Мариус Габриэль: The Ocean Liner

‘Rosemary’s spent her life under the skirts of a gang of old nuns. That’s why she gets mad. She’s frustrated. Here she is, nearly twenty-one and still at school. What kind of life is that?’

‘She’s still at school because she can hardly read or write.’

‘I have a bunch of letters from her. Not exactly Shakespeare, but she gets her point across. She’s the sweetest girl in the world.’

‘Rosemary isn’t always sweet. She’s as strong as a lioness and she behaves like one sometimes.’

‘If she doesn’t marry me, what are you going to do with her? Keep her locked up the rest of her life?’

The question was a shrewd one. Jack hesitated. ‘She needs more time.’

‘They say you’ll be president one day. On your way to the White House, Jack, wouldn’t you prefer to know that your sister is happily settled with a guy who loves her and looks after her – not climbing out of the window at night?’

Jack blinked. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘It means that you and your family won’t have to worry about her. She’ll be in Pasadena with me and you’ll be in Washington, running for president. We won’t bother you none.’

‘My mother wants me to tell you that she’ll go to the police if she has to.’

Hubbard raised his eyebrows. ‘The police?’

‘You could be charged with criminal seduction.’

‘You’re kidding me. I’ve heard the stories about you, Jack, tomcatting around London. You’re a fine one to talk about seduction.’

Jack grinned and finished his beer. ‘Like I said, we’ll do what we have to.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I hope you’ll think about this carefully. And I hope you’ll consider my sister’s happiness.’

‘It’s the most important thing in the world to me,’ Hubbard replied as they shook hands. ‘And I’m not going anywhere.’

‘The strange thing,’ he said to his mother, ‘is that I ended up quite liking the guy.’

‘Oh, Jack. I warned you he was plausible.’

‘He’s certainly crazy about Rosemary. But he’s blind to all her problems.’

‘That one has his eyes wide open, believe me.’

Jack glanced at her set face. ‘According to him, he and Rosemary have known each other for months. He says she writes to him. What puzzles me is how she could have kept something like that secret. She’s not capable of hiding anything.’

‘Oh, you’re wrong there,’ Mrs Kennedy said with a bitter smile. ‘She’s not the innocent girl she was before we came to this country. She knows how to hide things now, all right.’

‘What do you mean?’

A flush suffused his mother’s lean cheeks. She was clearly struggling with what she was about to say next. ‘She’s been getting out of her room at night.’

‘At the convent?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The nuns told me.’

‘Why don’t they stop her?’

‘They can’t. They can do nothing with her.’

‘Where does she go?’

‘She goes out into the street.’ His mother compressed her lips tightly for a moment. ‘She goes to bars and meets men.’

‘You don’t mean—’

‘Yes, Jack. I mean exactly that.’

Jack was stunned at the revelation. He recalled Cubby Hubbard’s words about Rosemary climbing out of the window. ‘Is that how she met Hubbard?’

‘Well, what do you think?’ she shot back.

‘He struck me as more decent than that,’ Jack said, rubbing his face. He was tired after his busy two days in Scotland and his mind was reeling. ‘As for Rosemary—’

‘As for Rosemary, I did not go through so much sacrifice to raise a slut.’

‘Please don’t talk like that about her.’

‘A girl who goes to bars, looking for alcohol and sex? What else would you call her?’

Jack sighed. ‘I have to leave for London. Dad’s waiting for me. There’s nothing I can do to stop Hubbard from getting on the Manhattan with you. We’re going to have to deal with him when we get to the States.’

‘I will deal with him long before that,’ Mrs Kennedy said.

Out in the North Sea, a hundred miles west of the British coast, where the shipping lanes converged, Kapitän-leutnant Jürgen Todt had ordered U-113 to heave to. The submarine was within range of British aircraft sweeping from the mainland, but it was the end of the day and the light would soon be gone. A heavy swell was rolling. The air was cold and salty, and the crew crowded at the rails, hawking and spitting up phlegm, or cupping cigarettes in the palms of their hands.

Todt’s number two, Leutnant zur See Rudolf Hufnagel, stood beside him, gratefully inhaling the clean air. Less than a month out of port, U-113 already stank. Not only were there no washing facilities for the men or their clothing, but the provisions were swiftly deteriorating. The onions, dried sausages and loaves of black bread, which were stuffed between pipes or in ducts, were sprouting white mould – rabbit’s-ears, as the crew called them – and spreading a dank smell of mildew. The single usable privy (the other was stuffed full of eatables) was a malodorous swamp, outside which was always a queue of sailors waiting to empty their bowels.

The crew, most of whom were by now sporting straggling beards, were bundled into sea-jackets, except the diesel officer Ludwig, who was obsessed with vitamin D, and who had stripped to the waist. He was baring his chest to the lurid yellow sunset, apparently impervious to the icy spray, his arms upraised to catch any benefit from the fading rays.

Morale was high. There was laughter, some of it at the expense of ‘Mad King’ Ludwig and his sun worship. Eccentricities were prized in the early weeks of a submarine’s voyage, sources of entertainment. Later, Hufnagel knew, they could become intolerable, but they had yet to experience that.

For all the good humour, Hufnagel saw that there was a perceptible barrier around the captain. None of the crew stood too close to him, or involved him in their banter. It was not that he was a martinet, or even an unpopular officer. Rather, there was an aura of coldness around him that precluded idle conversation. They knew little about him. The camaraderie, even informality, which grew around other U-boat captains, sometimes deepening into affection, had not established itself in U-113 .

But the boat was new and the crew was new. Most of them had been selected for the service and were not volunteers. Hufnagel would have preferred more experienced men. But this crew had been hastily assembled by a submarine command which had known that war was imminent. They had all been together only a few months, most of those spent in exercises in the Baltic Sea, stalking dummy targets, practising loading torpedoes and launching attacks, testing the ship’s motors, radio system and deck guns.

They had been in port in the Elbe during the last week of August. The day after the declaration of war, they had slipped out to sea again and had headed west into the Atlantic, to the hunting grounds assigned them by Admiral Dönitz. They had yet to sight an enemy vessel.

Hufnagel glanced at the skipper. The dying light which bathed Ludwig’s skinny chest and gilded the death’s-head painted on the conning tower also glowed in Todt’s blonde fringe. Todt’s pale eyes and flaxen hair had helped his progress through the ranks of the new Kriegsmarine , which counted an Aryan appearance – and membership of the Nazi Party – as considerable advantages, advantages which Hufnagel did not share.

Todt, unlike Hufnagel, had been a member of the Nazi Party almost since its inception, and was a devoted follower of its leader, who had promised to expunge the humiliation and treachery of 1918. He had been swiftly promoted, while Hufnagel, though his senior in age and experience, was only second-in-command. Hufnagel’s indifference to Nazism had counted against him, as had certain other errors.