THE sirens were wailing for a total black-out, wailing through the rain which fell interminably; the boys scrambled into the kitchen quarters, and bolted the door as though to protect themselves from some devil of the bush. Without pause the hundred and forty-four inches of water continued their steady and ponderous descent upon the roofs of the port. It was incredible to imagine that any human beings, let alone the dispirited fever-soaked defeated of Vichy territory, would open an assault at this time of the year, and yet of course one remembered the Heights of Abraham ... A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.
Scobie went out into the dripping darkness holding his big striped umbrella: a mackintosh was too hot to wear. He walked all round his quarters; not a light showed, the shutters of the kitchen were closed, and the Creole houses were invisible behind the rain. A torch gleamed momentarily in the transport park across the road, but, when he shouted, it went out: a coincidence: no one there could have heard his voice above the hammering of the water on the roof. Up in Cape Station the officers’ mess was shining wetly towards the sea, but that was not his responsibility. The headlamps of the military lorries ran like a chain of beads along the edge of the hills, but that too was someone else’s affair.
Up the road behind the transport park a light went suddenly on in one of the Nissen huts where the minor officials lived; it was a hut that had been unoccupied the day before and presumably some visitor had just moved in. Scobie considered getting his car from the garage, but the hut was only a couple of hundred yards away, and he walked. Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.
He knocked on the door of the Nissen hut, loudly because of the blows of the rain on the black roof like a tunnel. He had to knock twice before the door opened. The light for a moment blinded him. He said, ‘I’m sorry to bother you. One of your lights is showing.’
A woman’s voice said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. It was careless ...’ His eyes cleared, but for a moment he couldn’t put a name to the intensely remembered features. He knew everyone in the colony. This was something that had come from outside ... a river ... early morning ... a dying child. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s Mrs Rolt, isn’t it? I thought you were in hospital?’
‘Yes. Who are you? Do I know you?’
‘I’m Major Scobie of the police. I saw you at Pende.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember a thing that happened there.’
‘Can I fix your light?’
‘Of course. Please.’ He came in and drew the curtains close and shifted a table lamp. The hut was divided in two by a curtain: on one side a bed, a makeshift dressing-table: on the other a table, a couple of chairs - the few sticks of furniture of the pattern allowed to junior officials with salaries under ￡500 a year. He said, ‘They haven’t done you very proud, have they? I wish I’d known. I could have helped.’ He took her in closely now: the young worn-out face, with the hair gone dead ... The pyjamas she was wearing were too large for her: the body was lost in them: they fell in ugly folds. He looked to see whether the ring was still loose upon her finger, but it had gone altogether.
‘Everybody’s been very kind,’ she said. ‘Mrs Carter gave me a lovely pouf.’
His eyes wandered: there was nothing personal anywhere: no photographs, no books, no trinkets of any kind, but then he remembered that she had brought nothing out of the sea except herself and a stamp-album.
‘Is there any danger?’ she asked anxiously,
‘Danger?’
‘The sirens.’
‘Oh, none at all. These are just alarms. We get about one a month. Nothing ever happens.’ He took another long look at her. ‘They oughtn’t to have let you out of hospital so soon. It’s not six weeks ...’
‘I wanted to go. I wanted to be alone. People kept on coming to see me.’
‘Well, I’ll be going now myself. Remember if you ever want anything I’m just down the road. The two-storeyed white house beyond the transport park sitting in a swamp.’
‘Won’t you stay till the rain stops?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think I’d better,’ he said. ‘You see, it goes on until September,’ and won out of her a stiff unused smile.
‘The noise is awful.’
‘You get used to it in a few weeks. Like living beside a railway. But you won’t have to. They’ll be sending you home very soon. There’s a boat in a fortnight.’
‘Would you like a drink? Mrs Carter gave me a bottle of gin as well as the pouf.’
‘I’d better help you to drink it then.’ He noticed when she produced the bottle that nearly half had gone. ‘Have you any limes?’
‘No.’
‘They’ve given you a boy, I suppose?’
‘Yes, but I don’t know what to ask him for. And he never seems to be around.’
‘You’ve been drinking it neat?’
‘Oh no, I haven’t touched it. The boy upset it - that was his story.’
‘I’ll talk to your boy in the morning,’ Scobie said. ‘Got an ice-box?’
‘Yes, but the boy can’t get me any ice.’ She sat weakly down in a chair. ‘Don’t think me a fool. I just don’t know where I am. I’ve never been anywhere like this.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘Bury St Edmunds. In Suffolk. I was there eight weeks ago.’
‘Oh no, you weren’t. You were in that boat.’
‘Yes. I forgot the boat.’
‘They oughtn’t to have pushed you out of the hospital all alone like this.’
‘I’m all right. They had to have my bed. Mrs Carter said she’d find room for me, but I wanted to be alone. The doctor told them to do what I wanted.’
Scobie said, ‘I can understand you wouldn’t want to be with Mrs Carter, and you’ve only got to say the word and I’ll be off too.’
‘I’d rather you waited till the All Clear. I’m a bit rattled, you know.’ The stamina of women had always amazed Scobie. This one had survived forty days in an open boat and she talked about being rattled. He remembered the casualties in the report the chief engineer had made: the third officer and two seamen who had died, and the stoker who had gone off his head as a result of drinking sea water and drowned himself. When it came to strain it was always a man who broke. Now she lay back on her weakness as on a pillow.
He said, ‘Have you thought out things? Shall you go back to Bury?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll get a job.’
‘Have you had any experience?’
‘No,’ she confessed, looking away from him. ‘You see, I only left school a year ago.’
‘Did they teach you anything?’ It seemed to him that what she needed more than anything else was just talk, silly aimless talk. She thought that she wanted to be alone, but what she was afraid of was the awful responsibility of receiving sympathy. How could a child like that act the part of a woman whose husband had been drowned more or less before her eyes? As well expect her to act Lady Macbeth. Mrs Carter would have had no sympathy with her inadequacy. Mrs Carter, of course, would have known how to behave, having buried one husband and three children.
She said, ‘I was best at netball,’ breaking in on his thoughts.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you haven’t quite the figure for a gym instructor. Or have you, when you are well?’
Suddenly and without warning she began to talk. It was as if by the inadvertent use of a password he had induced a door to open: he couldn’t tell now which word he had used. Perhaps it was ‘gym instructor’, for she began rapidly to tell him about the netball (Mrs Carter, he thought, had probably talked about forty days in an open boat and a three-weeks’-old husband). She said, ‘I was in the school team for two years,’ leaning forward excitedly with her chin on her hand and one bony elbow upon a bony knee. With her white skin -unyellowed yet by atabrine or sunlight - he was reminded of a bone the sea has washed and cast up. ‘A year before that I was in the second team. I would have been captain if I’d stayed another year. In 1940 we beat Roedean and tied with Cheltenham.’
He listened with the intense interest one feels in a stranger’s life, the interest the young mistake for love. He felt the security of his age sitting there listening with a glass of gin in his hand and the rain coming down. She told him her school was on the downs just behind Seaport: they had a French mistress called Mile Dupont who had a vile temper. The headmistress could read Greek just like English - Virgil...
‘I always thought Virgil was Latin.’
‘Oh yes. I meant Homer. I wasn’t any good at Classics.’
‘Were you good at anything besides netball?’
‘I think I was next best at maths, but I was never any good at trigonometry.’ In summer they went into Seaport and bathed, and every Saturday they had a picnic on the downs -sometimes a paper-chase on ponies, and once a disastrous affair on bicycles which spread out over the whole country, and two girls didn’t return till one in the morning. He listened fascinated, revolving the heavy gin in his glass without drinking. The sirens squealed the All Clear through the rain, but neither of them paid any attention. He said, ‘And then in the holidays you went back to Bury?’
Apparently her mother had died ten years ago, and her father was a clergyman attached in some way to the Cathedral. They had a very small house on Angel Hill. Perhaps she had not been as happy at Bury as at school, for she tacked back at the first opportunity to discuss the games mistress whose name was the same as her own - Helen, and for whom the whole of her year had an enormous schwarmerei. She laughed now at this passion in a superior way: it was the only indication she gave him that she was grown-up, that she was - or rather had been - a married woman.
She broke suddenly off and said. ‘What nonsense it is telling you all this.’
‘I like it.’
‘You haven’t once asked me about - you know -’
He did know, for he had read the report. He knew exactly the water ration for each person in the boat - a cupful twice a day, which had been reduced after twenty-one days to half a cupful. That had been maintained until within twenty-four hours of the rescue mainly because the deaths had left a small surplus. Behind the school buildings of Seaport, the totem-pole of the netball game, he was aware of the intolerable surge, lifting the boat and dropping it again, lifting it and dropping it. ‘I was miserable when I left - it was the end of July. I cried in the taxi all the way to the station.’ Scobie counted the months - July to April: nine months: the period of gestation, and what had been born was a husband’s death and the Atlantic pushing them like wreckage towards the long flat African beach and the sailor throwing himself over the side. He said, ‘This is more interesting. I can guess the other.’
‘What a lot I’ve talked. Do you know, I think I shall sleep tonight.’
‘Haven’t you been sleeping?’
‘It was the breathing all round me at the hospital. People turning and breathing and muttering. When the light was out, it was just like - you know.’
‘You’ll sleep quietly here. No need to be afraid of anything. There’s a watchman always on duty. I’ll have a word with him.’
‘You’ve been so kind,’ she said. ‘Mrs Carter and the others - they’ve all been kind.’ She lifted her worn, frank, childish face and said, ‘I like you so much.’
‘I like you too,’ he said gravely. They both had an immense sense of security: they were friends who could never be anything else than friends - they were safely divided by a dead husband, a living wife, a father who was a clergyman, a games mistress called Helen, and years and years of experience. They hadn’t got to worry about what they should say to each other.
He said, ‘Good night. Tomorrow I’m going to bring you some stamps for your album.’
‘How did you know about my album?’
‘That’s my job. I’m a policeman.’
‘Good night.’
He walked away, feeling an extraordinary happiness, but this he would not remember as happiness, as he would remember setting out in the darkness, in the rain, alone.
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