Acts of Mutiny Read online

  And there is the memory that comes back like a spit in the face, like a gob of poison. It was Hugh Kendrick’s visit long after we had arrived in Adelaide, with his terrible story of the lovers in the desert, and what I had done. That strikes at me with its own coil, clear, and of a piece – with detail like scales. How I felt like a salamander in the fire that night after the scare at the township dump. That memory refuses to leave me, yet I cannot make it fit.

  You are cast adrift with me now, and must trust in my navigation.

  Creatures of air see nothing beneath the surface. The ocean has layers. Deep down there are lanterns, great-swallowers, dragonfish, star-eaters who rise up near the surface only for the night sky, and then sink back nearly a mile at dawn. Beneath them in turn it is perpetually sunless. There the blanched light-emitters blitz and glow. Angler fish, gulper eels, black bristle-mouths, oarfish. No living mariner knows of these depths; though thirty thousand corpses reach them a year, and scarcely a news column of concern.

  Consider the scars across the forehead of an old sperm whale. These tell of the giant squid. Consider the tentacles. Consider the hideous beak. This is a species that eludes us, lying in wait, unfathomably huge, maybe. It is rumoured to rise up once in a century to take a ship or two. It throws us into confusion.

  But memory can play us false. No record of the Armorica exists. Not with the shipping company itself, nor with Lloyd’s, nor with the Maritime Museum at Greenwich; not even at the Admiralty. I have rung everywhere and anywhere that passenger liners might be registered or listed. It is the same polite response: that I must be mistaken. We have nothing here on file in that name, sir.

  I have pulled rank, requested double-checks, paid for searches. I have been told to ‘hold the line’ and have patiently held. I have insisted: ‘But I was there. I once sailed in her.’ To no avail. And my family also deny knowledge. My aunt claims she is too upset to think about such things. Anyway, she has no recollection of all that. Why had I never bothered asking when my father was alive? It is almost as though I had killed him myself. Erica, my mother … is too ill. Moon-faced, full of drugs, she attended the hospital rather than the funeral. They may give her electro-shock. Under general anaesthetic, of course: what only the body undergoes, the nurse said, the mind need never know.

  Memory is a dangerous subject. Let me warn you once more. Quite apart from this bereavement, I have been under pressure. There was a woman the other day – she was brought to an interview room. I found her badly disfigured, burnt, presumably. The eyes brown, the silver hair still showing traces of a youthful black, the skin a pale tan – what original was left of it. She was scarred massively at one time or another, but who knows by what. Perhaps an unfortunate household accident. And she might have been anything, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Algerian, Vietnamese. She was screaming in a quiet, tired way that was horrible. She could have been white, even. I lost my temper – I suffer from dark moods. I almost lost my job. The department has to be careful; we pride ourselves. She was referred and will be deported, of course.

  She claimed … but how can you determine a torture victim? The doctor examined her. What are its precise badges? Terror? Depression? Incoherence, yes. Apathy, very often. She could give no precise account of what she had experienced. She was crazy, certainly; and articulately incoherent in her own version of English. There was an accent, but not a definitive one. She had seen God up there on the way. Courtesy of Qantas. She was the Holy Ghost and I was the recording angel.

  Then she demanded asylum, claiming Commonwealth citizenship – for what that is worth – but could give no country of origin. I have seen a lot of claimants, fished out of passport queues, flushed out of cargo holds. I have seen forged documents exposed, and various scars upon the body, some genuine. The airport becomes its own island beach, where the world’s wretched are washed up. She could, as I say, have been anything. She called me ‘frozen-faced douanier’, and she is right, it is my official persona – policeman of boundaries. Perhaps it was Carla’s presence that made this particular encounter stay in my mind, just after the night of our intimacy. A woman’s body, that Terra Australis Incognita. Carla is a member of my department. We sometimes work together.

  Could I have mistaken the name? Armorica? It is some slip, perhaps, where an idea loops back on itself and we find ourselves positive about an erroneous fragment. That is a commonplace of the witness-box, after all. No two people ever see quite the same incident. Details get confused. Could I have crossed one ship’s name with another? A burnt woman …

  While I should have been writing reports, I have been researching passenger lists: for the relevant years from the relevant companies. No Ralph and Erica Lightfoot appear. No David Lafayette Chaunteyman. There are two Kendricks and one Kettle, but they are not Penny or Robert.

  4

  If you asked me to describe the night of my return to Abbey Wood with Erica, I could not. There may have been scenes, recriminations, blows. What I do know is that afterwards the name Armorica never crossed our lips. Not once. The voyage’s memorabilia were trashed from our luggage: the menus with their little seabed illustrations, the brochures of ports, the bus tickets, waiter’s bills and so on. Our Australian effects, my school notebooks – even Erica’s snaps were handed over to be destroyed. When we returned and my grandfather was ‘gone’, the house was brought ruthlessly up to date. A proper television went in, fitted carpet, a three-piece suite, all hire purchase. It was fumigated of its past. And the television stayed on all the time, sealing them into their marital capsule.

  And this is my utter frustration now, of course: that for my father’s honour, my original voyage was so rubbed out. Within those walls it had absolutely never happened, though I can hardly think our self-censorship had the power to extinguish a whole ship from public record.

  My father hated memory. He never spoke of his war. Out of the Navy for good by VJ, he went to work in the arsenal – like everyone else. It remained for some years a large employer. All the while some kind of suffering was palpable in him, but unarticulated. You could see it in his arrogance, his ironic grin, as if he were perpetually biting back the pain of an inventive old-world punishment. Hating religion by the same token, he shrugged off any approach of emotion with grim clowning. He used that peculiar baby-talk larded with back slang, which tends to lurk in the Navy. By these means he cemented what must have been our conspiracy, for it was always to him that I took my troubles, right from a toddler. I regarded him as my special protector; like a joking Jesus.

  I try hard to imagine him in his own youth, cycling up to the grammar school at Shooter’s Hill; I rode there myself in my teens, on the same bike. Though he left at fourteen and was sent soon enough to HMS Ganges at Ipswich, the ‘stone frigate’ hell-hole, where his own dad had once been an instructor.

  I went through sixth form and qualified for my commission because the war had changed everything. There was technology and free education. And he told me in a gruff voice how I had ‘bloody gone aft’, how he ‘wouldn’t know how to speak to me no more’ – Ganges being to Dartmouth what the beast is to beauty. Gone aft! Dad, no one ‘goes aft’. It was wilful and jealous, this adherence to Jack Tar, who never slings his mental hammock but in a wooden man-o’-war.

  Once I was commissioned, the eddies of career kept me in the northern hemisphere. Not so unusual. It is not all ‘See the world’. So it was perhaps not until seventy-nine that I first found myself south of the Line. That would have been with Zebra, the best destroyer I served in. I was in my late twenties, keen, good at my job, making progress.

  We waved our flag at Cape Town and sailed east for Sydney on a goodwill visit, bound for Hong Kong. Oceans are all different. To trace the famous old trade routes of the roaring forties holds an excitement, a freshness. I enjoyed my baptism in those last-discovered waters, the southern seas. We hurried along to Australia at a steep clipper-fast run, and made landfall.

  But just as we approached Sydney harbour a flotilla of small
craft blocked our route. We had to hold off: yachts, cabin cruisers – even a few old steamers. They were making their way out past the Heads which mark the harbour’s entrance. It seemed as though the whole population had taken to the water, skittering and skimming about like a vast shoal haunting a reef.

  The few Sydney folk who had not got themselves afloat were up there waving right on the bluff, or drawn up to the very edges in their cars – we could just make them out and just hear, dimly on the breeze, the noise of their horns mingled with the hoots and blarings from the little fleet.

  In the midst of them stood a great white passenger ship dressed over all, proceeding out to sea. Every few minutes a blast of sound would come from her funnel across the swell, and the small fry would reply at once hooting back; and then tack or dart all the more.

  We lined the wires; it was a sight. I turned to speak to the man next to me, and found Tommy Hall-Patterson, our Principal Warfare Officer. He said it was the send-off for the liner Avalon on her last voyage. He was a distant, rather isolated man; but a hard-nosed sailor, one of the old school. Hated to see a damn good ship go to waste, he said. ‘She’s the last of the three white sisters, the Avalon, the Armorica, and the Hispania. There goes what it’s all been about, Ralphie. You see that glorious thing, beside which this old tub, though I love her dearly, is no more than a rocket-launching sardine can sharpened at one end …’ He paused. ‘Look at those bloody lines. Isn’t she a vision?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said.

  ‘And what are we having to do with her?’ he continued. ‘Sell her to the damn Chinks. She’s off to Taiwan to be broken up. With all her bloody glad rags on. Makes me livid.’ He nodded towards her, and added some half audible snippet of verse. ‘You know that?’ He repeated it: Kipling – about the great imperial steamers in their white and gold liveries. ‘When you see the like of her, what do you think?’ His angry eyes turned from the Avalon and seemed to bore into me. I hesitated, not knowing what sort of reply he was after.

  But he carried on: ‘For three hundred years, the Royal Navy has kept the seas so that a creature like that could slip off Clydebank and go anywhere she wanted without fear of bloody molestation. But there’s no more cash, boy. We’re all washed up. Men have given their lives for a cause and what does it amount to. The Jap, the Yank, the Russian, the damn German and the heathen bloody Chinee; these shall inherit the earth, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.

  ‘And if anyone has the balls to say nay,’ I can hear his cultured, old-fashioned voice even now, ‘if anyone questions the damn carve-up, Ralphie, why then it’s all hell and four-minute warnings. Short and curlies, eh? No one can move a damn muscle, for the awful poise of the balance. If poor old Britannia dares draw the line again what a bloody flap there’d be. Before you know it an unstoppable escalation, some idiot politician presses the button, and the lot of us gone up for good. You and I, Ralph, will never see active service. Have you grasped that? Lucky, are we? By God, I’d give anything for a crack at someone about this.’ He indicated the Avalon. ‘But the bastard politicians will cut us, and cut us, and cut everything down to the bloody bone. No merchant fleet left and nothing to defend.’

  His fist tightened on the wire before him. ‘But we never lost a war, did we? Battle or two maybe, but we never lost a war. Eh? No Vietnam. D’you see? No bloody Vietnam. Well, I’ll soon be hanging up my hat, boy. But what about you?’

  I had no answer. After eyeing me meaningfully once again, he went about his business. He was a good man; the sort you would want next to you in a crisis. Though of course he did not see active service; while I, of course, did.

  But later that day, when we were all in a bar in Sydney somewhere, he made a point of buttonholing me and buying me a Scotch. He insisted he had confused the names. Two sisters only: Avalon and Hispania. Why he should have made a mix-up like that he had no idea. Two sisters only.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘That’s all right then. That’s all right.’ And I cudgelled my brain then for the other name he had let slip.

  But now glimpses of the Armorica burst softly around me like the artillery of butterflies. The barrage of memory takes its own time, its own slow motion of opening.

  5

  It had not been calm all the way. In fact, the Armorica was late because of the Bay of Biscay. Only a few days out from Tilbury and the English Channel, a huge winter storm had forced her to turn head on to the waves, and stand far out into the Atlantic.

  ‘It claimed in the brochure this ship had stabilisers,’ Barry Parsons said to the steward that lunch-time, when the motion first went beyond a joke. Penny overheard him trying to help his green-faced wife out of the dining-room. All morning there had been wry smiles and comments about sea-legs. An ominous pewter sky bottomed wider and lower, beaten out by a dinting wind. The lounges were suddenly deserted; the clamorous gloom penetrated the cabins themselves. But Penny had always reckoned herself the kind of person who would, when put to the test, make a good sailor.

  In her neat blouse, her light jacket cinched at the waist, her long skirt of brown serge, and her court shoes which turned out slightly when she walked, she presented herself for lunch; though at the back of her mind she did worry that a ship made entirely of steel – it was, wasn’t it? – should be able to creak and grind so.

  The dining-room was large, brightly lit and expensively panelled. But, lying between the outermost cabins each side of D deck, it had no windows or portholes – and therefore no reassuring horizon. She shared a table with the Finch-Clarks, and now their little girl. Children were permitted at lunch. It was a table at the edge of the dining area, where carpet gave way to wood. About her, the slightly built Goan waiters coped with chops, game, fish, soup, and deployed their twin spoons to serve level vegetables on a treacherously sloping plate. The air was full, too, of the usual cuisine smells, made sharper and a touch greasier, she felt, by the worsening sea. Yet she began her meal in a spirit of bravery: with a portion of asparagus in butter, excellent as always. And then the lamb.

  But now a tray full of upturned coffee-cups slid off its side-table and avalanched pieces of crockery past them. A bad wave. From around the dining-room there were shrieks and remarks from folk caught up in similar local calamities. Hardly a moment to recoup before there came another. Tests of character. Penny gripped on to her own table with one hand while maintaining her plate with the other. Gravy trickled over her fingers. She could see the Parsons couple. They had been unable to move. Half slumping, half standing a few yards away, they clutched at the door-frame, the handrail and each other. She could see white knuckles. Then all the debris came cruising along the floor as the ship tipped back through what now seemed an enormous angle.

  And slowly – but not so slowly that it became acceptable – up again.

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t have the stabilisers out in this sort of a sea, sir. They’d break off.’

  ‘What!’ Barry Parsons’s fleshy presence boomed. ‘You’re joking, I take it.’ But its sound was as unconvincing as an echo.

  ‘Absolutely not, sir. They said yesterday we were likely to run into some heavy stuff. Just have to head up and ride it out. Besides, they only affect the roll, not the pitch, stabilisers.’ The steward gestured with his flattened hand. ‘The captain won’t want to get stuck in the Bay, see. I’m sure you’ll understand.’ He grinned. He was enjoying it, Penny thought. ‘ATM afraid it’s likely to get a touch worse than this, even. Which is a little unusual even for this time of year, sir, I admit.’ Definite relish.

  Queenie Parsons just managed, ‘Worse?’ Then, ‘But this is a liner’ died to a whisper as she fought with incredulity, terror and her stomach. Hanging on, the Parsons couple appeared to Penny as ham dramatics conversing from across an unkind wooden stage. But she was hanging on to the table herself, surprised, yes, genuinely surprised that the captain could allow roughness to get to the point of breakages.

  ‘You’d think they’d know what to expect,
wouldn’t you? And have special racks or whatever – for the things. You’d think they would.’ She made the remark to no one in particular, voicing her disquiet.

  Paul Finch-Clark leaned in to the table and managed to make a quip about Battersea fairground. Something else smashed. Penny caught the words ‘… You realise it isn’t quite what it looked like from dry-ground level.’

  Little Rosalind Finch-Clark gripped her chair at both sides, watching with wide eyes as her plate of half-eaten poached egg on toast moved now towards her father, now towards Penny.

  ‘When does it stop?’ Penny called out.

  It was the steward who replied. ‘Not for a few days, I’m afraid, madam.’

  ‘A few days! Like this!’ She found her voice joined by several from the neighbouring tables. Then she glanced to where the Parsons couple had been standing. They were now nowhere to be seen. They had been slid out of the ship and sluiced away, so she could fancy.

  A general lurching exodus from the dining-room was in progess, however, for the big sea continued. Every wave was a bad wave. Penny regarded her fellow travellers, trying herself to decide what to do. The ship’s creaks and groaning had increased, quite alarmingly. Surely that was not right. A noise overhead. She looked up in case signs of fracture should appear in the ceiling. She expected the lights to flicker. There was indeed an air of consternation. Sparks or water would burst through the walls.

  Only the hardiest old birds of passage were still eating, managing their plates with a degree of superiority. One or two were still calling out to waiters as if a regime of bouncing, splintering glassware and cascading cutlery were just what their specialist, when reminding them to go south again this year for the winter, had ordered. An old woman in pearls summoned assistance from her seat two tables away. ‘Cabin, I think, steward.’