“Hello, Jimmy! Wotcher, John! Sink anything?”
“Nothing much. Only half the Imperial Navy.”
“Both junks, eh. But what did you really get?” They told him.
“Not bad for beginners. Steward – gin bottle, please.”
After dinner, the Sub read the letters that had been waiting for him. It was a routine, well established, to save them for the quiet after-dinner period. First he read the ones from his family, then the one from the girl in Sussex, but he kept to the last the one and only letter addressed in Sheila’s neat handwriting. He finished his black coffee, put the cup down and tore open the blue envelope. This was a thing that he had looked forward to doing.
Not what he’d hoped to read, though. She told him that she was engaged to Gerry Watson, and that she didn’t think he ought to see her again. It would be better, she suggested, if he didn’t spend another leave in Kandy.
The Sub could only agree with that. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to face Kandy without Sheila. He thought of the lake, and knew that the affection which he had developed for it and for all the strange atmosphere of the place was only an offshoot of the way he felt about Sheila. Quickly he thought, that’s nonsense: I’ve learnt a lesson, that’s all.
As he sat there, opposite the big tray with the cups on it, a Medical Officer came along for his coffee. This was not only a doctor: this was the flotilla’s psychoanalyst, the man who put chaps back on the rails when they had begun to go a little bit queer.
The doctor paused, lingering over the array of cups. There were white ones, and a minority which bore a floral design around the edges. He picked up one of these coloured ones, and started towards the coffee urn. Suddenly he whirled round, dropped the cup back on the tray as though it had burnt his fingers. He took one of the white ones instead, and smiled cautiously at the Sub who was watching in astonishment.
“I can’t stand the ones with little pictures on them,” said the doctor.
After the late News from London, the B.B.C. orchestra played the National Anthem.
There were only a handful of men left in the bar: the Seahounds, a couple of other submarine officers, and an R.N.V.R. Sub-Lieutenant whose green stripe marked him as non-executive, an officer whose duties confined him to an office where he ciphered and deciphered secret signals. The Anthem ended, and the young man said:
“Lot of tripe.”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Sub, and Number One rose to his feet.
“This King business,” said the Cipher Officer. “It’s out of date. What do we need a King for?”
The others were also on their feet. It was a long distance from the wardroom deck to the water-level, a very long drop indeed. They came back into the bar, and Jimmy suggested a nightcap. While the steward poured it out, Jimmy lifted the receiver off the intercom telephone.
“Quartermaster’s Lobby,” he said to the exchange.
“Quartermaster? An officer has just fallen overboard on the port side. You’d better send a boat round. Yes, that’s right. He may have broken his neck.”
The next afternoon they went swimming from a beach called Sweat Bay. It was fifteen minutes’ walk from where the boat dropped them, through the trees where the monkeys lived, across a neck of land to the wide sweep of fine white sand on the other side.
Sub had brought a fitted charge, and when they were tired of swimming it was thrown into the water, as far out as possible. It went off like a miniature depth-charge, and they dived in to collect the stunned fish. Tiny made a fire of driftwood on the beach, and they baked the fish for tea. The meal tasted of mud and raw fish.
Number One spat out a lot of bones, and said, “What about a run ashore tonight, Sub?”
“All right. Where?”
“Officers’ Club, I suppose. Coming, Tiny?”
“Not me. Waste of money.” Tiny looked bigger than ever when he had nothing on.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. There’s liquor in the bar, and there are usually some women to look at.”
“Yes, at a distance, and that only makes it worse. Our own bar is all I want, and what’s more it’s Duty Free. Besides, there’s not so far to walk, when you feel like turning in.”
They caught a boat for the shore after a couple of quick gins in the bar, and at the landing-stage they engaged a ricksha to pull them along to the Club. They ordered drinks on the verandah, sat next to a party of four people, two Naval officers and two Wrens. Jimmy waved and smiled at one of the girls, and she discreetly returned the greeting. She was small, blonde, bright-looking: she had a snub nose in a well made-up face. She reminded the Sub of some Hollywood girl who had a raucous voice and a big mouth: he couldn’t remember the name. He asked Number One who the girl was.
“Mary-Ann. Her surname’s Chard. She was Smiley Martin’s girl-friend: he’s just gone home, you know. I’ll have a chat to her later: she shouldn’t be seen out with General Service chaps. It’s not respectable.”
After dinner they drank in the bar on the ground floor. Jimmy said, “Excuse me a minute, old boy.”
“Going to be sick?”
“No. Going to talk to Mary-Ann.”
Twenty minutes later he came back, looking pleased with himself.
“Sorry, Sub. Couldn’t get away.”
Sub had been talking to someone in the bar, or rather the other fellow had been doing the talking and Sub had pretended to be listening while he drank his drink and thought about Sheila.
“Submarines!” said the man. “What on earth, now, do people join submarines for?” He went on to answer his own question at considerable length, and Sub thought about the real answer in his own case.
Well, his first ship had been a battleship in the Mediterranean, an unusual sort of battleship because it had a damn great hole in it. An Italian submarine had done that: a midget submarine controlled by only two men had put one of the mightiest ships afloat out of action for months. It gave him a strange, exciting impression of the power that a few men hold in their hands. Seeing the submarines in the harbour at Alexandria he felt again that impression of swift, ruthless power, and it captured his imagination. The submarines lay alongside each other, amongst the rest of the fleet, and he saw them suddenly with the eyes of a submariner. They were wolves, amongst dogs.
So he joined them. But he couldn’t explain that sort of thing to a half-drunken bore who only raised the subject to give himself something to talk about. He wouldn’t understand, even if he’d listen. Sub couldn’t explain it any more than he could explain how much Sheila had meant to him. The only thing that a man like this would really feel would be a kick in the belly. He thought, Odd, that’s how I feel, like I’d just been kicked in the belly by a horse. But only now, he thought, because I’m a bit tight. In the morning, it won’t matter.
Jimmy’s glass was empty, so he finished his own and addressed the barman.
“Two brandy and sodas, please.”
Golf at Nuwara Eliya was played on a course which was far from easy to the uninitiated: streams criss-crossed the terrain in numbers to rival the streams of the Nile delta, and the streams were by no means as sluggish as the waterways of that insanitary area. These ran fast, in some places torrentially: golf balls, one after the other, vanished into their crystal depths. The caddies, small coffee-coloured urchins, had so many repaints ready to hand that it seemed not unlikely that secret pools or backwaters were the sources of their raw material.
Chief and the Captain were short-tempered long before they ended the round, and when they limped into the clubhouse in search of the watery tasteless beer which was all the bar stocked, and the elderly stranger who wore the uniform of a Captain in the Pioneer Corps addressed them in terms of some familiarity, it was perhaps pardonable that Chief’s reaction was more brusque than might have been expected from an officer from the cream of the Senior Service.