Acts of Mutiny

by Derek Beaven

  It was three o’clock by Robert’s spattered watch when the quartermaster mustered them, with the megaphone, to join the queues. The destroyer had left for Darwin half an hour ago.

  At the head of the ladders, by torchlight, the officer said, ‘You may be on the water for some time.’ He wore an oilskin against the rain. His eyes were strangely visible, in the hood made of his sou’wester brim.

  ‘Yes?’ said Robert, bracing himself on the rail.

  ‘We’re waiting for the Australian Navy. Another little destroyer. And there’s a frigate coming up by all accounts. They shouldn’t be too long. The order’s been given.’ The wind whipped the words away. ‘Better to get you all away from this bloody death-trap as soon as possible. Every boat’s been given the instruction to pull for it. The able-bodied among you should see to that straight away, as soon as your boat’s full.’

  ‘But what about all the other people?’ Penny indicated the stern of the ship. ‘They’ve been waiting as long as us. More cramped. More dangerous. What’s the situation? What are the casualty figures?’

  The officer’s sigh was audible above the weather. The torch’s beam flashed on to Finlay. ‘The captain is with them now. We’ve done all we can, ma’am, for the time being. He’ll give them the solemn assurance of what we know to be the case: that another ship will be here within the hour. The fire hasn’t gone through to them, you see. And probably won’t. Actually they’re safest where they are for the minute. But it’s a terrible situation, I know. The worst decisions have to be made. Now if you’ll get into the boat please, and we’ll have your Lite girl dropped down to you in a sling. Badly hurt, is she?’

  Penny and Robert climbed down into the pitching boat, which jostled dangerously alongside the Armorica’s hull, one in a line of three. It was nearly full with people they knew only by sight – faces and families with whom they had shared the voyage but loosely. They took their place near the bow, and then looked up, waiting for Finlay.

  ‘Ready!’ Penny shouted, as they swung on the wave. The rain, which had eased for a minute or so, grew worse again. Spray from above and below dashed off the white metal into her face.

  But Mary called down, ‘I’m not coming!’

  ‘What? Why? Mary, please hurry!’

  ‘I can’t. I’m not coming.’ Mary thrust her head out defiantly over the rail. The torchlight silhouetted her hair, loose and soaked and haphazard about her unguessable features like black seaweed. The shoulders of her ruined jacket made a stark, obstinate outline. ‘I’m going to stay! I’m insisting on staying. Someone has to! There’s no sign of trouble yet. I can stand it much hotter than this.’

  ‘Mary! What d’you mean? Do hurry! Please!’

  But Mary’s figure disappeared from its station and Penny was thrown back against the gunwale of the lifeboat, as the ship, lying awkwardly right across the sea, found herself rolled in an ungainly wallow between ridges. The boat smacked hard into the side, and, in desperation, the two men holding her on her lines cast off. She drifted free, leaving Penny’s cry unanswered. ‘Mary! What about Finlay?’

  In pitch dark for another two hours before daybreak, the company of the lifeboat endured, stunned, waterlogged, saying little. Robert and Penny clung together. Presumably so did their neighbours, for the Lite craft so leaped and skidded that it was a matter of holding on for dear life. There was an attempt at the oars, an attempt to understand the shelter that could, theoretically, be rigged. Neither was very successful. One of the ship’s officers slumped in an oilskin cape next to Robert. He was exhausted and had difficulty breathing.

  The rain stopped. The thunder went away. Someone near the stern was overcome with persistent tears. The officer woke with a shudder and passed his waterproof along to her. He was dressed in his tropical whites, very faintly visible. ‘Bloody smoke,’ he coughed to Robert. ‘I shall have to bloody give it up.’

  Gradually their contact with the Armorica was lost. The pinprick glows and needle streaks of her torches became harder and harder to locate. Then, much later it seemed, in the far distance there was a glow of flame-coloured brightness against the black. It was hard to say how long it lasted. Time stretched and contracted under those circumstances, even as the water heaved and raced, twisted, or collapsed suddenly into a dizzying slide. There was a moment when it looked as though the sea all around the distant Armorica was on fire. The officer was watching intently. ‘Wish I had my binoculars.’

  Robert watched too. He wondered precisely what nautical ghoulishness it was made the other man so keen to see the tragedy magnified.

  ‘Bastard. I never thought the bastard would do it. If that doesn’t beat bloody everything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Robert asked.

  ‘If you’ve seen it before you know what to look for. Mum’s the word; but oh, Christ, this is a bloody bad day and no mistake.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No. You wouldn’t. You don’t know what we know, do you. And best you don’t, old son.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Military matters. Nothing I can say. The daylight’s coming, you see. She’d be visible for miles.’ Then he muttered something under his breath which sounded distinctly like the word ‘torpedo’.

  Robert heard himself gasp.

  ‘I didn’t say anything. Is that understood?’ The officer shifted his position and turned away.

  But Robert could not help staring at the Armorica from the top of the next wave. And although there could be no hint of phosphorescence in that great churn of a swell which the storm had whipped up, it was almost as though he could see the path of the thing, still there, straight as an arrow towards the now leaping streaks of flame.

  Then dawn came, like a light bulb again, and everything was changed. A boat and its collection of people was delivered suddenly out of the dark. On the horizon rose a great plume of black smoke. It appeared to coil and snake into a vast column, widening as it climbed. And then, within twenty minutes as they watched, there was no more sign of it, and the traces of its cloud lifted upwards and faded out.

  64

  My lifeboat is much nearer. Smoke billowing, the body of the thing lifts momentarily, as though a whale has mistakenly tried to surface under her keel. We hold our breath, and curiously, there is no sound other than the wind. Then we are in a trough. The roiling column of black flattens and streaks to the south-west. When she comes into view again, the burning Armorica sits back in the water, not well.

  Now every time a sea lifts us up, while the sky lightens and lightens, we watch the poor creature sit lower and lower in the water. But it is not until about twenty minutes later that there comes the frightful tip-up of her bows against the horizon, by which the fire’s tumult is suddenly extinguished. The sea boils. I watch the twist that reveals all the cloud-wreathed red paint under her water-line. She gathers pace, gathers, and slips away. There is almost a hole in the burning slick. Then nothing. It is unbelievable. It is too much to take in. We have and have not seen.

  Hours have passed, perhaps; or perhaps only minutes. One other lifeboat is visible far away in the rain, which has started again. Next to it, there is a small black square standing up, like a matchbox flipped endways and carried along the wave crests. I know it is a sub. I have seen them at Chatham. When the sea permits, I can just make out the dark line of its topsides. Now a man in a life-jacket stands right next to us in a buzzing noise. He hails us from an inflatable. He is looking for Mr Barnwell, the senior officer. And the captain. We do not have them. We have no officers in our boat. Help is on its way, he tells us.

  No one speaks of what has happened. The talk is of muddling through. A couple near the stern have taken charge. They have found a bar of chocolate in somebody’s handbag and are busy dividing it into twenty-seven equal pieces. We are all for rationing. There is no attempt to make sense of what we have seen: the dawn, the clearing skies, the sub. No one wants to put two and two together. Not for a moment.

  A man has a wa
tch that still works. There is a desultory singsong every ninety minutes: hymns and camp-fire songs, even Vera Lynn.

  ‘Not long to go now, everybody. We have to remember that. Just keep saying to yourselves: Not long now. All right? All agreed?’ It reminds me of school assembly.

  ‘That chappie in the rubber boat’s been gone at least three hours. Can’t be long now. Could be worse. That lady, there. Your turn, dear.’

  The lady cries for a moment.

  ‘Now, now!’ The man from the stern jollies her.

  She steadies herself. She recites a poem she has by heart. It is a jig-jogging, classroom thing. We all applaud. Her chin trembles. We all feel better and I wonder what piece I shall do myself when the hands tick round. ‘The Lion and Albert’? We do not know each other’s names.

  ‘Do you think the sub …?’

  ‘Lucky they happened to be passing, eh? Pay us a visit, so to speak. Lets you know you’re not alone.’

  This close the waves loom right over us, like glass slopes, up which the boat slips sickeningly sideways at the last minute. Some crests break over the gunwales. They have a taste and a weight. There is a slopping surge running back and forth about our feet. We chart the progress of the next rain. Then it pelts on us and the men take awkward turns with the baler.

  I wake and look at my knuckles. They are split open and bleeding slightly. Erica’s are similar. It is the cold, and the salt. Waking is vile; for the wind blows again and yet more rain sluices down. Nothing is dry inside the boat. A man in the boat keeps shaking me, saying to Erica, ‘You let ’em drop off like that and they get to like it. Seen it happen. That was in the Atlantic. Quicker in the cold seas. Still. You be careful, sonny.’

  I smile foolishly at him. The impression he has ruined for me is that Erica plays a gramophone in the middle of the lifeboat, that the swimming-pool of the Armorica is contained right within the gunwales of our wretched tub, and that we are all getting ready to dance and take dips. I hate him for returning me to my flimsy, soaking clothes. Then my eyes open and there are the same speechless faces, the same heave of the lifeboat, the chasing clouds, the intolerable cold. I renew my grip on the rope and start to shiver.

  ‘That’s a good sign,’ the man says.

  ‘Yes,’ Erica replies.

  I am very hungry.

  Erica moves to touch me. ‘Cuddle up, Ralph.’ I shrink away. I cannot bear her near me. A military aircraft with two propellers slung under each wing scratches about in the cloud base, turning once, and turning again.

  The second day of rain gave way to a profound calm. It was not my hallucination that in the afternoon we sighted two of the other lifeboats, far away. We waved, they waved back. On the horizon there were smudges of smoke, but they did not alter course. I did imagine one was the Armorica still burning. Then I remembered.

  As for the third day, a tropical sun came out and dried us up. And shortly after that there was the smudge that turned into the frigate.

  65

  Hatred did for the Armorica, we can be sure of that. Hatred is an oddity. That it exists is undeniable. Perhaps it is scattered through the universe, between the stars.

  A floating city, Penny thought, before she boarded at Tilbury. There are some shipwrecks that are part of our folklore. There is no need to spell out their names; we are all brought up on them. They are famous because they staged themselves. They lead us to believe such losses always happen in the glare of publicity. The Armorica was not so big, nor so close to home. As an officer I am ashamed, and as a man.

  It was given out that there had been a fire and a certain loss of life, and that the wounded vessel had been towed up to Jakarta. That is what we survivors were told, and what the Press were told. Let me remind you that there was at that time no satellite communication, no front-line journalism, no instantaneous world-wide news network such as we have today. Australia was the other side of the globe. The long-range jet had only just been invented. Portable videotaping equipment had not.

  And in so vast and rudimentary a territory as Australia then was, the news of the sinking could fragment itself, one account appearing in this state newspaper one week, but denied the next week in that. A shape here, an outline there. Popping on to the ABC’s radio news as a lead for two evenings but disappearing for ever after. The pattern is not an unknown one, even now. But in any case, stories had to work hard to escape that continent in those days. Witness the test fall-out details, which were not welcome in England. Neither were those of radiation research, nor of the human guinea-pigs. So far out of sight, so far out of mind, as far as the old country was concerned.

  Reuters would have it world-wide, of course, though in the UK there might well be phone calls to certain newspaper proprietors about the national interest and military secrets. There might even be D-notices. The odd snippet of Australian footage might trickle home to London eventually, in a newsreel of survivors; shown in this Movietone cinema or that, but referred to only once or twice, perhaps, on the Home Service, or nudged out of television space altogether by some larger, more pressing domestic crisis. To be picked up later. Or not.

  Questions might even have been asked in the House. But answers can knock some matters stone dead. There were no pictures of the sinking ship, therefore no loss. A crime at sea is the most perfect, for the victim buries herself. Everything depends on the witnesses. Albatross-eyed, but lacking the missing evidence, I am making sense of what must have been.

  You will still not believe me. There are times when I do not believe it myself, dare not. It would be told, though, this tale. I am detained by it. A thousand families at either end touched in some way and no furore? No marches, petitions, protests? A whole ship? No screaming headlines? Exposures, investigative documentaries, royal commissions, private prosecutions?

  No, none of that. Ships go down all the time and we hear nothing. Passenger ships, too. And many far worse things go unseen. But that is not the point. It never matters really how many separate people know, are desolated, have their lives broken. So long as they are kept in isolation. So public life, too, loses its memory; I too signed the promise after we were picked up.

  After the adventure of rescue came their delivery to Adelaide, almost as if nothing had happened, almost by sleight of hand.

  ‘We have done it, darling. We’ve made it,’ Robert said.

  ‘We can still hope,’ Penny replied. ‘But doesn’t there now come the difficult part?’ She smiled ruefully. ‘There’s nothing for it. You’ll have to leave it to me, Robert, I’m afraid. He’s got to be told. It’s got to be made clear.’

  They put out their cigarettes, embraced, smiled, and parted at the roadside in Port Adelaide. She clung to the memory of his words. ‘Love is an island that really exists. No matter what. You’ve taught me that. That’s where we shall live.’ He had held the little brass box she had given him in his hand.

  In the first week she wrote to him every day. Sometimes twice a day. Then she tried telling Hugh. It was as though he took no notice of what she said but claimed her there and then, brutally, like a possession. And after that Penny could not write any more. Every time she picked up the pen the words ‘my dearest’ seemed to sink out of reach, as crumbs beside a lifeboat. The very paper felt soiled.

  So also did the dashing blooms in their garden. They should have been beautiful. The orange tree in the centre with its little green fruits struck her as a worthless nonsense; the two fig trees had some sort of leaf blight. Once, after the boys had arrived, she binged on the half-ripe fruit and made herself ill. The violence of it gave her a grim satisfaction.

  She could not approach Robert in her mind, could not make sense of what had preceded this endless summer which now seemed to be appointed for her; these flat, verandaed houses, all like her own, in their spacious plots; that insistent bird with a voice like a rusty gate; the tiny red-back spider that could kill; the regular invitations to meat-feasts outdoors at night with Hugh’s fellow researchers. The Armorica and its cata
strophe became a dream. Something so great, so incongruous against this basking suburbanism could not really have happened, surely. Now no one ever said anything on the wireless; there were no more press reports. The Finch-Clarks made the effort to write occasionally, but, being dutiful citizens, they never mentioned the ship.

  She held on to small things. The memory of Robert’s hand on her shoulder in the boat in the rain. They were sharing rations. How personal the sea was, even here, green-black, half transparent for the first inch of its down-drop – and then quite lightless when the grains of biscuit sank. How close the crazed surface of it had come. One might almost catch hold of it at last.

  She grew listless and withdrew behind a brave face. Hugh hardly noticed. The boys took up at new boarding-schools. She got her driving licence – a few questions on a piece of paper at the police station – and was free to drink tea with other women whenever Hugh had a lift in to work.

  And each letter from Robert, ever more anxious, bewildered, desperate than the one before, which she retrieved various mid-mornings from the letter-box on the garden gatepost, made her less able to answer.

  Once or twice she did manage a reply. But she could not say what she meant. Only what she hoped for. The passage of time slipped into a long flicker of anxiety and despair. Every minute seemed to ache past, and yet the months evaporated, like spills on the cement floor of her washroom, disappearing while she watched.

  66

  In the December, on a day when the north wind off the central scorch was making breathing itself almost intolerable, two security policemen called on Robert. One picked up the empty bottle of Scotch, the other made himself comfortable in the only armchair.

  ‘Like a drink, do you, Kettle?’