what?’
‘A man. The man I share with.’
‘You have to share?’
‘Yes. Don’t you?’
‘There is another bunk. But it’s empty.’
‘You must have more clout than me. My other bunk is full of a seasick man. It’s pretty disgusting.’
‘I didn’t realise people had to share. I mean except families. Heavens, I should hate that.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘For four or five weeks, cooped up with someone you’ve never met.’
‘Yes. I keep wondering who I should have tipped, or rung up beforehand. That’s the trouble, not having the right connections or the absolute know-how. I’m sure if I did offer someone money he’d just look at me – it would be the wrong bloke.’
‘Yes,’ said Penny. ‘But he’d just look at you and then take the money.’
‘Exactly.’ He laughed. ‘I’m sorry, sir. The ship’s full. There’s nothing I can do. But thank you very much all the same.’
This laughter in the face of the sea – Penny felt slightly uncomfortable, though – over and above the discomfort of the storm, which in all truth she had briefly forgotten. But she could put no name to the feeling. She waited. She thought the man was virtually bound to ask her about Hugh next. A man would. For all sorts of reasons.
So she pre-empted him. ‘We haven’t been introduced. Penny Kendrick.’ She held on and stretched out her free hand.
‘Robert Kettle.’ He clasped hers during the transition from suspension to effort, and then drew back to his place at the rail. ‘Both “K”.’ He smiled.
She smiled back. But the ‘K’ was Hugh’s name, of course. ‘My mother owns a preparatory school in Essex. That’s where I grew up – among lots of little boys away from home.’
‘I went to one of those once,’ he said. ‘Always marching and doing drill. Present arms with miniature hockey sticks. But not for long. My parents couldn’t afford to keep me there. We weren’t really in the right league, financially. I suppose they were making a desperate bid for social—’ He failed to finish as once more the spray surprised him.
‘Oh, I see.’ Then she realised why she had felt uncomfortable. It was the way they had linked themselves through the character of an inevitably corrupt purser, or accommodation officer. It reminded her of the little boys at the school; how they sought to cope with life away from home by such creations. Everyone outside their world was an articulately structured joke. Poor little devils. One thing her mother’s school had taught her was that she did not want her boys to go away like that. And yet that was where they were now, her boys, and she was here in the midst of these unlooked-for waves talking to an unlooked-for Robert Kettle, who would probably see the point and then apologise. But I didn’t mean it like that, she found herself protesting. I didn’t want it to happen like this. This is just temporary.
And she thought of all her furniture down there in the hold, their bed and their books, and her poor violin, and the Finch-Clarks’ enormous cat in its cage.
‘Hey, be careful with that, kid!’ Mr Chaunteyman had given me half a crown and told me to keep his service revolver dry on deck. He was an American, Navy too – though he never wore uniform. We were going to Australia with him, Erica and I. That much was clear. I had the gun strapped to my waist. It weighed me down on my left. I had pinned on my sheriff’s star and wore my cowboy hat, which the wind now thrummed at somewhere behind my head. The cord threatened a strangle, but I would not take it off.
I had turned one side of the brim up to the crown with a safety pin, Australian style. Failing anything to serve as an authentic tin visor I was Ned Kelly in mufti, on his boat. I had stalked the heaving promenade deck for twenty minutes looking for people to shoot: possibly one or two of the Commies I had heard about from Mr Chaunteyman’s lips. Luckily the other children were not in evidence. Then I had fetched my raincoat and come forward here.
I too thought the ship would soon shake to pieces. Images of my life ran appropriately before my eyes. Scenes of home – containing unfortunate further images of death. Such scenes, for example, as had welled once from the open experiment on top of our wireless when I was little. My father placed a stout board to support the metal frame; the cathode-ray tube perched in its own scaffold. We drew the drapes across the french windows and clicked the knob. And were transfixed by scintillation.
The television was the great metal granny of all knots. But I was warned off. My father tended it jealously, as a household god. Through its face our English future brightly spilled; with its back parts he had sole communion. The private glows and buzzes, the electron lens, the HT circuit – ‘twenty thousand volts, boy, all right?’ – the decoders, oscillators, transformers and valves remained a mystery to me.
It was unhealthy, and suffered intermittent snowstorms. In the midst of them I watched cowboy fantasies: The Mystery Riders, Roy Rogers, or Renfrew of the Mounties. North American corpses were two a penny. During weekends he set up a mirror and stood behind it, twiddling, tuning, testing, to attain that fullness, unstable as the grasshoppers on Bostall Heath, of which the contraption was capable. And then one Sunday he unclipped his Avo meter. He put down his insulated screwdriver with a grunt of satisfaction. Now the confusion was of real sea, and genuine weather. A poor, monochrome vessel was beam-ended on the Goodwin Sands; it rolled back and forth inside the screen, endlessly, helplessly.
The horror rose to my lips. ‘They’ll be all right?’
‘Two of them were saved. But the captain always goes down with his ship.’ My mother’s look assumed a glassiness as she said it. I had not seen her face so before.
Thus I realised early that there might occasionally flood in a loss which was unendurable. The skipper of the Enterprise had given his body to the waves; he breathed in lethal sea water as surely as I drank my National Health orange juice.
My mother’s cousin ‘went down with the Hood’, but to that bare phrase my small imagination could attach no picture at all. I put death in a far-off quarter, snow-bound, snow-blinded, epitomised solely by that other terrible captain: Scott of the Antarctic, whose recovered boat-coffin clung to the Embankment by Tower Bridge, and whose bereaved son painted snow-tormented birds in the screen of our television.
Then one evening Erica took me to a slide-show talk given by Sir John Hunt. It was at my school in Bostall Lane. The conqueror of Everest was some years happily returned. But Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing stood on the snowcap screen against a glare of magenta-blue, still planting the Union Jack. And after that I was reassured; for there was no undiscovered place upon the globe, no unexpected continent, able to surge in, disaster-filled, cannibal-fretted, sacrifice-plagued, species by man-eating species. Death was a thing of the past, and I learned to sleep by blocking it out. Until this ocean, and this storm. My beliefs heaved and bucked under me.
Regarding the Atlantic, though, I knew my father and grandfather had led charmed lives. It was Erica who had told me. Both career seamen, they were survivors of the two world wars. My grandad missed Jutland, being fortunately on weekend leave when his ship rushed hooting out of Chatham. He had already retired, and was only hooked back out of honourable discharge because there was a crisis. The worst shock he got in the war to end all wars was from a streak in the phosphorescence. Too paralysed to sing out – a potentially capital omission – he stood watch in his trance as the tell-tale slice closed and closed, aimed dead at the engine-room below him. Against the intimate torpedo there is no defence. Desperate small-arms fire would be as useless as prayer. Only at the last minute did the streak turn miraculously away, and he caught a glimpse of its dorsal fin in the moonlight; though not of its hammerhead sneer.