On the Beach

by Nevil Shute

  John Osborne asked, “What are you doing about the port?”

  “There’s only one thing to do,” the old man said. “What’s that?”

  “Drink it, my boy, drink it—every drop. No good leaving it for the next comer, with the cobalt half-life over five years. I come in now three days a week and take a bottle home with me.” He took another drink of his sherry. “If I’m to die, as I most certainly am, I’d rather die of drinking port than of this cholera thing. You say you none of you got that upon your cruise?”

  Peter Holmes shook his head. “We took precautions. We were submerged and under water most of the time.”

  “Ah, that makes a good protection.” He glanced at them. “There’s nobody alive up in North Queensland, is there?”

  “Not at Cairns, sir. I don’t know about Townsville.”

  The old man shook his head. “There’s been no communication with Townsville since last Thursday, and now Bowen has it. Somebody was saying that they’ve had some cases in Mackay.”

  John Osborne grinned. “Have to hurry up with that port, uncle.”

  “I know that. It’s a very terrible situation.” The sun shone down on them out of a cloudless sky, warm and comforting; the big chestnut in the garden cast dappled shadows on the lawn. “Still, we’re doing our best. The secretary tells me that we put away over three hundred bottles last month.”

  He turned to Peter. “How do you like serving in an American ship?”

  “I like it very much, sir. It’s a bit different from our navy, of course, and I’ve never served in a submarine before. But they’re quite a nice party to be with.”

  “Not too gloomy? Not too many widowers?”

  He shook his head. “They’re all pretty young, except the captain. I don’t think many of them were married. The captain was, of course, and some of the petty officers. But most of the officers and the enlisted men are in their early twenties. A lot of them seem to have got themselves girls here in Australia.” He paused. “It’s not a gloomy ship.”

  The old man nodded. “Of course, it’s been some time, now.” He drank again, and then he said, “The captain—is he a Commander Towers?”

  “That’s right, sir. Do you know him?”

  “He’s been in here once or twice, and I’ve been introduced to him. I have an idea that he’s an honorary member. Bill Davidson was telling me that Moira knows him.”

  “She does, sir. They met at my house.”

  “Well, I hope she doesn’t get him into mischief.”

  At that moment she was ringing up the Commander in the aircraft carrier, doing her best to do so. “This is Moira, Dwight,” she said. “What’s this I hear about your ship all getting measles?”

  His heart lightened at the sound of her voice. “You’re very right,” he said. “But that’s classified information.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Secret. If a ship in the U.S. Navy gets put out of action for a while we just don’t tell the world about it.”

  “All that machinery put out of action by a little thing like measles. It sounds like bad management to me. Do you think Scorpion’s got the right captain?”

  “I’m darned sure she hasn’t,” he said comfortably. “Let’s you and me get together some place and talk over a replacement. I’m just not satisfied myself.”

  “Are you going down to Peter Holmes this weekend?”

  “He hasn’t asked me.”

  “Would you go if you were asked? Or have you had him keel-hauled for insubordination since we met?”

  “He never caught a seagull,” he said. “I guess that’s all I’ve got against him. I never logged him for it.”

  “Did you expect him to catch seagulls?”

  “Sure. I rated him chief seagull catcher, but he fell down on the job. The Prime Minister, your Mr. Ritchie, he’ll be mighty sore with me about no seagull. A ship’s captain, though, he’s just so good as his officers and no better.”

  She asked, “Have you been drinking, Dwight?”

  “I’ll say I have. Coca-Cola.”

  “Ah, that’s what’s wrong. You need a double brandy—no, whisky. Can I speak to Peter Holmes?”

  “Not here, you can’t. He’s lunching with John Osborne some place, I believe. Could be the Pastoral Club.”

  “Worse and worse,” she said. “If he happens to ask you down, will you come? I’d like to see if you can sail that dinghy any better this time. I’ve got a padlock for my bra.”

  He laughed. “I’ll be glad to come. Even on those terms.”

  “He may not ask you,” she pointed out. “I don’t like the sound of this seagull business at all. It seems to me that there’s bad trouble in your ship.”

  “Let’s talk it over.”

  “Certainly,” she replied. “I’ll hear what you’ve got to say.”

  She rang off, and succeeded in catching Peter on the telephone as he was about to leave the club. She came directly to the point. “Peter, will you ask Dwight Towers down to your place for the week-end? I’ll ask myself.”

  He temporised. “I’ll get hell from Mary if he gives Jennifer measles.”

  “I’ll tell her she caught it from you. Will you ask him?”

  “If you like. I don’t suppose he’ll come.”

  “He will.”

  She met him at Falmouth station in her buggy, as she had before. As he passed through the ticket barrier he greeted her with, “Say, what happened to the red outfit?”

  She was dressed in khaki, khaki slacks and khaki shirt, practical and workmanlike. “I wasn’t sure about wearing it, meeting you,” she said. “I didn’t want to get it all messed up.”

  He laughed. “You’ve got quite an opinion of me!”

  “A girl can’t be too careful,” she said primly. “Not with all this hay about.”

  They walked down to where her horse and buggy stood tied to the rail. “I suppose we’d better settle up this seagull business before meeting Mary,” she said. “I mean, it’s not a thing one wants to talk about in mixed company. What about the Pier Hotel?”

  “Okay with me,” he said. They got up into the jinker and drove through the empty streets to the hotel. She tied the reins to the same bumper of the same car, and they went into the Ladies’ Lounge.

  He bought her a double brandy, and bought a single whisky for himself. “Now, what’s all this about the seagull?” she demanded. “You’d better come clean, Dwight, however discreditable it is.”

  “I saw the Prime Minister before we went off on this cruise,” he told her. “The First Naval Member, he took me over. He told us this and that, and among other things he wanted us to find out all we could about the bird life in the radioactive area.”

  “All right. Well, did you find out anything for him?”

  “Nothing at all,” he replied comfortably. “Nothing about the birds, nothing about the fish, and not much about anything else.”

  “Didn’t you catch any fish?”

  He grinned at her. “If anyone can tell me how to catch a fish out of a submarine that’s submerged, or a seagull when nobody can go on deck, I’d like to know. It could probably be done with specially designed equipment. Everything’s possible. But this was at the final briefing, half an hour before we sailed.”

  “So you didn’t bring back a seagull?”

  “No.”

  “Was the Prime Minister very much annoyed?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t dare go see him.”

  “I’m not surprised.” She paused and took a drink from her glass; and then more seriously she said, “Tell me. There’s nobody alive up there, is there?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s difficult to say for certain unless one was prepared to put a man on shore, in a protective suit. Looking back, I think that’s what we should have done in some of those places. But we weren’t briefed for that this time, and no equipment on board. The decontamination is a problem, when he comes back in the ship.”

&n
bsp; “‘This time’,” she quoted. “Are you going again?”

  He nodded. “I think so. We’ve had no orders, but I’ve got a hunch they’ll send us over to the States.”

  She opened her eyes. “Can you go there?”

  He nodded. “It’s quite a way, and it ‘ld be a very long time under water. Pretty hard on the crew. But yet—it could be done. Swordfish took a cruise like that, and so could we.”

  He told her about Swordfish and her cruise around the North Atlantic. “The trouble is, you see so very little through the periscope. We’ve got the captain’s report on the Swordfish cruise, and, when you sum it all up, they really learned very little. Not much more than you’d know if you sat down to think it out. You can only see the waterfront, and that from a height of about twenty feet. You can see if there’s been bomb damage in a city or a port, but that’s about all you can see. It was the same with us. We found out very little on this cruise. Just stayed there calling on the loud hailer for a while, and when nobody came down to look at us or answer, we assumed they were all dead.” He paused. “It’s all you can assume.”

  She nodded. “Somebody was saying that they’ve got it in Mackay. Do you think that’s true?”

  “I think it is true,” he said. “It’s coming south very steadily, just like the scientists said it would.”

  “If it goes on at this rate, how long will it be before it gets here?”

  “I’d say around September. Could be a bit before.”

  She got restlessly to her feet. “Get me another drink, Dwight.” And when he bought it she said, “I want to go somewhere—do something—dance!”

  “Anything you say, honey.”

  “We can’t just sit here mooning and moaning about what’s coming to us!”

  “You’re right,” he said. “But what do you want to do, more ’n you’re doing now?”

  “Don’t be sensible,” she said fretfully. “I just can’t bear it.”

  “Okay,” he said equably. “Drink up and let’s go up and meet the Holmeses, and then go sail that boat.”

  They found at the flat that Peter and Mary Holmes had arranged a beach picnic supper for the evening’s entertainment. Not only was it cheaper than a party and more pleasant in the heat of summer, but in Mary’s somewhat muddled view the more the men were kept out of the house the less likely they were to give the baby measles. That afternoon Moira and Dwight went down to the sailing club after a quick lunch to rig the boat and sail her in the race, while Peter and Mary followed with the baby in the bicycle trailer in the middle of the afternoon.

  The race went reasonably well that time. They bumped the buoy at the start, and engaged in a luffing match on the second round which ended in a minor collision because neither party knew the rules, but in that club such incidents were not infrequent, and protests very few. They finished the race in sixth place, an improvement on the time before, and in much better order. They sailed in to the beach at the conclusion of the race, parked the vessel on a convenient sandbank, and waded on shore to drink a cup of tea and eat small cakes with Peter and Mary.

  They bathed in leisurely fashion in the evening sun; in bathing costumes they unrigged the boat, put away the sails, and got her up to her resting place upon the dry sand of the beach. The sun dropped down to the horizon and they changed into their clothes, took drinks from the hamper, and walked out to the jetty’s end to see the sunset while Peter and Mary got busy with the supper.

  Sitting with him perched upon a rail, watching the rosy lights reflected in the calm sea, savouring the benison of the warm evening and the comfort of her drink, she asked him, “Dwight, tell me about the cruise that Swordfish made. Did you say she went to the United States?”

  “That’s right.” He paused, and then he said, “She went everywhere she could along the eastern seaboard, but all it amounted to was just a few of the small ports and harbours, Delaware Bay, the Hudson River, and, of course, New London. They took a big chance going in to look at New York City.”

  She was puzzled. “Was that dangerous?”

  He nodded. “Minefields—our own mines. Every major port or river entrance on the eastern seaboard was protected by a series of minefields. At any rate, that’s what we think. The west coast, too.” He paused for a moment in thought. “They should have been put down before the war. Whether they got them down before, or whether they were put down after, or whether they were never laid at all—we just don’t know. All we know is that there should be minefields there, and unless you have the plan of them to show the passage through—you can’t go in.”

  “You mean, if you hit one it had sink you?”

  “It most certainly would. Unless you have the key chart you just daren’t go near.”

  “Did they have the key chart when they went in to New York?”

  He shook his head. “They had one that was eight years old, with NOT TO BE USED stamped all over it. Those things are pretty secret; they don’t issue them unless a ship needs to go in there. They only had this old one. They must have wanted to go in very much. They got to figuring what alterations could have been made, retaining the main leading marks to show the safe channels in. They got it figured out that not much alteration to the plan they’d got would have been possible save on one leg. They chanced it, and went in, and got away with it. Maybe there were never any mines there at all.”

  “Did they find out much that was of value when they got in to the harbour?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing but what they knew already. It’s how it seems to be, exploring places in this way. You can’t find out a lot.”

  “There was nobody alive there?”

  “Oh no, honey. The whole geography was altered. It was very radioactive, too.”

  They sat in silence for a time, watching the sunset glow, smoking over their drinks. “What was the other place you say she went to?” the girl asked at last. “New London?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Where is that?”

  “In Connecticut, in the eastern part of the state,” he told her. “At the mouth of the Thames River.”

  “Did they run much risk in going there?”

  He shook his head. “It was their home port. They had the key chart for the minefields there, right up to date.” He paused. “It’s the main U.S. Navy submarine base on the east coast,” he said quietly. “Most of them lived there, I guess, or in the general area. Like I did.”

  “You lived there?”

  He nodded.

  “Was it just the same as all the other places?”

  “So it seems,” he said heavily. “They didn’t say much in the report, just the readings of the radioactivity. They were pretty bad. They got right up to the base, to their own dock that they left from. It must have been kind of funny going back like that, but there was nothing much about it in the report. Most of the officers and the enlisted men, they must have been very near their homes. There was nothing they could do, of course. They just stayed there a while, and then went out and went on with their mission. The captain said in his report they had some kind of a religious service in the ship. It must have been painful.”

  In the warm, rosy glow of the sunset there was still beauty in the world. “I wonder they went in there,” she observed.

  “I wondered about that, just at first,” he said. “I’d have passed it by, myself, I think. Although … well, I don’t know. But thinking it over, I’d say they had to go in there. It was the only place they had the key chart for—that, and Delaware Bay. They were the only two places that they could get in to safely. They just had to take advantage of the knowledge of the minefields that they had.”

  She nodded. “You lived there?”

  “Not in New London itself,” he said quietly. “The base is on the other side of the river, the east side. I’ve got a home about fifteen miles away, up the coast from the river entrance. Little place called West Mystic.”

  She said, “Don’t talk about it if you’d rather no
t.”

  He glanced at her. “I don’t mind talking, not to some people. But I wouldn’t want to bore you.” He smiled gently. “Nor to start crying, because I’d seen the baby.”

  She flushed a little. “When you let me use your cabin to change in,” she said, “I saw your photographs. Are those your family?”

  He nodded. “That’s my wife and our two kids,” he said a little proudly. “Sharon. Dwight goes to Grade School, and Helen, she’ll be going next fall. She goes to a little kindergarten right now, just up the street.”

  She had known for some time that his wife and family were very real to him, more real by far than the half-life in a far corner of the world that had been forced upon him since the war. The devastation of the northern hemisphere was not real to him, as it was not real to her. He had seen nothing of the destruction of the war, as she had not; in thinking of his wife and of his home it was impossible for him to visualise them in any other circumstances than those in which he had left them. He had little imagination, and that formed a solid core for his contentment in Australia.

  She knew that she was treading upon very dangerous ground. She wanted to be kind to him, and she had to say something. She asked a little timidly, “What’s Dwight going to be when he grows up?”

  “I’d like him to go to the Academy,” he said. “The Naval Academy. Go into the Navy, like I did. It’s a good life for a boy—I don’t know any better. Whether he can make the grade or not, well, that’s another thing. His mathematics aren’t so hot, but it’s too early yet to say. He won’t be ten years old till next July. But I’d like to see him get into the Academy. I think he wants it, too.”

  “Is he keen on the sea?” she asked.

  He nodded. “We live right near the shore. He’s on the water, swimming and running the outboard motor, most of the summer.” He paused thoughtfully. “They get so brown” he said. “All kids seem to be the same. I sometimes think that kids get browner than we do, with the same amount of exposure.”

  “They get very brown here,” she remarked. “You haven’t started him sailing yet?”