Her Victory

1

Tom resisted god-damning it when the strap of his suitcase snapped, for such words did no good. Laying everything on his bunk he found a spare belt which, though thin, would hold. During the last few minutes of peace on board he sat with knees apart and quietly smoked, listening to the Fidelio Overture and thinking that such music heralded a fine bout of freedom.

Signed-off and paid-up, and through the Customs, who took nothing off him, he went ashore and had supper at the Bull Hotel. Three of the crew were already eating. Tom nodded, and got a smile from one who then turned to go on talking with the others.

The roast beef was like damp cardboard, and all the vegetables (including the potatoes) tasted the same and were too soft. He drank a pint of beer for better nourishment, though neither did that satisfy. The cloth napkin was well ironed, but not perfectly clean. A lifetime spent on the lift and fall of knotted planks was over at last, a fact that might have been something to write home about if he had ever had one except the kind that was called an orphanage.

The waitress brought a double whisky, which he had not asked for. She pointed to the other table, and the men looked at him. ‘A goodbye drink for you, sir!’

A white rain blistered the pavement, and thrummed on the station roof. Water made him thirsty, and water made him piss, except when underfoot and full of grit on pavement, wharf or station platform. Luggage at his feet, and mackintosh open, he reached for his wallet. The sea is a place where angels fear to tread, and he supposed even Jesus just about made the shore.

‘A first-class ticket to London – single.’

No, I’m not going for a dirty weekend, he might have added, nor have I been here for one. I keep a monk’s berth in town for my excess clobber while I’m at sea, but that’s none of your monkey business, shipmate.

There was no ‘First-class to London? Yes sir!’ but a pudding-faced stare and cash slapped down to emphasize that the ensuing silence could go on for ever for all he cared. A Force-Niner pushing from behind had made a hard ride up Channel, and meant no easy job sliding into that concrete embrace of mother earth. You can push around the shoulder in the wind’s teeth, but it’s another matter when you get kicked at speed like a football to make that turn to port through the eye of a needle. But the Old Man had done it as he always did. They were in, and he was out, had chosen to make his last trip at fifty. From now on land and idleness would be his lot, and he anticipated filling the emptiness with only the good things of his choice.

You could laugh at dirty weather on land, watch its worst from behind the glass of a train window. He set his cap on the next seat, folded his mackintosh and put up his cases. The padded shoulder-bag containing sextant, deckwatch and short-wave radio, needed no more but never to be parted from, stayed by his feet.

He couldn’t read with his mind on the spin and half-way round the ratchets, even Our Mutual Friend and only a third through the tale. His bald dome with border of reddish hair shone with raindrops on the window glass. He saw his face and didn’t much care that he considered it ugly, especially the wide, somewhat flattened nose, broken while boxing and again in a shindig with one of the crew as second mate.

The train ran through darkness and he cupped his hands on the glass to look at stars in the clearing sky. The stars are dead but give light, yet never quite dead because they guide us at sea. Not everything is death. Not all is without purpose, not even me, though I’m damned if I know at the moment what it is.

In spite of a few trips around the islands of Central America his face was pale. Beer-smelling breath bounced, so he pressed the black flake into brown straw between his fingers and filled his pipe.

There was no one to think about except his aunt, who had lived in a large flat in Madeira Square. He had first climbed the stairs at fourteen, to stay a few days after she had written to the orphanage that she was his aunt and had better see him. He felt he had climbed more steps in that building than he ever had at sea, and wondered how she had managed as a woman of eighty. Age must find strength, ashes of heart and muscle proving that all isn’t over by a long shot. On his last visit he adjusted his cap, and pressed the bell which he remembered had been sticky as if someone had previously called with jam on their fingers. Most were elderly people, and the stairs smelled of dog and cat piss rather than of cooking food.

But she could see the sea from her lounge windows. ‘I got your Marconigram, so knew you were on your way. Probably saw your ship as I was having breakfast!’

At the end of every voyage there was no one else to visit. As a young man he had dreaded seeing her though called just the same, but got berths that kept him longer and longer away. Then he wondered and worried as she aged, and tried not to be more than three months absent, expecting every sight of her to be his last. Each time she kept him a full minute at the door as if to remind him that if it weren’t for him she would still have a sister, and he should never forget it.

At the first visit from the orphanage, she had been in her forties, a big old woman trying to frighten him. She had always kept him waiting, yet he never missed seeing her when ashore, which puzzled him often enough, except there was no one else to call on. If she hadn’t existed, any other country in the world would have had as equal a claim to be called Home as England.

In the Western Approaches he would get the Sparks to send a telegram via Land’s End Radio, as if such personal signals were vital for the ship’s navigation, or part of his own safety precautions. He didn’t know why, but the closer he came to shore the more he knew there was no option but to visit her. When on watch he allowed himself to think of nothing but the ship, so he was happy not knowing. Otherwise he slept, or listened to music in his cabin on the hi-fi system Clara had given him, one of the birthday gifts since he first went to sea, each preceded by a greetings telegram telling him what to expect. Wherever he was, the message and the package always found him, and during the war they waited at the company’s office.

2

At fourteen, stiff in his orphanage clothes and smelling of his own strong soap, he had stood in her large sitting-room among plush furniture, pictures and knick-knacks, and a cage of bright yellow birds that never stopped calling and whistling. He had wavy gingerish hair and soft brown eyes, a few freckles on skin that was otherwise pale. He couldn’t look directly at her, his cowardice remembered yet at the present time understood.

She sat in an armchair, and left him standing for half an hour. The tall pendulum clock which told him so was the only object he felt humanly close to. The birds talked to the room and to each other, and the woman who was supposed to be his aunt would never speak at all, so it seemed, though she looked at him.

Beyond the bay of the big second-floor window where she made him stand (and he wondered afterwards, remembering the way she was looking at him when he had the courage to glance at her, whether it hadn’t been some sort of plan) he could see a sheet of grey flat water down the square and across the promenade which seemed to lift like a hillside as if some barrier on the beach was stopping it rushing into the streets and destroying the town. The sight was scary, but there was nothing else worth looking at. A wide high sea expanded across the world with no land beyond. He stared as long as he thought his eyes were not getting crossed, hoping that when he turned back to the clock at least another minute would have gone by.

The water was the English Channel. He knew it from geography, and that France lay on the other side, but he imagined the sea went right to the South Pole across thousands of miles of ocean that got dark at night and had shining stars over it. There were lit-up ships there, liners, merchantmen, tankers and tramp steamers, and when you got to the ice you would find men fighting with giant whales as in Moby Dick, and when God wasn’t for them He was against them, and from within the hidden nine-tenths of an iceberg lurking underwater, He rose up to destroy men in order to show them His power while Jonah sat in the whale’s mouth and looked on in awe yet wondered whether to come out and take a chance on life.

The favoured victims struggled in a fearful sea of grey waves. There was daylight but no sky. The only colour was blood when harpoons struck and the sea monster struggled and died, or the great ice-saw of an iceberg’s side ripped the life out of ships and men, as in the grey engravings of a ‘Penny Dreadful’ yarn. He watched it from the window, then opened his eyes wider to see whether or not it had happened, and saw only the calm sea and, some miles out, several steamers. The superstructure on one ship was so high he thought it a white building on the coast of France. He made up his mind during that half hour what course his life would take, and he knew he would never alter it.

He would go to sea. With neither father nor mother, he would become a sailor and live on a ship.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘No, Aunt Clara.’

‘I said don’t they ever let you sit down at that orphanage? You can sit down, if you care to.’

He chose one of the hardest chairs, as if a sailor wouldn’t want anything softer. ‘They do at meals, and in class.’

‘Not on that one. It isn’t strong enough for a big boy like you.’ She pointed to a sofa whose curved legs, he said to himself, looked as if they wouldn’t support his big toe. But he did as he was told, sitting stiffly in his walking-out suit, and enclosed within his own carbolic whiff, at which she wrinkled her nose. ‘We shall have to do something with you.’

He glanced at the window, thinking she meant with his life, and that this was the reason for his excursion from the orphanage. ‘I’d like to go to sea, and be a sailor.’

‘Yes, you would. Just wouldn’t you?’ Her voice was so angry that he felt crippled by his mistake. She saw it, and smiled for the first time. ‘I meant that we shall have to do something with you after tea. There’s a concert on the pier. Would you like to go?’

He didn’t care, but knew he must say yes, which was what she wanted him to say. Therefore, he wanted to say it. The maid brought in tea, with biscuits and chocolate cake, and fish-paste and cucumber sandwiches.

‘Don’t gobble,’ Aunt Clara said. Her most stinging words came quietly and in a nice voice. ‘You’re not a turkey. Gobble like that, and I’ll call you Graham Gobble!’

When he smiled, sternness replaced her amusement. He had eaten porridge and bacon at breakfast, but wouldn’t say he’d had nothing since, first because he daren’t, and then because he couldn’t, and lastly because he wouldn’t. But he stopped gobbling. He had been hungry, and you had to do something when there was nothing to talk about. He glanced again at the window, as if the only safety lay beyond, thinking he’d like to smash his way out. It was better at the orphanage, which he liked because he was used to things there.

‘So you want to go to sea?’ Her anger was not yet gone.

He felt like a wall that would never be pushed down. ‘Yes, Aunt Clara.’

The boys would say: What’s she like? Does she have big tits? She’s an old woman, he would tell them, but the scoff was good.

‘I suppose it makes sense.’ She called for the maid: ‘Eunice!’

He tried not to laugh at her name when she came in, but knew even so that he’d reddened.

‘You’d better take that cake away or he’ll eat it all, and make himself disgustingly sick.’

Sarcasm ran off him like water. He didn’t care what she said. They had already eaten it but for a few crumbs, which she picked up between her fingers, rolled into a ball, and pressed into the birdcage. He decided she must be having a joke in telling the maid to take the cake away or he’d be sick. ‘What makes sense, Aunt Clara?’

The maid, nearer his own age, had bobbed fair hair, and he could tell the boys about how, as she came to the table, she winked at him, and that when she was close he could smell her scent.

‘Your father was a cook on a transatlantic liner, as far as we could make out. But there was nothing we could do about it. Not that we would have wanted to. Father tried to find out, but it was a big liner.’

She must hate him, but he would take no notice. Instead of puzzling out why she forever said such things he wondered whether the maid’s room was close to his. He’d have to tell the boys something when he got back. She came into my bed. She did, I tell you. He thought his parents had died when he was born. That’s what he’d told himself. He hadn’t known anything except that he had no parents. Now he knew that his father had been a cook on a liner. He must have been a chef wearing a white hat and an apron. His mother was the sister of this woman who was his aunt.

She pointed to a large photograph on the flat-topped piano. ‘I thought I’d better get it out for when you came.’

He walked over to see. She was certainly better-looking than the maid, or his aunt.

‘You feature her,’ she said, ‘that’s one good thing, except for the hair, and the nose. Ugh!’

Good or not, he didn’t care. The woman was thinner than his aunt, as she looked across at some horses in a field. The maid had eyes that were almost closed, and a narrow mouth that couldn’t open. Even when she smiled its size didn’t alter, though he thought she liked him.

‘In any case, by the time you were born half the cooks had gone to other ships. She died in a hotel.’

He thought she was going to cry because her voice went low and her lips shook, so he hoped the maid would come back because he wouldn’t know what to do. ‘How did she die?’

‘Of natural causes.’

She lied. ‘Why did I get sent to the orphanage?’

She would never tell the truth, but one day he’d find out. ‘Ask your grandfather,’ she snapped.

‘Isn’t he dead?’

‘Yes. There was no one to bring you up. Your uncle was killed in the Great War, and we couldn’t be doing with you. Father died soon after. The whole business broke his heart.’

The idea was laughable, but he kept his lips firm. He didn’t care what happened, or who he was. He was himself, and that was all that mattered. An oil painting hung above the mantelshelf, of an officer in smart khaki, the grey barrel of a howitzer behind. The face looked unreal, as dead as the man was dead, with dark hair and full lips and slightly protruding eyes. The oftener Tom glanced the more artificial it looked, as if he wasn’t absolutely dead but only waiting for one good reason to come back to life. He would jump out of a Christmas stocking, and kill everybody with a revolver.

The teachers had been in the Great War. Cranky Dick had a wooden leg. Old Pepper-pot had half an arm gone, though he was good at throwing the stick with the other if he thought you weren’t listening. The matron had her husband blown to bits and no known grave, but it was more than twenty forever-years ago. Passion Dale, they called it. Or Mons, Arrers, Wipers. Poppy Day came round and they had to stand still for two minutes. A poppy in every hat, and he always had a sixpenny big one to wear, for his uncle, he now supposed, the money every year being specially sent. And nobody had told him, but now he knew.

‘Your grandfather said he would never recover from losing John, but he did. He said the same about your mother, and he didn’t.’

You’ve got to die some time. Everybody had. He must have died because he was old enough to die. The maid smiled from the doorway. Then she winked. He liked her for that. She put her tongue out at his aunt. That was even better.

‘And I stayed single to look after him. There’s no other way in life.’ Her voice was suddenly shrill: ‘If you do that again, Eunice, I’ll send you away.’

Tom felt his cheeks redden, as if he had connived in the maid’s prank. Clara had seen her reflection in the bulge of a shiny vase. ‘And stop your winking. There’s nothing wrong with your eyes. Unless you have conjunctivitis as well as St Vitus’ Dance! Go and wash the tea things.’ She turned to him: ‘Can you swim?’

Those over thirteen had gone to Dovercourt for a week last summer. He had learned, with a lifebelt. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s a blessing.’ She stood. ‘Now wash your hands and face, then we’ll get our coats and go to the pier. We shall be late if we don’t hurry.’

She made him wash with scented soap. She couldn’t put up with carbolic, she said. But it was all he’d ever used.

The water was pink, and seemed still to have the same ships on it as before. As if unmoving, their spring-coils of smoke were fixed for ever. There was a calmness out there, but he couldn’t go yet. While laughing at the jokes, with the tide rushing in under the pier supports, and huge banks of white water flooding across the darkening shingle, one part of him pictured ships over the water of a wide ocean, with no land to be seen. His Aunt Clara would write to the orphanage and say that he should go to sea. The promise wasn’t yet made, but he knew she would see it done. If not, he’d run away.

He thought she hated him, but half-way through the concert she held his hand hard while laughing at the jokes. Perhaps she didn’t hate him after all, not at the moment anyway. Nothing was certain except at sea. The water might drown you, but it didn’t hate you, though if it drowned you whether you could swim or not maybe it did.

The next day was Sunday. Church was boring, but he had a way of making time go quickly, imagined he was looking from the window of a train, which made his eyes twice as sharp and brought everything so close that soon he was walking in the scenery and not riding through it, and then he was no longer part of the place he was being bored in, for he could sit down and stand up or sing and pray without disturbing the walks he was having in the landscapes he had gone into. For as long as he could remember he had never been bored unless he’d wanted to be, which sometimes was when he couldn’t make up his mind what scenery he should choose.

After lunch she sat in an armchair doing the News of the World crossword puzzle. She wouldn’t let him read the finished pages, but gave him a Wide World magazine to look at. She cut the crossword out and put it into an envelope with a postal order. ‘We’ll find a pillar box for it,’ she said, ‘on your way to the railway station.’

‘I hope you win five hundred pounds.’

‘You never win anything in this world,’ she snapped, ‘and don’t you forget it.’

‘Some people do.’

She looked at him, so that he could only stare again towards the sea. ‘You never will.’

There was no sense in caring. If he were going to sea he wouldn’t need to win. Every time you came back from a sea voyage you had lots of adventures to tell worth more than five hundred pounds. If they didn’t let him go, he would run away and find a ship on his own. He liked being alive now that he had something to think about.

‘All you have to do, Thomas, is study hard in the next year or so, and then we’ll get you on to a training ship. You’ll be happy in the Royal Navy, and I shall be glad to get you settled.’

She went out of the room. The Royal Navy seemed too grand, too severe, too much like the orphanage. You went in battleships to war. He had seen pictures of HMS Hood and HMS Rodney on Players cigarette cards. In a battle the ship burned around you, and turned over, and you sank with it. He had counted the guns, and knew the names of fifty warships.

‘Before I forget,’ she said, ‘take this back with you.’

He put the ten shilling note into his blazer pocket. ‘Thank you, Aunt.’

‘And here’s a bar of soap. Use it for when you come again in the summer. Write a letter and tell me what you buy with the ten shillings. I hope you don’t spend it on bars of chocolate, because if you do you’re sure to be sick.’

He’d never been sick in his life. ‘I don’t want to go in a battleship, Aunt.’

She poured something from a bottle which said ‘Dry Sack’ on the label, but it looked very wet to him. ‘I suppose it’ll be all the same when the war starts.’

Older boys listened to the news on the wireless twice a week, but the voice said one thing, and then it said the other, telling of battles in overseas places. ‘Is there going to be a war?’

Her coat was on, and a hat. ‘There will be if the Germans go on listening to that silly twerp Hitler. But I suppose you’ll be as well off in the Merchant Marine as anywhere. Now, don’t dawdle, or you’ll be late for the train.’

His mind had been empty. Now it was full of pictures and prophecies. He couldn’t wait, but everything would happen when it happened, so he knew he would have to. Unlike any other time, he had something to expect. Eunice gave him a packet of sandwiches tied with string, and Clara held his hand as they went down the steps. Both actions embarrassed him. When the train was half-way to London he went into the toilet and left the soap on the shelf.

3

He had watched her get old, and she had seen him reach the bleaker side of middle age. Her face was a calendar for the passing of his own life, otherwise he would have felt no older than twenty-five, that heady ridge on which the awkwardness of youth is left behind but the plateau of fulfilled manhood is not yet realized. He had left one stage and had not yet been too severely mauled by the other, which may have been what Clara liked about him, if she had ever found anything attractive in him at all. Perhaps she recognized a trait from her own family that he would pass on, though he would not get married while she was alive in case he made a mess of it.

He had never quite thought of her as needing to be looked at as one adult to another. Frail as she was, he could never be in any but a subordinate place when close to her. The assumption after his last time ashore that she hadn’t much longer to live made him feel that her demise might accelerate his own trot downhill. But as she stood at the door, and made him remain for a while outside, she glared as she always had, eyes fierce as if to say he had never known what the trouble of life was about, and that now he was fifty she hoped he never would.

She leaned on a silver-topped stick, and looked at the knuckles of the shaking hand that wouldn’t hold still. He recognized stony courage in such an exhibition of unbending formality which she would keep up to the end for his especial benefit. It was as if he expected to be kept waiting, as in his younger days he often was by the Old Man of many a ship. He knew her to be a person without malice, but in her attitude there was an unshakeable dislike that he would be glad to see go.

But in the meantime she would teach him the necessity, and the value, of knowing his place, expecting him to pass the same futile rigidity to others. While she stayed alive it was the only hard time she could give him, for hadn’t his appearance put the final touch of devastation on the family? He didn’t want to know. She blamed him, but could never make up her mind whether or not to utterly damn him. Until she knew one way or the other he must always be made aware of her dislike in the minute or so she kept him outside her door like a man selling bootlaces.

‘Hello, Aunt Clara. It’s me, Thomas.’

Her hands were so pale they were almost blue. They were streaked with purple. In the dim hall he wondered where the tall stout woman had gone, saddened by her lack of stature compared even to three months ago when he had thought she could not possibly get any thinner.

‘I can see who it is. I’m not blind.’

Instead of finding her sharp voice offensive he wanted to say thank God you can still speak. ‘I came straight from my ship.’

She drew her head back, aware that she hunched too much over her stick. ‘You smell better than you once did.’

He smiled. ‘I was in Jamaica, you know.’

‘What a place for a naval officer!’

It was a shame to waste his few bits of conversation in the hallway, yet he didn’t know how else to fill in the obligatory time. ‘I’ve been to worse.’

‘I dare say you have.’ She would get a cold standing in the draught, and looked so tired that he thought she would be wise to sit down. If she fell he would catch her, for it seemed she was almost certain to. On a ship you had to anticipate any emergency in a Force Nine gale, yet needed to be more careful on a calm sea, though you would be a fool to hope for much even at the best of times.

He had stood to attention for enough. ‘You might as well come in for a while,’ she said. ‘No use jawing where everyone can hear.’

The doors of the other flats were solid and heavy. No one could. The large front room was the same as when he had first walked into it as a carbolic-smelling orphanage boy over thirty years ago. Nothing was altered, but everything was faded, and a faint dust had grown on all surfaces. A woman came in by the day to clean, cook a meal, make the bed, and bring drugs from the chemist’s. You couldn’t find maids any more. They weren’t willing when you could, she said. They wanted you to pay them the earth. And even so, they didn’t care.

He sat on the same sofa, away from the plainer but more fragile chair. ‘Did you get my postcards?’

He’d sent one from every port of call. ‘Came in yesterday. Go tomorrow. I hope you are keeping in good health. I’m fine, as always.’ Or some such variation. The picture spoke more than anything he could say: palm trees, volcano, hills covered by forest with a narrow-gauge rack-and-pinion railway slicing to the crestline; waterfront, fort or government house. Hard to know what she thought of such sceneries. The only places she had been to were France, where she had visited her brother’s grave near Arras; to Belgium where she stayed in Ostend; and to St Moritz and the Rigi in Switzerland. ‘But I have never been to Germany,’ she told him more than once.

‘Yes,’ she said tonelessly, ‘I got all your cards.’

‘We had a rough old time coming back.’

She was not the sort to stand his postcards on the mantleshelf, or leave letters lying around, as he knew happened in some homes. He’d never received any letters from her, nor been thanked for his communications. He mentioned them because he wanted to know whether or not they had reached her. Most did, but a few didn’t. He could think of nothing else to say.

‘Sailors must expect it,’ she said. ‘It can get very rough around England. I look out at the water every day.’

When she did, he had to believe that she thought of sailors in general and of him in particular. In any case it was the nearest she’d get to expressing concern for him in his presence. She stood up to make tea, ignoring his offer of help. He looked around the room that had sent him to all parts of the world. He walked from end to end as if on the bridge. Only table lights were on, but the eyes of dead Uncle John in khaki watched him pace about. There was more in the portrait-figure’s gaze than dread of the unknown, and he wondered whether he’d ever know what it was.

She would order him to do something, but not countenance the least offer. ‘Come and get the tray.’

He brought it from the kitchen. The daily woman must have got the meal ready: chicken, salad, bread, pastry and a half bottle of chilled wine.

No matter how hard the days of heavy weather across the Atlantic might be, he always felt a surfeit of energy as he stepped ashore. But it didn’t last. A sudden exhaustion raddled him. A sensation of inner wastage brought on a shameful urge to weep both for himself and his aunt. His vision of a painful world without hope or purpose lasted a few moments. It went away, but left its track.

He shook himself, and she did not notice. In the orphanage and nowhere else had such a mixture of despair and tenderness swept through him. A trace had come abruptly, born from the same despondency of days gone by, but more of a threat than those fragments of former times.

He drank a glass of wine before eating. Several bottles might drown his whiff of anguish. There was nothing to say, but he knew better than to be silent. She looked straight at him. The skin hung on both sides of her face, and she could not help the shaking of her hands on the stick. Even that did not distress her sufficiently for her to acknowledge it. He felt insignificant when with her, but out of her presence no one awed him, a quality that came directly from her, and which had made him an efficient naval officer.

He talked of departures and landfalls during the last few months and, unable to know whether or not she was listening, remembered those moments in the orphanage before falling asleep that were marked by such intense despair that he wondered for the first time in his life why she and her father had got rid of him like a piece of rotten fruit, when they had accommodation where he could have been so much better cared for. The question had come too late. He couldn’t blame them, not having thought about it until he was old enough to know he might have acted with the same lack of charity.

‘Can I pour you a glass of wine, Aunt?’

Heavy and wrinkled, her lids shifted. Her eyes were wide open. ‘I can’t drink any more.’

‘Wouldn’t hurt you, I’m sure.’

‘I used to drink a bottle of sherry every day, and felt very well on it.’

He ate his meal quickly, then replaced the napkin into its ring, as if he would be there to use it tomorrow night also. ‘I never drink anything alcoholic while on board. Too many ships have been in trouble because of a soddened officer on watch, or a drunken captain in his cabin. I don’t touch anything from leaving land to walking off the ship.’

Her stick shifted. Her lips moved. ‘More fool you!’

He lit his cigar. The truth she spoke scorched him to the roots. He’d got his master’s ticket, but had never been given a command. No complaint had been made about his work, but he left ships at the shortest possible notice, or became ill, or didn’t get on with the captain – and didn’t trust himself to drink. That’s what she had meant. What are you frightened of? Can’t you hold yourself in properly? It was a look he got often when refusing a touch of liquor. For some reason he had made it a rule. On shore, it was different. Sometimes he came back to the ship hardly able to get on board. He would collapse into a sleep so deep that he didn’t waken till the ship was on the open sea. But no liquor was drunk between ports. The captain pushed the decanter towards him:

‘Hair of the dog?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You stank like a lousy old tomcat when they trundled you on deck last night.’

‘That was last night. I believe I was drunk.’

The captain laughed. ‘Is that what you call it? I call it rotten and senseless.’

He signed off as soon as he could.

‘I drank a bottle of sherry for my health – one a day at the best of times,’ his aunt was saying. ‘Now I don’t, because my body can’t take it.’

‘Here’s to you, then.’ He finished the glass, and the bottle. It was no feat to drink someone under the table. He’d often done it, so that no companion would chide him on board for a teetotaller. When they saw him as two people they knew when to leave one of them more or less alone. He walked to the heavy curtains drawn across the window. ‘I enjoy coming to see you.’

Her voice quavered out of the silence. ‘Don’t you visit other people?’

That had nothing to do with it. He spoke what was in his mind. There was no other person. He had met women from Galveston to Manila, from Durban to Seattle, even saw some of them more than once, but he had no one else except his aunt because that was the way he liked it. Happiness was in moving across the waters of the world, shooting the sun and the evening star when you could see them, and plotting your position on the chart. When the ship moved and he enjoyed a smoke and thought of everything that had happened to him, or about nothing in particular, he was happy, if that’s what it was called, though it had sometimes seemed that all his lifetime’s journeying through the cloven wave was an effort to find the dark place he had come from.

When the ship was in harbour or calm waters he could sit between watches on a deckchair outside his cabin and, savouring the homilies while remembering the perils and rough passages, browse through the copy of the Bible given as a parting gift – or shot – by the orphanage. There were also log books and almanacks, pilot books and books of tables in the chart room, but in his cabin were a dozen paperback novels to be read on a voyage and left behind. She was right, however. He had no one else.

‘Loyalty has always been thought much of in our family,’ she said, ‘but you should find a young woman and get married. I should think you’ve had enough of the sea by now.’

She had prised him into his career, and wanted to manoeuvre him out of it. ‘Don’t you think it’s respectable any more for me to be at sea?’

‘I never did,’ she returned quickly. ‘You chose it.’

She hadn’t married, because she had looked after her father till he died. It was too late to marry then, even if she had wanted to. The strong-minded don’t need excuses. They are one big excuse for doing exactly as they like. ‘If I left the sea,’ he said, ‘there’d be nothing else I could do by way of occupation.’

‘A married man is always busy.’ She make-believed, to pass the empty hours and keep herself lively.

‘I shall need to earn my living for that kind of expensive life. In any case, I’m fifty. What woman wants an old salt like me?’

She snorted, and held herself from speaking, waiting for him to say more. But he wouldn’t go on, believing that if he didn’t pursue the topic she would not. Perhaps whatever was on her mind was already settled. That was often the way she made decisions, and why he accepted them. Her combination of loyalty and pride was a knife-edged weapon that she could walk on even in bare feet, and pull him along after her. Her hidden and unqualified assumptions had strengthened his emptiness to such an extent that those he worked with considered him hard and ungiving. He remembered how a third mate had once said so to his face.

His overnight room was always ready. She told him to go to sleep before his face fell in the ashtray. The only thing about him that she didn’t seem to regard with contempt was his silence.

4

He would call at a pub by the docks, and stay an hour before walking the last few hundred yards through the gates and along the quay, a procedure which would keep him teetotal and morose throughout the voyage. The last evening ashore would blot out the effects of his leave. He’d empty his mind of any sentiment at being on land and seeing people among whom he might one day hope to live.

The more poignant the regrets the better. Walking along tree-lined London crescents of shabby houses, he noted each passing face. Even the flattest and ugliest seemed to have more life than his own, a fact which didn’t strike him as remarkable, merely a point to observe. Perhaps no one felt life’s heavy imprint on their own face, though he imagined that his sea experiences during five years of war had marked his features in some way or other. Yet when he passed a man of about fifty, who might also have served on a Murmansk convoy, his face seemed only to show the ordinary marks of those who hadn’t been in the war at all. Faces were divided into those that showed the spirit within, and those that concealed it, he thought, unwilling to decide which case he fitted into.

The fact that he would not stay at sea had taken long enough to enter his heart, though in the making of such decisions time – and wisdom – had no meaning. Twenty or thirty years seemed little more than a few days. A day on an Arctic convoy could pass, if that was the word, like a decade without leaving any wisdom in its wake. What remained in the soul after a fortnight of such days was a further emphasis of those characteristics which had allowed him to survive without going off his head.

It was no time for the imbibing of sagacity when ships were sinking into the icy sea and their crews had no chance of being saved before the pitiless cold drew them under, and knowing that without warning your ship could be next from either subs or bombers. You battened down the hatches of your spirit and zig-zagged through turmoil. Any notion of becoming wise through such experience would have added to the dangers by spoiling your set purpose of wanting to be alive at the end of the voyage while in every way performing your duty. Whether you got hit by machine-guns or shrapnel, or somersaulted under into the cold-dark without warning, was decided by something too far off for you ever to comprehend or take advantage of. Otherwise, you were kept going by the practical considerations of your trade, and that was that.

When solacing himself in Murmansk with a bottle of vodka he recalled telling his Aunt Clara as a boy that he didn’t want to go into the Royal Navy because such a fleet fought battles. There was no other word for what he had just come through except a massacre, because only a few broken and damaged ships came into port of the dozens that set out.

As he walked by the stalls of an East End market such recollections did not make him glad to be alive. They’d happened too long ago, and connected him to a shadowy self he had once been and wanted to forget.

The lack of such punctuating experiences in life would have made his progress seem like walking through a mist without landmarks. There had been too few, in any case, to prove that he wasn’t. Nothing much had occurred since then. Every event that promised to be memorable had turned out to be no more than routine. If he hadn’t been fifty years of age he would have hoped that something vital though in no way perilous might still happen for him to believe himself as fully alive as most people passing on the street.

When on shore he walked through whatever town he happened to be in. A rickshaw man who followed him in Penang, hoping for a fare, had refused to take no for an answer. Tom made his way to the Botanical Gardens in his own peculiar half-swaying naval stride, the rickshaw man continually pestering him to get in and be towed there. Tom hardly noticed him, nor even his own sweat from the steam-kettle heat, but finally, still unwilling to ride, he gave the man a few dollars and sent him away.

The monkeys looped their tails over a branch and swung towards him. He bought pink bananas and fed them. One claw came too close to his shirt and he was quick enough to land a blow at the head without being bitten. He laughed at his luck, as the monkey ran to the top of the tree. Then he made his way to the City Lights dance hall in town for a few drinks and a hugger-mugger embrace with a taxi-dancer, before walking as upright as was possible back to his rust-sided ship.

There was no such thing as rest. There was only sleep and work, otherwise you walked, and refreshed yourself by food and booze before going back on board. He was not shy with women but could never see himself on shore with job, wife and children. A few affairs had lasted a voyage or two, but after the third call lack of interest had been mutual, and there were no more letters. He was thankful that the one or two women he had imagined himself in love with at the time of getting his third mate’s ticket had not taken him seriously.

Work, duty and the ability to endure were no self-sacrifice, since he gained as much by, them as he gave. There was no fairer bargain. Work meant a mind emptied of all possible problems, scooped clean except for those connected with the job in hand. Even on a calm day, crossing the Arabian Sea in good visibility and heading for Colombo, there was enough to observe from the bridge to prevent any of life’s considerations getting a firm hold.

Towards dawn, on the surface of a lacquered sea, he could look from the stars down to the horizon for a first sight of the sun. Peace spanned his life, and surrounded him with a tranquillity that held off the forces of battle not yet unleashed. When they threatened on shore he endeavoured to walk them into the ground, to exhaust his body and stave off the night about to overwhelm him – going eventually into the nearest bar to drink his mind into such chaos that sense had no chance of alarming him.

The blue, dark sea turned choppy in the Malacca Passage. The mountains of island and mainland were covered with forest and barely ten miles apart. The ship had steamed into a zone of jellyfish whose grey shield-tops lay close together and covered the whole area from shore to shore. He had seen miles of them down the Malacca Straits, but never as many as in this narrow place. He looked through binoculars at the steep dense woods, then slowly back towards the ship across the living masses of jellyfish.

Fresh from sleep and a shower, in his laundered white uniform, he had the sensation of falling and hitting the sea in their midst, his body dissolving by the force of their electricity and poison.

He was drowning, the thrust of salt water up the nostrils and into the mouth as he corkscrewed slowly with closed eyes into the darkness. Tentacles of jellyfish wrapped around him so thickly they became a shroud he could not get out of, and he saw himself as an infant taken to the orphanage accompanied by the photographed face of his mother.

Memories struggled to get into his consciousness before vanishing with him for ever. He smelled the walls and tiles, sinks and toilets and blankets, the soap and the food, as well as the perfume and perspiration of whoever had carried him. He relived her clean clothes and salt tears so elaborately that he was threatened by a greater extinction than that of dropping overboard: a fear of the unstoppable reversal of life back to what was too painful to know about.

He perceived as many long-buried revelations from his past as he dared, part of him willing to go deeper providing the mysteries of his life would be explained; but a tighter grip on his binoculars brought him back to thoughts of duty and work, and the impossibility of making a choice which might cost so much that he would not survive to enjoy the results.

The wooden rail was sticky with his sweat and the salt sea air. He brought the binoculars to his side, and turned his gaze towards the mainland of Sumatra. A Dutch passenger ship passed close from the opposite direction. People on deck waved greetings. A white point of signal light flashed its name from the bridge telling where it had come from and its destination: ‘ORANJE – BATAVIA – AMSTERDAM’. He read the message aloud so as to keep control of himself, each dot and dash a thumb-tack stabbing the brain to reality. The sight of the morsed light and the voice of the man on his own ship reading the words like an echo brought him back to the fringes of his ordered life. He began to sway. He fought, but his legs were weak. He was watched by Sedgemoor at the wheel.

‘All right, sir?’

He walked a few paces without falling.

‘Touch of the sun,’ he called, loud and clear.

Sedgemoor knew what he was talking about. ‘Singapore will cure it, sir!’

‘Think so?’

He laughed, a belly-laugh from somewhere in Kent. ‘Cures everything, sir, me and the lads say, if you know where to go.’

He once asked Sedgemoor where he did roam on his shore leave there, and with a ferocious wink that could have boded no one any benefit, he replied that he was ‘off with the others to get fixed up with a nice orgy’.

He laughed. ‘But what about curing the cure, Sedgemoor?’

‘Don’t know about that, sir. But it ain’t been necessary yet, touch wood.’

5

He went up on the lift. Trolleys were pushed along the corridor by shouting orderlies who seemed to be clattering the lids of dinner-wagons or linen-tins with deliberate relish. He wondered how anyone could die peacefully in such a bedlam. Though it was day outside, the lights within were not bright enough, and the noise offended him.

A nurse saw him standing, cap in hand and holding a bunch of neatly petalled roses. ‘Can I help you?’

‘You mean to sort this lot out?’

‘More than anybody dare do.’

A sheen of dark hair showed under her cap. She had bright eyes and well-rounded cheeks. ‘I’m to see my aunt,’ he told her. ‘Name of Miss Phillips.’

A little circular watch was pinned at her breast. ‘Have you come far?’

He wanted to hold her arm, or take her by the waist. The impulse was so strong that he had to step back. ‘West Indies this time. I got in this morning.’

‘Lucky you!’

He glimpsed into a ward and saw patients in dressing-gowns sitting by beds or strolling about. ‘It was work.’

‘You see all those exotic places, though.’

‘From the bridge. Or through a porthole.’ He had nothing to lose, and perhaps something to gain from a state of mind which said it was immaterial whether or not he was old enough to be her father; a mood which came more frequently as he got older. A pace or two behind, he eyed her waist and shoulders, thinking how delectable she was. He caught her up. ‘The islands make wonderful scenery, especially from a distance, at dawn or sunset, say.’

‘You make me envious.’

‘That’s the idea!’

A ticket on the door of a private room displayed his aunt’s typed name. Clara was never a woman to be denied a place of her own. ‘How is she?’

‘Comfortable.’

They never told you anything. The hierarchy was as rigid as on a ship, beneath all the clatter. ‘Is that all?’

‘See the doctor afterwards. He’ll be in the ward by then.’

They faced each other, and he wondered whether Clara, in spite of her illness, could hear them talking. ‘Would you like to have dinner with me this evening?’

‘That’s rather quick!’

‘Quick enough, for a girl from a good family?’

‘And that’s rather sharp. But I could have said yes.’

‘Only what?’

‘I have to see my boy-friend.’

He laughed. ‘I’m consoled. Matter of having to be.’

‘You’re sweet,’ she said. ‘It might have been nice.’

‘Thank you. I’ll go back to sea a sadder and wiser man.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It’s the truth. I always do.’

‘You’re making me feel disappointed.’

The purpose of his errand told him it was time to cut the banter. He looked through the little square window. Clara was sleeping, and seemed at peace. He went in and placed his cap on the table, the door closing soundlessly behind. No ship’s officer could fault the white counterpane, polished floor, clean windows, and flowers by the bed.

Stimulated by his recent closeness to the nurse, he could only stand and look, in spite of the vacant chair, conscious of altitude and not wanting to lose it. Air grated through thin vibrating lips. He could neither sit nor get too close to the breath of this ancient person who did not seem to be the same imposing Aunt Clara he had met at fourteen. He remembered her smelling of scent and sherry, and holding his hand at the pierhead concert, and laughing at coarse jokes while he was aware of her trying not to. If he laughed, she’d stay quiet, but when she laughed out loud and shook her head he was crushed into a silence which he now realized was fear.

The accuracy of a recollection is always distorted by the powerful anchor of the present. Compared to the strength of the present the past was surely dead. Every statement is a damned lie. Sentences ran through his mind, and left him hoping that the young nurse would come in and set his roses by the spinney of carnations.

Her feet twitched. He wanted to smooth them free of irritation and pain. It would be a small service to do for her. She had been the only person to help him, but why was he the most hated member of that family? She had loathed him out of loyalty to the others, but had made him aware that he belonged to them nevertheless. He had been a call on her sense of duty, so she’d had no option but to do what she could. He understood. It had been sufficient.

Even those who in other circumstances might have deserved more, often ended by getting far less. Complaints should never be made. Injustice was not a disadvantage providing you could work, eat, breathe freely and say what you pleased – enough to make any man or woman happy if they had it in them.

One eye open stopped his thoughts. She shook her head, as if to deny whatever was going through his mind. ‘You were flirting with that nurse.’

He nodded. The chair scraped as he drew it close. Her fingers were so cold he thought they were wet, and he folded his hands over them, leaning to hear what she said.

‘I don’t blame you. I would, if I could.’

The light was dim. She was the last remnant of his mother, apart from himself. Standing in the open with his sextant, and taking a sight on a star before there was no more horizon, he felt afterwards while he worked out his calculations that the star was now lost among millions and of no further use. The heavens swallowed everything, and though they might sooner or later give something back to redress the balance, they would take his aunt like those stars he had sighted on in order to get his position before darkness intervened.

The stars denied any purpose in life except when you were close to the flesh and blood of someone you loved, or near to the person who hated you most. It was all the same, whichever way you defined the contact. He believed, and he didn’t. The truth, which he could never get hold of with sufficient firmness to find his exact emotional position on the earth, caused a pain at his midriff, which he supposed came from the grief of seeing someone die who had wept at his mother’s death, and as someone might see him one day slip out of sight like an elusive star. It was a matter of time. That inexorable eater of human bodies was already hovering. The chronometer in its plush box set to Greenwich, and the deckwatch fixed on local time to record each precise micrometer sighting of morning or evening star, ticked away so many unseen deaths a second, but here in a smallish hospital room he watched the demise of someone whom it had never entered his mind that, because he had lived an existence far from proper human contact, he would one day have to see die. For the sea was only a part of reality. On a ship you belonged to a machine for moving people and goods from one place to another. He had always thought that at sea you were also closer to God than when ashore, but in this room it came to him as a revelation that you were only near to God when you were in the proximity of other people.

The nurse placed the roses on the table. She walked out and made no signals. Clara’s fragile lids fluttered as if intense life still went on under them. Her hand moved in his, but the flame of life would not return to her arctic limbs. His own burning fingers made no difference.

His watch ticked until its sound was blotted out by her breathing. She withdrew her hand and put it under the clothes as if to find some weight there and hurl it away. He walked from the window to the door, and then back again. Her eyes opened and made him afraid, but he looked at her calmly: ‘You’ll be all right.’

She neither saw nor heard. The noise she made sounded like an anchor chain rattling over the side of a ship at the end of a long voyage.

6

In the nurse’s office he was given tea and biscuits. She leaned against the table and looked at him. ‘I think you’re tired.’

He made an effort not to stare at her shapely legs in dark stockings. He had two weeks ashore, but if he were due back on board tomorrow she wouldn’t have noticed any exhaustion. ‘Tell me your name,’ he said, ‘if it’s not a state registered secret.’

‘Beryl.’

‘I like that.’

‘That’s awfully nice of you.’ She smiled at her sarcasm, and brushed both hands against her hips. ‘My boy-friend phoned. He won’t be able to meet me tonight, after all.’

He wasn’t interested. A decade had passed since his suggestion. In every grain in his body he felt emptiness at the prospect of an evening out with this vibrant young woman.

‘Don’t worry about your mother.’

‘Aunt,’ he told her.

‘Aunt, then. She’ll be comfortable. Come and see her tomorrow.’

It was settled. ‘Let’s go, then.’

She came close. Girls today thought nothing of making the first move. She put an arm on his shoulder. ‘Will you spin me sailor’s yarns?’

He kissed her. Or maybe she kissed him. It was hard to say how it happened. ‘And more,’ he said.

Her body-heat was intense, and before they moved apart he knew she couldn’t have missed the stiffness at his trousers. ‘I go off duty in half an hour,’ she said, ‘but there’ll be no strings attached. All right?’

Across the restaurant table he told her what tales came into his mind. She expected it of an older man, listened with a hand at her face as he poured wine and yarned in such a way that she stopped saying how tired he looked. Wine and food charged the veins. She distorted her lips when he smoked between courses. He put the cigarette down. She moved the ashtray to the next table. Clara in the hospital seemed as far away as if he were in Port-au-Prince or Santa Cruz.

They went arm in arm to pick up his bag from the station, then came downhill and walked along the front. Breakers tore against the shingle, an occasional overcharged heave sending spray over their heads. She squeezed his arm as they leaned against the rail. ‘Looks murky. Do you want to be out there?’

‘I’m happier seeing it from here.’ He was at ease on a ship. It was home. Even on watch in a gale he was familiar with all procedures and, unless some malevolent flick of the heavens or waves brought a catastrophe, knew what to do.

‘As long as you don’t go back tonight.’

‘No chance of that.’ Having done most of the talking, he wondered who she was, and what she was really like. If he went mad and proposed marriage and she said yes and they settled down in a little suburban house what would he find out? She was such a mixture of deliberate gaiety and nervous anonymity that when neither spoke he felt as if he were vividly day-dreaming during a monotonous watch in the middle of an ocean. Marriage, he thought, might well be like that.

A touch on the arm brought him back. ‘You’ve had enough of the sea for a while,’ she said, as if trying to tell him something he might not believe.

His half-formed thoughts could only be of use to him after stewing around for a while. ‘I think I’d had enough of the sea when I first clapped eyes on it, but I was fed up even more with something else. Every move you make is an escape from something or other, but I believe I went to sea as a boy because when I first saw such a vast amount of water I was afraid of it.’

They walked across the promenade, back to the shelter of buildings. ‘That’s how people often get into things,’ she said.

It wasn’t, he supposed, that young people these days were especially wise, as that someone of fifty like himself had forgotten the wise or clever things he most likely said at that age. The self-assurance of the young often sounded like wisdom.

She took off her clothes in the hotel room. He was tardy, she said, helping him out of his, not even giving him, he told her, time to read the fire-escape instructions on the back of the door. She laughed, and they kissed before moving to the bed. A sidelight was left on, and she pushed him gently to straddle from above, resting on both palms to draw herself back and forth. It was difficult to lean up and kiss her, but he could touch her breasts which bowed warmly down. She kept her eyes closed, making it impossible to say how far away she was in her mind – or even where he was himself. No star sight could decide their positions in the world, and one could hardly expect both body and horizon to be perfectly joined after so little time together.

Her face was a mask. The run of her velvet movements increased, hair and skin opening, hair swaying across her mouth. She stifled herself on him, breathed noises of separation till the distance between both was immeasurable. He felt her contractions, and his own roots loosened. His existence was divested of meaning, and without regret he let himself go to her vigorous sounds of pleasure.

She was too far away to hear the noise from the mouth of his Aunt Clara which had sounded to him like the chain of an anchor going pell-mell down into the water.

No longer able to support herself, she lay on him and opened her eyes. ‘That was good. I must have needed it.’

He kissed her. ‘You did it by yourself.’

‘The other system doesn’t work for me.’

‘I thought you were taking pity on me.’

‘Funny bloke!’

‘That makes two of us.’

She lessened her reliance on him, and transferred some weight to her elbow. ‘Sorry I’ve got a boy-friend, in some ways.’

‘A beautiful girl like you can’t be unattached.’

‘I’m not glued to him, though,’ she said firmly. ‘He has his piece of action now and again, and so do I. As long as neither of us knows.’

When she lay under him, he went into her.

‘You must have been a long time at sea,’ she said.

There was no way of keeping the talk going. She held him, and moved her hips, and even though her eyes stayed open it was as if neither had any connection with her body. She wanted it to be finished. He went on till he knew she wasn’t able to respond in the same way as before, then felt an ejaculation of pure fire that seemed to have no liquid in it.

She washed herself at the sink.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

She came back to kiss him. ‘Gives you cancer. Or heart disease. You should stop.’

He embraced her. ‘I’m scared to, in case I get cancer.’

He watched her dress, then he washed and put his own clothes on. ‘Don’t come out with me,’ she said.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘I have to be on duty at six, to look after your poor old aunt. And a few others. Stay here and sleep, then you can eat your cornflakes – or whatever they give you in a place like this – read your newspaper, and have a pleasant stroll to the hospital. All right?’

It would have to be. He loved her and let her go, thanking God for such lovely kids. Sleep was a beneficial oblivion.

Almost too late for breakfast, he was grudgingly served. He lifted the lid to see one pale teabag floating in hot water. A cook once served the captain with such vile things, and the pot was thrown off the table. He drank the tasteless tea because he was choking with thirst. The sausages were as soft as putty, and even the trimmings were on the blink, he thought, cracking a piece of cold toast that was sharp enough to cut his throat, and smearing butter that looked suspiciously like margarine. The only genuine article was the bill of twenty pounds.

But he left his tip, and sat out his time while he smoked at the table, unaware that they were waiting for him to move. It was impossible to do so. There was no eagerness to go out and find that his life had changed. He already knew it, felt a relaxation so complete that for the moment it paralysed him. He suddenly did not know how to move, waited to do so, unwilling to give himself an order which he sensed would not be obeyed.

7

As a deck officer it was often necessary to pull back into the protection of his own shiftless and brooding mind, solitary contemplation teaching him how to stay sane when he felt as meaningless as the heaving sea outside the cabin. The ability to discipline his threatened mind into quiescence had come slowly, in tune with the growing power of the years to crush him into an uncontrollable blackness. The conscious effort to build a defensive system left no emotional energy for friends, or for the kind of prolonged relationship which might turn him into a tolerable human being. He considered people in the mass to be as threatening in their ever-changing unknowingness as the sea, which often turned wild by some force over which no agency in the universe seemed to have influence, and flew up against him like an enormous and mindless grey wolf intending to take his life away.

The sea at that moment regarded him as nothing, as no one, as a spark to be extinguished on an impulse of fiendishness. Because he knew that the body was fragile, life brief, and existence finally meaningless, he was always wary, continually on the alert to repel danger from any quarter, cultivating a readiness of mind which created a loneliness that over the years made him appear like a man fighting to keep his grip on a deadly secret which was eating his soul away.

Someone might try to get friendly, but he was incapable of taking any steps in that direction. A man of the sea, he was blocked off at all points from the land, and now looked with misgiving on so many years spent in the condition of a prisoner who had clung to the shreds of his soul only by withdrawing into an uncertain peace at the centre of himself. Unless he had done this he would have gone down into unfeeling oblivion. The dread of losing what little he knew about himself gnawed at the tenuous connection he had with the rest of the world, or with that small part which might be concerned as to whether or not he knew of its existence. His mathematical sharpness was continually in tune with the fair conduct of the moving ship between taking departure and landfall, and at times he felt that such faculties would be overwhelmed unless he murdered either another or himself in an attempt to retain the clarity that was necessary for his work. Unwilling to take alcohol, he would long for the trip to be over, but now craved an end of all voyages that tested him to such limits.

Others who were threatened by the same malaise defeated solitude on long trips by an obsessive ingenuity, which for self-respect they called a hobby. A man’s need to be absorbed often came to him like the rediscovery of the power of love, and might involve an attachment to some musical instrument, or to a collection of objects which, when laid out, created a design or picture that the heart viewed as a unique accomplishment. Outlandish schemes kept a man sane in what might otherwise have been his darkest moments. A project, no matter how futile, was necessary to keep within bounds that person who felt chaos press too close, and who knew that something effective to fix his mind on was the only solution.

Once on a tedious great circular haul across the northern Pacific, the third mate drew an outline of the world on Mercator’s Projection in faint pencil on a large sheet of plywood, but then emphasized the coastlines by sticking live match heads, almost touching, to bring out the shapes of the various land masses. The map included both Polar regions, and took weeks to draw, and longer still to cut off thousands of match heads with a razor and glue them firmly so as to demarcate every gulf, peninsula and large island. The operation went on through several voyages, and Tom wondered where the man found so many matches on a single ship, till he saw him walking up the gangplank at one port of call with two huge parcels.

A closer inspection of the near-finished masterpiece showed that the colour of the match heads varied from dark brown through crimson and scarlet almost to grey, but it was pointed out that when seen from a distance they appeared to match well enough. It was impossible to guess what he intended to do with this impressive portrayal of the world, though he did hint that, because he considered it the finest artefact ever devised – and he claimed to have made some really unusual objects in his time – he might give it as a wedding present to his best friend who, in one of his absences, had latched himself to his girl-friend.

In blue match heads the third mate had yet to chart those trips he had made while this treacherous love affair progressed to its final stage. The happy couple, he said, with a dangerous flash of the eyes, would accept it as an unusual gift from a loser who had no hard feelings. They would put it proudly on their living-room wall, together with the cheaply framed pictures and flying plaster birds, and one day, as they didn’t know what the map was made of, it would ignite in their overheated love nest while they were in bed upstairs doing what he himself should have been at if there had been any justice in the world, which there clearly was not – or at least wouldn’t be until his unique map took fire.

He was one of the looniest, though Tom had known some not too far removed, but whose pastimes, no less absorbing, ended almost as spectacularly. On the other hand, not everyone, either on the upper or lower deck, needed a hobby. Those who did were more interesting because they became garrulous with their new interest in life. But those others who scorned the idea of taking up some hobby often did their everyday jobs without complaint. Space did not frighten them, nor time intimidate. They were the salt of the sea, as it were, and also of the earth who were born with a gyroscope of placidity inside, and a self-correcting rudder that kept them on an even keel, so to speak. They did not fight against the monotony, nor were they unaware of it. For days the sky did not unroll its grey pall of cotton wool. The ship pitched with the same unvarying motion, till their faces took on the pallor of disappointment, though what they were hoping for no one could say. Their curses went little beyond their everyday ingenuity. The ship laboured, and work was done. Every man was different. Those who had no hobby considered that there was enough to do, and barely sufficient time in which to do it.

Nevertheless, the days went at a different rate for those who had a pastime. Tom had noticed that time had no meaning to a man fighting boredom and madness, but that as soon as he took up an occupation apart from his duty, having followed a sudden life-saving instinct, time slowed, and every spare minute spent with his absorbing hobby became an hour, a day, a week, a month of salvation. While it lasted he was a new man, and those who before kept as much out of his way as possible on the narrow spaces of a ship, would nod, smile, or pass an occasional remark. He had become safe. His obsession had rendered him harmless, hemmed him in by bars stronger than steel.

He was a believer who had no thought of making others take up the same occupation. He had no wish to convert anyone to his all-devouring view of a tiny part of the world. In fact total mayhem might have ensued, making an amok appear as a friendly gavotte, if someone had shown competing interest. But there had never been such a case, for which Tom as first officer could only be thankful, and the nouveau-hobbyist was a peaceful man, a menace to no one while he carved, played, scooped, sorted, painted, fluked or fiddled. All was well because it was only the beginning.

From stalking the decks unable to sit still, Sedgemoor filled in a few more numbers of different colours on a canvas which, when finished, would become a passable reproduction of the ‘Mona Lisa’ fit to hang in anyone’s furnished room. Or he arranged his collection of exotic Taiwan bottle-tops on a tray with a sufficiently high rim to prevent them slewing over the floor from the motion of the boat.

The Sparks on one ship rigged up his own amateur radio kit and, when not duty-bound and listening out on 500 kilocycles, tap-chatted to other hams as far off as Chile and Australia, Israel and Japan, thus adding to his wall of colourful QSL cards. Another seaman collected matchboxes and called himself a phillumenist. Someone gathered complete sets of coins from even the smallest of countries, and fixed them into the natty pockets of a large album, while others did the same with cigar bands or stamps, or paper money when their pay ran to it.

An electrician packed his leisure time by adding together all the numbers of the complete London telephone directory, so that he could work out the average digits for the millions of subscribers. He did this even before the days of electronic calculators. After finishing his eight-year task he gave a slip of paper to everyone on board with the mystical telephone number inscribed as if it contained the directions for finding the buried loot of Treasure Island.

Every merchant seaman has come across such people. To an outsider there might seem to be no spare time available, but to a sailor even half an hour can be onerous when the black dog is, as they say, sitting pretty on your left shoulder. Tom had only thought of these varied occupations, a spectrum running through his mind in idle hours, but he had seen others, to their pleasure and their cost, take them up.

A carpenter on one leaky tramp analysed all names on his home sheet of the one-inch ordnance survey map, counting the numbers of farms, villages, towns and rivers that began with any particular letter of the alphabet. He worked out how many names there were to a square mile, added up trigonometrical points and arrived at the average height, calculated the total length of roads, streets, lanes and watercourses. During the whole voyage he hadn’t a minute to spare. In his dedicated fashion he knew that sheet of map better than anyone else in the world – an accomplishment which made him a proud man while his passion lasted.

There was a deckhand who learned navigation, and when the time coincided with his off-duty period he shot the sun at midday or took star sights at dawn and dusk so as to work out his own position of the ship – as if, while he believed God Almighty, he was not so sure about the captain. He had his deckwatch and secondhand sextant, and all paraphernalia necessary for his conclusions. When the captain asked why he didn’t sit for his third mate’s ticket, the man remarked that navigation was his hobby, implying that to be deprived of it would leave him with no further interest in life.

The search for skill and perfection was satisfyingly endless, but a hiatus was sooner or later reached. The attraction of the hobby vanished from one watch to the next. Disillusionment was sudden, final, impossible to explain. Emptiness returned and was more devastating than before. Work and duty were not enough, and with vacuity of purpose came danger. Matchboxes were crushed underfoot, bottle-tops slung into the litter bin, and stamps torn. Paper money stuffed into pockets for spending in bar or brothel would hardly deaden the pain of the hobby’s absence. The coins thrown overboard looked like the tail-end of the Milky Way disappearing into a Black Hole.

The captain of one ship devised an intricate game of naval tactics. His rule book took a hundred pages of typescript, and there was an accompanying packet of charts twice as thick. The captain considered his game suitable for commercial reproduction, saying that at the time of retirement, when he had collated every amendment, he would take it to a firm that was certain to be interested. The only thing, he said, with not a glint of humour in his grey eyes, was to finish before someone stole it from his cabin.

Tom, then second mate, did not want to remind him that similar toys were already on the market, but supposed he already knew. The captain mentioned his game on the bridge one night, and Tom asked how many points one would score for landing a shell on the flight deck of an aircraft-carrier as opposed, for example, to sinking it. Or if half a squadron of Seafires were put out of action, would more points be gained than if the aircraft were old Swordfish biplanes that had plopped into the drink?

The captain, pleased at this seemingly serious response, invited him to play a game. Tom found the book of rules complicated and contradictory, but bluffed his way through a few rounds. The captain, however, paused in the course of slaughterous engagements to alter rules which did not seem to work, and in this way Tom lost the Battle of the Coral Sea twice, and the Battle of Midway once, though he came close to preventing the disaster of Pearl Harbor. The captain cast dice, enthusiastically spun funny little tops, and moved his pieces, while Tom played with caution and perhaps, he thought later, too intently.

The game was laid on a table in the chart room, illuminated by a special light, beyond which radius all seemed dark as the ship laboured through the night. Leaning over the table, the captain placed one of his tokens off the Falkland Islands. He stood straight, and stared at the wall. The unlit pipe fell from his teeth, and scattered ash across the Arabian Peninsula. He trembled wildly, then swayed into the darker area. When he screamed and fell, Tom ran to him. The captain’s limbs were stiff, but he fought to move them. Pained to see him helpless, Tom attempted to lift him into a chair.

The captain raved when Sedgemoor touched his legs and tried to straighten them. His jaws clamped. Sweat dripped from his face.

The engineer calmed him for a time, but through the rest of the night the captain’s demon continued its ravings. Sparkie called the medical service, which radioed back regrets that they had an epileptic on their hands, and sent instructions on how to treat him. Two days later they steamed into Seattle, and the captain was taken ashore, his game neatly parcelled and labelled by Tom, never to be seen by any of them again.

For years he could not pass a toy shop without wondering whether old Captain Robinson had recovered sufficiently to market his weird hobby. He would look among rows of coloured boxed in the hope of seeing that he had. Perhaps the concentration of devising such a complicated and never-ending game had in fact held back the seizure for many years, yet only till such time as would make certain that the first fit would be his last as far as duty at sea was concerned.

Sedgemoor spent weeks blocking in the colours of his ‘Mona Lisa’. He one day looked at his masterpiece (‘A bit too lovingly,’ said the cook), finished but for a few last numbers around the enigmatic yet for him utterly discouraging smile, and deciding he could do no more towards bringing it to life beyond the state of a mere painting, masterpiece though it might be, walked on deck with it, stood on the rail, and fell overboard.

A Filipino deck-swabber saw him go, so that he was soon hauled back. The artist-by-numbers explained to the captain, who had nothing less than murder in his eyes, that he had been taking his painting into the air to dry when a gust of wind caught the large canvas and, acting like a sail, carried him away.

8

The map of the world made from match heads by the third mate was, when complete, the marvel of the ship. Even the captain asked to see it. No one thought to remark on so inflammable a work being kept in one of the cabins. Some must have known that the match heads were lethal, but did not realize the possibility of fire should it rest too long against hot pipes.

Nothing of the sort happened, however. After finishing his object the third mate often placed it on a table, closed his eyes, and ran his fingers along coastlines till he knew it so well that he could tell exactly where he was, as if he were a blind person reading a Braille map of the world. The only man who had not seen it was the cook, and for him the third mate brought out his huge board and set it on the ping-pong table in the crew’s rest room. Those who thought they might not get another opportunity of seeing the map also came in.

Puffing a half-smoked cheroot, the cook leaned over to look. Such utter fascination must have its consequences. Hot ash from his foul-smelling smokeroo landed at the top of Norway and, being neglected while he looked at Australia, one match head ignited with a sprout of blue and yellow flame, generating sufficient heat to make contact with those on either side. A handkerchief, or perhaps an upturned ashtray, could easily have doused this initial conflagration, but no one seemed able to do anything except stare.

A line of blue flame went east along the Siberian coast, and another zig-zagged in a southerly direction down Norway and leapt across to Denmark. The cook was mesmerized, so much so that the cheroot also fell, bounced, and hit the top of Scotland, thus encircling Great Britain by fire, and also Ireland when heat seeped to Ulster via the Mull of Kintyre.

Those who looked were either helpless, or they enjoyed the sight of a disaster for which they had no responsibility. Eurasia went up in smoke, and flame traversed the Bering Straits to surround the Americas. From Asia it travelled via the Malay Peninsula to Indonesia, not even sparing Australia. The board was thick enough not to let the universal flare-up damage the table, and no one troubled to save the world. Not even Madagascar was unscorched, because after the white heat had ignited Africa through the Sinai Peninsula, and fizzed its all-destroying track down the Red Sea (joined by fire coming from a flame that had already entered the Dark Continent, soon to be dark no more, by the Straits of Gibraltar), it jumped sufficiently eastwards to reach that island also. Only a few spots in the Pacific and parts of the south Polar regions were seen to be untouched when the smoke became diagonal rather than vertical, and to these the third mate, after much hand-wringing, gibbering laughter, and a kind of tap-dancing rage, took out his lighter and also put a match.

The smouldering board was thrown over the side, trailing a few rags of smoke, a sound of conflict as it fought and then made peace with the water. Tom lent the third mate a pair of field-glasses so that he could view his devastated creation floating like a mouldy biscuit in the green sea.

No man’s pastime could have ended more satisfactorily. The man had come to the end of hobbying even before the accident, which was why he did not try to stop the powder-train of destruction. He could have saved Africa at least, perhaps half of Asia, conceivably Japan, but the fire combusted from the smouldering in his soul, and he played the malevolent god by letting continent after continent burn. The hobbyman has his own pressurized space within which the obsession plies itself, but sooner or later baleful normality breaks in from the world of so-called sanity, reminding him that even on a ship no man lives alone, and that all were subject to laws which, while not easily comprehended, bound them in ways from which it was impossible to escape.

Tom had noted the dogged preoccupations of the hobbyists which prevented self-knowledge from overwhelming them, or which denied the fact that their prior desolation had been an act of God. They were happy, and good luck to them, but he, apart from the distraction of a few books and records, preferred to let the ocean of twilight and nightly solitude break over him and do its worst. Between watches when he couldn’t sleep, read, listen to music or even talk to himself, he would sit in his darkened cabin with eyes wide open, lulled by the sound of bashing sea and consuming engines, to recall details of his life with as much clarity as imagination could muster, warding off despair with a determination that turned aside any notions of self-pity. Not knowing where he came from, he had no ghosts to push aside. Having no places to go to, there were few hopes on which he could with any realism dwell. Hopes that might be close were under the water through which the ship was pushing its way, and no moment passed when he was not aware that he would only find solutions if he sank endlessly down to look for them.

The energy to do much was present, but to seek any other posture except that of sitting upright on the only chair, would be to pull himself towards the water by a force impossible to hold back from. At the worst, the only way to survive was to stiffen against inner temptations which were stronger and more dangerous than those outside. His spirit, composed of the will to fight against emptiness, was opposed by the cultivation of an even greater emptiness, so that he could look on the original with less fear. From such a vantage point, he was safe – yet one shade nearer to the deadness which is called annihilation.

He descended, yet stayed alert, and hours had vanished into minutes when the steward knocked at his door and came in with tea, which he would drink quickly no matter how hot, then walk on to the bridge, thankful that duty intervened as a form of salvation from attacks against which his life seemed the only defence.

His colleagues sensed by the set of his features that he possessed only the moral strength to do his work, which confirmed him as a type with whom they could do no more than pass the time of the day. Nothing further in the way of friendship was possible. He was not at peace with himself, and was to be avoided. His silent and ungiving expression marked him as ‘one of the old sort’, and they left it at that. He knew what they thought, because the dumb insolence of his own miseries at least had the advantage of making him sensitive to the assumptions of other people concerning himself.

To take up some pastime as a guard against his isolation would be dangerous, for if he later tired of whatever hobby his temperament suggested, the peril of a greater emptiness than had assailed him before would be such that he might find himself beyond all reason for continuing his life. So he became known as the sort of person about whom it was said that his hobby was his work, and work his hobby.

The intensity of the struggle had varied over the years, but it was always present, till he saw that by being a firm part of his existence, such a fight might have saved the only quality his spirit possessed. Safety came to depend on the fight. The effort of contesting his despair pulled him through innumerable voyages. In the valley of the shadow he stayed sane. He remained part of life, fixed into himself, and committed to a battle which became responsible for his survival.

His spirit had chosen the way, because though the price was devastation, there was a reward of a sort, for beyond the turmoil, which there was no evading, was a love of and an enjoyment of life, of belonging to the land and sunsets, and certainly to those storms which, on a smallish ship, and for days at a time, often threatened to make the next minute his last. He was able to observe such manifestations coolly, and do his work, sometimes going from the bridge to the wireless cabin to hear the singing of the morse, and see a weather message written down telling of the storm’s increasing force.

The wireless operator on one ship was Paul Smith, a tall and youthful Ulsterman of forty, with long jaw, short sandy hair, and grey eyes that needled rather than looked. Deck officers rarely mixed with the Sparks on a ship, but Tom, friendly towards few, was undiscriminating when he chose to speak.

Paul tapped at the morse key, and shifted around in his armchair as if afflicted with some incurable disease of the posterior nerves, but which was only a habit of certain wireless officers who took pride in the speed and rhythm of their sending. Tom’s message from the captain was destined for the owners regarding cargo handling at the next port.

Like all wireless operators, Paul knew how to make himself comfortable. There was a cat asleep on the receiver, a large well-fed unfriendly ginger beast. A tea-making machine lay within arm’s radius, and two pots of flowers by the porthole, as well as framed photographs of Paul’s family, and scenic views of Ulster set in Union Jack frames and pinned by the transmitter.

‘It’s where I’m going when my time’s up,’ he called out. ‘There’s a message coming, so wait for it, if you like.’

‘I will.’ He looked along a shelf of books when Paul, with earphones clamped, began to write; glanced through a thin volume whose theme was that the British people were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. He had never heard of such a notion, though Paul had, because the pages were scratched with annotations. The argument was, Tom gathered, that the British were Sons (and presumably Daughters) of Abraham, who would one day resume their rightful place in Palestine – the book having been printed before the modern Israel was formed. An army of British-Israelite regiments would conquer the country from the Heathen (Gentile) Turk and run the country as part of the Empire before handing it over to the Jews as the heritage which had been promised by God to Abraham and his progeny for ever. The Jews of the earth would return, it being assumed that they would all wish to, under the protection of the British Government, and eventually the Kingdom of God would come about on earth because the Jews would finally become Christians.

Tom thought that the Jews might have a thing or two to say about this last point, but he read a few more pages to discover that the British, being Israelites (tell that to my Aunt Clara, he thought), would keep the world policed from the strategical centre of Palestine under a friendly government of Christian Israelites. For the British were the same people as the Hebrews, while other nations were referred to as ‘Gentiles’. The author quoted from the Holy Scriptures, and Tom thought his prophecies remarkable considering the present reality of Israel. He slid the book back on the shelf, and sat down.

Paul had got rid of the wireless message. ‘Convinced?’

‘I’m not much of a Bible scholar.’

He shook his head. ‘But he’s got something?’

It cost nothing to agree. ‘I suppose he has.’

Electrical chatter squeaked in through the atmospherics, and Paul gave the key a few punches as if to keep them quiet. ‘He knew that politics and religion have always been bound together, and always will be. The West is cartwheeling towards destruction because it has ceased to believe it. The Russians know it, and their communism is going full blast to convert the world. The first thing the Russians want are the Holy Places of Jerusalem so that they can control the world. It’s been their aim for centuries, and they’ll never let go. They want to wipe out our religion, but can’t because the other tribes of Israel are already back there to guard Jerusalem. Our great British-Israelite statesman David Balfour made arrangements for this in 1917. He knew that Western civilization and our Israelite religion depended on the existence of Israel, and God was in his right mind when the Promised Land was again made available to His scattered people – to whom you and I belong, by the way. The Jews in Israel have not yet taken to accepting the divinity of Jesus, but no scheme is perfect, and there is still time.’

Anything was possible, Tom thought, from the mouths of babes and radio operators. For ten more minutes Paul proved that at least he was good at scripture, and Tom wondered whether in idle moments he didn’t set his transmitter on to an empty wavelength and bash out exhortations in the hope of stunning some lonely radio man into instant conversion.

‘You’re not listening,’ Paul rapped out.

He was, and said so.

Paul’s fingertips keyed an outlandish rhythm into the transmitter. ‘What were my last words?’

To think and hear at the same time was no feat for a deck officer. ‘You said, “For Zion’s sake I will not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest.”’

When Paul leaned, Tom drew both hands back in case he tried to grasp them. ‘We British belong to the same Hebrew race by birthright, and you also are one of the annointed of the Lord!’ He flipped a switch, which caused water in the kettle to heat. ‘Israel is our ally against the Gentiles and Heathens of the world because we too have lived by the Book and worshipped the One Faceless God Who Shall Be Nameless. We have our own nation back again, with eternal Jerusalem as the capital city. He brought us to the dust, but has lifted us to our appointed places!’

Tom was as diffident with his questions as he would want a person to be who thought to ask something of him. A man’s views were bound up with his complete mental nuts and bolts, and you had to be careful. ‘Have you always known this?’

Without leaving his chair Paul drew milk and cream-biscuits from a small refrigerator by the side of the goniometer.

‘Sugar?’

Tom nodded, and passed tea cups from a row of plastic hooks.

‘My parents believed, may they rest in peace, that the British were a Lost Tribe with all the characteristics of the Wandering Jews. I might not have talked to you if God hadn’t led you to the one book which dealt with this universal question. When I glanced at your face I knew you were one of us.’

He made the best cup of tea on the ship, whatever his opinions and obsessions. ‘I’ll think about it.’

The effort of talking made Paul sweat more than when he worked at his wireless gear. ‘If you believe, the thought comes of itself. Logic falls into place when you have faith. When I took the log to the captain for signing the other day and explained to him that we were all Jews he seemed a wee bit puzzled, but he’s a man of learning, and agreed eventually that the State of Israel was vital to our world. Other nations resent it, but that’s because the idea of redemption through Israel is anathema to anti-Semites.’

Paul’s monologue sung on in the pertinent tones of his native Ulster, and Tom wanted to continue listening, because the voice of this biblical contortionist comforted him like the rhythmical swish of the sea when he was trying to rest. But to stay was a luxury he could not enjoy. ‘I have to get back to duty. Then I must write a letter to my aunt – or a postcard at any rate. Save me doing it on shore tomorrow.’

He reached out, and handed the book to him. ‘Take it with you. I’d like you to have it.’

Tom put it in his pocket. ‘Kind of you. I’ll have another crack at it.’

A volume, perhaps on the same subject – he thought all of them were – was dislodged by Paul’s haste and fell to the floor, and Tom was amused to see Paul press his lips to the cover before putting it back. He had found a way of filling his days at sea that did not depend on manual dexterity, or the enthusiasm of acquiring different versions of the same object, or the interest of calculations that were an end in themselves, but by a notion that was perpetrated by a belief in God, and reinforced by faith in the destiny of a people to whom he felt linked in a personal and moral way – and who could say how right or wrong he was?

From within his own fortress Tom envied no man, but thought no theory could be insane that kept the radio officer as sane as he generally appeared. Even though he himself needed no religion, and no such bizarre side-issue, he knew that Paul had found more stability than the boozers, gamblers, womanizers, and plain black-dog brooders of the maritime or any other fraternity. He was generous and dependable, good at his profession, and within his simplicity lay imagination and even humour, as well as a keen ability to put forth his argument. He studied Hebrew so as to prepare himself for the day when he would, he said, go to the Promised Land. When it did not interfere with his watch-keeping he listened to short-wave broadcasts from Jerusalem, towards which he beamed an aerial so that he would receive news from the middle of the world: ‘On perilous oceans I can, by God’s will, hear everything loud and clear.’

The Old Man nobbled him a few days later, and in spite of his sixty years and an air of nothing on earth being set to trouble him, grasped Tom’s arm and said: ‘Has that mad bloody Sparks been getting on to you about all of us being Jews yet? He has? I can see he has. Don’t deny it. I’ll have to get rid of him. Can’t go on like this. He converted the chief engineer yesterday, and once he gets a bee in his bonnet there’s no telling what happens. Not that I’ve anything against the Jews, mind you – no, not at all, Mr Phillips – but I can’t have the blue-and-white flag run up on my ship. You know what the Mozzies are – it’s like a red rag to a bull. No, I’ll have to get rid of him.’ And he went away shaking his head. ‘It’s a pity, though, a great pity to have such a good Sparks going off his rocker!’

9

He relit his pipe and opened the book while the train was sucked through the lights of Gatwick. Instead of reading, he preferred to sample his own immense space which, if nothing else, made him well off in possessing an area that kept people at a distance, so that he could manoeuvre without harming himself or causing offence to others. Awareness of space had always kept his head clear on meeting the greater and often far from friendly vastness of the sea, for if you weren’t afraid of your own space it wasn’t difficult to meet that of the ocean which, sometimes denying that space existed, reduced the world to a boxroom of unexpected perils.

Clara had occupied sufficient space in his life for him to send her postcards and telegrams, even the occasional letter, as echo-sounders registering her presence in himself. On their first meeting she had stepped into his space without asking, and stayed there because he realized no person could exist in absolute emptiness. She had gone into a bigger space than he could yet know about, and had left his own space emptier than any in which he had so far existed.

He went to the hospital. His age took on importance now that the one person close to him was dead. He had felt her solid assistance without seriously admitting it, and at the undertaker’s kissed her lips for the first and last time. On meeting her he had looked forward to the bigger space seen from her living-room window, and the only other space that lay before him now was the one she had already gone to.

He laid a cool finger on her colder forehead. People moved beyond the curtain. The more subtly you perceived life the more brutal it appeared. He stood straight, hands at his side. She had little space in that narrow box, and would have even less when the lid went down and wet earth was packed around. Who needed more room when the spirit was absent?

He would prefer to be buried into a bigger space than that of soil, for his body to meet water without an encasing box. Either the fishes got you, or the worms. He did not want to die because there was still too much to think about. There would be, right to the end, he didn’t doubt. He shrugged, which she would never have allowed, then went out, and walked by the public library and art gallery, to sit in the park by himself for half an hour.

A patient at the hospital told him that Beryl had gone to lunch. Must have seen us holding hands when we left last night. He signed for his aunt’s wallet and suitcase in the ward sister’s office, then took a taxi to Clara’s flat. From the large window he saw the roughening indigo sea on which two boats struggled. The surface changed from hour to hour, but was the same that had press-ganged him thirty-five years before.

He could sit without being told, but looked at the elegant unsafe chair and smiled at the thought of breaking it leg by leg. He took the marble-encased timepiece from the shelf, set the hands and turned the large key at the back, offended to see a clock not fulfilling its purpose. In the kitchen he opened a bottle of whisky and poured half a tumbler before returning to his stance by the window.

The view paralysed him. He sipped at the glass and looked at the sea. Toy boats on a bilious pond. Arms dead except to drink, sea dead except to swallow, landfall every few days, the stink of diesel oil and salt, coffee and disinfectant, stale tobacco and stew. The smell of heat and that peculiar odour of invigorating cold: he did not want to go back. The spell was broken. She had kept him at it long enough. He had searched all lanes and knew it well, yet had found nothing. More years than he had fingers and toes, as an old salt said. His contract had two months to run, then he would take his last sway down the gangplank to ironical cheers, and never a look back from dock gate or customs shed. A mote in the eye for ever as his first love vanished.

Dust flew when he hit a velvet-covered chair. He telephoned the hospital. She hadn’t given her second name, but they knew who he meant. ‘Are you free for dinner?’

A tone of nothing-doing came from her. ‘Boy-friend tonight. Really. All right?’

‘Some other time?’

‘Try when you can. It was fine last night. Really came off well, didn’t it?’

‘I liked it, too.’

‘Sorry about your mother.’

‘Aunt.’

‘Aunt, I mean. Must go. Busy-busy! Bye now.’

‘Goodbye, old girl.’

He was still a sailor: ‘as much at sea on land, as I am on land at sea’ – so the ditty went. The vacuum cleaner fell from its cupboard, and he took his jacket off, running the machine along lane after lane of carpet till dusk came and he switched on every table lamp and the overhead chandelier in a flush expenditure of amps that the flat couldn’t have seen for years.

A few dozen tins of food stood ready as if for another bout of wartime shortage. He opened asparagus and corned beef. There was a case of wine, and bottles of port and sherry. He found a jar of coffee beans, and tinned pineapple for dessert.

He wandered around the flat while eating. The built-in wardrobe held scores of dresses. A mothball smell when he slid back the door was almost solid. He banged it shut. In a drawer of her desk he found an album with snapshots of his mother which Clara had never shown. She hadn’t cared to disturb him, he supposed, by what he had never known. Not wanting to complicate their relationship, she had kept him totally in her power.

He went back to the dining-room to finish his meal, turning off the electric lights and setting out enough candles to see by. Clara had tied him firmly to herself by the simple trick of endeavouring to keep him as far away from her as possible. He regretted not having visited her more often. She had wanted it that way, and could no longer answer his questions. Perhaps her purpose had been to open his mind to speculation the moment she was no longer here.

She had disliked him so much, yet been kind to him. There was no doubt about it. His sextant and deckwatch from Potters had been paid for by her, and she had settled the bill for his third mate’s uniform, all by way of accepting responsibility for his fateful glance out of her window.

‘Responsibility,’ she told him, and he wondered in his young arrogance where she could have read it, ‘is the hallmark of maturity. I accept the responsibility for whatever I have caused in this life, and I expect you to act in the same way.’

She had said no more, for he was being taken to tea at the Metropole, where she talked only about the weather, and his career. She checked his appearance and behaviour as if he were still a boy, and he held himself from being cheeky because he knew by then that he was afraid of her.

He fetched a pack of Jamaican cigars from his bag, and smoked by the living-room window so that he could hear the thump of breakers between passing traffic. He notified her death to The Times, more to inform himself than to tell anyone who might still remember. On the telephone her solicitor said he would like to see him. ‘You’re her only beneficiary, and have a fair amount coming to you after probate, taxes, duties and all costs have been settled. Hard to say how much. Something like three hundred thousand, I’d say. She was fond of you. After the funeral will be a good time for us to meet. You will be staying till then, I expect. Keep account of all receipts and expenses regarding death certificate, funeral costs, rates on the flat, and so on. It’s your responsibility now.’

A swollen bank book would be an affliction. His savings and pension plan were enough for his needs. Having been free of land-ties all his life he had no worries. See her well buried, get back to the ship, and stay for as long as you can stand by the wheel and lift a sextant, then find a Pacific island where you can live like a king on your bit of income. He’d heard talk of places where you wanted for nothing as long as you didn’t want much.

The sea glistened in the morning, ominous blades of light across the surface, that could change all too quickly into a white-capped Force Ten blow-up with four horizons only as far away as the hand could reach. Yet it would alter to a grey and tolerable chop before long. The state of the sea never stayed the same, you could be sure of that, which fortunately applied to everything else as well.

He once heard talk of a sailor who carried a piece of rope in his kit to hang himself if things got too bad. When he showed the rope to his shipmates they had a good laugh and thought what a way to make sure you never did yank yourself up. The tale of the bloke with the portable rope went the rounds for years till he met an acquaintance in Galveston who said: ‘Remember Jimmy Hawkins on the old ship Alinoa who always had a rope in his kit? Well, he actually topped himself. The Sparks told me, who’d got it from another sparky-bloke who was on the very old tub that Jimmy did for himself. We learned it only a few hours after it had happened. You know how fast news can travel when those mad wireless operators get spirit-tapping away. I expect the story is still bouncing into all sorts of one-eyed french-letter grateholes that haven’t heard about it yet. But what misery old Jimmy must have gone through before doing a crazy thing like that.’

No, he wasn’t built in any way, shape or form, he told himself, to go the way of Saintly Jimmy. Neither the igloo of his heart nor the fireplace of his brain was set on it, and in any case what would Clara say if ever he did, and they met in the lobby of the ‘Nevermore Hotel’?

10

The train squeaked alongside the platform, and stopped to the sound of a few doors banging back against the carriages. He steadied the handle and manoeuvred his luggage. There were no trolleys, and no such people as porters any more. Which was why, Clara said, she hadn’t travelled in the last ten years. One needed looking after, but nowadays no one wanted your florins, so you had better stay at home.

He lugged his stuff through the desolate station. There were more down-and-outs on the benches than a few years ago. He found it strange that though there were a million unemployed no one wanted the work of cleaning the station, which was looking more like some God-forsaken place in South America.

At Clara’s funeral, sunlight flamed through the windows while the chaplain read his piece. There were more people than expected. She had given money every Christmas to those who worked in the shops, to the milkman and the postman, to rubbish collectors and caretakers, and some came to see her buried.

By the grave Beryl held his hand, her glove curving over his, but he drew away so as to bring his right arm up into a salute which he assumed his aunt would expect. They went to the flat for food and drinks, and when everyone had left he telephoned for a taxi to take Beryl to the hospital. He was glad to be alone.

A few more trips at sea allowed him to ponder on what to do, and to get so fed up with life on board that he had no alternative but to leave. When taxes had been paid from Clara’s estate he found it hard to believe that so much money was his. In the orphanage he started with a penny a week, and never had more than the ten-shilling note she had given him till he went into the Merchant Navy. He made certain never to lack a reserve of money. Even with the few pounds a month of those days it was possible to put a little cash into the bank, his self-respect added to by the fact that he had earned it. Instead of spending more than he allowed himself, he found excitement in spare-time reading for his various certificates. He searched secondhand bookshops in Liverpool and Preston for texbooks which, though a few years out of date, served for his studies. After thirty years of varying parsimony he would need no other money than his own to live on when he left the sea, yet the invested capital of Clara’s assets would bring in more than thirty thousand a year before tax. Twelve months ago he’d been alone in his simple life, but now he had a lawyer, an accountant, and a broker. The whole of the family money had devolved on to him.

His London room felt more like home than Clara’s flat. Five years ago he had seen an advertisement at a tobacconist’s, went to look, and rented it. He sat back in the taxi. Cars flashed by on Park Lane. He felt free, lost in space, without a ship and with nothing to do, too disorientated to know whether or not he liked it. The nearest human being seemed as far as the closest star. No one could reach him. Neither could he touch them. He didn’t want to. Some hardly visible being ran across the road, and the driver braked: ‘Did you see that meshugge?’

He slid the window a few inches open. ‘I did.’

‘Drunk.’

They turned into the Bayswater Road. ‘It seemed like it.’

He looked for a star, to reassure himself that he existed, but the sodium orange lights made a ceiling that hid them. Beryl had telephoned some days after the funeral. ‘What about tonight, sailor?’

‘Tonight?’

‘My boy-friend’s away.’ Her tone clashed with the shield that covered his grief.

‘I’m busy,’ he said.

The intense feeling of loss surprised him. Except to shop for food he didn’t leave the flat till the time to go back to his ship. He looked at the changing sheet of sea during the day, and paced at night with all lights on. He could not say what he thought. Hours of dark and light passed as if the time they spanned did not exist. His life had no meaning. He tried to understand the tenuous connections that held one person to another, and knew that if he didn’t find an answer in the place where Clara had lived he would not be able to do so when he went back to sea.

The pull of luggage told him he was alive and fit. The taxi driver carried one case to the kerb and offered to help him upstairs, but Tom said he could manage. A ten-watt bulb on the top landing gave more shadow than light. There was a glow under next door and he wondered who was there, before turning to sort among his wad of keys. He pushed the cases across the threshold with his foot, then hauled in the hold-all. The damp wallpaper smelled as if some occupant had rotted there. He unscrewed the release on the Rippengilles stove and heard the reassuring bubble as paraffin went down into the burner ring.

His only secure space on shore was tidy but needed heat. Before going back to sea the floor was swept and books placed on the shelf. Dishes were washed and put away, and bedclothes folded on to the mattress as neatly as any recruit’s. A small wooden box on the table contained rations of coffee, tea, soda biscuits and sardines. There were matches in a plastic case, a two-ounce tin of tobacco, a packet of pipe cleaners, a quarter-bottle of whisky and some cigars. A pile of cheap classics lay on top of his record player. He plugged in the radio, and tuned to the nearest caterwauling transmitter so that the room would have a voice to which he need not listen.

Until the heat took hold he kept warm by unpacking. He put his uniform and spare suit into a shallow cupboard which did for a wardrobe, remembering how an otherwise taciturn old captain once said: ‘A good mariner wants for little, and needs little. Necessaries are luxuries, but no luxury is necessary’ – a habit of speaking which caused Paul the wireless operator to refer to him as Captain Epigram.

He looked along the spines of his books: a set of Gibbon, all of Dickens except A Tale of Two Cities which someone had taken a fancy to, odd compendiums of geography and travel published donkey’s years ago, a Bible lifted from some hotel, his old seamanship and navigation manuals, a few maps and novels brought back from various parts of the world. There was no reason to keep them, yet they were the capes and pinpoints of his recollections, each marking an otherwise empty log of a dead-reckoning plot, and never to be replaced by Clara’s inherited library of leatherbound editions. If his own motley books had been packed in a watertight container and floated to the beach of a desert island on which he was stranded he would want for little in the way of reading till a banana boat came to his rescue.

The radio broke into his thoughts, and he diminished its noise before turning to make the bed. Tripping against a shoe reminded him that it was time to sleep. He asked what he was doing here, and answered that he needed refuge from Clara’s flat where no reflection seemed to be his own. Between these four walls he had never known anyone but himself.

His eyes obstinately fought the dead weight of the body pushing against them. Braying music was halted by the rattle of news and weather: frost was coming, cold and clear, a Force Nothing easterly with chilly sunshine to get the black dog off old Beaufort’s back. Water jiggered in next door’s tap, though the place was quieter than when a student and his girl-friend used to hammer each other under the sound-umbrella of a pop group that shook the windows.

He screwed down the Rippengilles to bubble itself out, but left the wireless on in case silence should disturb his peace of mind while going to sleep. On a ship, engines rattled the bones for weeks at a time, and there was a vigorous thudding of water to go with it. He needed noise in order to sleep, as if he were still on board and had to wake up in four hours.

The easiest way to attain unbroken repose was to drink alcohol till he was unconscious, but he was no longer willing for such dynamite to blow down the walls that separated him from peace. His patience would get him there in its own good time, and if it baulked at the task then he would lie there till it did.

Clara had never suspected his occasional indulgence in alcoholic blackouts – as far as he knew, though she was a realistic woman who was perhaps more familiar with the world’s ways, and those of men who went to sea, than he realized. Even so, she certainly did not imagine the depth of his occasional severance from reality and decency. On wondering whether she had died in order that he could reform, he felt the light of morning behind his eyelids.