He made a final check in the mirror: there was a speck of lint on his lapel and a splash of toothpaste in the bristles at the corner of his mouth. Shoulders back … chin up … smile, please. He unbolted the door, ducked under the beam and steamed cautiously ahead into the living room, his colours hoisted and his hatches battened down.
When Diana said “You will stay on to have some supper, won’t you? It’s nothing much, just chops and things …”, George realized that he’d been wondering how to avoid going back to Thalassa. It was a relief to stand in Diana’s kitchen, watching the bramble-scarred backs of her hands as she peeled the papery skin from an onion. It was nice to be told where things were and assigned the small symbolic tasks of an acolyte. She showed him where the corkscrew lived. He went out to the woodpile and filled her wicker basket with logs. He could hear the spitting fat in the pan on the kitchen stove and the sound of the tide coming in over the rocks in the dark. There was no wind, the sky was low with cloud, and the water was fitting itself stealthily, invisibly, around the house and drowning the shoreline of the bay.
The knowledge of Sheila’s baby had started as a sudden blow to the gut; it changed to an itch, and each time George remembered it he felt compelled to scratch.
“Odd, really,” he said “ … Sheila going on television like that, so … long before the event.”
“Yes, when is it due?”
He’d hoped that Diana would be able to tell him that. “Oh … not for ages yet. This Moselle’s nice—where does one go for wine round here?”
Diana asked if Sheila was his only child. Yes, said George, but he was thinking of that other baby in his life—a baby curiously more vivid to him in some ways than Sheila had ever been. For Sheila was always Angela’s child—hers in the same way that her frocks and the MG and her torn nursery teddy bear were hers. George had only once seen Sheila being breastfed: that was a part of Angela’s personal toilette, and she would no more have allowed him to be present than she would have let him see her on the lavatory.
But the other baby was different. He still sometimes surfaced in George’s dreams, with his outraged old man’s face and lobster body. George liked to imagine him as a farmer now, with terraces of vines and olive trees … a serious family man with a fat wife and a string of kids of his own.
He said: “When I was in the Navy, there was a tiny scrap of a baby … Greek …”
“You mean, yours?”
“No, not mine. I just pulled him out of the water and looked after him for a few hours—”
It was a week after VJ Day. Hecla, bound for Singapore, was still in the Mediterranean, 300 miles short of the Suez Canal. They spotted the burning refugee ship at midnight—she looked like a mirage city on the horizon. It turned out later that the fire started when a nurse overturned a primus stove; by the time Hecla arrived, the ship was alight from end to end. Half her lifeboats and rafts were gone and she was listing badly; a great floating bonfire that lit the faces of the men on Hecla’s bridge and showed the sea as an amazing ruddy tangle of heads, carley floats, empty lifebelts, fibre suitcases, cardboard boxes and bits of smoking woodwork. The submarine Trouncer was lying off, a mile from the ship, and had launched a little flotilla of rubber dinghies; they bobbed about in the lumpy sea as if they had escaped from a suburban regatta.
The captain asked all strong swimmers in the crew to volunteer. George, naked in his lifejacket, went into the water as soon as the scrambling nets were lowered over the side. It was a curious business. Every time you saw a body, it turned out to be something else. George rescued a very lifelike overcoat, a pair of oilskin trousers, somebody’s sleeping bag and a dead goat before he found his first real survivor—an elderly man in a flat cap, clutching a plucked chicken, who gazed at George with fixed reproach as he was dog-paddled to the ship’s side. He missed the baby twice, swimming straight past it in an attempt to save what turned out to be an upturned wastepaper basket and a coil of heavy rope.
Hecla was in chaos. The flight deck had been turned into a shanty town of tarpaulins rigged over lines of blankets and palliasses. No-one wanted George’s baby. The refugees were in shock. They stared as he tried to show them his wet little bundle, saying “Yes? Yes? You like? You know Mama?” He walked up and down the lines, robed in a towel, trying to find a medical orderly to take the baby off his hands. No go. George carried it to his cabin, where he cut its raggy clothes off with a pair of scissors, patted it dry and wrapped it in his pyjamas.
The baby was eerily silent. It lay on George’s bunk, as pale and waxy as if it had been carved in cream cheese. Then it slowly reddened, and as its colour came back it started to bawl; a high thin shriek that started like the sound of tearing silk, then grew in volume until the whole cabin seemed to be contained inside the baby’s cry.
George pulled faces at it. He rocked it in his arms. He warmed some milk over the wardroom stove and tried to drip it into the baby’s mouth from the end of a teaspoon. Now the shriek was like a drill grinding on a raw nerve in a back tooth.
“Hush,” he said. “Hush. Please hush—” The baby drew breath, stared in a wobbly cross-eyed way at a point somewhere just in front of its nose, and let out a chainsaw scream. George crooked his little finger, dipped it in the milk, and offered his wet knuckle to the small, purple knot of anger that was the baby’s face.
“I’m sorry,” George said. The baby howled. George saw it dying on him. How often did babies need to be fed? Could they die of apoplexy? He felt uselessly male. The baby was yelling Breast! Breast! Breast! and flat-chested George was no bloody good to it at all. Justice, felt George, was all on the baby’s side.
Breast! Breast! Breast!
On setting out for the Far East, everyone on the Hecla had been issued with three French letters, Captain’s Orders. (“On my ship,” the captain had announced over the tannoy system on the first Sunday out, “anyone who comes back with a dose of the clap goes on a charge.”) In the ratings’ quarters, they were being widely used as balloons. George’s were kept hidden in a drawer under a pile of socks.
Breast! screamed the baby on the bunk.
George unrolled a condom on his thumb and punctured its limp nipple with the point of a safety pin. Then he filled the thing with the warm milk, cradled the baby in one arm, and dangled the pallid, greasy sheath over the baby’s nose.
“Come on, baby. Come on, my love. Tit—”
The baby was fooled. It fastened its lips round the end of the French letter and sucked. Milk dribbled down its cheeks and chin. Its eyes slowly closed. George cuddled it in triumph. He took it up to the bridge, where he demonstrated his invention to Farley who was on the dawn watch. The baby’s mouth moved in a vague parabola to form what George was certain was a smile, and it farted, quite noisily, three times.
“Listen to that,” George said. “Little bugger’s in complete working order.”
“What’s its name?”
“Aristotle. Harry for short.”
“What the fuck are you proposing to do with it?”
“I don’t know. Put him down for Harrow, do you think? Angela will know what to do.” Sitting by the Asdic, George joggled the baby on his lap. Aristotle gaped at him with a devoted, owl-like stare. George held the swollen condom to the baby’s mouth; Aristotle sucked and waved his wrinkled fists.
He could still smell the baby after thirty—no, more like forty—years. To Diana, he said, “His mother had been on Trouncer all along. We located her later on in the morning. She got him back when we docked at Port Said.”
“Did you meet her?”
“No. The M.O. took charge of all that. I didn’t even learn her name. Pity, really. I have a recurrent fantasy that at least I ought to be able to send that kid a Christmas card every once in a while.”
“Were many people lost?”
“Oh …” The burning ship seemed so much further away than the baby. “There were thirty or so missing at the end of the day. We picked up about two hundred survivors; and Trounc
er picked up another ninety.”
“It’s a lovely story.”
That was just what George had expected Angela to say, when he told her in the drawing room of her parents’ house in Markham Street. Instead she’d made a face and said “How perfectly disgusting!” Then, a moment later, “But you must have been frightfully brave, darling, jumping into the sea like that; do you think they’ll give you a gong?” To celebrate George’s homecoming, they had booked in for two nights at the Dorchester, where they lay between the stiff hotel sheets and George said, “Darling … do we need to go on bothering with these things?” and felt Angela shaking her head vigorously in the dark.
At the time, George was sure that Angela’s silent, sweet, impatient negative meant that she wanted a baby. He had astonished himself with his own excitement at the thought, and it was wonderful to find that Angela shared it without them having spoken a word. That was all part of being married; you just found yourself knowing and wanting the same things because you were we, and you weren’t alone any more, even in the most private rooms in your head.
When Angela came, she gripped his neck so tightly that it hurt, and she made a shocked gargling noise as if she had been injured in some awful accident. He could feel the tears on her cheeks. She said, “My God. George. George!” His name was an appalled shout on the air as he, loving his wife, came too.
Next morning they went shopping together. In the Burlington Arcade she was bright and tinny, like someone he’d just met at a cocktail party. “Oh, darling—” she kept on saying; “Oh, darling!” But there was no special intimacy in the word; it was pronounced exactly as she used to carol it over the telephone to old school chums from Hatherup Castle, like Tanya Fox and Serena Lake-Williams.
At Fortnum’s for coffee, George found a horrible idea taking hold of him like an infection. When Angela had shaken her head so violently the night before—had he got hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether? In the café, with its sobering smell of chicory and wet umbrellas, it seemed to George that Angela might have meant something quite different. Had he just reminded her of Aristotle sucking on the teat of the French letter? And was her headshake just a spasm of reminiscent disgust at the image?
Surely not. It was a giddying and shameful thought. George did his best to kill it on the cab ride to Rules, where they lunched. Seven weeks later Angela came back from the doctor’s; she was pregnant.
“Do you drink brandy?” A log cracked and whistled in the grate. Diana was putting a record on the stereo system.
“Yes, please. Is that … one of yours?”
“Oh God, no—” There was a loud bass crackle as the needle touched the rim of the disc; then, four bars in, George recognized the piece as Mozart’s clarinet quintet. He said: “I used to have this myself, on a pile of 78s, when I had a wind-up gramophone in Mombasa. My version went with a bit more of a swing than yours—it had Benny Goodman.”
“Oh, yes” she said, with her definite, actressy trick of emphasis. “Yes. That’s a neat recording.” She stood with her narrow back to him, busy with bottles on a tray. The clarinet notes were marching down the scale in pairs. Tu-whit, tu-woo. Tu-whit, tu-woo. “This is so nice.” She turned round. “Cornish evenings can seem to last for ever if one’s by oneself, don’t you think? Yes?” Her mouth was framed in a polite English teaparty smile, but her refugee eyes went on staring at him until he felt his own gaze slide away from them to the fire.
“Yes … that’s why I’m trying to teach myself to watch the television.”
“Oh? Is there a lot to learn?”
Glad of an escape route from her eyes, George told her his theory that all programmes on the television were about other programmes on the television, and that if you came to England from abroad you found yourself trying to decipher an extremely complicated code that everyone else grasped by instinct while you laboured over it as if every comedy show was being transmitted in Morse.
“It used to be our class system that foreigners could never get the hang of. Now it seems to be the television. Do you by any chance know who a man called Russell Harty is?”
When Angela returned from the doctor’s, she was fiercely gay; clattering about the house and shouting to George from distant rooms. “Did Tanya ring? We’re supposed to be going round to Lizzie’s for drinks. Did you see that man of Daddy’s?” George didn’t know why she had gone to Dr Spellman twice in a week, and was shy of asking her. When she finally landed up in the same room as George (where he was filling in an application form for a job as a trainee in a Marine Insurance company), he said, “All in order, darling?” “Yes,” she said; “Fine. Wizard. I’ve got … What do your beastly sailors call it? I’m in the pudding club,” and started to cry.
After nearly forty years the phrase still had the power to make his guts turn over. He hadn’t known what to do, what to say. He had stared at her until she yelled, “I thought you’d be pleased, if no-one else was!”, and ran up the stairs to “her” room where George, the new husband, was tolerated like an awkward guest.
Diana, smiling through her smoke, said, “Well … does it feel like a proper homecoming?”
George felt an unmanly prickling in his eyes. He couldn’t think why—perhaps it was just Diana’s cigarette, or the pine burning in the fireplace. He hoped it didn’t show. He said: “Oh … it’s just like any new posting, I suppose. It takes one a while to … shake down, you know.”
“I found it pretty medium hell when I came back.” Her eyes went on looking at him after she’d spoken as if she was still talking. They were saying, Tell, Confess.
But he couldn’t tell. He sat sprawled in her armchair: he grinned; he hid behind his tumbler of brandy; he searched for pipe and matches in his pockets; he said, “I don’t know. Do you think it’s hell not to know who Russell Harty is?”
“Limbo, at least,” Diana said. “Rather an enviable limbo, at that.”
She was looking into the fire. The long back of her cashmere sweater was stretched tight: he could count her vertebrae and see the mothwing pattern of her shoulderblades beneath the wool. She made him think of the model aeroplanes that he’d built as a boy, with their lovely, intricate frames of balsa struts and spars, their taut and glassy tissue paper skins. They were hald together by pure stress: Diana looked as if she were constructed on the same principle. George discovered that he was watching her with surprised and involuntary desire. He felt a sudden jolt of tenderness for her small bones, the surfline of down on her exposed forearm in the firelight, her sad, gruff, ruined voice. He wanted to—
“But you will stay?” Diana was still looking at the burning logs and, for two sweet seconds, George thought she was flying another signal altogether. “Yes,” he said. “There’s something going on in Montedor at present. Something rather awful, I’m afraid. It’s in the papers. It rather looks as if I shan’t be able to go back.”
It would be so nice, he thought, if he could turn to her. For comfort. For kindliness. For loneliness, too. Temporizing, he inspected his empty glass as if he’d just noticed a gang of microbes swimming in the treacly drop of liquid that remained at the bottom. Well? Did she want him to risk the hazardous crossing of the rug to where she sat by the fire? He felt as jittery about it, as nervously constricted, as he’d been at seventeen. Encouraged by something in the way her hair (and it was still blonde … a very pale, polleny blonde … it wasn’t white at all) grazed her shoulder, he shifted a couple of inches forward in his chair, but found himself finally too stiff to admit his own weakness, to make that bold, vulnerable, candid move.
“Do you want to try to explain it to me?”
George gazed at her, smiling, his head swimming a little with relief. In a tone as gentle as he could manage, he said,
“What?”
“About what’s happening … in Monty … in your African place.”
“Oh.” Disappointed, he made a show of sitting back deep in the chair. “It wouldn’t really make much sense to anyone who hadn’t be
en there. It’s too messy and internal. No Left or Right to it. The usual boring African story. A weak president in power, and a first-rate shit waiting in the wings to make his move. I’m a president’s man, and I wouldn’t stand a chance if the shit gets into office. That’s about it, really.” With every fresh word he spoke, he felt himself losing her.
“Will it be bloody?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. The shit has been stockpiling weapons for the last two years, and he’s got a lot of the army with him.” He watched Diana. Her face was tilted a little away from him. It seemed to drift out of focus, leaving him staring at a single enlarged eye, the colour of a harebell.
“And your friend—the one in the photograph? What’ll happen to her?”
“Oh … Vera Osorio …” George put a heavy emphasis on Vera’s second name. “She’ll be all right.” To clear himself of any lingering attachment in that direction, he added: “She’s with the Minister of Communications. He’s an old friend too, but he’ll behave like the Vicar of Bray.”
“You’re still there, aren’t you? You’re not really here at all.”
“I thought I was supposed to be in limbo.”
Stubbing out her cigarette, Diana smiled—a quick and funny twist of a smile that might conceivably have held in it the promise of something else, George thought. She said, “You’ll just have to learn now to look forward to things like taking your grandchild sailing on your boat.”
Grandchild? For a moment the word was as inexplicable as chihuahua or concertina. It didn’t seem to apply to him at all. Then George remembered. He supposed, sadly, that if Diana was sending him any signals now, she was flying her P and S flags. Keep your distance. Do not come any closer. In a studiedly offhand voice he said, “Yes. Talking of the boat, actually … I want to try her out at sea while this weather holds. Tomorrow, even … or maybe the day after.” He realized that he was quoting her old song. “If it’d amuse you to come along as a passenger—”
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