He sat on the same sofa, away from the plainer but more fragile chair. ‘Did you get my postcards?’
He’d sent one from every port of call. ‘Came in yesterday. Go tomorrow. I hope you are keeping in good health. I’m fine, as always.’ Or some such variation. The picture spoke more than anything he could say: palm trees, volcano, hills covered by forest with a narrow-gauge rack-and-pinion railway slicing to the crestline; waterfront, fort or government house. Hard to know what she thought of such sceneries. The only places she had been to were France, where she had visited her brother’s grave near Arras; to Belgium where she stayed in Ostend; and to St Moritz and the Rigi in Switzerland. ‘But I have never been to Germany,’ she told him more than once.
‘Yes,’ she said tonelessly, ‘I got all your cards.’
‘We had a rough old time coming back.’
She was not the sort to stand his postcards on the mantleshelf, or leave letters lying around, as he knew happened in some homes. He’d never received any letters from her, nor been thanked for his communications. He mentioned them because he wanted to know whether or not they had reached her. Most did, but a few didn’t. He could think of nothing else to say.
‘Sailors must expect it,’ she said. ‘It can get very rough around England. I look out at the water every day.’
When she did, he had to believe that she thought of sailors in general and of him in particular. In any case it was the nearest she’d get to expressing concern for him in his presence. She stood up to make tea, ignoring his offer of help. He looked around the room that had sent him to all parts of the world. He walked from end to end as if on the bridge. Only table lights were on, but the eyes of dead Uncle John in khaki watched him pace about. There was more in the portrait-figure’s gaze than dread of the unknown, and he wondered whether he’d ever know what it was.
She would order him to do something, but not countenance the least offer. ‘Come and get the tray.’
He brought it from the kitchen. The daily woman must have got the meal ready: chicken, salad, bread, pastry and a half bottle of chilled wine.
No matter how hard the days of heavy weather across the Atlantic might be, he always felt a surfeit of energy as he stepped ashore. But it didn’t last. A sudden exhaustion raddled him. A sensation of inner wastage brought on a shameful urge to weep both for himself and his aunt. His vision of a painful world without hope or purpose lasted a few moments. It went away, but left its track.
He shook himself, and she did not notice. In the orphanage and nowhere else had such a mixture of despair and tenderness swept through him. A trace had come abruptly, born from the same despondency of days gone by, but more of a threat than those fragments of former times.
He drank a glass of wine before eating. Several bottles might drown his whiff of anguish. There was nothing to say, but he knew better than to be silent. She looked straight at him. The skin hung on both sides of her face, and she could not help the shaking of her hands on the stick. Even that did not distress her sufficiently for her to acknowledge it. He felt insignificant when with her, but out of her presence no one awed him, a quality that came directly from her, and which had made him an efficient naval officer.
He talked of departures and landfalls during the last few months and, unable to know whether or not she was listening, remembered those moments in the orphanage before falling asleep that were marked by such intense despair that he wondered for the first time in his life why she and her father had got rid of him like a piece of rotten fruit, when they had accommodation where he could have been so much better cared for. The question had come too late. He couldn’t blame them, not having thought about it until he was old enough to know he might have acted with the same lack of charity.
‘Can I pour you a glass of wine, Aunt?’
Heavy and wrinkled, her lids shifted. Her eyes were wide open. ‘I can’t drink any more.’
‘Wouldn’t hurt you, I’m sure.’
‘I used to drink a bottle of sherry every day, and felt very well on it.’
He ate his meal quickly, then replaced the napkin into its ring, as if he would be there to use it tomorrow night also. ‘I never drink anything alcoholic while on board. Too many ships have been in trouble because of a soddened officer on watch, or a drunken captain in his cabin. I don’t touch anything from leaving land to walking off the ship.’
Her stick shifted. Her lips moved. ‘More fool you!’
He lit his cigar. The truth she spoke scorched him to the roots. He’d got his master’s ticket, but had never been given a command. No complaint had been made about his work, but he left ships at the shortest possible notice, or became ill, or didn’t get on with the captain – and didn’t trust himself to drink. That’s what she had meant. What are you frightened of? Can’t you hold yourself in properly? It was a look he got often when refusing a touch of liquor. For some reason he had made it a rule. On shore, it was different. Sometimes he came back to the ship hardly able to get on board. He would collapse into a sleep so deep that he didn’t waken till the ship was on the open sea. But no liquor was drunk between ports. The captain pushed the decanter towards him:
‘Hair of the dog?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You stank like a lousy old tomcat when they trundled you on deck last night.’
‘That was last night. I believe I was drunk.’
The captain laughed. ‘Is that what you call it? I call it rotten and senseless.’
He signed off as soon as he could.
‘I drank a bottle of sherry for my health – one a day at the best of times,’ his aunt was saying. ‘Now I don’t, because my body can’t take it.’
‘Here’s to you, then.’ He finished the glass, and the bottle. It was no feat to drink someone under the table. He’d often done it, so that no companion would chide him on board for a teetotaller. When they saw him as two people they knew when to leave one of them more or less alone. He walked to the heavy curtains drawn across the window. ‘I enjoy coming to see you.’
Her voice quavered out of the silence. ‘Don’t you visit other people?’
That had nothing to do with it. He spoke what was in his mind. There was no other person. He had met women from Galveston to Manila, from Durban to Seattle, even saw some of them more than once, but he had no one else except his aunt because that was the way he liked it. Happiness was in moving across the waters of the world, shooting the sun and the evening star when you could see them, and plotting your position on the chart. When the ship moved and he enjoyed a smoke and thought of everything that had happened to him, or about nothing in particular, he was happy, if that’s what it was called, though it had sometimes seemed that all his lifetime’s journeying through the cloven wave was an effort to find the dark place he had come from.
When the ship was in harbour or calm waters he could sit between watches on a deckchair outside his cabin and, savouring the homilies while remembering the perils and rough passages, browse through the copy of the Bible given as a parting gift – or shot – by the orphanage. There were also log books and almanacks, pilot books and books of tables in the chart room, but in his cabin were a dozen paperback novels to be read on a voyage and left behind. She was right, however. He had no one else.
‘Loyalty has always been thought much of in our family,’ she said, ‘but you should find a young woman and get married. I should think you’ve had enough of the sea by now.’