‘Is he?’ He smoothed his moustache, the first real pleasure he had shown.
She touched his arm. ‘How much sugar, Herbert?’
‘Two, please.’
They sat without talking for a while, so much to tell that nothing would come out. Maud knew it wasn’t done not to say a word or two. ‘You look a very smart soldier, but I do wish you’d go in for a commission, Herbert. It would be natural for you. You’re our only child, and we want you to do well.’
‘We’ll have lunch, and talk about that afterwards.’ Hugh dangled his watch, spun the chain around a long finger, then threaded it into his waistcoat. ‘I suppose we can fix him up with a show this evening? That’s what I always liked to do in London.’
Maud picked up the Daily Telegraph. ‘There’s The Gang Show at the Stoll. Not very much really. What about Song of Norway?’
‘Bit musicky, isn’t it?’ Hugh said.
‘Well, there’s Caesar and Cleopatra at the pictures. Shakespeare, Herbert?’
‘Expect you got that rammed down your throat at school, didn’t you?’ Hugh winked.
He smiled. If they sat in the cinema it would be two hours when he wouldn’t need to talk. ‘Well, yes, but all the same I’d like to see it.’ He turned to his mother. ‘That’d be fine.’
‘All right,’ Hugh said. ‘Might be just the thing.’ He stroked Maud’s wrist, and Herbert noticed his loving smile. ‘Vivien Leigh’s damned good to look at.’
‘That’s settled, then.’
Herbert knew he couldn’t berate them any more for shovelling him into those dreadful schools, but neither did he feel any flush of returning affection. He’d have to go back too far for that, to his infancy in India when they mooned over him with so much pleasure and, he now realized, spoiled him rotten. His heart was like a stone, as if he’d just come back from its funeral. ‘I don’t intend to sign on in the army,’ he told them at lunch. ‘All I want is the experience for two or three years. After that, I’ll decide what to do.’
Hugh’s fingers drummed some garbled message on to the table, while Maud worked at her beads, looking to the window as if a solution to the situation might show itself in the glass. ‘I suppose we can at least be pleased at the way you seem to chew things over before you speak,’ Hugh said.
She stacked the plates to clear the table. ‘Well, that’s just like you, isn’t it, dear?’
His father could be as sarcastic as he liked. Nothing would alter his mind. Not that he knew what his mind was. He didn’t much care, being on Fate’s conveyor belt, and he could do nothing about that even if he wanted to. Neither, therefore, could they, which suited him fine. You could hardly expect such old parents to understand. At the same time he was beginning to feel so much part of them that there was nothing more to be said or done, except do exactly as he bloody well liked. Time in the factory had strengthened his will against intimidation. If they thought to change his mind later about their ideas for his future they would be thwarted because a troopship would soon be taking him to he didn’t know where, a place he hoped would be as far from them as he could possibly get, Japan for preference.
Eight
He walked across the deck for a change in the view, bracing a leg at each step, to find that the opposite horizon had the same aspect of violence and colour, coming equally close at the tilt of the ship, but he felt the world to be his, and that he was part of it, feet solid on the wood, in harmony with the world on water, body invulnerable. He had never felt better, or more himself or, more to the point, that he had no interest in who he was, merely that he was separated as far as could be from his past yet was part of a moving organization in which he had for the time being found refuge.
A light from France flickered white as the troopship made a long turn towards Biscay. ‘We’re on our way,’ Pemberton said.
‘I’m glad. You?’
In the last months Pemberton had lost the oversensitive uncertainty of his mouth. The light had gone out of his eyes, the quick movement that remained due more to self-preservation among the mob than from any kind of fear. ‘All right. Neither good nor bad, philosophically speaking. Things just are.’
Herbert smiled, and asked if he wasn’t leaving a nice girl behind.
‘You don’t meet girls when you’re swatting for Higher School Cert. The girls in the office were difficult to approach, though there’s one I write to. We’re just friends.’
‘You mean you’ve never had one?’
‘Had one?’
‘Well, I think if the fucking boat turned a somersault, and a fish floated up with your number on it — would you be very happy knowing you’d never shagged a girl?’ Pemberton looked blank: what you hadn’t had you can hardly regret. ‘Though I suppose’, Herbert went on, a stiffened arm stopping him getting cracked ribs at the rail, while Pemberton weathered it with some fancy twitching of the feet, ‘that if you have had it you regret dying even more in knowing you’ll never have it again.’
‘I imagine that’s the case,’ Pemberton said. ‘But I’m going down to find my hammock, before I start to feel queasy.’
Herbert was also sad to be leaving, so could relish the best of both states. He took Eileen’s letter from his battledress pocket for another musing read. Now that she hated him, and wished he would — as if such a journey would somehow scare him — ‘go to bleeding hell’, he imagined himself still half in love, though no more so in yearning for her warm body and cow-like generous trust to be with him now. Maybe he would get a reply off at Gibraltar, asking her to think again, wait for him, even to forgive, though he didn’t know what for.
A shudder of regret was meaningless to the waves, which was no bad thing. He was on his own at last. The opposite rail started its exorable lift, beams and girders taking the strain. Rain hit the portholes like gravel, peppering the superstructure. He put the letter into his notebook and, before it could get wet, slotted it back into his pocket; then zigzagged into the dimly lit other ranks’ saloon.
Bumping between the crowd showed no place to sit. For a while he stood with his legs apart to counteract the swaying. Fag smoke and diesel smells weeded out all but the strongest stomachs. Barraclough put down his unfinished half-pint and, with muslin features, pushed by on his way to be sick.
When the sun shone from a clear sky off the coast of Spain he sat among hundreds on the open deck to relish the cruise. Passing Cape Trafalgar, a sandy-looking bluff in the distance, he opened his notebook to write up the log of his travels. A copy of the farewell missive from Eileen rested there, as well as his reply. He pulled both out and tore them into the smallest pieces possible, and watched them blow away from the stern like snow, a confetti that disappointed the gulls. She had callously reminded him of what he didn’t need to know, that there were a lot more pebbles on the beach. Being compared to a pebble irritated him beyond endurance, especially since he was one of a thousand on this three-funnelled troopship heading for some outpost of the Empire.
The Med was stormier than Biscay, and his stomach wasn’t too steady, so he was glad to clatter down the companionway to the bottom of the ship for bulkhead duty, a paperback snatched from the library in his back pocket. So far below, he was clear of the sea-howl, stew-reek and diesel stench that thickened in the air of upper decks.
The steel doors either side were to be rammed shut if a mournful death-in-the-heart signal indicated that the sea had broken in. Very comforting, he thought, but practical. The bottom length of the ship was divided into compartments, each to be made separate and watertight so that if rock was struck or a stray mine left from the war brought in the floor the vessel would stay afloat. Crippled but viable, it might even make a few knots, which kind of mechanics made firm sense. The sergeant of the watch came striding in. ‘Not supposed to have your nose in a book when on guard, are we?’