The Ship of Brides

Margaret laid her hands on her stomach. ‘Nobody’s going to tell on you, Jean,’ she said.

There was a deafening silence from Avice’s bunk.

Outside, an unknown distance away, they could hear a foghorn. It sounded a single low, melancholy note.

‘Frances?’ said Jean.

‘She’s asleep,’ whispered Margaret.

‘No, she’s not. I saw her eyes when I lit my ciggie. You won’t tell on me, Frances, will you?’

‘No,’ said Frances, from the bunk opposite. ‘I won’t.’

Jean got out of bed. She patted Margaret’s leg, then climbed nimbly back up to her bunk, where she could be heard rustling herself into comfort. ‘So, come on, then,’ she said eventually. ‘Who likes doing it, and what is it that makes you actually get a baby?’

On the flight deck, a thousand-pound bomb from a Stuka aircraft looks curiously like a beer barrel. It rolls casually from the underbelly of the sinister little plane, with the same g*y insouciance as if it were about to be rolled down the steps of a beer cellar. Surrounded by its brothers, flanked by a bunched formation of fighter planes, it seems to pause momentarily in the sky, then float down towards the ship, guided, as if by an invisible force, towards the deck.

This is one of the things Captain Highfield thinks as he stares up at his impending death. This, and the fact that, when the wall of flame rises up from the armoured deck, engulfing the island, the ship’s command centre, its blue-white heat clawing upwards, and he is possessed of the immobilising terror, as he had always known he would be, he has forgotten something. Something he had to do. And in his blind paralysis even he is dimly aware of how ridiculous it is to be casting around for some unremembered task while he faces immolation.

Then, in the raging heart of the fire, as the bombs rain around him, bouncing off the decks, as his nostrils sting with the smell of burning fuel and his ears refuse to close to the screams of his men, he looks up to see a plane, where there is no plane. It, too, is engulfed, yellow flames licking at the cockpit, the tilted wings blackened, but not enough to obscure, within, Hart’s face, which is untouched, his eyes questioning as he faces the captain.

I’m sorry, Highfield weeps, unsure if, through the roar of the fire, the younger man can hear him. I’m sorry.

When he wakes, his pillow damp and the skies still dark above the quiet ocean, he is still speaking these words into the silence.

7

I, like many others, had developed a love-hate relationship with the Vic. We hated the life, but we were proud of her as a fighting unit. We cursed her between ourselves, but would not hear anyone outside of the ship say anything derogatory about her . . . she was a lucky ship. Sailors are so superstitious.

L. Troman, seaman, HMS Victorious,

in Wine, Women and War

Two weeks previously

According to her log, HMS Victoria had seen action in the north Atlantic, the Pacific and, most recently, at Morotai where, carrying Corsairs, she helped force back the Japanese and bore the scars to show it. She, and many like her, had stopped repeatedly over the past few years at the dockyards at Woolloomooloo to have her mine-damaged hull repaired, bullet and torpedo holes plugged, the brutal scars of her time at sea put straight before she was sent out again, bearing men who had themselves been patched up and readied for battle.

Captain George Highfield was much given to fanciful thinking, but as he walked along the dry dock, staring up through the sea mist at the hulls of Victoria and her neighbours, he often allowed himself to think about the vessels as his fellows. Hard not to see them as suffering some kind of hurt, as having some kind of personality when they had allied themselves to you, given you their all, braved high seas and fierce fire. In forty years’ service, he’d had his favourites: those that had felt undeniably his, the occasional alchemic conjunction of ship and crew in which each man knew he would lay down his life willingly for its protection. He had bitten back private tears of grief when he left them, less privately when they had been sunk. He often supposed this was how previous generations of fighting men must have felt about their horses.

‘Poor old girl,’ he muttered, glancing at the hole ripped in the aircraft-carrier’s side. She looked so much like Indomitable, his old ship.

The surgeon had said he should use a stick. Highfield suspected that the man had told others he shouldn’t be allowed back to sea at all. ‘These things take longer to heal at your age,’ he had observed, of the livid scar tissue where the metal had sliced through to the bone, the ridged skin of the burns around it. ‘I’m not convinced you should be up and about on that just yet, Captain.’

Highfield had discharged himself from the hospital that morning. ‘I have a ship to take home,’ he had said, closing the conversation. As if he would allow himself to be invalided out at this stage.

Like everyone else, the surgeon had said nothing. Sometimes it seemed to Highfield that no one knew what to say to him now. He hardly blamed them: in their shoes he would probably have felt the same.

‘Ah, Highfield. They told me you were out here.’

‘Sir.’ He stopped and saluted. The admiral approached through the light rain, waving away the umbrella-bearing officer beside him. Above them, the gulls wheeled and dived, their cries muffled by the mist.

‘Leg all better?’

‘Absolutely fine, sir. Good as new.’

He watched the admiral glance down at it. When you spotted an admiral out in the open air, his men used to say, you’d not know whether to polish your buttons for a ceremony or brace yourself for a roasting. But McManus was a good sort, who always knew somehow what was going on. So many of them spent their time behind their desks, breaking off only to go aboard ship the day before she was due back in, thus claiming some of her glory. But this admiral was a rare bird: always wanting to know what was going on at the docks, mediating in disputes, testing the political waters, questioning everything, missing nothing.

Highfield fought the urge to shift the weight off his leg again. He was conscious suddenly that McManus probably knew all about that too. ‘Thought I’d go and take a look at Victoria,’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen her in a few years. Not since I went aboard during the Adriatic convoys.’

‘You may find her a little changed,’ said McManus. ‘She’s taken a bit of a bashing.’

‘I suppose you could say the same for most of us.’ It was the closest Highfield would come to a joke, and McManus acknowledged it in his quiet smile.

The two men walked slowly along the dock, unconsciously stepping in time with each other.

‘So you’re A1 and ready to go again, eh, Highfield?’

‘Sir.’

‘Terrible business, what happened. We all felt for you, you know.’

Highfield kept his face to the front.

‘Yes,’ McManus continued. ‘Hart would have gone all the way to the top. Not your usual crabfat . . . Bloody shame when you were all so close to getting home.’

‘I contacted his mother, sir, while I was in hospital.’

‘Yes. Good man. Best coming from you.’

It was embarrassing to be praised for so small an achievement. Then Highfield found, as often happened when the young man was mentioned, that he could no longer speak.

When the silence had lasted several minutes, the admiral stopped and faced him. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself.’

‘Sir.’

‘I hear you’ve been a little . . . down about it. Well, we’ve all suffered such losses, and we’ve all lain awake at nights wondering if we could have prevented them.’ His assessing gaze passed over Highfield’s face. ‘You had no choice. Everyone is aware of that.’

Highfield tensed. He found it impossible to meet the admiral’s eye.

‘I mean it. And if your remaining company’s careers last as long as yours they’ll see worse. Don’t dwell on it, Highfield. These things happen.’ McManus tailed off, as if he were deep in thought, and Highfield stayed silent, listening to the sound of his feet on the now slick dockside, the distant grind and thump of cranes.

They had almost reached the gangplank. Even from here he could see the engineers on board, replacing the metal that had been buckled by impact, hear the banging and drilling that told him welders were busy inside the hangar space. They had been working hard, but a huge charred cleft in the starboard side was still partly visible in the smooth grey metal. She would win no beauty contests but, as his eyes rested upon her, Highfield felt the misery of the past weeks melt away.

They paused at the foot of the gangplank, squinting up into the light rain. Highfield’s leg twinged again and he wondered whether he could hold on to the sides inconspicuously.

‘So, what next when you get back, Highfield?’

Highfield hesitated. ‘Well, I’ll be retired, sir.’

‘I know that, man. I meant what are you going to do with yourself? Got any hobbies? No Mrs Highfield that you’ve been hiding all these years?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Oh.’

Highfield thought he detected pity in the word. He wanted to say he had never felt the lack of a female presence in his life. Get too close to a woman, and you were never happy anywhere. He’d seen men hankering for their wives while they were afloat, then irritated by the confines of femininity and domesticity when they were on land. He didn’t bother saying this any more: on the occasions when he had, the men had looked at him rather curiously.

The admiral turned back towards Victoria. ‘Well, there’s nothing like a “lifer”, is there? I suppose we wouldn’t have had the best of you if you’d always had your mind on some woman somewhere.’

‘Indeed, sir.’

‘Golf’s my thing. I plan to be on the links morning till evening. Think my wife’ll like it that way too.’ He laughed. ‘She’s got used to doing her own thing, over the years, you know.’

‘Yes,’ said Captain Highfield, although he didn’t.

‘Doesn’t relish the prospect of me under her feet all the time.’

‘Still.’

‘Not something you’ll have to worry about, eh? You can play all the golf you like.’

‘I’m not really a golfing man, sir.’

‘What?’

‘Think I’m happier on the water.’ He nearly said what he thought: that he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. And that he felt discomfited at not knowing. He had spent the last four decades with his life planned out in minutes, knowing days, weeks ahead what he would be doing, even where, according to his typewritten short or long cast, in what part of the world he would be.

Some thought him lucky to be finishing his career as the war ended: a blaze of glory, they joked, then realised what they’d said. I’ll bring my men home, he said. It’ll be a good way to end. He could sound very convincing. Several times he had fought the urge to beg the admiral to let him stay on.

‘Going up then?’

‘Thought I might inspect the work. Sounds like they’ve been busy.’ Now that he was on board again, Highfield felt a little of his authority return, the sense of surety and order that had ebbed away from him during his time in hospital. The admiral said nothing, but went briskly up the gangplank, his hands linked behind his back.

The pegging-in board had been turned towards the wall. The captain paused at the doorway, turned it round and slid his name tag across to confirm his presence aboard; a reassuring gesture. Then they stepped over the sill of the doorway, ducking simultaneously as they entered the cavernous hangar.

Not all of the lights were illuminated, and it took Highfield a couple of minutes to adjust to the gloom. Around him, ratings were strapping huge boxes of equipment to narrow shelves, raising and lowering black buckets of tools for those working above them. At one end, three young dabbers were repainting the pipework. They glanced behind them, apparently unsure whether they should salute. He recognised one, a young lad who had nearly lost a finger a few weeks previously when it got caught in the lashings. The boy saluted, revealing a leather pocket strapped to his hand. Highfield nodded in acknowledgement, pleased that he was already back to work. Then he looked in front of him at the huge liftwell that transported the planes to the deck. Several men were at work, one on a scaffold platform, apparently securing metal struts at regular intervals all the way up to the flight deck. He stared at the scene, trying to work out a possible explanation. He failed.