Douglas Reeman - In Danger's Hour

Hargrave smiled. ‘In that case it could be the Arctic.’ They both laughed.

At that moment Sub-Lieutenant Morgan, who was O.O.D., drew back the curtain and entered with another young officer wearing a single wavy stripe on his sleeve.

Hargrave stood up to greet the new arrival. ‘Sub-Lieutenant Tritton? I’m the first lieutenant.’

He had noticed that both Morgan and the newcomer had been in close conversation when they had entered the wardroom. They must have known each other elsewhere. The navy’s way.

Tritton looked around. A pleasant, youthful face, with a ready and innocent smile.

‘I’m glad to be here, sir.’ He glanced at Morgan. ‘I was a snotty in his last ship. One of the reasons I volunteered for minesweepers, as a matter of fact.’

Fallows said irritably, ‘Don’t swing the lamp yet!’

Bone peered across his beer. ‘What’s yer name?’ For the Gunner (T) he was being remarkably friendly; his trip home must have done him some good.

‘Actually, it’s Vere.’

Bone nodded sagely. ‘That’s a queer sort of ‘andle to ’ave!’

Tritton looked at his friend. ‘Most people call me Bunny.’

Hargrave heard Fallows choking on his tomato juice and said, ‘Welcome to Rob Roy .’ He added, ‘Funny, we already have a Bunny in the mess.’

‘Really, sir?’ Tritton’s eyes were like saucers. ‘Well, of course we do breed quite quickly.’

Morgan slapped Fallows on the shoulders. ‘All right, Bunny? Cough it up, eh?’

By the quartermaster’s lobby Beckett heard the laughter and thought suddenly of Tinker. Heartless bastards.

The Buffer hurried along the side-deck and beamed at him. He looked ev£n more like a monkey, Beckett thought.

‘Time for yer tot, Swain. I’ll tell you about the party I picked up when I was up the line.’

Beckett grinned. ‘Why not?’ Tinker was forgotten.

Lieutenant Philip Sherwood wrenched open the door of a First Class compartment and stared with distaste at the occupants. He tried the next, where to his surprise there was a corner seat by the corridor. In the navy you learned to cherish privacy, even lying on a table with your cap over your face.

He slumped down and turned up the collar of his raincoat. It was early morning, with the clattering, lurching journey to the Medway towns and Chatham still stretching ahead.

It had been cool, icy even when he had left the flat in Mayfair. For once no sirens had split the night apart, and the barrage balloons, floating high above the beleaguered city, shone in faint sunlight, although on the ground it was still as dark as pitch. Sherwood had left early so that he could walk all the way to Waterloo. He had not realised how out of condition shipboard life had made him. He thought of the woman he had left sprawled across the bed, sleeping as if she was dead. Maybe when she awoke, she might wish she was.

Sherwood closed his eyes as an air force officer smiled across, as if he was about to open a conversation.

Sherwood thought of their night of passion. He was still not sure how it had begun. In her case it had been a release probably. He had taken her to hotels and restaurants she had only heard about. Even a red-tabbed general had turned to stare when a head-waiter had called Sherwood respectfully by name. It had reminded him of the staff officer he had knocked down with a chair. He still could not believe that he had changed so much.

Working within a hair’s breadth of self-destruction, defusing mines and sometimes huge bombs with delayed-action booby traps, he had taught himself to empty his mind of everything but the job, and the one after that. Even of fear, for himself and for others.

It had simply happened. He could place no time or exact reason. That final evening they had walked back to the flat, across Berkeley Square, then along Hill Street.

She had not spoken about her dead husband, and he had said nothing further about his family.

Once she had caught him looking up at a chandelier in one hotel restaurant, and he had found himself telling her about the company.

She had watched him closely as if she had been trying to remember every feature of his face.

‘What will you do when the war’s over, Philip?’

He had heard himself say, ‘Over? It’ll go on for years and years. I try not to think about it.’

Once their hands had touched across the table and he had found himself holding her fingers, as her husband must have acted.

Perhaps that had done it, he thought.

When they had returned to the flat last night they had stood in the centre of the room without speaking.

Then he had remarked, ‘No sirens yet. We’ll get a good sleep for once.’

She had been unable to look at him. ‘Don’t sleep in the kitchen. Not tonight, Philip.’ That was all.

He had held her without yearning, lifting her chin to look into her eyes, to see a pulse beating in her throat like a tiny, trapped creature.

It had started like a brushfire, and had ended with them both sprawled naked and breathless across the bed. He had hurt her; she had not had a man since her husband had gone overseas. She had cried out in pain and in a wild desire which neither of them had expected. Just once, when she fell asleep on his shoulder, she had spoken his name. Tom. It was a secret Sherwood knew he would keep.

Later he had stood by the window and waited for the first hint of morning. The clink of a milkman’s basket, a policeman’s boots on the pavement below. Men and women had died, probably in their thousands, while they had been making love in this room, he had thought. But that had been somewhere else.

He thought desperately, I must not see her again. I can’t. Any connection now would make me careless and unaware. It might also break her heart.

Her name Svas Rosemary. It was better to leave now, brutally and finally. They had had their precious moment, both of them. In war that was rare indeed.

Ransome leaned on one elbow and plucked his shirt away from his chest. With the deadlights screwed tightly shut for another night alongside the dockyard wall the air felt clammy and unmoving, in spite of the deckhead fans and a breeze from the Medway.

He stared at the pile of ledgers and files through which he had worked with barely a break, but could find no reward in what he had done. As if the day had been empty.

Dockyard reports to check and sign, signals to read, orders from the Staff Officer Minesweeping, from even higher authority at the Admiralty, which all had to be examined; translated was a more apt description.

Dockyard foremen had come and gone, and his own heads of departments, from the first lieutenant to Wakeford the leading writer, once a physics master at a grammar school, had all visited this cabin to increase or diminish his workload.

Now it was done. Even a personal letter to Tinker’s father, although he wondered if it could make any difference to him. Had he acted correctly with Hargrave? No matter what he had told old Moncrieff he still felt some lingering doubts.

But the other rumour was now a fact. Rob Roy and the flotilla would soon be heading for the Mediterranean, to a real war, where it would take every ounce of skill and endurance to carry out the work for which this class of warship had been designed. It would not just be ‘putting up with it’, a conflict of boredom punctuated occasionally by stark and violent death and destruction. It was no time to start changing the team around. He had met the new sub, Tritton, a likeable youngster who probably saw the dangerous grind of sweeping mines as something glamourous. Fallows might have to leave soon when his promotion was announced. He might end up as somebody’s first lieutenant. Better them than me, he thought. But be did know bis job. In war that was vital, at the top of the stakes. In another year, there would be even more eager, barely trained amateurs filling gaps left by the Fallows of this world.