* * *
The turbulent waters to which he returns are a world apart from those of the South Atlantic where he’s just spent the past half hour. His absence has not gone unnoticed. Though Gulnaz is still preoccupied, the care worker he’s supposed to be helping serve sandwiches spots him the moment he appears at the door and duly steers him back to his post.
Behind the piles of crab paste and queuing zombies, the party’s host is already flashing her ruby smile, fold upon fold of green lame fanning the room. In full flight now, ecstatic in her created reality, Margaret Shenton-Stevens soars through the air, her arms circling and beckoning in a ritual dance. ‘Finest foie gras! Beluga caviar! Burgundy snails! Italian white truffles! Moroccan black olives!’, all courtesy of her magnanimous husband and his heroic merchant fleet. Everyone is declared welcome to her reception, welcome to the feast. Alex thinks of his father’s ship, and of merchant seaman Stevens, both having carved their lone paths through unguarded waters as they waited like sitting ducks for Skyhawk and U-boat respectively. Where one life was sacrificed for probably no more than a few tons of grain, the other was forfeited for the pittance of a tactical manoeuvre. Greenall’s bombshell was that their ship had been deployed as a decoy for enemy fire, to draw attention away from the landing beaches. He stares at the woman. For all the heartbreak of not knowing the fate of her lover, Mrs Shenton-Stevens is at least spared the outrage against the faceless generals who assign such little value to men’s lives. How they dare sit in their bombproof bunkers thousands of miles from conflict, deciding impassively who should live and who should die, and whose families should bear the scars of grief and loss for generations to come.
Or take those like Greenall, whose body survived but whose heart died that day. Reading the confession in his letter had been another blow to the gut – a direct strike to the ship’s bow, ripping it open, fire and smoke engulfing the hangar where Greenall had been working; his instinct to survive shoving all else aside, and the price it would exact upon his conscience for the rest of his life. Hearing his shipmates calling out through the smoke, seeing them squirm in the flames, only to clamber in a frenzy over a carpet of writhing bodies in his desperate bid to get out.
The sandwich queue has now backed up to the door. Many are helping themselves. The table is becoming a bombsite, a massacre. Alex can’t help them. He’s lost the use of his arms. With a hundred things to do and a hundred places to watch, the nurse beside him has yet to note his deterioration, only their failing battle to keep the servery afloat. Now, as a request for a clean plate is ignored for the third time, she rounds on him more than a little sharply.
“Are you going to help us here, Alex, or not?”
She becomes aware of his trembling hands. Someone else is called to take over. The nurse takes his arm.
“You’ve probably overdone it. You’re probably just tired. I don’t suppose you’ve had anything to eat anything yet, have you?”
A plate of pink paste and white bread and a glass of squash are hurriedly assembled, and before he knows it he has a side table all to himself. The thought of food only makes him want to vomit.
A thin voice asks him timidly, “Aren’t you going to wish me a happy birthday, Daniel?”
Behind the table he sees Margaret standing, suddenly frail and frightened; no more the radiant birthday girl. Little beads of sweat are erupting through the crust of pancake; the folds in her skin deepen and shift. The beaming red smile is gone, her face left sad and lonely, utterly overwhelmed.
“Their ship was bombed,” he mutters, without thinking.
“Oh, my poor husband!” Her eyes begin welling with tears. “I knew something terrible must have happened when he didn’t come.”
“No, Margaret. No, not your husband. I meant my father. Another ship had to tow them away. They read out a list of the dead and the missing. My dad was one of them. They sailed home to a hero’s welcome. They didn’t feel like heroes. They felt like broken men.”
“Like broken men,” her little mouth quivers. “Yes, I’m sure they did.”
News of his exhaustion has reached Gulnaz and she’s managed to prise herself free to join him. He suddenly finds her standing within earshot, open-jawed.
“You’re speaking,” she stammers.
The cat is out of the bag.
“Oh, yeah, a few words. Just since yesterday. I was going to tell you.”
“But Alex, on top of your walking, that’s marvellous! How…?”
“Look,” he interrupts, “it’s not a good time. I don’t feel well. Please take me back to my room. I just need to rest.”
“Yes, yes of course.”
It really isn’t the moment to be faced with her jubilation, or her optimism, or her questions. She does her best to contain all three as she withdraws him from the party. When she says, “We’ll talk all about it later,” it’s a rain check as much for herself as it is for him. For the rest of the day, Alex confines himself to bed, turning the words in the letter over and over. Not the attack, not his uncle’s impulse for self-preservation, but the core of the letter, the bombshell that really blew him away: how the blood of those men came to be stained on his father’s hands.
But should he be lying here in judgement? When Greenall’s words put him aboard that warship he can instantly feel his father’s terror.
“So alone, our floating island, our highly disciplined, meticulously engineered ecosystem of man and machine – one half tooled up for life support, the other for meting out death. Along the horizon before us; a strip of land – once British – now an alien menace with a thousand watchful eyes; plotting our every move and plotting its reprisal. We knew attack would come as surely as nightfall would follow this dawn. Who of us would still be around to profit from its cloaking darkness? None of us daring to ask. Only praying. Sanity screaming from every quarter to head for safer waters, but nobody voicing it. Every gun turret, every porthole, every aerial, guard rail, walkway, every damn rivet and weld wanting only to be somewhere far away. But all silently complicit. One ship, two hundred men, no air cover, no hiding place, no escape. Just our orders to hold firm.
Would Alex too have gone into meltdown when the shout came – “Skyhawk!”, as the panic spread, in the scrabble to find shelter, under the scream of a diving engine, with the ship’s guns spitting fire into the smoke trail of the banking plane, could he have endured this any better than his father? Or would he too have lost his nerve, rampaged like a mad bull through the ship’s hangar, screaming at his shipmates to join him in taking over the bridge and signalling surrender?
Greenall claims he’d tried to shut him up, that they’d argued, even exchanged blows. In the mayhem, the second call – “Hit the deck!” had apparently gone unheard. They blamed his father for that, the survivors, because no-one in the hangar was ready when the explosion hit them full in the face.
“Some of the crew died right there; some – myself among them – managed to battle blindly through fire out onto the decks. Your father was blown clean through a hole in the gaping hull. Whether he hit the freezing waters alive or dead nobody will ever know, but minutes later, Alex, I promise it would have made no difference.”
The letter goes on to mention an inquiry, set up to question the wisdom of putting ships in such a vulnerable spot. But the top brass were in no mood to have their strategic decisions picked over and challenged. The inquiry was a whitewash. As a result, his father’s insurrection never surfaced. Maybe others on board had behaved as badly. Maybe this was accepted as normal in the confusion and panic of battle. Other stories were breaking: stories more ghoulish, more capable of whipping up public passions – the fate of Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram, the awful disfigurement and immense courage of Simon Weston. Greenall and the others were forgotten, left to salvage their own meanings from the wreckage of their lives. It might have ended there. But when the story of Alex’s fall broke in the local press, inevitably the journalists were keen to amplify the tragedy with back stories of
his father’s heroism and ultimate sacrifice. For one of the ships’ crew, a junior rating who’d been attending the Lynx helicopter down in the hangar, reading those words must have been too much. He’d sent the paper a damning account of Petty Officer George’s call to mutiny, exaggerated beyond belief. Perhaps it was his way of finding the closure they all sought. The paper promptly retracted their story and crucified their former hero. Their words left Rose George a completely broken woman. To spare Daniel from the inevitable bullying, Greenall had persuaded her to send him up north, to be with family for a while, until the story had faded from people’s minds…