Sometimes, between the bridge evenings at the Club, and the blistering Friday beach picnics, and cocktails at the Residency, and bungalow parties up and down the length of Steamer Point, they did have the occasional week night to themselves, and George ached for these times when he and Angela could sprawl alone in the majlis room.
Copies of Vogue and the Tatler were beginning to arrive for Angela by slow seamail now. While George tried to teach himself to read and write Arabic out of a book, Angela read out snippets of news from home.
“Greta Garbo’s having a thing with Cecil Beaton.”
“Someone’s just opened a new oyster bar in Curzon Street.”
“Oh, look, there’s Lady Throckmorton with the Maharajah of Jaipur.”
The Dunkley pram came, vast and resplendent in a much labelled plywood packing case. He unveiled it for Angela, a surprise; but Angela wept when she saw it. Appalled, George cradled her.
“Oh, Georgie, I don’t want to have this beastly baby—not when I’m having such a lovely time.”
It was with pride and fascination that George watched the steady swelling of Angela’s pregnancy. Sometimes she allowed him to rub her with Lady Standing’s Rejuvenating Cream For Tired Faces And Hands. Spreading the cream over her belly with his fingers, he marvelled at her stretched skin, blue and shiny and hard as porcelain. During the seventh month, her navel turned inside out. George didn’t like to mention it, but this development intrigued him no end: it stood on top of the great mound of her womb like a sprig of holly on a Christmas cake. Once, he saw the skin quake and shudder as the baby kicked. Full of wonder, he put his lips to Angela’s oiled stomach.
She pulled her nightdress down over herself with an angry tug, hurting George’s cheek with her knuckles.
“Don’t! I’m so bloody ugly I want to die!”
Angela’s pains started in the middle of a dinner at the Residency. Billy Wilshawe drove them to the Naval Hospital, hooting all the way. George held Angela’s hand tightly and watched wild dogs scarpering from the jumpy beams of the headlights. At the hospital, she was taken away from him by a nurse and he was left by himself in a creaky wooden room full of rattan cane chairs and dog-eared magazines. The bare electric bulb was fly-specked, the yellow light came in fits and starts. Under the noise of the crickets outside, he could hear the hum-and-grumble of a generator in the grounds.
The nurse came back.
“It’s going to be a long time yet, Mr Grey. If I were you I’d go home and get some sleep.”
“Would you mind awfully if I kipped down here?”
“No. I’ll get you some blankets if you really want to, but you’d be much more comfortable at home.”
“I’d sooner stay. If that’s alright with you.” At ten, the nurse came back with a pile of hospital blankets and a mug of tea. At eleven, George went out on to the loggia, where he smoked a pipe and stared into the half-lit dusty courtyard. Someone had once planted a tree in the middle, but like most green things in Aden it had died. At midnight, he tried to read a magazine. It was tough going.
An Eton and Harrowing Tale
The warning to the public to bring its own
snacks to the ‘Varsity and Eton and Harrow
matches, coming on top of what we are told
about our bread, serves to emphasise the
sombre hue of our times …
He wasn’t sure whether it was supposed to be funny or not.
“Still up and about?” It was the nurse again. “You’re not going to be good for much in the morning, are you? Still, I’ve brought you a drop of brandy. Don’t drink it all at once—we’ve got quite enough on our hands without having to deal with sozzled fathers.”
“She is … all right … isn’t she?”
“She’s tophole. She’s sound asleep at present. Just like you ought to be, my lad.”
George measured out the quarter bottle of brandy at a fingernail an hour. He watched the dawn sky lighten to the colour of Parma violets and saw the kites wheeling high over Crater Town like scraps of burnt paper. At six, he heard singing—a soprano hitting a random selection of top notes—and realized that it was a moan of pain. He couldn’t tell how far away it was, but it didn’t sound at all like Angela. At seven, breakfast came on a tray.
“Sleep well? She’s doing fine. Not long to wait now.”
The morning lasted for days and weeks. People passed by the loggia, talking, busy, indifferent. George hated them. Angela was Having a Baby, yet the bread man stood by gossipping in Arabic with a ward orderly, a doctor in the uniform of the RAMC walked past whistling “Much Binding in the Marsh” and a dog was lifting its leg against a gatepost. He swallowed the last of the brandy. He wanted to go to the lavatory but didn’t dare, in case they needed him.
A few minutes after noon, George heard Angela scream. It was a scream in which the whole world seemed to curdle—a scream from which it seemed impossible that the screamer could survive. It was ragged, gasping, louder and louder, arching over the hospital into the sky. Clutching his head in his hands, George shuddered with it, as if the scream was inside him. He bit on his sleeve. Then there was silence. A landrover, misfiring on all five cylinders, went by on Hospital Road.
Drenched in sudden sweat, George thought, she’s dead. He stood in the corner of the room, hunched, his eyes covered, his head pressed against the hot wood. He felt someone touching him. Then he heard another horrible scream.
“It’s all right, dear. Don’t worry. She’s having nice big contractions now.”
The nurse was laughing at him.
He said: “It’s not … always like this?”
“Oh, yes, dear. It’s perfectly normal. It’s just Nature’s Way.”
“Oh, God,” George said, as Angela screamed again.
“It’s always the fathers who have the worst time of it. The mums just sail through.”
At 12.30, Angela’s bachelors piled out of a Morris 8 into the courtyard. Peter Moffatt. Alan Chalmers. Tony Flower. Bill Nesbit. Justin Quayle.
“Hello, George! Hasn’t she had it yet?”
“Don’t mind us, do you? Just thought we ought to turn out and show the flag.”
“I say, George, you look positively wrecked.”
“What’s the latest from the quacks?”
Angela screamed.
“Christ,” said Tony Flower.
Justin Quayle produced a packet of Players.
George shook his head wordlessly at the sight of the cigarettes. The bachelors lit up in silence, looking suddenly pale under their yellow tans.
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Bill Nesbit said.
When Angela next screamed, Peter Moffatt put his arm round George’s shoulder and held him. George’s eyes were squashed shut. He was pressing into them with his fists.
“Bear up, George,” Peter Moffatt said. “They know what they’re doing. Pretty bloody, though, isn’t it? I had no idea. Tony—what about a spot of whisky for the wounded man?”
George sucked gratefully at the bottle. “Thanks so much. I suppose I’m being a b.f., really. The nurse seems to think so, anyway.”
“How long have you been on sentry-go?”
“Since 10 last night.”
“You should have roused out the chaps. We’d have sat it out with you. Bit bloody much having to face it all out on your own-i-o.”
“What are you going to call it, George?”
Angela screamed. The bachelors stood awkwardly at attention. When the sound died, George said, “Ah … Crispin … if it’s a … boy … or … ah, Sheila, you know …”
“Good-oh,” Tony Flower said. “I’ve got a brother called Crispin. The one who’s out in Sarawak, poor old bugger.”
“Well, there’ll be a lot of sloshing being done over at the Club tonight,” Alan Chalmers said. “Bags-I the job of making sure that George gets pissed out of his mind.”
“I suppose they’ll keep her in for a few days, for observation.”
“Bound
to,” Justin Quayle said. “My sister had a baby last year, in Godalming. They kept her in for a fortnight, I think it was.”
“Boy or girl?” said Tony Flower.
“Boy. Pretty squalid little nipper, actually.”
The screams were coming at closer and closer intervals. The bachelors, battle-hardened now, sat around on the cane chairs, smoking and tugging at the knees of their trousers in embarrassment when they heard Angela cry out each new time. Bill Nesbit remembered that there was a pack of cards in the glove compartment of the car, so they played poker. Since no-one had any cash on them, they played for imaginary stakes. They bet their next year’s salaries and their parents’ houses in England. Peter Moffatt bet his sister’s virginity on a pair of tens, and lost it to George, who had a full house.
“To him that hath …” Justin Quayle said.
“The painting by Joshua Reynolds in the drawing-room. Six Chippendale chairs. And the Chinese vase thing on the hall table,” Bill Nesbit said.
“Pass,” said George, even though he’d been dealt a straight flush in diamonds.
At 4.00 in the afternoon if was Peter Moffatt who noticed the silence. “I wonder if that’s … it?” he said. Ten minutes later, a different nurse came out on to the loggia.
“It’s a girl.”
The bachelors whooped. “Sheila!” Peter Moffatt said, his arms round George. “Well done!”
“Well, which of you boys is the Daddy, then?”
The nurse looked surprised when George shambled forward, grinning helplessly. He followed her along the walkway, under a painted sign saying “X-Ray Unit” in War Department lettering.
“Just through here—”
The whitewashed room was cool and smelled of medicine. A flappy punkah fan was turning overhead, and Angela was lying back on the pillows, her face as colourless as putty. Pain had given her a sort of isolating celebrity, and George felt shy of touching her. He said, “Oh Christ, my darling.” The baby was in her arms, wrapped closely in a shawl. George gazed unbelievingly at his daughter. She was like an enormous wrinkled purple grub, not really human at all. He said: “She’s … wonderful.”
Angela said, in a strange, croaky voice, “Everyone was quite sweet.”
“Oh Christ,” George said, shaking his head to try and bring the world back in focus. “Was it terrible? Were you awfully frightened, darling?”
Angela smiled. She looked as if she found it difficult to make her lips move properly. And suddenly the room was full of bachelors. Tony Flower was the first to kiss her, and the bachelors were doing and saying all the things to Angela that George couldn’t do or say for love of her.
“Angie—you clever girl!”
“Isn’t she stunning!”
“She’s got Angie’s eyes!”
“I never knew you had it in you,” Justin Quayle said, staring lugubriously at the baby, and everyone, even Angela laughed. Suddenly bright, she said: “Oh, Bill—you shouldn’t have. Look—shampoo!”
The tide had turned against him. The water in the English Channel was drifting westwards now, back to the Atlantic. For the most part, it was moving sluggishly at a knot or so; but where Start Point stuck out into the stream like a crooked forefinger, the tide raced past the land, as fast as a river in flood. Even with the engine on, Calliope was making hardly any headway over the ground. The lighthouse, standing on its own island of black shadowed rock, remained firmly stuck a mile off on the port bow, though the sea swept by in a wash of foam, and the boat’s wake trailed behind her in a broad V of curling water. It was bloody strange—as if reality had torn in half, and the two sides of the picture refused to match. When he looked at the sea, he was creaming along at top speed. But when he looked across at the land, he was as fixed as a navigation buoy, tethered to the seafloor on a chain and bucking fretfully on the tide. Sometimes the sea won, sometimes the land, and every time George looked, he knew that what his eyes told him was untrue.
He couldn’t rid his mouth of the carbony, acidic taste of the champagne.
Peter Moffatt said, “Well, here’s to Angie and Sheila—and George, of course”, and the baby in Angela’s arms began to cry, like a single, thin, monotonous note on the top of the scale on a harmonica. The sound deepened and grew louder, the wizened face filled out and turned into George’s own baby, up on the bridge aboard Hecla.
“She wants her milk … doesn’t she?” George said.
In full view of the bachelors, Angela exposed her nipple with its mysterious circlet of fair hair. The baby sucked, as sure of itself as a sea anemone fastening on an extended fingertip. The bachelors, silent in the presence of a sacrament, studied the turning fan over the bed. George watched. His eyes pricked with love and pride and hope. It was the only time that Angela ever let him see her suckling their baby; and Sheila was weaned at fourteen days.
It took an hour to round the lighthouse, with the wind dying away and the cliffs casting a widening pool of cold shadow over the sea. Calliope, straining against the surge of tide, inched past, her sails slatting uselessly, her engine drumming under George’s feet. Hunting for slack water close inshore, he steered the boat frighteningly near to the rocks. There was no slack water. The sea raced past the drying ledges, looking as smooth and thick as black treacle.
Beyond the lighthouse, the horizon was oddly lumpy and there were breakers ahead. Scared of running aground on a shoal, George checked with the chart and saw immediately what the trouble was. The tide, sweeping south and east, rode slap bang over a shallow hill of sand, where it crumpled and broke up. He tried to skirt the tangled water of the race, but was caught in the edge of it. Calliope was shoved and jostled by houndstooth waves that sprang up out of nowhere. Zigzags of foamy water, like the tracks of giant fish, charged at the boat. The steering went slack as she skidded on the lip of a yawning eddy. Down below, something heavy was sliding across the floor of the saloon. A wave like a waterspout threw Calliope on her side for a second, and George feared for the rigging as the boom of the slack mainsail crashed into the shrouds.
“And hands that do dishes …” Wedged in tight, he hung on to the wheel and saw the sky slide up from under his feet. The propeller screeched as a rogue wave lifted it clear of the water and made it grind on air. The wheelhouse windows streamed.
“Will be soft as your face …” Yawing and slamming her way through the last of the rough stuff, the boat carried him into the frozen calm of Start Bay, where he found that he was still bellowing that damned jingle out loud and the blood was foaming in his veins like the sea.
He went out on deck to get the sails down. Between the boat and the shore, the twilit water had the metallic iridescence of a pool of mercury. It was joined to Devonshire by a fine seam of wet sand. At the edge of the sea, the land was a long low strip of grassy dunes and straggling villages: from half a mile off it was as remote as a little world inside a blown glass paperweight. At Hall Sands there were anglers under green umbrellas; at Tor Cross, a matchstick man was throwing driftwood for his capering dog. One after another, lights came on in bungalows and squat mock Tudor villas: George, bundling the cold canvas in his arms, watched. It was the time for tea and sponge cakes and the electric-coloured yatter of children’s TV. The tips of his fingers were white and numb as he lashed the sail to the boom. He liked the feeling of being out at sea in the dark, unnoticed, looking in. When he went back to the wheelhouse he was smiling in his beard, as if the villages were a pretty invention that he’d just made up.
There was no making out the daymark above the entrance to the River Dart. He motored cautiously north through the still water towards a mountainous wall of matt black. A Naval College launch full of cadets cut across his bows. Then he was overtaken by a returning crabber, her stern deck blindingly floodlit, seagulls jostling in her wake like bats. George could hear the sea sucking on rocks worryingly close at hand.
Shielding his eyes from the lights of the trawler, he searched the darkness over on the port side and found the lazy red flas
h of Kingswear Main Light inside the estuary. He kept on course and waited for the red flash to turn to white. Red. Red. Red. Red. Red. Calliope seemed to be right under the cliff ahead before the white sector showed and he swung the boat to home in on the beam. The wooded land closed round him like fur. He squeezed between the turretted silhouettes of a pair of storybook castles, and there was Dartmouth—a carnival of lights on the water, a good party to gatecrash.
Even so, he was choosy about the company he kept. He left the regimented alloy forest of a yacht marina well to starboard, not wanting the magic of the evening to be spoiled by a lot of bloody yachtsmen. He dodged a ferry, slipped under the stern of an antique brigantine moored in the fairway, and came up in an uncrowded reach of inky water on the Kingswear side of the river. Working by torchlight, he dropped his hook and saw the heavy anchor wink deep down like a turning fish as the chain rattled over the bow.
He lit the paraffin lamps and tidied up the wreckage in the saloon. It wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d feared: two plates were broken; Conrad, Kipling, P. G. Wodehouse and Reed’s Nautical Almanac were tangled up together on the floor; the transistor radio had come unstowed and its casing was cracked, but when George switched it on a woman was reading the usual news. He got the charcoal stove going, poured himself half a tumblerful of Chivas Regal and laid out food in tins. Vera watched him from her photograph on the bulkhead.
She said: “Oh, George—you eating chickenshit again?” Chickenshit was one of Teddy’s words, and George resented it.
“It’s a perfectly good steak and kidney pudding,” he said.
“Steak and kidney chickenshit. You know the cholesterol level of that thing? One of these days, George, I am telling you, you are going to be dead before your time.”
He punctured the tin with a can opener and looked back at Vera on her rock, ample as a dugong.
“The trouble with you, George, is you just love to eat shit.” “Oh, do come off it, old love,” he said feebly, and lowered the tin carefully into a saucepan of hot water. He wasn’t up to much as a cook, but there were a few things that he could do pretty efficiently and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pudding was one of them.
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