All the Drowning Seas: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 3

by Alexander Fullerton

“There are a couple of dozen stitches in his face, under that pad. It was open to the cheekbone and down as far as the corners of his mouth. Starting near the eye. About thirty stitches in the scalp. It’s very fortunate the skull isn’t fractured: I don’t believe it is. I suppose because the glass broke. If it hadn’t, his skull would have. And of course I’ve no way of knowing what internal damage there may be: that’s the major question.”

  “If he comes out of the coma, will he be—well, normal? I mean mentally?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you estimate how long it may be before there’s some kind of change?”

  “As I said”—Sibbold shut his eyes. He looked as if he was trying not to scream—”I do not know what damage may have been done to the brain. It is impossible, at this stage—”

  “All right.” Gant sighed. “I’m sorry …”

  “I’m sorry. If I could find reason to make optimistic noises, I’d be making them—very happily indeed. But for the time being—frankly—the best we can do is what we’re doing already, plus maybe say a prayer or two.”

  Gant realized that all this time he’d been stooping, bending forward so as to look at Everard’s face. He realized it because now, as he straightened, his back felt as if there was a fire in it. Sibbold was looking at him from close range, and it was an effort to keep the pain from showing in his face. He asked him, looking at the figure in the upper berth of this tier, “Who’s this?”

  “Leading Seaman Williams. Quartermaster.”

  “But—he was in the wheelhouse—”

  “Very lucky to be alive, aren’t we, Williams?”

  “I’d like to write a letter, sir. Before she starts doin’ her nut.”

  “Well, there won’t be a mail landed for some time yet, old chap. And you’d write a better letter if you waited until you were stronger. I’d just rest, if I were you.”

  He told Gant, as they moved away, “He’s a concussion case too. Plus some bits of wheelhouse in his legs. He had the luck to be on the far side of the chief quartermaster, who was between him and the blast. The chief QM was a very large man, as you know. Wasn’t much left of him: what there was—” He frowned, shook his head. “Williams’s concussion’s nothing to worry about. But the letter he wants to write is to that wife of his who got lost in Singapore. His memory’ll come back to him in a day or two—possibly even in an hour—and when it does it won’t be good for him at all. Now here we have one of our prize exhibits.” The doctor’s voice had risen: “Stoker Petty Officer Arnold, sir. First degree burns: but we’ll soon have him chasing the girls again. Eh, Arnold? Here’s the commander to see you …”

  A few minutes later, in the other part of the room, they gave him the list of casualties. The dead included AB Gladwill, the captain’s servant; Yeoman Ruddle and Chief Yeoman Howell; Alan Swanson the torpedo officer, a bridge messenger and two signalmen and one lookout; Hobbs the schoolmaster and Newcomb who was a CW candidate and Hobbs’s assistant in the plot, and Paymaster Sub-Lieutenant Bloom; four torpedomen including a torpedo gunner’s mate; and the stokers who were in the boiler room. In the wheelhouse the chief QM, a stoker petty officer and an able seaman had brought the total to twenty-two.

  Gant showed Padre Forbes the list. “This is what we have to talk about.”

  “Yes.” Forbes nodded, blinking. “Of course.”

  Gant went back through the curtain, for another quick look at his captain. He said in his mind, staring down at the bandaged, bloodless-looking face, Come on now, come on … And then, remembering Sibbold’s suggestion—which might have come better from young Forbes, when one thought about it—he whispered, Please God, may we have him back with us, well again?

  He had to admit then—and if he was in contact with a Supreme Authority his mind would anyway be open to inspection—that he was making the request for his own sake, more than for Everard’s. He and the ship and all her officers and men needed Everard alive—needed his experience and leadership and luck. He had a reputation for getting into sticky situations, and for getting out of them too—so possibly, if he could remain alive and even get back on his feet … Gant asked humbly and self-consciously, knowing he wasn’t much of a hand at the supplication routine, If you could see your way to helping, please—to help us all?

  Reaction set in as he turned away. He wasn’t a praying man: he was a churchgoer only because the Navy made it compulsory and because at home his wife expected him to set an example to the children. If God existed, He’d know this: and why should He take notice of an appeal from an agnostic, when He had real believers sending up forty thousand prayers a minute?

  Gant thought that perhaps Everard had been in too many tight corners. No man’s luck could last for ever … He nodded to Sibbold. Defiant’s principal medical officer was in his middle thirties, dark-jowled and brown-eyed, Mediterranean-looking. He could easily have been taken for a Greek. Gant asked the chaplain, “Coming?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Something had Paul by the shoulder, pushing and pulling at it. Then Dennis Brill’s voice broke through: “What does it take to wake you up, for God’s sake?” He was awake: remembering where he was and that this was the day the Luftwaffe was likely to pull the stops out.

  “What’s the time?”

  “It’s alive, then. I was beginning to wonder.” The doctor told him, “Five o’clock. Just after. Half an hour to action stations, right?”

  Twenty-five minutes, actually. There’d be coffee available in the saloon, it had been mentioned. Paul let himself down from the bunk—it was the top one, with Brill’s under it—and began to get dressed while the doctor shaved.

  “You going to be all morning with that basin?”

  “So far, I’ve been thirty seconds.”

  The hell with shaving, anyway. Who’d care—Leading Seaman Beale? Paul muttered, buttoning his battledress trousers, “Likely to be a tough day, according to the experts.”

  Brill said, glancing at him in the mirror as he scraped his Adam’s apple, “There was some news last night, after you’d left us. I’d have told you, but I didn’t like to spoil the rhythm of your snores … Aren’t you shaving?”

  “Later, maybe. What’s this news?”

  “RAF Beaufighters from Malta made a bombing raid on some Sardinian airfield—in aid of this convoy’s easier passage, one gathers—and either on the way in or on the way back they flew over Cagliari Bay and saw Italian cruisers leaving Cagliari and steaming east.”

  It would have been on their way back, Paul thought. If they’d still had bomb-loads they’d have dropped them on the cruisers, surely. But the news didn’t seem to him to add up to much. He glanced up from pulling on his halfboots: “That’s it?”

  Cleaning his teeth now, Brill nodded.

  “Well, thanks for not waking me last night.”

  “Steaming east, Paul, suggests they’d be on their way to rendezvous with other Italian ships. And as the Italian fleet hardly ever does leave its harbours, I’m told the natural conclusion is they’re assembling a force to put between us and Malta.”

  Paul smiled. “What time does your brain start working, Doc?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We have battleships with us, remember? And carriers?”

  “But they’ll turn back tonight.”

  “They part company with us, sure. But McCall didn’t say it all. Mackeson told me that what the big ships do then is hang around somewhere to the west, and the escort that’s taking up to Malta—cruisers and destroyers—see us into Valletta but don’t come in with us. They turn around and steam back to rejoin the heavy mob, who’ll be waiting for them. Bit further west still, just outside flying range of the Sardinian fields, they all join up with the fleet oilers, and away they go. Because otherwise the destroyers would have to refuel in Malta, which doesn’t have enough oil for itself … Anyway, the point is that while they wait out here somewhere the battlefleet’s a threat to any Italian ships that did think about coming south.�
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  “A long way from us, though?”

  “Near enough to put the wind up the Italians. They like to have the sea to themselves before they stick their necks out.” He’d pulled on a sweater, and now he reached for his battledress jacket. Brill wasn’t even half ready yet. Paul had had a lot of practice, of course, in turning out fast to get up on watch: and in conditions a lot less comfortable than these. A destroyer’s messdecks in foul weather—well, to an outsider it wouldn’t seem possible that men could live like that. Brill, fresh out of medical school, wouldn’t have believed it if he’d seen it. A lot of people wouldn’t. Brill was standing on one leg getting into his khaki trousers. Paul took the opportunity to slap him on the back, and he went staggering across the cabin. “See you, Doc. I’ll be where the coffee is.”

  Mackeson was in the saloon, and so was Thornton and the middle-aged flying officer. Thornton, in the early morning, looked to Paul like a turkey with an egg stuck halfway out. Amused at the thought, he smiled at him, and Thornton seemed disconcerted. You could guess he wasn’t accustomed to being smiled at. Paul said “Good morning” to Mackeson, and asked him, “Is it true there are Italian surface ships on the move, sir?”

  “Seem to be.” Mackeson was loading his pipe. “But their destination may be the eastern basin. That’d be my guess.” “Why would they be going east?”

  “There’s a dummy convoy, a diversion to take some enemy attention off this one, persuade them to hold a few squadrons of Stukas in Crete, for instance, rather than concentrate the lot on us. The dummy consists of four ships out of Port Said in ballast, with a light escort joining them from Alexandria. Might look tempting to the intrepid Latins, eh?” “Bongo” smiled, patting his pockets in search of a match. He asked Paul, “How did you get on with the DEMS characters?”

  They were on the dismal, frozen foc’sl-head, with their Oerlikons loaded and ready, when he got up there just after 5:30. Light was seeping up from the eastern horizon, silhouetting the dark bulk of the MV Warrenpoint ahead of the Montgovern. To starboard the Castleventry was a grey ghost-ship hissing along on a cushion of white foam, while to port a Hunt-class destroyer was visible only by her bow-wave.

  Beale said, by way of greeting, “Nice an’ peaceful.”

  The four gunners were muffled in scarves, overcoats and balaclavas. Paul said, “I always thought of the Med as a warm sea.”

  “Gets fookin’ ’orrible when it wants to.” Withinshaw took his hands out of his pockets and beat them together. “Am I right in guessin’ you’re a Yank—sir?”

  He’d trotted the question out so quickly that it was obvious they’d been discussing him. And it was the first time any of them had used the word “sir” to him. Compensation, probably, for the directly personal question. But he didn’t give a damn, one way or the other. He told Withinshaw, “I’m British, but I was at school in the States for a few years. Sounds like it, does it?”

  “Well, not all that bad.” He was being fookin’ patronizing now, Paul thought. “How come you was in Yanky-land, then?”

  It was because my mother’s Russian and she and my father didn’t get along … He wasn’t about to explain all that to Withinshaw, though. He said, “Family reasons … Where are you lot from?”

  Withinshaw had started life in Birkenhead but lived in Yarmouth. Beale had a wife and baby daughter in Nottingham. Wally was a Londoner whose parents had moved up to Preston, Lancs, and McNaught was a Glaswegian.

  Bloody cold …

  Light was increasing, reaching upwards from the horizon ahead. He wondered what might be showing on the warships’ RDF screens. It was a fair bet the enemy would have reconnaissance flights out by this time, and bombers lined up on Sardinian airstrips waiting for the convoy to be pinpointed. Some of those bombers would be taking off for the last time, and some of these ships might not be afloat by sunset; but there’d be very few airmen or sailors reckoning on it being their own last day. That was strange, when you thought about it: because conversely, if you had a ticket in a lottery you did, surely, consider the chances of winning.

  He wished he’d written to his father.

  Steady pounding of the freighter’s engines, swishing murmur of the sea. It was like waiting for a curtain to go up. He wondered what the odds really were, on any one of these ships in the convoy getting through. Sixteen ships: if you reckoned on four of them arriving, you might have it about right?

  Funny they’d sent passengers in them, really. Except there wasn’t any other way to get there. To be flown to Malta you’d need to be an admiral or a politician, and even that wouldn’t be anything like safe transport.

  Such an enormous effort, to sustain that one small island. The reason for it, he supposed, was that if Malta fell there’d be no base from which to attack Axis supply convoys to the desert. So they’d be able to build up their forces to any strength they needed and then keep them supplied without interruption, so they’d sweep through to take Cairo and the Canal. Then the rest of the Middle East, including the Gulf and its oil; and up into the Caucasus to link with their armies facing the Russians there. They’d have the world strangling in a Nazi noose. When you stretched the imagination that far it became understandable that the Admiralty and the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff should be satisfied if just a few of these sixteen ships survived to reach Malta. You could understand it yourself, even when you happened to be sitting on top of one of them.

  He doubted whether the Admiralty would sweat blood, exactly, if Sub-Lieutenant Paul Everard RNVR didn’t make it to the island, either.

  If he’d mustered the resolution to write that letter before he’d left England, what would he have said in it? How did you raise a subject like this one, to your own father?

  He left the DEMS group and paced for’ard, into the eyes of the ship, the narrowing stem with its furnishing of heavy anchor-and-cable gear and the waist-high steel bulwark. He stood in the curve of it, right in the very bow, and tried to frame a letter in his mind.

  I wish I didn’t have to tell you this, but I hope you’ll see why I do have to. If I could wait until we met it might be easier to say it than to write it—well, I don’t know about that either, but the fact is I’m the only person you could hear it from, and if anything happened to me before I saw you, you wouldn’t ever know. Not until it was too late. So, here goes.

  You’ll remember telling me and Jack about the Gay Nineties Club, and that you asked Mrs Gordon to make us members of it if we went along and saw her. Well, Jack and I met in London and we did just that, and she—Phyllis Gordon—introduced us to Mrs Fiona Gascoyne …

  Phil Gordon was a very good-looking woman and a great personality: very smart, bright, outgoing. The Gordon family, Paul had gathered from what his father had said, was well-known in the hotel business, and this probably explained the fact that here in her own club she used her maiden name, although she was actually the wife of Eric Maschwitz, the man who’d written “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” He was in the club too on the evening Paul and Jack Everard called in, but he wasn’t around for long. He had some job in or near that same square, and his wife’s club was in Berkeley Street so it was very convenient for him. A tall man, genial and easy to get along with; he was in SIS or Military Intelligence, one of those outfits. He’d spent a few minutes with them, then excused himself to go through to the dining room—where the menu was chalked, in a very stylish handwriting, on a blackboard on an easel.

  Phil Gordon perched herself at the bar, and patted the stools on each side of her.

  “Up you get, boys.” She told the white-coated barman, “We’ll have those again, Terry.”

  “Large ones, Miss Gordon?”

  “Naturally.” She smiled at Paul: her eyes did most of the smiling. “I’d have known you for a son of Nick Everard’s even if you hadn’t told me.” She shook her head at Jack. “Not you, though.”

  “Perhaps because I’m not a son of his?”

  Jack was a powerful, hard-looking man n
ow, and the way he looked at Phil suggested that the twenty years’ difference in their ages wouldn’t have stood in his way if he’d been in the mood. That was very much the impression he gave: that he’d take what he wanted, when he wanted it. Paul was to remember afterwards that he’d had this thought in his mind less than half an hour before Jack went right ahead and proved it … But the two-year interval since they’d last met had changed Jack Everard completely. Even if it had been ten years you wouldn’t have expected such a difference. It wasn’t only that he looked so much older. At Mullbergh, at Christmas of 1939, Paul had thought he was supercilious and spoilt, with a sneering, snobby manner that wasn’t easy to put up with. He’d been pampered by that rather forbidding, bloodless mother of his, Nick’s stepmother Sarah. And defensive, unsure of himself.

  Now, the lap-dog had turned wolfish.

  Phil Gordon seemed wary of him too. She’d talked mostly to Paul. He’d asked her, “You must have known my father quite a while?”

  “So much of a while I’d rather not dwell on it. How is the old darling?”

  “Fit and strong, going by his letters. He has a destroyer flotilla, you know, out in—”

  He’d stopped, before it slipped out. “Careless Talk”: there were posters on a lot of walls about it. Phyllis said, “Wherever he is, give him my love.”

  “I sure will.”

  “And kisses.”

  He wondered, sipping his drink, whether they’d be a brand of kisses already familiar to his father, from some time in the pre-war era. The old man could have shown worse taste, at that … Phil might have guessed how his thoughts were running. She’d laughed, murmured, “Not in front of the future Lady Everard, though … Have you two met her?”

  Neither of them had known of the existence of any such creature. Phil told them, “Well, if you pop in here often enough I’ll see you do. She’s one of our regulars.”

  “Well.” Paul shook his head. “Bombshell, if there ever was one.”

  Jack asked, “Who is she?”