The Restless Sea, page 30
‘You all right?’ he asks.
‘I think I’m going to leave,’ she says, raising her voice above the noise.
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No need.’
‘I want to,’ he says. ‘Got to be up early.’
She can see he is scanning the room, searching the faces. She thinks of the painted girls she left him with last time. ‘Are you looking for someone?’ she asks.
‘I was, but she’s not here.’
‘Maybe you should wait for her?’
He shakes his head. ‘I wanted to say goodbye,’ he says. ‘But I need to get back as well. Early start tomorrow.’
Maggie appears at his elbow. ‘I’ll come too,’ she says. ‘Don’t want to be left here on my own.’ Gladys and William have already sloped off, and Julia is settling in for a long night with friends.
They are all staying at the Pimlico flat. It is conveniently near Victoria Station for Charlie in the morning. He may not even bother to sleep. Maggie pours some gin from a bottle in the sitting room. Olivia holds up her hand. ‘Not for me, thanks. I think I’ll turn in.’ She doesn’t want to get in the way. She goes to the kitchen, finds a glass for some water. Charlie follows her, his tall frame blocking the light in the doorway.
‘Don’t suppose I could ask you something?’ he says.
She turns. ‘Of course.’
‘I wondered whether I could put you down as my next of kin?’
She grips the glass, feels a small surge of sadness tinged with pride. She doesn’t know what to say. From next door, Maggie calls out: ‘Is anyone going to help me drink this?’
‘Two seconds,’ Charlie calls back over his shoulder. Then he turns to Olivia again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking. There’s no one else …’
‘What about Aunt Nancy?’
He smiles ruefully. ‘Isn’t it meant to be the other way round? She’s my godmother; she’s meant to look after me …’ He pauses. ‘She’s certainly meant to outlive me—’
Olivia pulls herself together. ‘Of course she will,’ she says. ‘And of course you can put me down …’
‘It didn’t seem that important to me before but …’
‘Where are you going tomorrow?’ she says, thinking of his case, which is packed and ready by the door.
‘It’s the Russia run.’
She puts the glass down, feels herself teetering on the brink of darkness.
‘It’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why I suddenly thought of it. I suppose it seems a bit sad if no one knows that I’ve gone …’
‘You shouldn’t think like that.’
‘That’s the way it is …’
They are silent for a moment, and then Charlie says, ‘You know I’m truly sorry about how I behaved.’
‘I know.’
‘I just …’
‘It’s all right, really,’ she says, laying a hand on his arm.
He puts his hand over hers and they sit quietly for a moment, and then she can’t help it. She wants him to know what sort of person she is. Perhaps it will make him feel better. She takes a deep breath. ‘Charlie,’ she says, ‘I’m pregnant.’
She hears the sharp intake of air as he acknowledges the statement. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asks.
‘Keep it.’
‘But your family …’
‘I know. They won’t ever accept it. If Jack doesn’t come back, I’ll have to do it alone.’
‘That will be extremely tough.’
‘It will.’
‘Not just on you. On the child … I grew up without my parents. I know how hard it can be.’
‘It will have me.’
‘That makes it very lucky.’
‘Thank you, Charlie.’ In that moment she feels an overwhelming sense of gratitude and love for him.
He squeezes her hand. ‘I’ll do my best to find out what happened to him when I get out there,’ he says.
‘You’ve done more than enough already.’
‘You’re going to need any support you can get.’
‘I know.’
‘And I’ll talk to your parents when I get back.’
‘There’s no need to do that.’
‘I want to. I really admire the way you stick to your guns.’
‘We’re not so different, after all, you and me?’
‘I’m trying to be more open-minded.’
‘You’re doing a great job of it.’
He shifts and starts to say something, but thinks better of it.
‘Oh Charlie. What will happen to us?’
‘I don’t know about me,’ he says, ‘but I know you will be fine.’
She gives him a sad smile. Even after all these years of war, it still seems strange to be thinking of death – they should be deciding who to partner in a tennis tournament, or where to sit at a university lecture, or what country they are going to visit next.
‘Come on, Charlie,’ yells Maggie suddenly from next door, ‘or I’ll have finished this gin by myself!’ They laugh, and then they hear the drone of the bombers and the air-raid sirens start up. The building shakes, and the smell of dust clags in her nostrils as they are plunged into darkness. Charlie moves the blackout curtains so he can peer out into the street. The moon is almost full and it flings pale light across the kitchen, highlighting the contours of his face, the hollows of his cheeks, the furrowed brow. Olivia suddenly wants to reach out and touch him: she can imagine the warmth of his skin, the rasp of his stubble.
Maggie’s voice calls again: ‘Bring the bloody candles too!’
‘I’d better go and give her a hand,’ he says. ‘Sleep well.’
‘You too.’ Olivia closes her eyes and says a silent prayer, breathing in the faint smell of him before it disappears.
CHAPTER 20
Jack
It has been five days. They have lost another two men. They buried them near the cliffs, scraping holes into the dark, damp sand with their bare hands. They marked the shallow graves with wooden crosses made from driftwood. Jack can’t help but think of the foxes that will surely come; their haunting barks grow closer every day. He has heard other strange noises too, which turned out to be walruses lumbering further round the coast. Neither he nor Grifter nor the Chief has mentioned the polar bear print again. Jack sleeps with one arm over his eyes, trying to block out the light. The landscape never changes. All he sees is the brown, bare beach, and, further away, the rock and snow and water and light, and the smoke from the fire corkscrewing up into the air. He sees it when he has his eyes open and when he has them closed. His body craves night-time and darkness.
At least Carl is better. He can sit up now. But he cannot walk. His legs are a pulpy mess. ‘Do you think the Navy will find us?’ he asks Jack.
‘Any day now,’ says Jack, although he is thinking of the same Navy that abandoned them.
A fog descends. It is a relief not to be able to see anything. Jack leans back and closes his eyes, arm slung over his face. The colourless world turns blood-red. The sounds are distorted. He hears someone squeak in their dreams and is immediately awake and sitting up again because the sound wasn’t quite a squeak but more of a whistle.
He peers into the milky mist. Now he wishes he could see that bare beach again. The sound cuts through the fog once more. Jack senses the other men stir around him.
‘What was that?’ He recognises Grifter’s voice.
‘Was it a whistle?’
‘I heard it too.’ The voices fragment in the white of the fog.
Again, a whistle. And suddenly one of their own men is blowing a whistle from a discarded life jacket – and another one, and another. They are all whistling on the beach, and there’s a reply whistle from the fog – from the sea, because Jack knows that’s the sea out there somewhere.
‘Don’t move,’ says Jack. ‘Wait for the fog to clear.’ And the men are calling to each other through the fog, but it’s like a nightmare you can’t wake up from and they just have to sit and wait in the clammy, groping cloud, praying that it’s the Navy at last.
The fog starts to clear, like steam from a train. First, Jack can make out shadows. The shadows become his friends, then the cliffs, then the shore. Jack and the Chief move towards the newcomers, their hearts thudding in their throats. The other men hang back. The Chief glances at Jack to see whether to advance. Now Jack can make out the shadow of a ship on the water. Friend or foe? The mist rolls back and the ship comes into focus. He strains to make out the flags. Then relief. It is another American ship from their convoy. It has run aground on a sandbank, having strayed too close to the island.
The Americans are just as surprised to see them. They welcome the lifeboat survivors on board, supporting the weary men against their shoulders or carrying them on stretchers. The crew from the Aurora are put together in a mess room. Someone brings hot coffee, but Jack can’t drink it because it makes him retch.
His feet tingle and his hands throb as the heat of the ship seeps into them. In the light of the cabin, he takes a proper look at his shipmates. The seven of them are in a filthy state. Their swollen hands and feet are beginning to blister as they thaw. Their faces are black with ingrained dirt. Their hair is matted, and their beards encrusted with food and salt. And they stink: of rotting flesh and filth and sweat. Jack is too tired to care.
The American ship radios a Russian trawler. Jack picks up bits of information. They are not the only men from their convoy to have made it to these islands, called Novaya Zemlya. There are other ships that have been hiding in the Matochkin Strait, a strip of water that separates this half of the island from its other half. They are gathering here, near a lighthouse, from where they will make their final move to Archangel. The thought of being back on the open sea in a ship fills Jack with horror. He could stay and eat seabirds for the rest of his life. But Carl needs help; Jack must get him to safety. His hand goes to Olivia’s knife, which has given him strength through all these days. He will see her again. He will.
As he is transferred to the Russian trawler, Jack can see that every ship that has managed to drag itself here is overladen with extra men. They are the lucky ones, the survivors plucked from the sea and from other lifeboats. They cower into the shadows; their haunted eyes barely registering each other. You can’t feel lucky when you know that for every one of you there are the countless, frozen unlucky. The men from the Aurora huddle together under the Americans’ blankets, and stare at their Russian crew. There is a female doctor, the first woman they have seen since the Russian tanker. She is small and neat, but her face is lined, which makes her seem older than her young, sad eyes. The Russians cannot speak English, and the crew of the Aurora cannot speak Russian. The doctor hands them salted fish to eat. It is as tasteless as the seabirds. Jack chews it slowly. It is all the Russians have. At least there is plenty of fresh water.
The scrappy new convoy sets off once more across the sea, to finish what they started. Carl communicates in whispers, but at least he can talk. ‘I can’t feel my legs,’ he says.
‘It’s just the shock,’ says Jack. ‘They look fine.’ It is a lie.
The next few hours are spent in aching terror, each man reliving his last moments on board the Aurora with every bump and creak of the trawler. Jack tries to keep spirits up by recounting tales of their training ship, but it only serves to remind them of what they have left behind. The Russians start to shout orders at each other. The mainland is in sight. The ship steams into the White Sea before heading into the mouth of the River Dvina. There, great piles of timber line the banks, long tree trunks stacked high, not sawn planks like those at the Surrey Docks. Enormous logs float past, bowled along by the current. The sparse and scrubby banks are dotted with wooden huts. People who seem no more than scruffy bundles of rags stare at them. And then Archangel rises before them on the coast, looking nothing like it sounds: not heavenly at all.
As they approach the shore, Jack sees the docks are busy with groups of people – men and women – loading and unloading cargo. A man slows to peer at the incoming line of ships, and he is immediately prodded and shouted at by a guard. He stumbles back into line.
‘Prisoners,’ says the Chief, who has been here before. ‘Mostly Russian and Finnish. Perhaps Norwegian.’
The docks are some way from the town. Pine forests stretch into the distance. The men stagger down the gangway. It is hard to tell who is a local, who is a prisoner, and who a survivor. Everyone has the same ragged look, the same weary, gaunt faces. The survivors stand in a confused cluster. Someone waves at them to stay where they are. Another woman appears and instructs them to do something. ‘She say to take clothes off,’ says the Russian doctor, surprising everyone that she can speak English.
The men shake their heads and back off, but there is nowhere to go. They refuse to take off their clothes. They are not the only ones. The whole quay is packed with men from different ships – Americans and Dutch and British. Those that can still walk stick together in clumps. Those that can’t, crawl towards each other, hoping there is safety in numbers. Grifter is trying to talk to the doctor, but she is shaking her head and saying, ‘Better here. You must here.’ The men look to Jack, but he crouches by Carl, ready to swing at anyone if they come near.
And now Russian guards appear, waving their guns, the bayonets glinting and flashing above their thick overcoats, their faces hidden behind scarves and under their warm hats. The exhausted men shout back at them and the tension swirls, mixing with the stink of sewage that seems to pervade everything. The guards press forward, and the men gather together, shouting back. Jack grips Olivia’s knife in his pocket. He will use it if he has to. He keeps one hand on Carl’s shoulder.
He hears someone shout: ‘Back away. Back away.’ He has never been so pleased to hear an English order barked out. Slowly the Russian guards step back into their positions surrounding the men. They rest the stocks of their rifles on the ground. Their shoulders hunch up around their necks as their beady eyes glitter from the darkness, watching all the time.
‘Well met, men,’ says a small round man with rosy cheeks and little round glasses. ‘And welcome to Archangel. I’m Captain Tasker, Royal Army Medical Corps. I’m afraid Archangel is rather basic in the hygiene department. The corporal and lance corporal’ – here he nods at the two men accompanying him – ‘will take your numbers, rank, and ship names. You need to form two queues. British here, non-British there.’
The men straggle into line, and the medics work their way along, making notes and nodding. When he reaches Carl and Jack, the corporal asks about his burns, whether they have dressed them, whether they smell. He scratches notes on his paper and then whistles at one of the orderlies. They come with a stretcher. ‘No,’ says Jack. ‘I need to stay with him.’
The corporal lays a hand on Jack’s arm. ‘We’ll look after him,’ he says.
‘You can’t take him.’ They are beginning to shout at each other above the general commotion. The men on the quay fall silent and watch as Jack feels the anger and panic rise in his throat. An image of Betsy being ushered away from him at the station dances through his mind.
The doctor trots down the line. ‘It’s all right,’ he says, waving the corporal on.
‘I can’t leave him,’ says Jack.
‘I know it’s hard,’ says the doctor. ‘But your friend needs to go to a specialist place. We’re packed to the gunwales with injured men, and where you’re going they’ve got no idea how to treat something this bad. The Russian hospital is the best chance your friend has. They really know their frostbite and burns.’
Jack swallows. The doctor lays his hand on Jack’s shoulder. ‘I promise he’ll be better off.’ Jack sighs. He is too weak to fight. The doctor clicks his fingers at the orderlies, and they gently lift Carl on to the stretcher.
‘I’ll find you as soon as I can,’ says Jack.
Carl squeezes his hand. ‘I’m not Betsy,’ he says. ‘I’ll be fine.’
The orderlies climb into the back of a waiting lorry with the stretchers, as it rattles to life and pulls away.
‘Right,’ says Dr Tasker. ‘The rest of you have been deemed walking wounded; fit enough to be debagged and deloused here. I know it’s not very orthodox, but it’s for your own good, believe me. Facilities are very basic, and we can’t risk taking more infection into the recuperation centres.’ He nods at the corporal.
‘You’ll need to remove your clothes now or you’ll be spending the night here.’ The men look up and down the filthy docks, at the cranes and the sacks and the rubbish and the sewage and the flies. A scrawny man begins to pull off his clothes.
One by one, the rest follow. The prisoners collect their rags, gathering them into a pile to be incinerated. A thickset woman with a ruddy face tries to take Jack’s knife away, but he clasps it tightly and yells at her, and she yells back at him, and the doctor appears again. ‘Let him keep it,’ he says. ‘These men have suffered enough.’
She grudgingly releases her grip, and Jack presses the knife to his chest.
A gang of men stands with hoses ready. The Russian guards bark an order at them and the gang begins to work its way along the lines of men.
Jack gasps when the water hits him. The cold makes him forget any humiliation as he stands there like an animal in a farmyard. But even this water cannot get the worst of the grime off his blackened hands and feet. Worse is to come. Now the women start to work their way along the lines. Jack wants to run, but there is nowhere to go: hostile armed guards in front of them; filthy water behind. Dr Tasker and his soldiers gaze into the distance. Somewhere some women are singing a song.
A woman approaches Jack with a razor. She does not meet his eyes. A guard stamps his rifle on the ground. Jack feels the cold metal of the blade against his scalp and the scrape as it is pulled back along his head, gently working around his scar. His hair falls in matted clumps around his feet. He feels the woman’s warm hand against his throat as she starts on his beard. The scritch of the razor across his cheek and up his throat. He feels the last scrap of dignity drift from his body. But she hasn’t finished yet: ‘Up! Up!’ she says, and she taps on his arms. The razor scrapes away at the hair in his armpits and then she starts to move around his groin. He grips the open knife in his hand until it digs into his palm and the blood starts to trickle along the blade and drip slowly on to the ground. All his hair is gone. He is as naked and vulnerable as a newborn baby.
