As the train rumbled over the Manchester ship canal at Runcorn one of the compartment’s other occupants – an army major – lifting the window blind, peered out into the darkness and swore.
‘What’s up, Freddie?’ his companion, a half-colonel, asked, stirring grumpily from a doze and waking the others.
‘Bloody air raid, that’s what’s up, sir!’ the major explained, and they all peered in turn at the distant prospect, the searchlight beams probing the night sky, the dull and distant flashes of bomb bursts and the faint lines of tracer fire from the ack-ack batteries and the anti-aircraft guns fired from ships in the docks lining either side of the Mersey. They were rumbling over the great river itself now, their view blocked as the curve of the track led round towards the city. The blackout blind fell back into place and they all resumed their seats, staring at each other.
‘Poor old Liverpool getting another pasting,’ the major remarked. ‘Had several bad raids since last May.’ He looked at Clark. ‘If he can’t get you chaps at sea, he’ll get you when you and your convoy get into port, eh?’
‘Yes.’ Clark said, nodding.
‘Don’t know where it’ll all end,’ a dark-suited, elderly civilian offered.
‘In victory, by God,’ the major affirmed.
‘God knows what time we’ll arrive now,’ the lieutenant-colonel groaned, ‘let alone what time we’ll get to bed!’
‘It’s a real bugger,’ agreed the major. ‘You joining a ship?’ he asked Clark.
Clark shook his head. ‘No, going on leave.’
‘Won’t have much fun in that lot,’ the major responded, nodding at the blanked-off window.
‘No. What about you, sir?’
‘Oh we’re, er, well, you know…’
‘Don’t like to say too much about it,’ the half-colonel put in, rolling his eyes towards the civilian.
Clark nodded. ‘I’ve been in the North Atlantic,’ he said, ‘and I don’t like to say too much about that either.’
‘Bloody business, eh?’ the major asked.
Clark nodded. ‘Pretty awful, yes.’
‘Need you chaps, though, keep the stuff coming through – and now we’ve got the Yanks in, things should start looking up. Drink?’ The major held out a hip flask towards him.
‘Kind of you, sir, but no thanks.’
The major grunted and offered the flask to the colonel. ‘No thanks, Freddie.’
The major hesitated a moment before offering the flask to the civilian. ‘Not for me, but thanks all the same.’
‘Oh, well,’ said the major, holding it out towards Clark. ‘Here’s to the navy.’ Clark smiled and nodded.
‘Thanks,’ he said as the major took a nip.
It was an hour later before the train finally drew into Lime Street station. The air raid was over, but the air was gritty and smelled of burning. Hefting his overnight bag, Clark headed to the street, debating his best course of action. He was extremely hungry and it was very late. His only chance was to see if he could get something to eat at the Adelphi, where, he decided, he had better take a room for the night. It was not what he had planned, but the delay to the train made getting across to the Wirral too difficult and he was too inured to the vicissitudes of war to concern himself; besides, he was bone-weary and longed for a bed that did not move up and down and from which no one would summon him at some ungodly hour.
Once through the blackout curtains shrouding the hotel from the street, the atmosphere of disregard for the effects of German bombs was remarkable. The sound of the dance band carried up into the large foyer, through which a few couples moved, men in uniform and women in bright dresses, taking off or putting on their coats. Along with the music came the chink of glasses and the seemingly irrepressible noise of voices and laughter. Clark thought of Magda but, without her beside him, he was too weary for the most superficial distractions of this brittle gaiety, and he approached the reception desk. They would serve him with some food if he took a room, to which he happily agreed. He carried his own bag up to the third floor. Inside the room he threw his bridge coat on a chair and removed his shoes, wiggling his toes with a luxurious pleasure. Slipping off collar and tie, he found the ‘Do not disturb’ sign and went to the door. As Clark opened it he came face to face with a couple arm in arm, a couple clearly intent upon a night of passion together as the man fumbled in his jacket pocket for his room key, and the tall, dark young woman nuzzled up to him.
‘Magda!’
They stood staring at each other for a second, the shock of recognition mutual. But an instant later it was swiftly followed by all that the encounter implied.
* * *
Clark fell asleep as dawn broke over the great sea port. The agony of having discovered Magda’s betrayal had bitten deeply, but at last fatigue had overwhelmed him. It was after noon when he finally awoke to the misery of realisation. The change in his life and hopes insinuated itself into his consciousness like a knife blade, almost imperceptibly at first, but then with a mounting crescendo of pain. He turned his face into the pillow and wept; a long and bitter release which drained from his soul not only his anger at Magda’s infidelity, but, once tapped, all the horrors of war in the Atlantic. Magda was no longer the one bright expectation against which he could set the awfulness of convoy escort: the fear, the privation, the cold, the inequity of the struggle and the personal humiliations of helplessness as he, as Daisy’s first lieutenant, presided over the deaths of oil-sodden seamen pulled from the ocean’s cold waters. Magda, herself a victim of the indifferent cruelty of war, had shone in his imagination with the promise of a perfection which he knew existed, for he had tasted it in the depths of her body.
But Magda’s dark and passionate eyes had been upon another’s face, her arm had been entwined with another man, her legs about to clasp the eager waist of another lover. Clark could reconcile an old affair with Kurt, could absorb Kurt’s part in the small triangle of their own private and familial eternal quandary; but he could not hold with that triangle assuming the outline of a square; or worse, perhaps, of a polygon.
Yes, that was it! He knew with a sudden intuitive conviction that Magda had buried her German past, her memories of her abandoned parents and even of her relationship with Kurt in the ready appeal of hedonistic pleasure. What was the point of subjecting herself to the painful anxieties of falling in love with a seaman who might never come back? She had lost Kurt, she might lose Jack. Why worry about one man, when there were plenty of them eager to sleep with her? Why, she could lose the particular in the general! She could have her pick, play the field, enjoy herself to excess!
Christ! Clark thought as he recalled their most intimate moments. Had she been behaving like this all the time? And one thought swiftly bred another: what in God’s name had she been up to with Diana Cranbrooke? Her ladyship was, he thought wildly, not beyond making a cuckold of Sir Desmond. The two of them would attract spectacular notice in London, if they chose to, while in Liverpool, with her husband in the capital, Diana Cranbrooke could have her pick of lovers. And Magda was a perfect decoy too. Good God, they might even act as a pair, together…
Clark lashed himself into a frenzy of furious jealousy. What had she said? War changed people? Was that a half-confession of her own deep metamorphosis? How the hell would he know anyhow? He had been blinded by his own devotion! She might have been as enthusiastic a whore in Hamburg!
He thrashed around the bed wallowing in his misery until, in due course, a chambermaid knocked on his door. He had nowhere to go, now; the thought of calling upon his preoccupied father and dining in that echoing house appalled him. He wanted to hide in the grubby, knocking-shop anonymity of the Adelphi.
‘I’ll take the room for another night,’ he told the woman. ‘Now leave me alone and let me sleep.’
‘It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, sir,’ she remonstrated with scouse truculence.
‘I don’t care what the bloody time is, just leave me alone.’
; She must have had a colleague with her, as he heard her say grumpily, ‘He thinks it’s blooming Christmas already.’
Christmas! Christmas, with all its overtones of family and gifts, seemed as remote as the dark side of the moon! He drifted in and out of rage and sleep, finally waking at six o’clock. He wanted a drink, wanted to get drunk and drown his unhappiness in the sailor’s remedy, but the thought of his mission intruded. It was the only thing he had in life now; a hard, difficult thing, but a thing to be embraced like a piece of timber floating circumstantially alongside the floundering survivor. He must seize such an improvised lifesaver with the tenacity of desperation.
Clark was not a man to give up.
* * *
He drew a bath and put on a clean shirt and collar. He would go for a walk, a long walk, air raid or not. He would call in at a couple of pubs and allow himself a few drinks. Then, when it was late and he had tired himself out, he would come back and fall asleep again. Tomorrow he would go home and muster his sea kit, then travel up to London for his meeting with Gifford and Admiral Sir Dudley Pound. After that he would be on his way north to join his ship on Teesside.
The streets were dark and rain was falling, driven on a strong wind that caught him on corners and pressed against the heavy serge of his bridge coat. It would be a foul night in the Atlantic, he thought. It was funny how the notion brought him a grim comfort, as though the gale sought him out to remind him of his true habitat.
‘But I wasn’t cut out to be a monk,’ he muttered to himself, articulating the great dilemma of the natural seaman: to fuck or float? And he took the seaman’s traditional medicine, that quantity of alcohol rendered down into a reasonable ‘few beers’. Not that he was drunk at ten o’clock when the air-raid sirens wailed and those in the street began to flow towards the shelters which had become familiar to them. Hunching his shoulders against the wind, he pressed on. Sod the bloody Jerries!
At the end of the street he was confronted by an air-raid warden. ‘Not that way, sir,’ the man said, holding up an arm and seeing Clark’s naval cap. ‘Shelter’s down there. Follow those people, sir.’
Clark hesitated, the beer warming him to a contentious disobedience. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. Overhead the rumble of bombers was met with the stabbing divergence of the searchlight beams, probing up through the falling rain.
‘Don’t make life difficult, sir. I’ve got a son in destroyers and I know you’re having a rough time. Just bugger off after those people and sit quiet in the shelter.’
Clark gave in. The man had a kindly voice. The sideways reference of sympathy moved him and the beer added its sentimental influence. He felt a sudden and unmanly desire to cry, turning away to hide the brightness in his eyes which, even in the blackness, he thought the ARP warden could not fail to notice. He stumbled after the retreating forms hurrying towards the shelter.
Once inside he sought out a corner. Benches lined with huddling men and women, a few young people and a number of children, talking softly, as though unwilling to draw attention to themselves. An elderly man began to sing an Irish song in a fine baritone voice. A thin accompaniment joined him, growing in volume until almost everyone who knew the words of the old rebel song was singing. Those who were unfamiliar with the Fenian plaint knew the tune and hummed. The origins of the song did not matter; its historical inappropriateness at this intense moment of British patriotic anxiety was immaterial. Its power lay in its defiance.
Clark knew the words, and if he disapproved of their sentiment, he roared out the passion of their universality as it summoned up their conjoined courage. If a German bomb had destroyed them in that moment, they would have died victorious. As the song reached its end, he was quite unaware that tears were flowing down his cheeks. It was some moments after they had finished singing – so that they were once more awkward, individual and anxious selves, as the sudden silence gradually gave way to soft, half-embarrassed laughter and low conversation – that the first crumps of exploding bombs made the earth tremble and shook the dust from the ceiling overhead. At that moment he saw Jenny O’Neil watching him.
She had been watching him as he sang and, as recognition dawned on him, she came over and sat beside him.
‘What a nice surprise, Mr Clark. I had no idea you were at home. Your father never said a word.’
‘Jenny!’ Clark said, genuinely brightening at the sight of her. She was smiling at him, her face, wrapped in a headscarf, looking older than it was. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘my father has no idea I’m in Liverpool. Anyway, how are you?’
‘I’m all right. I’m the captain’s personal secretary now. Mary Logan has joined the Wrens; she’s commissioned too. How about you?’ She regarded him with an almost maternal concern.
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ he blustered. Then, as she continued to stare at him he asked: ‘Why?’ as though he wore some sign that he had been made a fool of by Magda.
‘You looked sad while you were singing,’ she said simply, not mentioning the tears.
‘Sad? Good heavens no.’ He attempted ironic laughter. ‘It’s good to be back in Liverpool and share the joys of war with you lot. Haven’t had such a good sing-song for a long time!’
She was rummaging in her bag and produced a handkerchief. ‘Here,’ she said quietly, handing it to him. ‘Blow your nose and wipe your eyes. You look terrible.’
He stared at her a moment in astonishment. Then he took the offered handkerchief and was about to blow his nose when he recovered himself.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, handing it back, ‘I’ve got one of my own.’
‘Don’t be silly. Use mine.’
He hesitated a moment, then did as he was bid. ‘I’ll, um, take it and wash it, and send it back to you.’
‘There’s no need,’ she said, taking it from him. ‘You’ve had a bad trip,’ she said, lowering her eyes and facing straight ahead, the moment over. It was not a question, rather a commiserating statement, as though Jenny O’Neil wanted no explanation other than the one she herself offered.
‘Pretty bad,’ he said quietly, entering into the spirit of the wordplay, though unaware of her motive, seeking only to conceal his own.
‘You poor dear,’ she said, and without turning her head, she slipped her arm through his as she drew their bodies closer. He was touched by the kindness. Under the circumstances, there seemed nothing odd in this gentle gesture of solidarity as they sat and waited for the Luftwaffe to desist from bombing their city and the homes of their fellow citizens. Nor did it seem odd when the all-clear sounded and they emerged into the windy street, Jenny’s arm still tucked inside his, and she said, ‘Would you walk me home, Jack? It’s not far.’
‘Yes, of course.’ They pulled up their collars and leaned into the wind and rain. ‘What were you doing out on your own?’
‘Oh, once a week Maureen McCarthy – you know her, the head of the typing pool – well, we go to the cinema. We wanted to see Gone with the Wind again and it came back on at the Empire.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Oh yes, Vivien Leigh is so lovely…’
‘And what about your mother?’
‘Oh, she passed over last winter with the bronchitis. It was a relief really. I don’t think she could have coped with all this. It’s no time to be old…’
They walked on in silence, turning into a street of terraced houses, down which the wind thrust at them with its full force. Instinctively they drew closer together.
They passed the remains of two houses. The debris had been cleared up so that the heap of bricks, flapping wallpaper and jags of splintered timber joists, all visible in the gloom, only occupied the precise, bounded area of the property.
‘We’ve had a few visits from our German cousins,’ Jenny remarked matter-of-factly with an unconscious irony.
‘Yes, so I see,’ replied Clark, regarding the English nicety of the clearing-up operation.
‘So far, I’ve been lucky,’ Jenny said, stopping at
the door of her house, detaching herself from Clark and taking her keys from her bag.
‘Come in for a cuppa,’ she said over her shoulder as she turned the key in the lock.
‘I ought not to.’
‘Why?’ she said, standing in the doorway, her bag tucked under one arm, her other hand extricating the key from the lock. Her face, constrained by the headscarf, was a pale oval. The threshold lay between them like the Rubicon.
Clark chuckled. ‘On a night like this there’s nothing I’d like more than a cuppa,’ he said.
Inside, he stood in the utter darkness of the hall until the flare of a match lit the gas light in the room beyond and the incandescence spilled through from the kitchen.
‘Come through,’ she said. ‘It’s not much,’ she added apologetically, taking off her coat and laying it on the single armchair beside the range. It bore obvious traces of having been her late mother’s. ‘What with father dying and mother being left to me to look after… Well, you know how it is. I wanted to move out to the new housing estates at Aigburth, but mother wouldn’t hear of it. Perhaps one day…’ She sighed and, filling the kettle, she put it on the hob. ‘You’re used to better things,’ she said, not looking at him as she bent and stoked the fire.
‘Not on a corvette, I’m not,’ he said, regarding her rump in its cheap tweed skirt. What he could see of her legs in their thick brown stockings disappeared into short, ugly boots.
Dead Man Talking Page 12
