“Look,” he said. “You’ll both be seeing the First Lieutenant in the morning. Meantime, to save any more of this nonsense, listen to this.
“Rookes: Shadwell didn’t know you were married. The word he used was not directed at anyone in particular. Do you accept that?”
Rookes muttered that he did. He had difficulty in moving his lips.
“Shadwelclass="underline" Rookes thought you meant to insult his wife. If you’d thought that someone had used an expression like that about your wife, I reckon if you’d been the smaller man you’d have grabbed the nearest weapon and used it, eh?”
“No, sir. Well, I dunno, really.”
“Good God, man! Someone refers to your wife as a whore, and you don’t do anything about it?”
Shadwell scratched the side of his head. “Well, y’ see, sir, in a manner o’ speakin’, she is.”
Chapter 9
Once again, His Majesty’s Submarine Seahound was about to sail from her base. Only one rope for’ard and one rope aft held her alongside, and as soon as the Captain came aboard and gave the order; these last links would be thrown off. Sub stood waiting on the for’ard casing: Bird, the Second Cox’n, stood massively beside him, coiling a heaving-line.
“Bit different to sailing from ’Oly Loch, ain’t it, sir?”
It was, indeed. When they had left Scotland, just over a year ago, they had left foul weather, a gale and bursts of hail. A squall had lashed across the Loch just as they were slipping their ropes and wires, and some of the men, with the sailor’s tendency towards superstition, had seen this as a bad omen for the future. But nothing had occurred to justify such fears, unless it had been the crossing of the Bay of Biscay in weather that made a misery of watchkeeping and a hell of everything except lying flat on your bunk, in that position with your knees up.
Bird muttered, “Captain coming, sir.”
Sub moved aft to where the plank rested on the casing, waited there and saluted the Captain as he stepped on board and turned away to the bridge.
Rogers murmured, “All aboard the flippin’ Skylark, trip rahnd the ’arbour ’alf a tanner!”
Sub glared at him, shouted: “Away plank!”
Two men of the Spare Crew, on the inside submarine, hauled it off. Number One yelled from the bridge, “Let go aft!” and a minute later, as the stern swung out, “Let go for’ard!” The ropes were thrown off the bollards, and the submarine backed away from the Depot Ship, driven by her electric motors. Clear of the side, she swung her bow away towards the harbour entrance, and at the same time her diesels roared into action. A shrill pipe was answered once more by the bugle on the high quarterdeck: gathering speed, Seahound headed for the open sea and the Malacca Straits.
“Well,” said the Captain, “before we leave for the next patrol, Chief, we may have seen our wives. Number One: when do you plan to get married?”
“Not in a hurry, sir. When we get back to U.K. Think this war’s going to last long, sir?”
“Don’t ask me.” There had been a lot of rumours going around in Trincomali: one of an imminent Japanese surrender, and one of a Second Front being opened in Malaya. There was no doubt that the Fourteenth Army in Burma was moving steadily, rapidly forward: but there were always these rumours, in every ship, and they always started on the messdecks.
The Captain’s cup and saucer began to slide slowly across the table. He pressed the bell for the messenger.
“Ask the Officer of the Watch what the weather’s doing.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Presently the man returned.
“Officer of the Watch says it’s blowing up a bit, sir.”
Number One patted the Engineer Officer on the shoulder.
“That’s it, Chiefy: you’re looking paler already.”
“You go to hell. Let’s have the dice out, shall we?”
“Wants to take his mind off it,” observed Number One as he reached into the locker and brought out the dice.
“Ace up, King towards.” He flipped the dice with his finger: it trickled along a few inches and rested with the Ace on top again.
“Mine, by the looks of it.”
When the messenger of the Watch shook Sub at ten minutes to two in the morning and shouted in his ear that he was due to be on watch in ten minutes’ time, Sub felt more than usually disinclined to leave his bunk. He was tired, and the violent motion of the submarine as she rose and fell to the sea left little doubt in his mind that this was one of the nights when a bunk was by far the best place. He tried to pretend that it was all a bad dream, this listening to the sea crashing on the hull over his head, but the messenger knew his job, and sharp at two o’clock Number One was delighted to hear the helmsman ask permission for the relief Officer of the Watch to come up. Number One, of course, was wide awake, and cheerful at the prospect of getting down to a cup of the Cox’n’s cocoa before turning in for four lovely hours in his comfortable bunk, but his gay conversation was quite lost on the Sub, who had caught a bucketful of flying sea in his bleary face the moment he rose out of the hatch.
“Get your nose out, you old cow!” The bow digs deep into an enormous wave, then soars, flinging back a ton of salt water at the bridge. Sub ducks, cursing, cracks his head on the edge of the voice-pipe and curses more wildly as the water drenches him. Now the bow stands clear, the stern low and buried in the sea: a huge gulf opens ahead and the submarine swoops forward, her bow crashing down like a giant hammer. Bow up, roll to port: bow down, roll to starboard, swinging over until it looks as though she’s going all the way. But she never does, she staggers for a moment then comes back fast while the bow swings up, up, high over the bridge while she stands on her tail and you hang on for your life. The sea crashes over, slams into the bridge and bursts like flying shrapnel up through the holes in the platform.
It’s strange to think that at other times you feel like a trespasser, spoiling the smooth flat mirror of the ocean. This is the sea as you know her when her mood is bad, and you know all the moods she has. She’s like the girl in that song that the sailors sing, a fascinating bitch. A bitch that has the devil’s temper, and she lets it rip whenever she feels like it. Look down at the bow, at that crazy hammer-head that swings in a great arc up and down a dozen times a minute. Inside that thing are men asleep in their hammocks: asleep, in that! At home they used to pay sixpence a time to have that done to them in a fun-fair: at home they were woken if the wind flapped a curtain in the bedroom.
Keep your watch. This is your life, the one you chose.
The sea had changed her mood when the submarine approached the entrance to the Straits, two days later. Not a ripple, not a single streak of white showed that twenty-four hours earlier this placid beauty had been a chaos of pounding waves and flying foam. She was the Indian Ocean again: she had worn herself out pretending to be the North Atlantic.
“Why don’t you get a new pipe, Chief?” The Captain looked critically at his Engineer Officer’s briar, which had half the mouthpiece bitten off.
“I like this one,” answered Chief, with his usual simplicity.
“What made you bite the end off? Lose your temper?”
“Well, it’s rather a long story, really. And I don’t think I ought to tell it, with this youngster here… sorry, Sub, I was forgetting you’d come of age.”
“Let’s have it, Chiefy.”