by Max Hennessy
‘You’re going back to sea?’
‘Only home I have.’
‘Let him go!’ Minnie snapped. ‘And good riddance!’
‘Shut up!’ I turned furiously on her, and she backed away.
Old Boxer stared at me. ‘To be quite honest, Jess,’ he said, ‘I feel the need of clean sea winds and spray on me face.’ He looked at Minnie as he spoke and her mouth tightened. She thrust his hat at him.
‘Come on, let’s have you!’ she hissed.
Old Boxer turned slowly towards her. Ponderously and heavily.
‘My dear Messalina,’ he said mildly, ‘you’re too late. I’m going. I’ve got to go. I couldn’t stay here and watch you ruin Jess’s life.’
‘What do you mean?’ Minnie demanded loudly. ‘Who’s ruining anybody’s life? People like you want to mind what they’re sayin’.’
‘I know now why you married him,’ he said. ‘God forgive you, I only hope he’s strong enough to rid himself of you before he’s sunk as low as you have.’
He turned away, taking his hat out of Minnie’s nerveless fingers as he moved. Then he placed a heavy hand on my shoulder for a second and walked out of the door.
VII
I hadn’t been married long before I began to suspect that Minnie had made a fool of me. This Minnie I was living with was as far removed from the woman I’d dreamed of at sea thousands of miles away as I was from the kid I’d been when I first fell for her. She was even different from the lusty, hearty, loving Minnie who’d infatuated me during my leave.
This Minnie – and I realized with a shock I was supposed to live with her for the rest of my life – was a person I’d never known. She was a slattern who liked her gin, and her habits around the Steam Packet startled me.
It was useless trying to coax any order into her affairs, a waste of time trying to get things shipshape. Having made the effort to capture me she didn’t seem able to produce any more interest or energy to continue it.
‘It was all right for me before I married you,’ she complained. ‘It was all right for Ma. And you weren’t so bothered about it before the wedding. All you wanted then was to get your hands on me.’
It was a queer situation. Physically, we were perfectly matched. I was able to satisfy Minnie’s desires, and she mine, and it forged strong links that prevented us from drifting apart. She was a healthy animal, full-bodied and lustful, and – though the thought was a torment to my brain – was experienced in the art of love-making. There were occasions, too, when our quarrels dissolved into merriment, for Minnie had a bawdy humour and left me shouting with laughter more than once in the middle of hot words. But these were only few and life began to have an unrestful drabness such as I’d known only in Atlantic Street before I went to sea.
It was full of deadly routine, but without any of the things that should have come from routine – comfort, cleanliness and good food. To Minnie food was a nuisance right up to the time it was eaten. She’d have starved without the frying-pan and the jam-pot.
And I suddenly began to realize with a shock that even my conversation had never roused a great deal of enthusiasm in her, in spite of the absorption she’d shown for it before we were married. Java and Bali and the Far East were of no interest to Minnie and never had been. She probably thought they were suburbs of London or somewhere like Blackpool, with a pleasure beach and roundabouts.
‘I think you only married me to keep the pub,’ I said bitterly. And as Minnie’s wide violet eyes stared up at me and she accepted the accusation without comment, I realized how right I was.
* * *
I’d had no intention when I married of forsaking the sea. I was a sailor and will be to my dying day. But Minnie seemed to have taken it for granted that I would, and she wasn’t easy to argue with.
‘Not much good to me at the other side of the world, are you?’ she said, blunt and forthright. ‘Use a bit of common. I married you to keep me warm in bed, and a fat lot of good you’d be for that if you were in New York.’
There seemed to be no answer to that.
There were other things, too, that didn’t work out the way I’d expected. The Steam Packet, for instance. It was only when I lived in one and watched the weeks roll by that I found I’d no taste for life inside a pub. Pubs were places I’d known only for celebrations on reaching land, where matelots spent their wages in one great joyous blowout after being kept away from drink and women and bright lights for weeks at a time. But to live in, they could soon assume the proportions of a prison.
I began to feel suffocated and as though I wanted to stretch in great muscle-cracking heaves that would shove the walls down and let the air into those stale little rooms.
Once, and only once, like a breath of sea breeze, came an unexpected letter from Old Boxer, written in a hand that was obviously unsteady. It came from Singapore, and the postmark made my heart jump awkwardly.
‘I’m in the steamer Eastern Star,’ he wrote, and his bitterness showed even in the grubby, thumbed pages and the handwriting that was educated and well-formed in spite of the trembling fingers that had written it. ‘She’s an ill-designed, meanly-found, cock-eyed vessel built by a set of profit-making shipowners who consider cargo space before the souls of the men who have to sail in her. But still, God be praised and no thanks to them, she’s heading at a rate of knots for the rising sun with the wind and tide on her stern…’
As I stood in the beer-cellar with the sheet of paper which had been torn from an exercise book in my hand, I felt a hard lump in my throat at all that the words conjured up: the cramped forecastle, with its grumbling men and its profanity and abuse. The smell of hot engine oil, steam, straw and wet steel. The sun, brassy in the heavens and hitting upwards in hammer-blows from the iron decks. Or a soft night with the wide-eyed moon like a yellow orange on the horizon, and the Southern Cross and the glowing phosphorescence of the wake; and the cry of the watch on the forecastle head, ‘Two bells and all’s well!’
I could just imagine Old Boxer folding the paper and putting away a borrowed stub of pencil as the watch was called out, heaving his great bulk from the comfortless forecastle bench. I could almost see him on the deck, rolling to the swing of the ship that sent the mastheads reeling round the stars, dignified by his size and the remains of breeding that still clung to him.
It was then that I suddenly realized I missed him…
I shoved the letter angrily into my pocket and poured myself a drink. I knew I was drinking too much, but it was always so easy with so much of it around. I mounted the steps from the cellar and stared through the back doorway across the river. There, near the back of the Steam Packet, it had none of the romance and bustle of the dock area or the broad freedom of the sea. There it was the receptacle for rusty tin cans and old buckets and cast-off hats and shoes.
A fine change it was, I thought bitterly, from a fresh sea breeze or a hot wind that blew from the desert. A fine change from white beaches shining in the sun, and coral gleaming in the surf. A fine change from palms and the hot red of frangipani and the glint of flying-fish.
I tossed aside my half-smoked cigarette irritably and went to the bar in an ugly temper.
Pat Fee was there, leaning on the counter, whispering to Minnie. Their heads were close together, and as I pushed open the door Pat caught sight of me out of the corner of his eye and laughed as he drew away.
‘Bet you never heard that one before,’ he said, his voice changing.
Minnie caught the warning signal and she laughed in his face, a harsh laugh, just a bit too loud to be mirthful.
‘That’s a good one,’ she said. ‘Where you hear it?’
I scowled, well aware that Pat’s whispering had been no smutty joke. It was the first time he’d been in the Steam Packet since Minnie’s marriage, but their quarrel was obviously patched up. Minnie and Pat would always be like this, one minute not on speaking terms, the next whispering in corners in low undertones that seemed to expose all sorts of lewdness
, all sorts of sordidness and cunning and distrust that made marriage into a cheap jeer.
‘What do you want?’ I demanded, glaring at Pat. I knew his presence would be the prelude to one of the stormy periods which had become a part of my life with Minnie.
Pat waved a ringed hand and leaned comfortably on the bar.
‘Only come in for a drink,’ he said easily, chewing at his cigar. ‘That’s what this place’s for, ain’t it?’
‘Give him his drink, Minnie,’ I said shortly. ‘Then let him drink it up and get out.’
Pat stared as he put the money on the counter.
‘That’s a fine welcome, I don’t think,’ he said. ‘That’s a proper way to get customers.’
‘I can just see him hurryin’ in here again,’ Minnie added bitterly, ‘after you’ve spoke to him like that.’
Pat sipped his drink and studied me coolly.
‘Seen our Kate lately?’ he asked suddenly.
‘No,’ I replied shortly, hoping there was no change in my expression, for Kate’s name and all the gentleness and kindness and decency it suggested gave an odd tug at my heart.
Pat shrugged, unmoved by my shortness, and continued to lean on the bar. Minnie was obviously waiting for me to go, but I stood with my hands in my pockets staring at Pat.
Eventually, even Pat – brassy as he was – began to grow restless as I stared at him, and he swallowed his drink and hurried out.
‘Well, so long,’ he said – and he was speaking to Minnie, not to me. ‘I’ll be seein’ you.’
Minnie rounded furiously on me as he left, her hands on her plump hips.
‘You’re a fine one,’ she snapped. ‘You’re not right in your head – driving customers out. Anybody’d think we were rollin’ in dough.’
‘Pat Fee’s not the sort of customer we want here,’ I said.
‘Even if other people don’t like him’ – Minnie was indignant – ‘he might be a friend of mine.’
‘It isn’t so long since you’d have cut his throat,’ I reminded her.
‘That was different. Just a little quarrel. All over now.’
I looked at her, bold-eyed and full-bosomed, and I felt suddenly cold and angry.
‘Just what is there between you and Pat Fee, Minnie?’ I asked.
‘Between me and Pat Fee?’ Minnie seemed to be caught off her guard for once. ‘Nothing. What should there be?’
‘I don’t know.’ I turned away. ‘Knowing Pat Fee – and knowing you, too, I suppose – there might be anything.’
‘What are you accusing me of ?’ Minnie demanded shrilly. ‘Me. Your own wife. The woman you promised for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness in health.’
‘To love and cherish till death us do part,’ I ended for her. ‘Remember that as well, Minnie.’
‘Why should I remember it so special?’ Minnie stared at me for a second, then her eyes blazed suddenly, and she screamed at me. ‘And for God’s sake stop walkin’ up and down!’
I stopped dead. I’d been pacing backwards and forwards with the old habit of the deck, a habit I’d never get out of.
‘Up and down. Up and down. Like a yo-yo. For God’s sake, stop it!’ Minnie screamed. ‘You drive a woman daft. You aren’t on your blasted ship now.’
‘I sometimes wish I was.’
‘That’s a fine thing to say,’ Minnie shrilled. ‘In front of your own wife.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Minnie, shut up!’ I begged. ‘Leave me alone for a bit.’
‘When I married you I thought I might get a bit of help about the place, but all I’ve ever had is complaints. I seen you,’ she said. ‘I seen you looking at pictures. I seen you by the river, Ships. Ships. Ships. You look at ’em like you never look at me. Why didn’t you marry one? Go on. Tell me. Why didn’t you marry one?’
* * *
Life became an erratic, untranquil thing. Temper was never very far after laughter, and angry words chased hot-blooded passion. It was an unpredictable, unstable affair that was still paradoxically monotonous. At times, Minnie would melt and become the loving, clinging Minnie who’d first attracted me, or a hot-eyed, voluptuous, sensual Minnie full of urgent whisperings; then the next day, all the pleasure of knowing her would be swept aside by her shrewish tempers and her slovenliness.
The tragic unevenness of our life wasn’t entirely Minnie’s fault. I couldn’t lay all the blame on her. Partly it was the Steam Packet’s and partly it was mine. I’d seen too much. I’d lived too fully and tasted too much of life to settle easily into the narrow confines of the town. The smell of the sea was always in my nostrils, the sound of it always in my ears.
I remembered something Yorky had once said to me: ‘It’s easy to get to sea, son, but it’s flamin’ ’ard to be shot of it.’
Yorky was more right than he ever suspected. I ached to see that cold, grey expanse of water and hear the hiss as it lashed across the deck and round the stanchions. I itched to feel the pulse of a vessel; to hear the creak and beat of it; to feel the rails trembling under my hand and the shrouds drumming in the wind; to feel the heaving of the forecastle and the crash as the waves hit at its steel sides. For all its lack of comfort, its burgoo and man-eating bugs, for all the calendars scarred with pencil-marks to tick off the days, for all the swearing and the dirty packs of cards that whiled away the time, there was something about it all that drew at me with a pull that was almost a physical pain.
I needed a Western Ocean blow just then to shift the cobwebs from me – one of those shut-down screaming gales that lifted the spray parallel with the iron-grey sea and clawed the foam in long white streaks down the valleys of the waves; one of those howling blasts that made a ship groan in torment and set her doing everything except stand on her head.
Gradually, almost without realizing it – almost without being aware of it even – I began to find my way to Wiggins’s boat-yard again. It was the only place I knew where I could get the feel of a ship again and know that it had a soul and a life as real as my own.
Dig was busy those days. Since the Munich crisis the yard was building naval launches, which had forced them to expand. The wall that had separated Wiggins’s from the dilapidated wreck that had once been Old Boxer’s property had been pulled down. The rubbish had been cleared and the bones of the ancient vessel that had propped up the wharf had been taken apart and given a decent resting-place. New slips had been laid where she’d rotted, and the thump of carpenters’ adzes and the scream of mechanical saws were being heard again by the old wharf. Already the ribs and framework of the first of the new launches were in place.
Dig was always careful to avoid mention of Minnie when I saw him. For all his unworldliness, it hadn’t taken him long to realize that something was wrong.
‘Take the dinghy out, Jess,’ he said. ‘Take her beyond St. Andrew. I’ll fix it with the boss. It’ll do you good. You’re looking fidgety these days.’
So, occasionally, I began to escape from Minnie in the afternoons, taking the dinghy along the shimmering, water of the river to where the evening light fell, trailing a mackerel line, drawing great gulps of fresh air as though I’d been cheated of it for years. I helped them at the yard, too, when they were shorthanded, moving launches upriver or over to St. Clewes – even, once or twice, down the coast. I was glad of the trips, glad of the fresh breeze and the feel of a living vessel under my feet.
There was little feeling of security abroad those days, mind you. The papers were full of war scares. Every time Hitler gave a speech we all felt there was something evil darkening the sunshine. People sought their enjoyment nervously, hurriedly, anxious to make sure of it before it was snatched away from them. Gaiety became important – a sort of last port of call between peace and the disaster we all knew was on the way.
Several times I’d turned these things over in my mind as an excuse to get back to sea. Obviously my life at the Steam Packet was becoming a farce. I was nothing more than wet-nurse to a pub.
/> I drove the dinghy hard that summer. I must have terrified Dig with the hours I spent out of sight of the river mouth. However, I weathered the sudden squalls that blew up the Channel and returned drenched and cold and hungry. But with a strange feeling of exultation in me, as though I’d snatched something from the sea – just one breath of clean wind, just one touch of damp breeze.
Unknown to me, Kate Fee watched me go often. We exchanged only a few brief words when we met, but our early happiness together was a subject we daren’t discuss.
Kate never said much, and went on watching me, those great dark eyes of hers sad, as though she was blaming herself for something that was really more my fault than hers.
‘You look as though you’d lost a shilling and found tuppence,’ she said to me once as I came ashore.
‘I reckon I did just that very thing,’ I replied, and I was thinking of her as I spoke.
Kate kept her eyes on the water. The wharf was deserted and she took the gear from me as I handed it to her from the boat.
‘Aren’t you happy, Jess?’ she said suddenly, as though the words had burst out of her control.
‘Not very.’ It was no good trying to lie to her. ‘I get a bit fed up sometimes.’
Kate pretended to be busy with the gear she was putting aside, but I knew she was only avoiding looking at me.
‘I’m sorry, Jess,’ she murmured.
‘I’m sorry, too,’ I said.
I put on my jacket over the old blue jersey I wore and Kate stared at me mutely, as though she didn’t know what to reply to this sudden rush of confidence. I climbed out of the boat and touched her hand. I couldn’t help comparing her with Minnie. She was paler, thinner, her clothes cheaper but somehow neater, and she had an honest look in her eyes that Minnie couldn’t have managed if she’d tried till she was black in the face.
‘Kate,’ I said quietly, ‘you and me are a couple of fools, and the worst of it is we both know it now.’
