Bel Ria

by Sheila Burnford

  “Didn’t you do some kind of work with animals in civvy street?” asked the assistant cook, who was one of his messmates. “Do you know anything about monkeys?”

  “A bit,” said MacLean cautiously.

  “Then you’d better get up to the foredeck,” said the cook. “There’s one there and they can’t get it down. The Chief’s in a proper tear about it —”

  Armed with some nuts, MacLean made his way up to the foredeck. The monkey was clinging to a stay. The Chief Petty Officer was directing two ratings to its capture, and there was a lot of encouraging banter from the rest of the work party. It looked infinitely small and pitiful, the skin loosely shriveled, the oil streaked face so pinched and furrowed that had almost retreated into the frame of fur. MacLean had intended to do nothing about it, to leave it to the crew to find; now he realized that the vital spark that had kept this delicate creature going so miraculously long in nightmare conditions would be extinguished if something were not done soon. This could not be allowed.

  As he joined the ring of men, the monkey’s head turned toward him. “Tch, tch, tch,” he said and recognition came into the eyes, the black upper lip drew back from its teeth and he heard the soft smacking sounds of greeting. It reached out an arm towards him.

  “All right, you have a go, MacLean,” said the Chief disgustedly. “You try and get the little perisher down.”

  MacLean held out his hand, palm upwards, with the nuts. The monkey dropped down at once and scuttled to his feet where it grasped a trouser leg and gazed earnestly up at his face. It put out a hesitant paw, then took a few nuts, stuffing them listlessly into its mouth with forefinger and thumb. The watching group to a man admired this prodigious feat with sentimental smiles, and even the Chief’s face relaxed for a moment before he recollected himself and told one of the ratings to grab it. But the monkey huddled against MacLean’s leg, clinging on, and threatened with lips pulled back over its teeth when the hand approached. The hand retreated smartly.

  “Come along now, Wainwright,” said the Chief. “Smartly now, before the First Lieutenant comes along and says what the fricking hell’s going on on my foredeck.”

  The sailor straightened up and looked at him. He was a giant of a man who looked not unlike a gorilla. “I’m afraid, Chief,” he said gravely, and there was a snigger from the men.

  “You have a go, Chiefie,” they said encouragingly, and the Chief bent down — then retreated sharply before the teeth.

  Suddenly the monkey took things into its own paws; reaching up for MacLean’s hand, it swung itself up into the crook of his arm and clung around his neck. It was shivering, yet there was a dry heat to its body that MacLean’s mind associated immediately with other ailing monkeys in other days.

  “Right,” said the Chief Petty Officer briskly. “Now, MacLean, if you’ll just double off to the Harbor Police with it, and you, Wainwright, swab that mucky deck down, we’ll get on with the job of running this ship —” but the last of his words were drowned by the wail of sirens, and as the ship’s alarm bell followed, the group scattered to their stations. The monkey burrowed its head deeply into MacLean’s jacket, trying to shut out the din.

  “Hang on to it, MacLean,” bellowed the Chief against the uproar. “Get it below and . . .”

  As MacLean ducked in through the steel doorway, he saw the anti-aircraft gun mounted on the superstructure above already swiveling around. He covered the monkey’s head with his hand, pressing it against his shoulder before the ensuing noise. It rewarded him by vomiting down his jacket.

  The doctor was still sitting in the sick bay, his feet on the desk, his eyes closed. MacLean coughed gently. “The Chief sent me down with one of the Lancastria’s lot that got left behind, sir,” he said.

  The doctor opened his eyes and took in the monkey without any change of expression. “The army’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel, isn’t it?” he observed at last. “What is it, and what’s it complaining of?”

  “A capuchin monkey, sir, suffering from exposure and possible pneumonia,” said MacLean with equal gravity.

  The doctor sighed, removed his feet from the desk, and took a stethoscope out of the drawer. “Take a deep breath, Capuchin,” he said. Then as the monkey bared its teeth, “Your patient, I think, MacLean,” he added generously, and watched with sleepy interest as the patient submitted apathetically to having its eyes swabbed out, drops administered and M & B tablets crushed up in water and poured down its throat without a drop being spilled. Finally it was briskly and neatly cocooned in cotton wool and a towel. “Very professional,” he said approvingly, “and now what?”

  “Number one boiler room,” said MacLean as he departed, with a look of such profound distaste at the bundle in his arms that he might have been bent on incineration rather than its eventual installation in a cardboard box with some holes punched out in the lid.

  Three hours later, Tertian cast off from the tanker and slipped away from Falmouth, heading for the open Atlantic, her complement irrevocably increased by two small and very miserable refugees.

  Chapter 5

  IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES they could not have been more fortunate. Tertian was what was known in the Navy as a “happy ship”: from the day that she had been commissioned, her officers and men had shaken down and integrated to form the mysterious chance medley that makes such a ship, and into which two more animals were easily assimilated. Besides, she was only fulfilling the role of her familiar alias “Noah’s Ark” — a nickname that had followed inevitably when Lieutenant Commander Andrew Knorr, R.N., had been appointed to her command — as the shipboard sages pointed out.

  As well as being the “Owner” of his Ark and of a flaming red beard, Knorr was also the owner of the legendary Barkis, some seventy amiable pounds of solid white bull terrier who had conformed to life in a destroyer almost as though he had evolved there. Even his descent of a vertical ladder or companionway was a fine bold adaptation: with forelegs in diving position and hind legs extended, his mighty body steeled, he would hurl himself down the length as though on a chute, gaining such impetus on the way that he usually slithered several feet along the deck, taking the legs away from anyone unfortunate enough to be in his path as he went. While the ship’s company admired and respected their skipper for qualities such as unruffled seamanship or his unique — and contagious — general enthusiasm, it was quite obvious that Barkis regarded him merely as a willing, easily taken-in slave.

  When Knorr eventually issued an official warning, therefore, that any subsequent infringement of ship’s discipline that could be traced to the presence of the new arrivals on board would result in their being dumped overboard forthwith (an operation that he, personally, would supervise), no one was unduly alarmed.

  The dog had been discovered in a storeroom, most fortuitously by none other than APO Reid, who duly reported its presence to the Buffer, receiving the sole comment “Flaming Ark is flaming right —” who had in turn reported it to the First Lieutenant, who had only inquired hopefully whether it was large enough to devour the fecund Hyacinthe and then reported it in turn to the Captain, who had instructed the Office of the Watch to enter it in the ship’s log. Finally SBA MacLean had volunteered to assume responsibility. So, officially at least, one dog had been processed through all the proper channels, and was now on the ship’s strength.

  Even if he had understood, this knowledge would have been little consolation in his present insensate terror. Tertian went about her ordained way, her crew long conditioned and balanced to the cramped discomfort and ceaseless sawing movement of a destroyer slicing through the Atlantic swell. Up on the bridge Barkis relaxed on a bunk in the Captain’s sea cabin or rolled nonchalantly along the decks in widespread nautical gait, conforming effortlessly to the ship’s every movement. Below decks in Number Two Mess, Hyacinthe slept the hours away in her small swaying hammock, peacefully unmoved by all uncouth human disturbance.

  But to the small newcomer, straining to keep his balance,
even his faculties, under a fixed table in a small cramped mess, what was routine to them must have been a heaving nightmare of confusion and terror from the moment he had staggered to his feet in the slippery pitching blackness of the storeroom.

  He had lived his entire life on the open road, yet safely contained within the small nomadic world of which he was the beloved and valued center. In one flame-seared moment that world had gone, and with it all security: he had come through the terrors of fire and water to waken now in what was possibly the most terrible element of all to him — confinement. Confinement in an unstable, unyielding steel box filled with the hurrying boots of strangers and their unrecognizable speech sounds: his ears assailed by fearful incessant noise, ranging from the routine background of bells and wailing pipes and disembodied voices of the loud hailers, the whine of turbines to the wind’s eerie descant, the crashing roar of heavy seas, the thunder of guns that reverberated throughout every inch, and the great muffled shudder of exploding depth charges. An inhuman metallic world now that sought to deafen him to the gentle familiarity of tinkling bells and the clap of hands, the creak of rolling wheels, the notes of birdsong and flute: an arid world that would deaden his senses to the smell of damp woods and fresh green fields, hot living smells of fairgrounds, the promise of wood smoke.

  Above all, it must have been the loneliest of worlds, with only the slightest association of voice and smell between this human who now ordered his life, MacLean, and that deep, however brief, attachment to the soldier from whom stretched back his only link with his lost world. The soldier had shared that world once, traveled in the caravan and left his imprint on its people — the transference to him had been of the dog’s own volition. Later in the terrors of the sea there had grown a close interdependence. Now there was only this unyielding stranger with the competent but impersonal hands, a brusque exclusion in his voice and unsmiling eyes.

  A rope collar had been fashioned for him, not for restraint, for he was too terrified to move anywhere by himself, but to stop him sliding around the deck. And he was kept tied up, with only brief forays on the end of a line to where the depth charges were secured over the stern. Here, in an area frequently washed down by following seas, Barkis came to lift his Olympian leg, or squat, while his attendant of the moment stood by with a hygienic bucket of water. Here, to this sterile, salty substitute for trees and fragrant earth, came the trembling newcomer, creeping low, hesitantly testing the deck as though expecting it to give way beneath his paws, or scrabbling desperately for purchase as it heeled, the whites of his eyes supplicating the white-maned restless unknown that filled the horizon beyond the rails. Barkis displayed an overwhelmingly generous interest when they met there, but the exuberance of his greeting, the excited lash of his whiplike tail and the playful buttings of his rock-hard head invariably capsized the small dog’s already precarious balance and terrified him even more.

  Hyacinthe had appraised him the first day with a cold green gooseberry eye, apparently found nothing to alarm or disquiet, and thereafter ignored him.

  Although his body shivered constantly, he was otherwise unanimated. All the spark had gone out of him, the endearing topknot had been cut off, his shaggy ears trimmed short: he was drearily unattractive in his misery, and he had become very thin. He spent the hours routinely in the dark obscurity of the kneehole under the sick bay desk, or under the Mess table, never curled up or sprawled in canine relaxation, but always tensely crouched, giving the impression that he was somehow clinging on against a suspended movement and dared not let go.

  Both from safeguard and training, he had been taught never to eat anything offered by strangers. Only one familiar hand had slipped tidbits into his expectant mouth, and then always in reward, the same hand that had never touched him save in praise or affection. There had been no unsteady isolated bowl set before him, its unrecognizable contents to be eaten alone or apart. Food had always meant a shared savory intimacy at the end of the day’s work or travel, her plate or the pot to lick clean afterwards, perhaps a morsel fallen from the old man’s fingers, a handout from the monkey — and, if there were any doubts over the rights, there had always been her smiling nod of reassurance.

  MacLean attributed the dog’s refusal of food now to a combination of seasickness and changed environment. In charge of an animal experimental laboratory before the war, he had known plenty of sick and miserable animals in his time to refuse food, and almost always they had become reconciled to their lot in the end and had started eating once more. But as the days passed, and his charge continued to exist on tinned milk alone, he was forced to admit that there was a difference between those withdrawn, hunger-striking animals and this miserable but adamant little dog who would accept a biscuit, then lay it on the deck, where it would remain untouched: or if confronted with a bowl, would give the contents a perfunctory sniff, then turn away as though he had no stomach for them.

  MacLean tried seasick remedies, put sulfur in the dog’s drinking water; he mixed conditioning powders and emptied them down the unprotesting throat, vitamin pills by the handful followed. He doused the coat with flea powder and searched his memory for every last veterinary remedy dispensed to distraught owners of small pampered dogs who had gone off their food. He even — and this went very much against his principles — tried feeding by hand; but his disapproval inevitably communicated through his fingers and voice, and in the end it was only by holding the muzzle and waiting until the throat was forced to swallow that he achieved anything, and then the dog retched up again. This behavior, and the dog’s utter dejection and constant shivering irritated MacLean exceedingly: it went against his professional grain. For the first time in his life, he had encountered an animal whose will to resist him was unyielding.

  He even consulted the doctor, who thought that the dog might still be shocked, suffering from exposure, inhaled some oil . . . at least he was drinking, it couldn’t be rabies . . . give him time, he’d never heard of a dog starving itself to death.

  “My prescription would be time,” he ended, looking sympathetically at the abject huddle with the round baffled eyes at MacLean’s feet. “Time — and lots of TLC.”

  “TLC?”

  “Tender Loving Care — plus, plus,” said the doctor, who took a perverse delight in rousing his dour SBA’s invariable reaction to any sentiment. He was not disappointed now.

  “Thank you, sir,” said MacLean, his voice as acidly disapproving as his face.

  “Patient’s name, rank, and number?” asked the doctor, happily adding a row of hearts and hieroglyphics to TLC on a medical form.

  “It hasn’t got a name,” said MacLean, stiff with outrage at this foolishness.

  The doctor looked up in genuine astonishment. “Well, you might start in right there with the treatment — at least give it a personality, poor little devil,” he said. “I wouldn’t feel like eating myself if I were nothing but an It,” he added, half to himself, as MacLean departed. And he wondered, not for the first time, at the complex nature of this man whose hands he had seen at work on a tiny sick monkey with the most expert deftness — yet with less actual involvement with his subject than he had seen in a mechanic dealing with a choked carburetor. It was the same with “It”: how, out of the whole ship’s company, one who quite obviously had no affinity for dogs should have taken over this one was a corresponding puzzle.

  His SBA was a reticent man, and apart from once prying out the fact that he had worked for a vet and in an animal laboratory before joining up at the outbreak of war, the doctor knew little of him other than what he had observed. He spent his off-duty time in the sick bay, when it was empty, reading and knitting or playing solitary chess. Very much a loner, not liked by his shipmates, yet not disliked either — rather one who was treated with wary circumspection, for he more than made up for his small stature by the bite and lash of his tongue. He ran the sick bay and dispensary with impersonal extreme efficiency. The long-mouthed lead swinger got short and scornful shift, but
he could show deepest concern and unstinting gentleness towards the wounded or seriously ill. In the six months that he had been on board, the doctor could not fault him in any of his duties.

  Periodically after a shore leave, he would appear so drunk at the end of the brow that it was so far only by a miracle — or by a deliberate Nelson-eye approach to his problem on the part of the duty personnel — that he had avoided the defaulter’s list. But no matter how monumental the hangover, how green his face, how black an eye, he had never failed to report for duty dead on time in total efficient control of himself, and smelling strongly of peppermints.

  “I’m chust partial to a wee dram at times. It helps,” had been his only explanation when the exasperated MO, putting a stitch in above an eyebrow, had asked him once why he had to drink to such heroic excess each time.

  “Helps what?” he had persisted.

  “To pass the time,” said MacLean woodenly.

  The doctor returned to his job of censoring the crew’s letters. Over the months he had become expert at skimming over the contents, long familiar with those incautious hands that invariably needed his deleting attention. Among this week’s batch was one that he read twice:

  HMS TERTIAN

  c/o GPO

  July 1st 1940

  Dear Corporal Sinclair,

  It is my sincere hope that when this reaches you, you will be well on the road to recovery. Perhaps even enjoying some sick leave. I write this line just to tell you that I have your belongings in safe keeping. I found the enclosed souvenir among them and enclose it for luck. The clapper was missing, but I have fashioned another.

  I would be glad to receive a line from you. There seems little likelihood that I will be able to dispatch the above mentioned article for some time as we are kept on the hop just now. But I will see to it that it reaches you in good condition one day as promised.