Acts of Mutiny. Derek Beaven

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СКАЧАТЬ naval artificer, still working by his lamp at some Marconi chassis, waiting, with the smoke wisping up from the solder. I do half expect that special smell, of burning dust and Fluxite, mingled with the leftover flavour of kippers. But it is empty, of course, and icy cold.

      The house has been modernised and remodernised. The back room no longer swims in its browns and greens. He is not, of course, at the table, his repair gutted on the spread newspaper, his sweet-tin of resistors and condensers tipped out all of a wire jumble.

      We once squeezed in. We were pressed by furniture: lacquered, oak-stained, brown-draped. Even when I was a child it was out of date, like a workman’s Edwardiana, pickled. The two bucket chairs in leather, shiny with use; the heavy oak table and five mock-Chippendale chairs; the gloomy bureau; the rust-coloured dresser; the wireless table in the corner; the china cupboard – there was scarcely room for the fireplace. There was scarcely room even for the tea kettle on its hinged iron platform beside the grate. My grandfather the gunner, who lived with us, would swing it round into the flames, and then force his huge khaki-shirted frame slowly along the last side of the table and into his carver, beating upwind, braces strung tight and heaving at his waistband like the main-sheets of a square-rig.

      The place is quite empty, and brims with its own incommunicable loss.

      On the tight margin of floor in front of the hearth I can imagine my small self – stretched out by the french windows’ gloam. I lie reading my London’s River at Work and at War, lost in its illustrations, a romance of barges. The sails are tan, the river mud-green, the lines of the vessels wood on wood. And there are tramp steamers, painted iron with a fuss of tugs: grimed hulls, the ochres and rusts of their superstructure. Dark outpourings of smoke blot cranes and whole expanses of page. That was the river I knew; an oilscape of docks. Even the sun – I lived in sepia, my growing up here was an unbroken stream, brown as varnish, leading inevitably to the sea.

      I swear the boy looks up. Is it me he is afraid of?

      My scalp tingles. I remember another time back there on the doorstep with Erica my mother. We too are hesitating to go in, having hauled our suitcases to the top of ‘the ladders’. She grips my arm. We are coming home. I remember it well. Clear, in fact, as daylight. It is from my first voyage in a voyaging life. But – this is the astonishing thing – in forty years I swear that particular scene and that childhood sea-passage have never once entered my head. Of course, it is coming to me now, there was a whole year I did not live here at all. Had gone to the ends of the earth with … Mr Chaunteyman was his unusual name. And I am caught up suddenly in a romance of names: Penny Kendrick, Robert Kettle; and the Indian Ocean. Clear as you like.

2

      It was January 1959. They met on the journey out. Before Port Said they pretended there was nothing between them. After Aden it was undeniable. Yet ‘nothing’ of it had been spoken. Penny was joining her husband in Adelaide. Robert was going up-country.

      ‘I’m starting with a team at the observatory, the tracking station,’ he had said. Every sentence in each other’s hearing took on an extra meaning, like a jewelled, coded gift.

      Now they and the Madeleys stood together near the aft end of the boat deck, past the run of white lifeboats. The sun dropped without ceremony into the Indian Ocean just to the left of the ship’s wake, scorching it for a moment or two with orange flares. On cue, there rose a warm, slightly scented breeze from the sea.

      ‘I suppose we really ought to be getting ready for dinner, if you’ll excuse us, Penny, Mr Kettle,’ Mrs Madeley said. ‘Come along, Douglas, I think.’ She picked up two of the empty glasses with their fruited cocktail sticks, as if to include the pair of them in her command.

      ‘Calm as you like.’ Douglas addressed the sea but was following his wife with cautious, elderly steps.

      Penny seemed to comply. ‘Yes. I must decide what to wear. So uncomplicated for the men, isn’t it. They can just rush down at the last minute and hurl themselves into a dress suit.’

      Robert felt desperate with her; then hated himself for it. They strolled back as a foursome, past the housing for the smokestack, towards the stairs in the white steel wall of the bridge. To their right the shapes of five lifeboats were slow white moments running out.

      Penny stopped to rummage in her bag. He waited beside her.

      ‘We’ll see you shortly, then? Perhaps a drink before?’ Mrs Madeley raised her voice from the companion-way door, which she held open. Strains of some light string trio crept up from below. Douglas, his long tropical shorts unflattering above brown knees and scout socks, had reached it now and was edging inside.

      ‘Probably see you in a minute,’ Robert called. He dreaded the next ritual Pimm’s. ‘Isn’t there a film tonight, Douglas?’ Penny’s words ‘so uncomplicated for the men’ mocked him. His feelings were jangled.

      Yet Penny had managed to contrive them a moment; effortlessly, daringly – unless she was only checking her bag for her compact, or whatever, and actually did intend to follow the Madeleys away.

      ‘Not our sort of show, Mr Kettle,’ Douglas answered. ‘We like musical comedies. Can take any amount of them, can’t we, dear?’ They disappeared downwards. Penny straightened, and allowed her straw bag to hang from her shoulder again.

      So at last Robert was alone with her; really alone for only the third time on the voyage.

      ‘In Adelaide?’ She continued the conversation several days old. He read her tone, as if the intervening time with its meals and games and the ship’s daily run had collapsed. ‘Did you mean an observatory in Adelaide? There would be one?’ she asked.

      ‘Oh no.’ His nerve wavered. They had missed each other. She had not known where he would be going. She had not allowed for it. ‘Well, yes, there is one in Adelaide. But I meant up in the salt lakes. Beyond the hills … North. The desert. The Flinders Range.’ Some anxiety made him forbear to trot out the government name of the town-cum-missile-base, although there was no real reason why he should not. There was no secret. Nothing to feel ashamed of. For a moment his sunburn from the Red Sea began to itch again, and to ache.

      They waited for a moment in the deck tennis markings. Then she moved under the boats to lean on the rail; and he stood next to her.

      ‘When I mentioned the tracking station, I thought you’d know’

      ‘I don’t. Tracking what? And what lakes would they be? I don’t know anything … about the lie of the land.’ She shifted her hands on the rail, through which as always the churn and drive of the engines could be felt, a constant background.

      ‘I thought he might have told you. Your husband. You said he’d gone out to Adelaide “in the weapons interest”.’

      ‘To the research establishment at Salisbury, yes. But he doesn’t write to me about that sort of thing – they’re not quite supposed to, are they? Anyway, it isn’t really an interest we’ve managed to have in common.’

      Robert laughed and caught her smile, the lipstick now star-glazed. How unfamiliar it was still, that here, close to the Equator, day just switched off, and then it was dark; without lingering or pause for reflection. What did he write to her, then, was what he wanted to ask. But dared not.

      He looked up at the swinging, СКАЧАТЬ