was a pudgy, self-important looking man of about forty whose top lip curled so emphatically upwards, it implied a constant attitude of supercilious disdain. He was balding and sweating and wholly unprepossessing, save for his piercing blue eyes, which held their object so fiercely in their sights that it was difficult not to find him intimidating. He looked like the kind of man whose own shortcomings compelled him to be harsher on those he scented in others. ‘Colin McGrath’ it said on the name plaque in front of him, and he radiated ill temper.

  Clearly he was hot, and all his tasks that morning seemed to be demanding a great deal of extravagant concentration, the least disturbance to which resulted in an exaggerated display of annoyance. He glared and he huffed, he tutted and he squirmed. He seemed particularly incensed by the inordinate cheeriness of a big man wandering around at the back of the room, who was whistling with consummate unconcern. No amount of belligerent stares and emphatic sighing affected the whistler in the slightest and McGrath was becoming increasingly exasperated.

  Sitting next to him was an uncommonly pretty blonde girl of about twenty-five. She really was quite beautiful. Her hair was arranged in dainty curls about the elfin arches of her flowerlike face, and sweet grey eyes framed with long, dark lashes challenged almost every man there to distinguish himself for their approval. Her lipstick was ruby red and she was lovely. I hoped I would be called up by her. She quite effortlessly commanded the attention of all of us except perhaps for the whistler, who was now reading the notices in the corner and who scarcely seemed aware of anything much at all.

  Amused by McGrath’s impotent fury and with the pretty blonde to distract my thoughts, I didn’t notice Jamie come in until he sat down next to me. I had sailed with him on my last trip but one on the City of Exeter. We had shared the radio shifts and a cabin all the way to India and back. He was a lugubrious fellow, not given much to mirth or conversation. Though he was three years older than me, at twenty-two, he appeared much younger as he was so small and skinny. I suspected that he was more level-headed and certainly calmer than me and I suspected equally that the crew on the Exeter had thought so too. I liked him though.

  ‘Jamie.’

  ‘Brian,’ he nodded.

  ‘You just back?’

  ‘Ten days.’

  ‘Where’d you go?’

  ‘Italy.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Nope.’ I couldn’t remember getting much more out of Jamie all the way to India and back either and so, defeated by his monosyllables and knowing full well there wasn’t much chance of, or inclination for, any meaningful conversation, we lapsed into silence. We listened to Colin McGrath deal brusquely with various sailors and kept our eyes on the beguiling blonde, though we pretended not to.

  After half an hour or so, McGrath called out my name.

  He didn’t look up as I stood before him. I hesitated.

  ‘Well?’ he barked. As I didn’t move, he thrust out a hand and snapped his fingers at me three or four times impatiently. ‘Book, laddie! Book!’ He still hadn’t looked up. His pencil continued to scroll steadily down the lists.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I began, ‘but I don’t have it.’

  ‘You don’t have it? Why not?’

  ‘I’ve mislaid it.’ He looked up sharply then, scenting an opportunity to flex some official muscle. ‘Mislaid it?’ he asked, too loudly.

  ‘Lost it.’ I said, helpfully.

  ‘You have lost your discharge book?’

  ‘So it would seem,’ I said. This came out a little more flippantly than I had intended but it was a stupid game. How many ways were there of saying it? It irritated him. He would not be cheeked by a mere nineteen-year-old boy, and certainly not in front of such a pretty office junior and, by now, quite a crowded office. He threw his pencil down on the desk and eyed me narrowly.

  ‘You do realise you need your discharge book to sign on?’

  I said that I did.

  ‘And you have come here without it?’ He looked first at me and then at the blonde with mock incredulity, eyebrows raised, eyes wide.

  ‘So it would seem,’ I said again, my own hackles beginning to rise.

  ‘Don’t you take that tone with me, laddie,’ he snipped quickly, his ice-blue eyes darkening with anger. Then he blinked purposefully and inhaling slowly through pursed lips, he tilted his head, regaining control. ‘Well, I suggest now, boy, that you run along home and find it.’

  Pointedly unpleasant, he glared at me for an instant longer, and then picked up his pencil and went back to his lists. I studied his balding pate for a moment or two but didn’t move.

  ‘I’ve told you,’ I said. ‘It’s lost.’

  I was suddenly aware that the waiting room had gone quiet behind me. Even the whistler had stopped. And with the thought that all eyes were now upon me, I felt myself beginning to b
lush. I could feel its spreading glow, racing up the back of my neck and making my armpits and ears hot. Anger gave way to embarrassment. Even the blonde, who to her credit had so far kept her face firmly averted, was now absolutely still.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. He looked up again, sighing crossly and I tried for a winning smile. It was ill-judged. He took me for facetious and it infuriated him still further. His cheeks flushed pink and his face crystallised with dislike.

  He smiled a feline, little sneer. ‘Well, sorry isn’t really good enough, is it? How old are you, Mr Clarke?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘Mmn. Nineteen.’ Nodding slowly as if my answer afforded him all the enlightenment he needed, he folded his arms and sat back in his chair. ‘Think you know everything, don’t you, boy?’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to this and, loath to incur further wrath, I just stood there. I am not by nature particularly deferential nor am I afraid of confrontation but I was more than a little taken aback by this man’s unwarranted vitriol. It occurred to me that his determination to belittle me was not wholly unconnected to the presence of the beautiful blonde. Some men, I knew, seek to aggrandise themselves by disparaging others in front of girls but they are not generally men who know much about women. Perhaps he felt that by putting me so firmly in my place, he would impress her with his authority. Either that or he was trying to teach her how young upstart sailors should be dealt with. But to start returning fire at my employer, no matter how condescending he might be, at this moment, seemed just foolhardy.

  ‘You have a Special I presume?’ he went on. I nodded. ‘How am I to know what you are or what you have done if you fail to bring your discharge book along with you, Mr Clarke? We at Marconi do have a reputation to consider, you know.’ He smirked slyly along the counter at the blonde. ‘Well, Miss Davies, what would you recommend we do with Mr Clarke here? Do we just issue him with another book and let him get away with such feckless behaviour or do we send him home to find it?’ His eyes returned to me and he looked me up and down sourly. ‘And bear in mind, Miss Davies, that some sort of discipline is necessary for a merchant sailor, no matter how unsuitable the raw material.’ Directly appealed to thus, Miss Davies could no longer politely ignore my embarrassment and she tittered nervously in hers.