The Cruel Sea (1951) (17 page)

Bennett was talking to a woman in a hotel bedroom. She was the usual woman – infinitely tainted, infinitely practised, hard as nails; it was the usual room. The hotel stood, or rather lay in wait, at the back of the dock area; it was dedicated to a fornication so incessant and so transitory that there were often more people passing up and down the stairs than using the bedrooms. It was like a dirty hive, serving a machine-made sexuality, emitting a drone of love . . . If Bennett had known that the building housed, at that particular moment, four members of
Compass Rose’s
crew besides himself, it would probably have struck him as a form of insubordination. He would not have considered that he himself was in the wrong place.

Now he untied his tie before the tarnished mirror, while behind him the bed springs creaked as the woman composed herself for the encounter. While thus occupied, they made the conversation appropriate to the moment.

‘Did you have a nice voyage, dear?’

‘Lousy,’ said Bennett briefly. ‘Gets worse every time. I reckon I’m going to quit.’

‘You can’t do that, can you?’

‘I’ll find a way. They can’t keep me cooped up in a little crap boat like that for ever.’

‘It must be funny on a boat – a lot of men all jammed up together. What d’you talk about?’

Bennett, who was taking off his trousers, paused. ‘What do you think?’

‘Love, eh? Love all the time, I suppose.’

‘Something like that.’

‘They say sailors are all the same.’ The woman, whom no violence and no crudity incidental to her trade could now surprise, sketched a sentimental sigh. It was a minor triumph of artifice over conviction. ‘There was a bit in the
Mirror
about it the other day – how they were always on the lookout for pen pals.’

‘First I’ve heard of it,’ said Bennett. He leered. ‘They’re always on the lookout for something, but they don’t want to use a pen in it.’

The woman smiled mechanically. For her, no indecent jokes were new, or funny, but they seemed to entrance the customers. One man had nearly fallen out of bed, telling her about a friend of his who got cramp on the job and had to be carted off to hospital, with the girl beside him on the stretcher. For the life of her, she couldn’t crack a smile about that one . . .

‘Well,’ said Bennett, turning to the bed, ‘this is what I’ve been waiting for.’

‘My!’ said the woman, almost immediately. ‘You
are
passionate, aren’t you! Sure you’re not French?’

‘There’s only one thing French about me,’ said Bennett, and roared with sudden laughter.

The woman smiled again. Very comical . . . ‘I’m sure you must be French,’ she insisted. ‘They say they’re too bloody passionate to live.’

‘You can’t hold on to it for ever,’ said Bennett explanatorily. ‘I’ve been carrying this lot around for four months.’

‘It all adds up, doesn’t it?’ said the woman vaguely. ‘Careful now . . .’

Morell, who had very much wanted a quiet evening at home, said: ‘Of course, darling. Where would you like to go?’

Elaine Morell did not answer immediately. There were so many lovely places and they had only five days to cover them . . . Of course, she could go anywhere she liked, whether he were here or not, but it was nice to make the most of him while he
was
here – he looked so sweet in his uniform, even though the single thin stripe was a bit depressing. She pulled a face at herself in the dressing table mirror, adjusted a curl at the nape of her neck, and said: ‘You decide, darling. It’s your leave, after all.’

Morell, lounging behind her on the quilted bed, wondered if that were quite true. He wondered, indeed, whether anything really belonged to him, where his wife was concerned: he found her so incredibly lovely and persuasive that all his will, all his competent judgement, could be swamped on the instant, and he would surrender the most cherished project at a flick of her fingers. The world saw him as a grave young man, with a capable brain, developing judgement, and a future in the law; it did not see, it could not guess, how his marriage had proved a sensual solvent for this whole fabric.

She was a minor actress, on the fringe of the West End stage: she was not appearing at the moment – the war seemed to have made her so very busy in other ways . . . When Morell had married her, it was almost as if he were playing a part himself, so incongruous did the combination of himself and this glamorous creature seem: the incongruity had been solved by his ceasing, for all intents and purposes, to be himself at all, when he was with her. He spoke to her as he spoke to no one else, with a tender diffidence which none of his friends would have recognised or credited: he listened to her talking, and answered her, as if the brittle chatter of her lovely mouth had been his lordship’s address to the jury. He also did exactly as he was told.

At this moment, for instance, he was desperately tired: it would be the third night running they had gone out to dine or to dance, and he wanted peace, he wanted Elaine to himself. But from the beginning she had proclaimed that she wished to show him off everywhere, and so it had been a procession of cocktail parties, restaurants, and nightclubs: even on his first evening, they had not returned home to their flat until four in the morning. Of course, she had made it up then, made it up with a cunning intensity which had, after three months without her, swamped and overthrown his senses. It seemed that she had felt that too. ‘Darling,’ she had said, with that murmur in her throat which could stir something inside him, even in a moment of satiety. ‘Darling, you must go away more often, or something – that was terrific!’

In the face of so fierce a welcome, how difficult to refuse her anything; and if he did refuse her (though this was a thought for secrecy), how quickly that fervour might dry up . . . She was beautiful – not in a remote fashion, but with a face which beckoned, a mouth formed only for kissing, and a body so soft, so shapely, and so glowing that its only conceivable purpose was to fuse with the sinewed imprint of a man’s. She had, for Morell, a sensual pull which two years of marriage had never assuaged: her moving limbs induced in him an almost insane urgency, her body seemed to flicker for his delight. Even, as now, to watch her dressing, perfuming her neck and shoulders, adjusting a brassiere to encase her flawless breasts, was intolerably exciting . . . Whenever she wanted, she could promote this frenzy: whenever she did not want, the frenzy was there in a yet more desperate degree.

Of course she demanded too much, of course she betrayed the cool man he had imagined himself to be. But a single glance of hers, a single movement, squared the account, making it natural and essential to please her, and boorish to do otherwise. And, once again, if he
didn’t
please her, if he failed to follow her lead in anything, it became dangerous, it was more than he dared. There were so many other people . . .

One of these other people indeed had telephoned, on Morell’s first evening at home. From her bath Elaine had called: ‘Answer that, darling – I’m wet,’ and when he lifted the receiver a man’s voice, against a background of music and other voices, had broken in immediately: ‘Elaine? There’s a swell party here, but we need that beautiful body – how about coming over?’

Morell said, rather foolishly: ‘Hallo?’

‘Oh, sorry,’ said the voice. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Morell.’

‘Who?’

‘Morell.’

‘Oh – yes.’ An odd laugh. ‘Sorry, old boy, I didn’t know you were back.’

‘I’ll tell my wife you called,’ said Morell. ‘Who is it speaking?’

‘Doesn’t matter – forget it. G’bye.’ He sounded rather drunk, but not as drunk as all that.

That evening, once again, they danced till very late, in a nightclub so hot, so noisy, and so uninhibited that it might have been part of a zoo. It was very crowded. Elaine seemed to know a great many people, among them half a dozen Air Force pilots who came up in a solid procession to ask her to dance. At one point, clinging to Morell in the twilight of the dance floor, she had stroked his sleeve and murmured: ‘Darling, how long before you get promoted?’ and he had ceased to be proud of her head on his shoulder, and felt rather foolish instead. But, as usual, she drove all that away, as soon as they were home: in bed at last, erotic with alcohol, she swamped and sucked him of fervour till the fatigue of love became an aching reality, and sleep the only drug to ease it.

It was his leave, after all.

With Mavis, Ferraby spent a wonderful and tender period. She was now living with her mother, and the circumstances – a cramped, suburban house at Purley, a lack of privacy at meals and in the evenings – were not ideal; but it was so lovely to see her again, so lovely to
be
somebody, to be considered and deferred to, after the brusque contempt of
Compass Rose,
that the drawbacks were forgotten. The freedom from constraint, and the fading out of the hatred at close quarters, were tangible blessings; and in their private times together, the return to tenderness proffered so startling a contrast that, to begin with, he could scarcely believe it.

‘He must be absolutely beastly!’ said Mavis indignantly, when Ferraby had told her something of Bennett’s manners and methods. ‘Why do they allow it?’

‘It’s discipline,’ said Ferraby vaguely. He did not really believe this, nor had he, for very shame, told her the full story; but he did not want the shadow to stay where it had fallen. ‘The First Lieutenant’s meant to run the ship really, and that means the officers as well.’

‘But he needn’t be so horrid about it.’

‘He’s like that.’

‘They oughtn’t to allow it,’ she said again. ‘I’d like to give him a piece of my mind.’

Dear Mavis, so sweet and attractive in slacks and the blue Angora jersey, with her little face screwed up in anger and sadness . . . He kissed her, and said: ‘Let’s forget about it. How about going for a walk?’

‘If you’re not too tired.’

He looked at her, and smiled. ‘Why should I be too tired?’

She blushed, not meeting his eye. ‘Gordon Ferraby, you’re a disgrace . . . You know quite well what I meant.’

He felt very masculine as he took her arm.

But the mention of Bennett’s name must have started a train of thought which remained with him. That night he dreamed of
Compass Rose
in a storm, and of Bennett shouting at him and refusing to let him issue the right helm orders, so that they were in danger of running ashore: he woke up, yelling at the top of his voice and sweating with panic, just as the ship drove through smoking breakers towards a line of rocks . . . Mavis, putting her arms round him, was appalled at the feel of his wet trembling body and at the idea, which each shudder communicated, of an emotional turmoil greater than he could bear: when he apologised for the noise he had made, it was as if he were excusing some hopeless deformity for which he deserved all the pity in her heart.

‘I must have been dreaming,’ he muttered hoarsely. ‘I’m sorry, darling.’

‘What was the dream about, Gordon?’

‘The ship.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’ve forgotten.’ But after a moment he did start to tell her, while she held him close and listened with misgiving and with a new understanding compassion flooding through her: for in the end he told her everything – his fears and failures, the guilty doubt of his fitness for the job, the true story of the last few months. It was easier in the dark, with her head on his shoulder, and, as usual with her, there was no shame in confession; indeed, it was she who was the more moved when he had finished, who suffered his own fear of returning after the leave was finished, and felt it as her own miserable dilemma. Above all, she was shaken by the revelation, which nothing in his cheerful letters to her had even hinted at. This was not the man she knew and had married: what had they done to him?

They talked far into the night. There was little she could give him save the assurance of her own confidence: it sounded pathetically inadequate, against the wretched background he had sketched for her. She remembered for long afterwards a single stubborn sentence of his, which he repeated whenever she suggested that he might ask for a different job: ‘I can’t give up something I volunteered for.’ She could not persuade him either that the job was proving infinitely harder than he had imagined, and might thus be honourably abandoned, or that Bennett was so horrible a complication that the whole basis of his engagement was changed. Somewhere deep inside him, an obstinate self-destroying will was at work, forbidding him to surrender.

For some reason, after that night, she hoped that she would have a child as soon as possible.

Lockhart, having lost the toss, stayed aboard as duty officer. It would be his turn for leave next time, and in any case he found that he did not mind being left behind: it was the sort of rest he needed, and in his spare time he occupied himself much as he would have done on leave – reading, listening to the radio, unwinding the tight coil of the past few months.
Compass Rose,
with her boilers blown down and no fans working, was cool and silent: it was odd to feel the ship, hitherto so active and alive, sinking back into a suspended laziness which matched his own. There was very little to do, and nothing that demanded any sort of concentration on his part: he saw the hands fall in after breakfast, and told Leading-Seaman Phillips what had to be done in the way of sweeping and painting: he opened the mail, in case there was anything urgent: he despatched the liberty men ashore, clean and tidy, at four o’clock; and he went round the ship at nine in the evening, to see that all was secure for the night. Meals were something of a picnic: both the leading-cook and Carslake, the leading-steward, were on leave, and his welfare was in the hands of the second steward, Tomlinson, who had once had a coffee stall in the Edgware Road and whose methods were better suited to a quick turnover in saveloys and hot pies, cash only and no back answers, than to the gentler world of the wardroom. But since, being alone, Lockhart had revived his peacetime habit of reading all the time he was eating, the slapdash service and the indifferent food did not greatly worry him.