‘You know they test the bomb in Australia, don’t you, Bob? They’ll test anything there.’
Robert said, ‘Do you think we’ll see sharks?’
‘You won’t see any sharks on this cruise, mate. Take my word. Not unless someone lets blood. Takes a good old-fashioned naval action to get the sharks interested. Now in the Pacific …’ Joe gave a grim laugh. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. I was never in the Pacific’
Robert believed in the deterrent.
He said the next morning, ‘It’s not that I don’t admire the Bertrand Russells, the Canon Collinses of this world.’
‘What? The Bertrand Russell? The philosopher? What’s he been doing?’
‘The Ban the Bomb marches. They march to Aldermaston and so on. Where they make the … well, I don’t know which part of the bombs or what exactly they do make there, because it’s so secret …’ He felt it was his business to know but not to disclose – but then he really had been told nothing. The industry was compartmentalised, its units sealed, the best form of secrecy. The left hand never knew what all the other left hands were doing.
‘Aldermaston! I was brought up in Tadley. What’s all this about Aldermaston?’
‘I don’t even know where it is, to tell the truth. I only know they march there, the Aldermaston marchers.’ And suddenly, at the newspaper picture in his mind of the young people of his own generation with their duffle-coats and courage, becoming friends, lovers even, he was moved and sad. ‘Those are the headlines; and the newsreel pictures. Nobody mentions where it is, as such. They assume it’s common knowledge – which of course it is. Even signposted; though not in big lettering: “This way to the nuclear …” Well, of course not. Reading way, isn’t it?’
‘Course it bloody is! Bloody Reading way. Here’s me down under for the best part of my life, Bob, having to tell you where Aldermaston is. But now you’re telling me that’s where they make them. How long’s that been going on? I thought it was Cumberland or somewhere safely in the wilds. Just turn your back and they’re at it. That was down the road from us when I was a nipper, Alder-bloody-maston.’
Robert wanted to justify himself; to show that he was not just another white-coated yes-man who rattled along doing very nicely on government research, while washing his hands of the ethics. He did question. He did feel enormous reservations about, yes, England again. England at the root of it all, almost. Bloody-handed, clever England. He wanted to shout, ‘I’ve read Spengler and Marx! I play the piano!’ But he would merely have made himself ridiculous.
‘The Russians are stockpiling nuclear weapons. What’s the alternative? Human nature, I suppose; that’s at the root of it all. No one can afford to back down. Nobody likes it, but nobody wants the world to be incinerated. Blown to smithereens. I don’t. What’s the alternative, Joe, once two sides have got the damn things?’
Joe churned in the lower bunk and asked him to fetch the basin again. Robert got down and did so.
‘Don’t ask me, mate. I’m just one of the poor bloody infantry.’ He retched uselessly and painfully over the bowl. ‘In Australia it’s a different matter, anyway. How would you like fall-out clouds drifting over your back yard? My bloody back yard. They do, you know. Or did. Drift. Maybe your papers don’t run those headlines. Don’t want to know. They wouldn’t care, would they? Of course they wouldn’t. Whack! The black cloud. Whack! That island up the coast from Perth, Monty-something. Whack! Maralinga. No risk at all. No risk to Westminster, more like. It just happens to be right where we live. And quite a lot of us don’t like it, no matter for Bob bloody Menzies.’
So Robert was left tarred as an apologist for the arms-race lunacy; even by this voyage going out to further it.
The steward knocked and came in with Joe’s tea.
‘Thanks, old sport.’ Joe fished for a coin on the locker top beside him and handed it over. ‘Out of hours, mate. Appreciate it.’
‘Thank you very much, sir.’ The steward left.
‘Good bloke, that.’
Joe’s forearm appeared to be tattooed, so that the finish of something mostly covered by pyjama sleeve and dressing-gown cuff could be seen on his wrist. Robert wondered idly what it was of.
‘Sailors!’ Joe gave a laugh. ‘Trouser pirates. Couple of pulls of merchant seaman we used to ask for at the bar, just to wind the poor joker up.’
‘Oh,’ said Robert.
‘It’s your move.’
At last there came a time when the Armorica turned her back to the wind, and Robert could anticipate the Med. Now, on the way in, the acute flexing of seascape seemed so mundane as to be beyond comment. Everyone had grown used to the bad weather. They had all worked out ways of shortening sail, as it were. It had become routine to cross even the smallest interior spaces as if at one minute you were scaling Everest, and the next leaping off.
The wind eased. On the unabated swell they were running eastwards now, level with Gibraltar. The creaking and groaning sounds lessened slightly, and the following motion was different: longer, less aggressive. He had begun to find exhilarating the sudden compression of the ship’s lifts, and the remarkable weight loss next, by which he could cross the assembly area in only four or five strides. As the children did. Indeed, he felt like a boy again, and looked gingerly around to check that no one had seen the excitement on his face, and, once, when the space was momentarily empty one morning, the wheeling of his arms.
A link with Penny had forged. Imperceptibly, out of nothing, amid all these fantastical comings and goings it had taken shape. He knew it. She must know it. They had flashed signals in each other’s eyes. Surely they had. She kept appearing in his thoughts, would not be displaced. He imagined the entwining of her legs. She was a mermaid.
‘We’ll be docking at Gibraltar only to refuel, I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen.’ The Chief Officer made the announcement. ‘And that’ll be tonight. As you’ll all be aware, the conditions have been somewhat exceptional, we don’t mind saying so, even us toughened old salts.’ He laughed. ‘We don’t often find ourselves in forty – or fifty-foot seas on this run. More like Cape Horn, to be honest.’ He grinned again at the few people gathered round the board marking the mileage of the ship’s daily run.
So at least they were admitting it, Robert thought. Once he grasped that they had weathered a storm which the crew also had struggled to cope with, then the large number of breakages, the several days of slips and spills and sliding became indexes of their courage, rather than of their own mere landlubberliness. He recalled his conversation with the steward of the Verandah bar. And felt better about it. In all probability the Armorica would not turn over now, for all the extra demands that had been made on her tanks. They would make it.
The Chief Officer continued. ‘To be perfectly frank I don’t recommend Gib in both the middle of winter and the middle of the night.’ The small group, which included Penny, responded with a polite chuckle, while the deck moved under them as usual. ‘We’ve lost several days, you see, and shall have to make up for lost time. As to disembarking procedure …’
But Robert’s attention became diverted because Penny spoke separately in an undertone to her neighbour. ‘Not so long ago I’d have given almost anything to set foot on dry land, but if it’s just during the small hours, I don’t see the point either. Do you? It would just be nothing at all.’
‘We shan’t be going,’ the neighbour replied, a woman called Mrs Burns who had once, with her husband, shared Robert’s table for dinner. Since the storm, she had been absent. He suspected she had been able