We Joined The Navy (17 page)

George Dewberry led the way by instinct into the first bar.

The walls were tiled with scenes from the bullfight. The bar itself was of hard black wood polished with a wet cloth and barrels of sherry were stacked to the roof behind it. The bartender kept each customer’s score chalked on the bar and no money passed until the customer was ready to leave. Each drinker was besieged by a clamouring crowd of shoe-shine boys, men selling fountain pens and postcards, and small girls holding baskets of peanuts and flowers.

The bar was crowded with officers from
Barsetshire
, among them The Bodger, who had his arm round the bartender’s wife, and was loudly calling for Fundadore for both of them.

Raymond Ball looked around him.

‘Might as well be back in
Barsetshire
’ he said disgustedly. ‘Come on, Paul. Let’s try somewhere else. This place is too sordid for words.’

They collected George Dewberry, who, in one crowded minute, had had his right shoe polished and had bought three bags of peanuts, a carnation and a postcard of two women wrestling with a donkey, and went outside.

Deeper in the town they came upon a street which reeked of lechery. The air smelt sickly, over-ripe with the smell of offal and garbage. The very houses huddled lewdly together and women in the doorways winked invitingly at the cadets and leapt out into the street to snatch at them.

‘Golly!’ said Paul. ‘This is like something out of Hogarth in one of his juicier moods. Let’s get out of the light before we all get raped.’

Raymond Ball might have considered the bar they had just left sordid, but the first bar the cadets tried in this street showed him that there were still depths they had not plumbed.

The bar was small and dark and had a stale smell. It contained two women, one behind the bar and the other in front.

Both were past their prime but they had been good-looking in their youth and even now they had preserved a lush maturity of figure which made George Dewberry’s eyes pop.

‘Ai-yai-
yai
!’ he said excitedly.

‘Quiet, you bloody idiot!’ whispered Paul. ‘You’re here to drink and that’s all. Either of those harridans could eat you alive and come back for more, so keep your eyes in the boat.’

Paul ordered four sherries.

But the woman in front of the bar had already noticed that George Dewberry was the most susceptible member of the party. She sidled up to him.

She was wearing a sagging black dress which drooped low over her breasts.

‘What your name, Joe?’ she grated in a metallic voice which made George Dewberry start like a spurred stallion.

‘Paddy,’ answered George Dewberry brightly.

‘Come to bed, Paddy.’

‘Oh I
say
!’

‘Come to bed, Paddy.’

George Dewberry giggled.

‘George old man, she’s quite serious,’ said Raymond Ball.

The woman slid closer to George Dewberry and wound a long serpentine arm round his neck.

‘Come to bed, Paddy,’ she repeated purposefully.

‘Oh, I couldn’t! I mean, I hardly know you . . .’

The woman was four inches taller than George Dewberry. She stood fully upright and glared down at him with burning, hypnotic eyes.

The others swallowed the remains of their drinks, seized George Dewberry and hurried outside. The woman pursued them.

‘Come to bed, Paddy! Fifty pesetas!’

They ran past the next bar, where the Chief Bosun’s Mate and the Chief G.I. in plain clothes were drinking.

In the third bar they found Maconochie, who was pinned in a corner by a small woman.

‘They all seem to have one track minds in this place,’ said Paul.

‘Dirt track minds, you mean,’ said Raymond Ball.

Maconochie looked up and saw them gazing in at him from the window.

‘Hey, you guys!’ he shouted. ‘Come and give us a hand will you? Quick!’

The rest crowded into the bar. The small woman was ecstatic. She released Maconochie and hurried behind the bar to serve them.

Maconochie was glad to see them.

‘I never thought I’d be pleased to see you lot,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see how I was going to get away without assaulting her and she’d probably have had the police in.’

‘You nearly didn’t see young George here at all. We only just got him out of the last place alive.’

‘She was sort of hypnotic. If she’d gone on saying “Come to bed” in that tone of voice much longer I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself.’

‘The moral is don’t come to these places alone.’

‘She wasn’t bad looking actually’ said Raymond Ball. ‘In a reptilian sort of way.’

‘Never mind, come on, men. Let’s try somewhere else. We’re obviously in good company.’

The next bar was also a dance hall. A man and a girl were dancing a form of paso doble in the middle of the floor. It was not the paso doble of Gibraltar. The Gibraltar paso doble was a formal dance executed for the customers. This was the authentic mating dance of man and woman, a wild dance, without inhibitions.

‘Name of a name of a name’ said Paul. ‘Do you see what I see?’

‘It’s Pete Cleghorn’ whispered Raymond Ball in a hushed voice.

As a dancer of repute himself, Raymond Ball was both shocked and envious. He had always thought Peter Cleghorn a particularly dull person and had attributed it to his Pangbourne upbringing. Now he saw him dancing in a manner which, in a British dance hall, would have put him in the hands of the constabulary. Raymond Ball also knew that his own technique might be better but he could never match Peter Cleghorn’s élan.

The party watched in amazement from the door as he whirled his partner, flung back his head, stamped his foot and brought the dance to an end.

‘Ole!’ the room shouted, as Cleghorn led his partner back to a table. ‘Ole! Ole!’

They crossed over and stood around Peter Cleghorn’s table.

‘Hi fellows!’

‘Pete, I didn’t know you could dance like that!’

‘I didn’t know myself. This is the first time I’ve tried it. I’ve watched about four of the bloody things tonight and I thought I might as well have a go at it. What did you think of it?’

‘Hot stuff, boy. You’d better let The Bodger have a look. That’s right up his street.’

‘Heaven forbid. Have you met Conchita?’

Conchita had black hair and very white teeth and looked about sixteen years of age. She smiled at the cadets round the table but she plainly had no eyes for anyone but this phenomenal Englishman who had out-Spaniarded the Spaniards.

‘We’ll leave you to it’ said Paul.

Raymond Ball was separated from the main party in the next bar. He was much taken with a girl who, until he noticed her, had been sitting by herself and taking no part in the entertainment.

‘I say, Mike, lend me thirty pesetas, will you?’

‘Surely,’ said Michael.

‘Thanks.’

Raymond Ball went over to the girl, who looked up enquiringly.

‘Hello, my dear,’ he said, in his most engaging manner, which made Michael think of the Walrus talking to the Oysters. ‘How about a little bit of je ne sais quoi?’

‘Eighty-five pesetas,’ said the girl briskly.

‘Whatever you say, my dear.’

‘Well, I’ll be goddamned,’ said Paul. ‘Would you like to take a walk? Let’s go and find our own exibeesh, Mike.’

‘Good idea,’ said Michael.

Towards midnight, the bars and the curtained spaces behind them began to empty. Paul and Michael walked arm in arm up the street back to the frontier, following in the zigzag wake of Maconochie and George Dewberry just ahead.

As they passed the first bar they had visited, they saw the tall woman in the black dress talking to The Bodger.

‘Come to bed, Bodger,’ she was saying. ‘Forty-five pesetas!’

Barsetshire
was an elderly lady who needed more time and care than most to make up her face and complete her toilette. Each cruise she retired to a secluded spot to paint ship; in the Mediterranean cruise she anchored in a remote Sardinian bay.

The bay was a desolate spot, with bare brown hills on either side, empty of life or habitation of any kind. In the afternoons the water stretched as smooth as sheet glass and the outline of the shore was distorted by dancing heat vapours.
Barsetshire
lay at anchor, still and motionless, like a painted ship upon a painted ocean. Here, the ship’s company settled down to paint ship, or rather, the cadets painted, and the ship’s company settled down to watch.

The junior cadets, in their innocence, could not have imagined that there was more to Paint Ship than merely taking paint from a pot and applying it to the ship’s side. But they were to learn better. There is more to the art of cosmetics than the mere taking of cream and colour from bottles and putting it on to the skin. Paint Ship in H.M.S.
Barsetshire
was attended with all the rites and ceremonies of a Pompadour’s levee.

Able Seaman Froggins and the other lockermen marshalled an awe-inspiring parade of scrapers, buckets and scrubbers (Paint Ship was for them the high moment of a cruise, just as Mr Piles’ was a Gun Salute). The Bosun and his party provided a forest of stages, bosun’s chairs and ropes. The Painter mustered bundles of brushes and drew off pot after pot of grey paint. The Ship’s Band filled a motor cutter and cruised round and about playing excerpts from the operas of Wagner, the Bandmaster conducting from the sternsheets, while the Commander, surrounded by a retinue of divisional officers, captains of tops, the Mate of the Upper Deck and the Chief Bosun’s Mate, drove round the ship in the Captain’s Motorboat pointing out weak patches in the ship’s side with the pomp and authority of a Doge going out to wed the Adriatic.

Before actual painting, there was scrubbing. Stages were lowered over the ship’s side, two cadets were lowered on to each stage, and two buckets and two scrubbers were lowered down to each pair of cadets. Every scrubber was attached to a cadet by a lanyard. It might have been assumed that the lanyards were provided so that the scrubbers might in some measure act as marker buoys for cadets who fell from the stages into the sea. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The cadets were intended to act as marker buoys for the scrubbers.

When the ship’s side had been scrubbed, bad patches were rubbed with brick and rust marks taken off with scrapers. The canvas was then ready for the paint.

Most of the cadets enjoyed painting. It was one of the few creative pieces of work they were called upon to do in the training cruiser. They found it pleasant to hang over the side on a stage in the sunshine and watch the area of gleaming new paintwork growing overhead.

It was while painting ship that Paul first came into contact with the cadet disciplinary authorities. He was sharing a stage with Maconochie, which was perhaps the root of the trouble. Misfortune hovered over Maconochie as a halo over a saint.

‘Don’t you feel a certain--how shall I put it?--
atavistic
pleasure in painting, Trog?’ asked Paul, of Maconochie.

‘Don’t call me that,’ growled Maconochie.

‘But don’t you feel something carnally satisfying about it? Dip the brush in, twirl it around, scrape it on the edge, two strokes up, two strokes down, rub it well in and finish on the upward stroke. Don’t you sense something vaguely sexually stimulating in it?’

‘No,’ said Maconochie.

Paul had confirmed early in the cramped space of
Barsetshire
what he had suspected at Dartmouth. Maconochie had no sense of humour. He took everything said to him at its face value. He made a perfect foil for Paul in whimsical mood.

‘Like the last lascivious kisses of a dying love, don’t you think? The brush moving up and down like the drooping of silken eyelashes against a satin cheek.’

‘It’s nothing like that.’

‘Nor like the caress of a fingertip trailed in tranquil water and sprinkled on a lily-like breast beneath the waving willows?’

‘No.’

‘Not even the waving willows, Trog?’

‘I’ve told you before,
don’t
call me that.’

‘You will live to a great age, Trog. I prophesy it. Others may come, dwell their little hour or so, worry a little, and then go. But not Trog. Trog the Inscrutable. The Great Trog, the great-nephew of the Great Chang. Have you ever tried to unscrew the inscrutable, Trog?’

‘No.’

‘Try it. You will find it as rewarding as that wretched band are finding their rendering of The Ride of the Valkyries with the Commander bellowing like a mad thing next door to them. Have you ever ridden with the Valkyries, Trog?’

‘Oh, go and get knotted.’

‘Tut tut.’

Just then the Captain’s red setter, Owen Glendower, looked over the ship’s side. Owen Glendower normally enjoyed Paint Ship as much as anyone. There were always interesting pots and cans to sniff at, the decks were always filled with bustle and excitement, there were always ropes and lanyards to gnaw at, and above all there were always more, and more senior, feet to trip over him. Since the day Maconochie had inadvertently trodden on him, Owen Glendower had disliked him; as far as Owen Glendower was concerned, Maconochie’s name might as well have been Dr Fell. When Owen Glendower looked over the ship’s side and saw Maconochie, his day was spoiled. He seated himself on the beading which ran round the upper deck, immediately above Maconochie’s head.

‘There’s that bloody pooch,’ said Maconochie.

Paul looked up and saw a part of Owen Glendower projecting over the sill.

‘He doesn’t seem to like us very much.’

‘It’s mutual,’ said Maconochie sourly.

Paul looked up at Owen Glendower again. A great temptation seized him. He struggled with it for a time and then gave in. After all, Paul thought, was it not Oscar Wilde who said that the only way to get rid of temptation was to yield to it?

‘What would Oscar Wilde have done?’ asked Paul rhetorically.

Owen Glendower gave a yelp of rage and vanished.

The Cadet Training Officer’s Requestmen and Defaulters were held in a special office just off the cadets’ messdeck. It was used for nothing else and the inference was that there were normally so many requestmen and defaulters that a separate room was required to hold them. When Paul arrived the only other cadet there was Peter Cleghorn but because he was a requestman and not a defaulter like Paul, Peter Cleghorn was ordered to stand on the other side of the passageway.