Came the Dawn

by Roger Bax

  I said good-bye to Steve and Svetlana at the hotel. I would have left Marya there also, but she was too Russian to cut the knot sharply at the end and she insisted on coming to the airport with me.

  The ’plane was already warming up when we got there and we didn’t have long to wait. Marya clung to me, looking woefully lost and pathetic. She said, “Philip, if they won’t let me out you will come back here, won’t you … just to see me, I mean?” Her voice trembled. “I—I don’t feel ready to say goodbye.” She pressed her head against my shoulder and began to sob in a way that tore my heart.

  I said: “I’ll come back, darling, darling Marya. I promise.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to stay …”

  “I know, sweetheart. Don’t let’s talk about it. It won’t come to that. We’ll find a way.”

  Marya looked deep into my eyes and said slowly: “Whatever happens I shall always love you. Always. I shall wait for you if I wait all my life.”

  “And I shall always love you, Marya. You’re not—sorry—about everything?”

  The tears sprang to her eyes once more. “I would do it all again,” she said earnestly. “I’ve been so happy.”

  The loudspeaker blared. Marya dabbed her face. She said, trying to smile: “I don’t want you to remember me like this. I must look dreadful.”

  We got up and went to the barrier. I took her in my arms, kissed her and held her close for a moment. Then I grabbed my case and went blindly on to the tarmac, not knowing if I should ever see her again.

  Chapter Two

  I worked in New York for more than eighteen months. Marya and I kept as close as we could by correspondence but it was a heartbreaking business. The whole thing seemed so wickedly unnecessary and unfair. I don’t think she was ever out of my mind for a moment. There was no difficulty about getting private messages carried to and fro, for newspaper men were frequently going in and coming out and I knew most of them. Once Steve came out by air for a short break. He was reassuring up to a point—he said that Marya, though a little subdued in private, was dancing better than ever, and he thought she was too popular to come to any harm. Otherwise, there was little he could tell me that I didn’t know from her letters.

  When the case of the Russian wives was taken up officially by the Foreign Office I did what little I could to help in the campaign. It was impossible not to go on hoping, but as the months went by and relations between Russia and the West grew worse, the hope faded. Every conceivable approach had been made to the Russians. They had been appealed to on the ground of common humanity, and on the ground that they themselves had sanctioned the marriages with foreigners, and on the ground that we had been their fighting allies and deserved something better at their hands. Well-known friends of the Soviet Union had interceded on our behalf. The Press had given publicity to our troubles; the subject had been raised repeatedly in Parliament and at the highest diplomatic levels. The plain fact was that the Soviet Government had decided that it had nothing to gain by giving way, and there was nothing on earth that could compel it to do so. It had even set the seal on its decision by enacting a decree making any future marriage of Russians with foreigners illegal. It had slammed and bolted the door, and my Marya was on the wrong side.

  By the beginning of 1947 I felt that at all costs I must get back to Moscow and talk to Marya. I put the situation squarely to the office and they were very decent. They called me back to London, and after a long talk Barnes, the editor, suggested that I should return to Moscow as the paper’s resident correspondent. It was all the more generous of them because in other circumstances I doubt if they would have gone to the expense of keeping a permanent man there. Of course, I jumped at the offer. I applied for a visa, with a supporting letter from the paper, and in a week I got a reply. The application was refused. No reason was given, except that I was no longer persona grata to the Soviet authorities.

  I broke the news to Marya by letter and, as one does, I urged her not to despair. But she wrote back in words of anguish and I couldn’t think of any way to cheer her. I was helpless—we were all helpless.

  Good colleagues of mine told me that the only thing to do now was to try to forget. I suppose it was sound advice—it was certainly well-meant—but it was advice I couldn’t follow. It would have been different if Marya had been dead—that was something I could have taken on the chin like any other man. But the knowledge that nothing separated us except fifteen hundred miles and the harsh obstinacy of a bunch of bureaucrats just gnawed at me. When I dwelt on the brutal injustice of their action—as I did about a dozen times a day—I fairly choked with anger. I had got pretty low in health as well as in spirits by this time, and I wasn’t much use about the office. Barnes realized I was in a bad state, gave me a fatherly lecture, and urged me to take some leave. The prospect wasn’t very attractive at the end of March 1947, when London was still gripped by the worst winter for about fifty years, but a couple of weeks later the weather did a complete somersault and I could hardly get out of London quickly enough.

  What I needed was fresh air, hard physical exercise and a change of scene. I thought without much enthusiasm of walking or climbing, and then I suddenly remembered the little sailing-boat that I’d told Marya about. I didn’t know whether it would still float after being completely neglected for the best part of eight years, but at least I could go and see. So on a delicious spring morning early in April I travelled down to Southfleet in the Essex flats with a week’s rations in my rucksack, a pair of sea-boots, and a determination to follow Barnes’s advice and ‘snap out of it’ if I possibly could.

  The boat, Wayfarer, was a three-tonner with a tiny cabin. I had stripped her of all her gear and contents just before war broke out and had left her high up on the saltings where only an extraordinary spring tide could reach her. The sails and spars I had given into the care of a young chap named Joe Brooks, to whom life and boats were interchangeable terms. As it happened, Joe was almost the first person I saw on the saltings—he hailed me as I was struggling to negotiate the deep glutinous mud of the creek at low water and directed me to a better route. I was really glad to see him, and he seemed pleased to see me. I had known him for only a short while before the war, and not very well at that, for he was quiet and reserved. But he was one of those naturally amiable fellows whom you can’t help getting along with. He was about my age, spare and very brown, with frank eyes as blue as the sea and hair already a little grizzled at the temples.

  When I’d cleaned some of the mud off myself we sat down on the gunwale of a dinghy he’d been scraping and had a talk and a smoke. He told me he’d joined the Navy at the outbreak of war but had been invalided out a couple of years later. Since then he’d been slowly building up a one-man business on the saltings, repairing yachts, looking after other people’s boats, and doing a bit of brokerage when an opportunity offered.

  I asked him about Wayfarer. The creek was dotted with yachts and dinghies, barges and fishing-boats, all dried out in the mud, and I hadn’t been able to spot her.

  Joe stood up and pointed across the saltings to a little rill. “There she is. She’s in rather a bad state. I moved her when I came back so that she’d be under my eye.”

  “Will she do up all right?”

  “I should think so,” said Joe cautiously.

  I told him that I had some leave and that if the weather kept fair I planned to stay down on the saltings for a few days and fit the boat out.

  “It’s very nice just now,” Joe said approvingly. He was always in favour of anybody spending time on the saltings. “I live in the workshop over there.” He pointed to a spacious but dilapidated houseboat like a Noah’s Ark.

  “You’re not married, Joe?”

  He smiled a trifle cynically and shook his head. “Boats are enough trouble,” he said. “And women aren’t usually very keen on my sort of life. They like water to come out of taps.”

  I wanted to tell him about Marya, but I didn’t—not then. Instead we went ove
r to have a look at Wayfarer.

  Her condition, it seemed to me, was not too bad. Of course, she’d lost almost every scrap of paint and varnish and the wood was a bit soft in places, but I felt sure she’d do up sufficiently to give me some good sailing again. She’d never be the sort of boat to take to sea in a blow, but then I wasn’t competent to take anything out in really bad weather. I had no illusions about my seamanship.

  “Her gear’s all right,” said Joe encouragingly. “We’d better bail her out and see if she’ll float on the afternoon tide. I’ll get a bucket.” And he plodded off cheerfully to the workshop. His time was his own, and he gave the impression of enjoying every minute of it.

  During the next few days I threw myself with savage zest into hard physical activity. I wanted to tire myself out so that I could sleep at nights. Stripped down to a pair of old flannels, I scraped and painted and stopped leaks and rove new ropes from dawn till dusk. Joe lent me the tools and materials I needed, and often a helping hand as well. He also let me shake down in his workshop until Wayfarer was sufficiently dry for me to sleep in her. The weather was heavenly, with sunshine and soft air and larks twittering away like mad, and I soon began to feel a new man. The days passed very quickly. There was always something fresh to look at when the muscles got tired. It was the ‘fitting-out’ season, and from morning till night you could hear the sounds of hammering and sawing, the clank of steel cable, and the cheerful rattle of rope running through blocks. Boats changed colour rapidly as owners applied new paint with skill and pride, and the creek was soon as bright as a rainbow.

  Joe seemed to be everywhere at once. He got through an immense amount of work, but all in his own way. He was an individualist, the monarch of his estate, which was about three acres of saltings. His jobs were as varied as the tools and stores in his workshop. One day he would go out and navigate a boat up the tricky channel from the Estuary; the next he would be burning off or painting a hull or fitting an auxiliary engine. He knew a good deal about engines, but sail was his passion. He was incredibly conscientious. He had quite a lot of boats under his charge and if a bit of wind got up during the night and the tide happened to be high Joe would turn out and row around in his dinghy, loosening a warp here or heaving in a bit of anchor chain there, until all was safe. He enjoyed it. I think he felt that he really owned the creek at night, when everyone else was asleep.

  It took me just over a week to finish Wayfarer. I was rather proud of the transformation and was looking forward to taking her out, but first I went up to the flat which I rented in Chelsea to get some clean clothes and collect my correspondence. There was a letter from Marya that put me right back to Square One. Joe must have noticed my change of mood when I reached Southfleet that night but he didn’t say anything. Later, when he was brewing the pot of tea we usually had before turning in, I felt I had to talk about Marya or burst, and I told him the whole story. He didn’t say much, but he looked at her picture for longer than mere politeness demanded. When he handed it back there was a firmness about his chin which left no doubt where his sympathies lay, and he muttered something about ‘bastards’, which I thought showed exactly the right spirit.

  The next day we had a short but exhilarating sail in Wayfarer and then I took some stores aboard and went down the creek on my own for a few days. That wasn’t so good. It was all right while I was actually sailing, for in those difficult shoal waters off the Essex coast I was fully occupied trying not to go aground or getting off once I had grounded. There are a hundred-and-one things you can do wrong in a small boat and I did them all. But it got dark early in the evenings and then there was nothing to do but find a quiet berth for the night, cook a meal, and turn in. Those saltings and mud-flats were lonely at dusk. After the tide had gone out and Wayfarer had been left high and dry, there’d be nothing visible in any direction except mud and a low shoreline and a wide sky, and nothing audible except the depressing cries of sea-birds. At such times I told myself I’d been a fool to creep away from the lights and companionship of the town.

  Sometimes I would be wakened in the night by a moaning wind, and then I would lie thinking—always the same thoughts. After two years, the ache for Marya was as hard to bear as when we had first parted. I saw her in my mind continually—Marya coming in breathless from her practices, bright-eyed and laughing, with the first snow sparkling on her little fur hat and muff; Marya singing for all she was worth on a long sleigh ride we had taken out into the country; Marya dancing impromptu to amuse the little shaven-headed children in the war orphans’ home; Marya hopefully stirring a concoction on the stove. God, how I missed her! I tried to tell myself, as others had told me, that the only sensible thing to do was to write the marriage off and hope that perhaps someone else would turn up for each of us later on and that the pain would grow less sharp. Marya, after all, was still only twenty-two. She would fall in love again, and she would be much better off with a Russian. Such thoughts tortured me, without convincing. I didn’t want her to fall in love with anyone else, and for all my experience of the world I couldn’t believe she would. As for me, I knew I couldn’t work up the faintest interest in any other woman. I wanted Marya. I wanted her so much I felt there was nothing I wouldn’t do to get her.

  Thinking about it all was just a mental treadmill. If there had been a single effective action I could have taken it would have been different. It was the prospect of living for years on slowly fading recollections of happiness that was intolerable. I knew I was in a desperate state. I couldn’t forget, and yet I had to forget. I must discipline myself not to recall things best forgotten, yet the tricks of memory could not be disciplined. What was the good of pretending? For better or for worse, Marya was my life.

  I sailed back to Southfleet much more depressed than when I left it. Physically, I was in splendid shape. I was as tanned as Joe himself. My hands were calloused from hauling on sheets and halyards, and my muscles were hard. I was bursting with energy. I could have throttled a Commissar easily! But my mind was like tangled rope.

  I turned Wayfarer into the wind opposite the workshop and had the anchor down and the sails furled as smartly as even Joe could have required. When I had made all snug aboard I went ashore to see what he was doing. I found him in what was, for him, a bit of a temper. It seemed that a client with an expensive new boat and no knowledge had been throwing his weight about, and that always made Joe mad. He had a craftsman’s pride and dignity and he didn’t like being treated like a long-shoreman. He used some nautical language about spivs with luxury yachts and no manners that cheered me up considerably. It felt good to have a companion again. I made some tea and we sat down on the short grey grass of the saltings and idly watched the creek filling up.

  If my mind had been easy, I could have watched that creek quite happily all day long. It was interesting even when it was dry. I liked the way the mud hissed as all the life beneath it breathed. It was intriguing to let the shadow of a hand move across the mud and to watch hundreds of sea-lice draw back into the putty-like substance as though they had been drilled. I loved to watch a spring tide pouring in, with its fringe of brown foam and bubbles and its hint of power. Joe felt the same. He was a dreamer. He had plans for a bigger and better workshop. He wanted to make some money so that he could buy the right sort of boat and go off round the world. He didn’t want money for anything else, as far as I could see. To most people the creeks and channels which ran through the saltings like veins in a leaf were nothing but smelly beds of rather disgusting mud. To Joe, they were a gateway. He knew he was nearer real freedom sitting on the deck of a small boat dried out in one of those muddy creeks than he would have been in a suite at the Ritz. For when the tide came in the little boat suddenly became a living thing, eager to move, and the gate was unlocked to the open sea. You didn’t have to ask permission or buy a licence or depend on anybody else’s efforts. You could just up-anchor and sail away to the ends of the earth if you had the right boat and the knowledge and the guts. I felt prett
y sure Joe would sail away one day.

  We drained the teapot for a second cup, and watched a boat come in that I hadn’t seen in the creek before. She was a gaff-rigged cutter, rather old-fashioned in her lines and sturdily built by modern standards, but very easy on the eye. As she turned into the wind I saw that she was roomy and broad in the beam. Her spars were heavy, and so was her gear. She looked like a much-used working boat in need of a coat of paint.

  “That’s a nice little ship,” I said, with proper diffidence. I was always hesitant about voicing too emphatic an opinion on any nautical subject when Joe was about. But this time I could see by the quiet gleam in his eye that he fully shared my view.

  “She’s a husky job,” he said.

  “She must be pretty old.”

  “Thirty or forty years—but no one can build like that these days. There isn’t the timber. She’s well-seasoned oak and teak, and nothing scamped. I’d sooner have her than any modern yacht.”

  The cutter swung a little in the wind and I saw her name. It was Dawn.

  I said, “Do you know the boat, Joe?”

  Joe nodded. “She’s from Mersea. That old boy stowing her sails is the owner. He’s brought her here to sell her.”

  My interest was still no more than academic. I said:

  “She looks a fine sea-boat. Nice and dry, I should think.”

  “Yes,” said Joe, “she’s what sailing chaps call sea-kindly. I was out in her once or twice before I joined up. You could go anywhere in Dawn.”

  “Anywhere?” I said, a shade surprised. She didn’t look all that big. “What do you suppose she is—ten tons?”

  “Just under, I should think. But she’d weather any storm, properly handled.”

  I said, “Would she sail to the Baltic?”