by Alan Clark
I turned and went out. As I closed the door, a remark was passed which drew a loud and tumultuous chorus of laughter, and the jiving and screaming started up again.
‘Aha, Crane.’ Gevaert, in his plimsolls, had effected a silent approach. ‘Getting the lie of the land, eh?’
‘Where’s Paul?’ I was ruffled by my reception in the first-class saloon, and in no mood for Gevaert’s innuendoes. ‘I thought he was with you.’
‘Little Paul is settling down very nicely. There is a knot-tying class being held in the bows.’ Gevaert’s tone sharpened up a bit. ‘I suggest you go along there and keep an eye on things.’ He went into the saloon.
I waited for a few seconds. This should be good, I thought. But the noise went on without any perceptible alteration in either volume or consistency. They can’t have been accepting Gevaert, surely? And, anyway, what the hell was he doing there? Dancing? Putting sixpences in the Würlitzer? Blast, blast. Jealous, frustrated, slightly hungry, and with my heavy head-cold, I climbed back up the steps and on to the deck.
For about an hour I slouched sulking in the bows. The Warwick was making about three knots down the canal, rising and falling in a sluggish and almost imperceptible rhythm. At a short distance the ‘knot-tying’ class proceeded. A woman, the only other adult on the ship (I was later to discover), presided over the group. She had iron-grey hair and a gleaming eye. She looked as if she had lately come from some mental institution, contriving to alternate the suggestion of wardress and inmate.
The woman was not enjoying success in her efforts to hold the attention of her class. And much of the blame for this, I could see, was to be laid at the door of the big Scout. He was cutting off lengths of rope from a new and expensive-looking coil (which had presumably been paid for by the Daily Clarion), using a most villainous-looking sheath-knife which he flourished, to the accompaniment of ribald and sometimes menacing commentary. In his quieter periods he forced his attentions on one of the children in the class, forcing her to roll up her sleeve so that he could caress her elbow-fold, and jerking her about when she remonstrated with him. Oh dear, I thought, she really is too young to be treated like that. I turned and walked a few paces down the deck. From the first-class saloon came the beat and jangle of the juke-box. Everyone seemed to be below decks now, although the sun was shining brightly. The only exceptions were two youths who had been received into the wheelhouse. They seemed to be on good terms with the seafaring man, and as I drew level with the door one of them emerged and hurled an empty dimple Haig bottle overboard. It crashed and broke with a loud report against the concrete side of the canal.
I didn’t like that. Were they plying the helmsman with drink?
‘Mr. Crane.’ Little Paul was at my side, with the juvenile victim of the big Scout’s attentions. He, leering, stood at a short distance. ‘Mr. Crane, Anna says he keeps wanting her to go for a walk with him.’ Anna didn’t speak. She had large eyes and a wide, adult mouth.
‘Your father is looking for you, Paul. Why don’t you slip along and find him and take Anna with you.’
As they moved off, I, trembling slightly stepped in the big Scout’s path. ‘I would go back to the class if I were you.’
His face blackened and most alarmingly he drew his sheath-knife.
‘Jer want yerself chivved, mate? It can happen, yer know.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that,’ I said, sidling round a bollard. ‘I’ll report you to Mr. Baxter.’
‘Mr. Baxter,’ said the big Scout slowly, loudly, but not distinctly, ‘is a——’ Then, with a laugh, his face reverted to its habitual expression of oafish lust. ‘Anyway, what about the grub? I’m getting ruddy starved, man.’
‘Grub? Well, yes, I don’t know exactly what arrangements have been made … why don’t we go below, see what’s—er—cooking?’ I forced a smile.
Turning my back on him I started down the steps. To my relief he followed.
Once below decks it became apparent that there had been a substantial deterioration in the general morale of the passengers or, as they were so pedantically termed by Gevaert, ‘the trainees’. From the first-class saloon the noise of orgy and riot was deafening. Outside it sat a youth in a black leather jacket. His face was the colour of a cooking-apple. A friend stood by him asking repeatedly, and without giving time for an answer, ‘Are you all right?’
As we went past the friend said to us, ‘He’s not all right.’
‘I’ll send the M.O. down,’ I told him. To the big Scout I said, ‘I didn’t know it was possible to buy drink aboard.’
‘It ain’t. But some of the lads nicked an off-licence last night.’
So much for a ‘less settled background’, I thought to myself. In the galley, or steward’s room or whatever it was, we found Ponsonby.
‘My dears, what a lot of goings-on.’ He didn’t look at ease. A kettle was boiling and a loaf of pre-cut bread lay on the table.
‘Cor, hot buttered toast,’ said the big Scout; ‘just the job.’
Ponsonby came up to me and whispered: ‘It’s too boring, everyone is plastered. And the ghastly thing is, so is the crew, he won’t listen to reason.’
I didn’t like this use of the singular to describe the ‘crew’, but made no reply.
The big Scout said, ‘Where’s all the ruddy grub, then?’ and took a long pull from one of those glass ‘export’ hip flasks of White Horse.
‘Really, now,’ said Ponsonby acidly, ‘“Be Prepared”. Remember? You don’t seem to be.’
I saw at once it was a mistake. The big Scout, who had placed a slab of butter about one and a half inches thick between two slices of toast and sunk his teeth into it, moved round so that he was between us and the door.
‘My fingers is all greasy,’ he said. ‘Don’t you love to feel the melted butter running down your fingers? It makes me feel all langorious.’ Mounting excitement was sharpening a slight Welsh accent. ‘’Ere, you want to let me show you my bayonet sometime. It’s a beaut, all eight inches of it.’
Ponsonby, by now thoroughly alarmed, was backing away.
‘Don’t you want to see my bayonet?’ The big Scout was aggrieved. He fastened my wrist in an iron grip. ‘I’m tellin’ you, man, one night in the pub they was having an argument about bayonets. I put mine on the table and the lads made a mark. It was eight and a half bloody inches.’
At that instant the Warwick lurched violently and the big Scout relaxed his fingers.
‘This is an emergency,’ I said, making for the door.
Ponsonby’s head was framed in the hatchway. ‘We’re aground. The crew is insensible on the box.’
From the deck our predicament was all too plainly apparent. Warwick was firmly embedded in a sandbar and with the passing of each minute her plight worsened, for the tide was ebbing fast.
It had been intended that the high point of the afternoon’s cruise should be a brief sally into the placid waters of Cumber Bay. To this end the Warwick had chugged slowly along the military canal, past Westerlea quay, and on down the tidal cut that brought the timber ships through the marsh and sand-bar to unload at Chandler’s Yard. But on nearing the mouth of the cut the seafaring man had, it seemed, taken the wrong course. To our left the main current ebbed strongly away, dark green and menacing. To our right a gleaming bank of muddy silt was already beginning to emerge, bubbling noxiously. Beyond a rickety breakwater covered in green slime, and surprisingly close lay the golden curve of Cumber Sands, heavily populated with groups of holiday-makers.
Within seconds the entire complement of ‘trainees’ were on deck. Many were flushed, all were excited, not a few were in a state of intoxication. A certain clamour, more menacing than anything they had managed so far, gathered weight.
‘Quiet everyone!’ shrieked Ponsonby, displaying a new ‘leadership’ side to his character. ‘We’ll soon get her off again. In the meantime there’s hot buttered toast in the galley.’
Cooped up and inflamed by alcohol, ‘the child
ren from less settled backgrounds’ were in no mood to respond to an appeal of this kind. There was a splash, a ribald cheer, then other splashes in quick succession. They were abandoning ship. Electric socks gleamed, girls squealed, here and there the drab khaki of a recidivist Scout heightened the impression of some wartime disaster. It was Dunkirk in reverse. Within minutes the vanguard of the survivors had gained the far side and begun to terrorize the holiday-makers there.
Certain acts of vandalism: the thieving of beach umbrellas, the kicking of coloured balls, the snatching of towels—these things could be discerned from my vantage point in the prow.
After a short while the decks were clear again. Ponsonby and Gevaert were attempting to communicate with the helmsman, who would not unlock the door of his wheelhouse and indeed appeared to have done nothing to recognize our emergency other than to switch off the engine. I pondered on our situation. In the first rush to get overboard the Warwick had taken on a severe list to port, and I began to form the opinion that this was steepening. From the mole at the far side certain onlookers regarded us impassively. One of them shouted something—was it a warning?
At that moment a second wave of youths emerged from the hatchway. They were laden with various fittings, food, electric-light bulbs, several packets of Brooke Bond tea, lampshades, and a two-gallon can of paraffin, all looted from below. Infected by panic or heaven knows what herd instinct, I followed their example and leaped overboard.
The water was desperately cold and my arms and chest were splashed with a thick and adhesive mud. Desperately I struggled with quicksand and current, scrabbled over the breakwater, cutting hands and clothes on the sharp clusters of molluscs that lodged there. My ‘tropical suit’, cheaply purchased some four years ago at one of the sales, was ruined.
Now followed a timeless period of misery and desolation. Running, tight-chested with my (now strongly revived) head-cold, alternately sweating and shivering, I pounded across the desert of Cumber Sands. Was it only yesterday, less than twenty-four hours ago, that I had been suffering at this same spot? Fantasy had become fact, I was a fugitive in reality as well as in appearance. Sergeant Chambers, of course, was at the back of my mind, but there were other more immediate antagonisms.
From groups of sitting, squatting, recumbent sun-bathers that I passed, dogs detached themselves. These creatures, indefatigable and knowing bullies that they are, queried my breathless gait, my mud-stained suit, they pursued me singly and in packs. They yapped and, at intervals snapped. The passage of earlier survivors from the Warwick had done nothing to smooth my passage.
‘Clear off.’
‘Borstal boys.’
‘We don’t want none of your sort here.’
And a more sophisticated form of abuse: ‘Shocking, ain’t it, the likes of them drawing National Assistance.’
14 * Desperate Measures
Within four and one-fifth seconds of my getting back to Pyedums I ran into Gevaert. He was coming down the stairs, cleanly dressed in a brown suit.
‘Aha. Mr. Crane. A case of sauve qui peut, eh?’
‘I know, I’m sorry. I went to get help.’
Gevaert came very close indeed and looked me up and down.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ I went on. ‘I’ll pop upstairs and get cleaned up.’
‘You have no time for a bath,’ he hissed. ‘Don’t you know your services are required at the rehearsal in Chandler’s Yard this evening? Already we are late.’
‘Why don’t you go on ahead? I’ll join you there.’
‘That, in fact, is my intention. But listen to me, Crane. I shall be watching you very carefully this evening.’
In the bath which I ran the moment I heard the front door close I thought over Gevaert’s improbable, but none the less definitely sinister, warning. Should I not simply pack up, with what remained of my wage, and leave Westerlea? But no, I couldn’t do that, of course, because of this damned murder or disappearance or whatever it was, in which I was the prime suspect—‘You will keep us informed of your movements, won’t you, Mr. Crane?’ Chambers had said. In that case there was nothing for it but to go on down to the rehearsal and look for clues. Gevaert wasn’t going to be the only person doing a lot of ‘careful watching’ that evening. As I put on my last set of dry clothes I was wishing strongly that I had a Beretta and a flat gunmetal cigarette-case.
Chandler’s Yard was a wide, unsurfaced expanse of ground down by the quay. On three sides dark, satanic warehouses towered above us, giving a wholly foreign impression, with their black, pitchstained, weatherboard sides and steep, pointed, orange roofs.
Within this area there was, at a quarter past seven that evening, a great deal of confused noise and activity. Tractors and trailers reversed gruntingly into one another in clouds of paraffin smoke; labouring-class voices competed, successfully, with the genteel pipings of the whist-drive set, in the shouting of question-and-answer.
The division of the throng into town and tea-gown was soon apparent. The former were using as their headquarters the Shipmakers Arms, a roughish pub that stood on the corner of Chandler’s Yard and the quay whence, already, a considerable volume of ribald laughter and periodic snatches of song could be heard. The upper classes, however, were congregated opposite in quieter mood round a sign which read ‘Costumes’. Here was a long trestle table on which mounds of shapeless fusty clothing were piled. Pick, wearing a loose poloneck jersey over his dog-collar, and Riddle-Brede, who was dressed in riding-breeches and the jacket of the bluey-green suit, attempted to maintain a liaison between these two groups.
‘Come on now, everybody, there’s no time to be lost if you’re all to be issued with costumes before the light goes. I want everyone to come up in turn,’ squawked Pick.
To Riddle-Brede he said, ‘It’s always like this, so difficult to get anyone to take an intelligent interest until the last moment; they’ll all be drunk by ten, of course.’
‘You, there; that’s right, you—Hawkhurst, isn’t it? Have you drawn your costumes yet?’ Riddle-Brede responded vigorously and struck at the nearest likely looking victim. ‘Where’s the rest of your party?’
The addressee of these questions, a hulking, sunburned, agrarian-looking figure in gumboots whom I had noticed trying to escape when Pick had started his exhortation, touched his forelock.
‘We be making out with our own custumes this year, zur,’ he said, in what I took to be authentic Sussex dialect, if there is a Sussex dialect.
‘Really?’ said Riddle-Brede. ‘What’s your subject?’
‘“A day on the beach”,’ he mumbled.
‘Very interesting. We haven’t had that one before, have we, Reverend? But I don’t want any lewdness, mind. Now, you there—Barratt, isn’t it? Have you been up to the costume store yet? What’s your tableau this year?’
This fellow, a smaller, foxy-faced man who had been trying to slink past, at the same time indulging in a perfect orgy of conspicuously furtive behaviour, looking away, pulling his cap over his eyes shiftily wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and so on, said:
‘Soydermaken.’
‘Cider-making again? Don’t you think we could have a change once in a while, Barratt? I don’t want any repetition of last year’s disgusting behaviour. …’
Much as I should have liked to stay and hear more about this, I felt that it would be prudent to remove myself as far as possible from Riddle-Brede while he was in his present officious mood. I drifted round the back of the stall, trying, successfully, not to catch the eye of the person running it, who was, I noticed, the little old lady who had featured in that appalling fairy-godmother sequence at the Gevaerts’ party. She didn’t seem to be doing a very flourishing business and a little pool of silence started to develop around us. I thought it might be nice to get away from all this and have a cigarette. I pushed open one of the adjacent doors in the warehouse and started to explore.
The little old lady was following me, though, and this perplexed and irritated
me a good deal.
It was very nice in the warehouse: cool, quiet, and smelling of flour and meal. I was in a long corridor off which led different doors of rooms that were occupied in normal times, I assumed, by the administrative staff. On that evening various temporary notices proclaimed the identity of the occupants, ‘Make-up room’, ‘Transport’, ‘Wittersham choir’. Behind me the little old lady was shuffling along; any occult quality that she possessed seemed now to savour of witchery rather than fairy-godmotherhood.
‘Can I help you?’ she called after me, in a tone of rebuke that was, if anything, emphasized by the formality of the text.
‘No,’ I replied, without turning round. I quickened my step. ‘No, thanks.’
I must look as if I’m about some sort of business, I thought; at my side was a door above which was a notice that I could not quite see. I turned the handle and as I did so:
‘No, no!’ cried the little old lady. And at the same time, in a terrible kaleidoscopic series of flashes, there was Mrs. Roydon, wearing practically nothing and holding before herself, with an expression of desperate outrage, some ridiculous fancy dress.
‘Oops, sorry,’ I said, and reeled out again, noticing as I did so the text of the notice, ‘Wedding Party ladies’ changing-room’. I bumped, or jolly nearly bumped, into the little old lady, who was now openly remonstrating, and started off, farther down the corridor, at a shambling jog-trot.
At the far end another door gave out on to a narrow lane. I burst through this to the discomfiture of a group of oafs who were loading a quantity of goods—probably stolen, I thought—on to an old van. Sensing, however, my essentially fugitive status, they soon recovered their composure.
