The Cruel Sea (1951) Read Online Free

him . . . He’s feeling his way, the same as we are, only he’s making more noise about it.’
    ‘He’s certainly doing that.’ Ferraby lay back again. ‘I wonder if I could get my wife up here?’
    ‘Good idea. We won’t be living on board for some time. Why not ask about it?’
    ‘Ask who?’
    ‘Bennett, I suppose. Or the Captain.’
    ‘Bennett would say “no” . . . I was just getting used to being married.’
    ‘It must be very satisfactory,’ said Lockhart, without irony.
    ‘It’s more than that.’ Shyly enthusiastic, Ferraby could not disguise the true focus of his thoughts. ‘It’s meant everything to me, the last few weeks. I don’t know how I could have got through otherwise. She’s so – when you marry a person—’ he floundered, and then made an effort. ‘Haven’t you ever felt as if you must have someone you can trust absolutely – someone you can tell everything to, without – without ever feeling ashamed. Someone who’s the other half of yourself?’
    ‘No,’ said Lockhart after a pause. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever needed that.’
    ‘That’s what it’s been like for me. For both of us, I think. That’s why it’s so rotten to be separated.’
    ‘Well, see if you can get her up here.’ Lockhart closed his book, and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘There’s no harm in asking, anyway. After all, the Captain’s wife is here.’
    ‘That’s different.’
    ‘Not necessarily. Try it and see what happens.’ Lockhart switched out the light, and lay back. ‘Oh, God why do we have to get up so early?’
    ‘There’s a terrific lot to do.’
    ‘Yes, I suppose so . . . Goodnight.’
    ‘Goodnight.’
    ‘And don’t let it get you down.’
    ‘It’s all so different from what I expected.’
    ‘It’d be damned funny if it weren’t.’

    Downstairs, in the lounge of the same hotel, Bennett was withholding his custom from a grim-looking tart he had picked up at the bar. He couldn’t quite make up his mind – and, in the meantime, he felt like a nice chat . . . The room was crowded, noisy, and very hot. Above Bennett’s sweaty red face, his cap still maintained its informal angle.
    For the fifth or sixth time the woman tipped her glass and said: ‘Here’s fun, dear!’ She had a face like a ruined skull, white and lined: her tight black skirt strained at its seams, overdoing the candour of the flesh, repellent in its allure.
    ‘Cheerio!’ said Bennett, as before. He drank, and stared at his glass. ‘Ever been in Australia?’
    ‘No,’ said the woman. ‘Can’t say I have. Long way from here, you know.’
    ‘Too right, it’s a long way! Might be the other side of hell for all the chance I have of seeing it.’
    ‘You’ll get back all right. Soon as the war’s over.’
    ‘Can’t be too soon for me.’ He sipped his beer moodily.
    ‘Don’t you like Scotland? . . . Bonny Scotland,’ she added as an afterthought. She was clearly a Cockney, and the Scottish inflection, borrowed from the music halls, had a grotesque unreality. ‘”Glasgie belongs to me” – you know what the song says.’ She drank elegantly, finger crooked, and set down her glass as if ashamed of using so crude an instrument.
    ‘Oh, Scotland’s all right,’ said Bennett after a pause. ‘But you know how it is—’ he waved his hand round the bar, knocked over a tankard, and drenched his coat and trousers with beer. ‘Oh, — it!’ he exclaimed loudly.
    ‘Naughty!’ said the woman mechanically.
    Bennett mopped himself vigorously. ‘Waste of a good drink,’ he said. And then: ‘Scotland’s all right. But it’s not Sydney, by a long way.’
    ‘I suppose not,’ said the woman. She crossed her legs delicately. ‘Have you got a girl, back in Australia?’
    ‘Sure,’ said Bennett, ‘rafts of them.’
    ‘The girls I left behind me, eh?’
    ‘Something like that.’
    ‘Well,’ said the woman, a trifle edgily, ‘tonight’s my busy night.’ She picked up her bag from the