The Cruel Sea (1951) Read Online Free Page A

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    ‘Don’t go,’ said Bennett, making up his mind. ‘Have another drink.’
    ‘No, thanks.’
    ‘I’ll see you home, then.’
    ‘It’s a long way,’ said the woman. ‘Fourpence in the trams.’
    ‘We’ll get a taxi.’
    ‘My! – Going the pace, aren’t you?’ She got down from her stool at the bar and stood looking at him, judging his mood. ‘What happens when we get there?’
    ‘I’ll see you’re all right.’
    ‘I’ve met sailors before,’ said the woman.
    ‘Not Australians.’
    ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘You’re the first Australian I’ve met, socially speaking.’
    ‘It’ll be a treat for you.’ Bennett heaved himself off his stool, and took her arm. ‘Well, here we go.’
    The woman nodded to the barman. ‘So long, Fred.’
    ‘See you again,’ said the barman. ‘Goodnight.’
    ‘I’ll see to the goodnight myself,’ said Bennett. ‘That’s my little bit of the job.’ He crammed his cap over one eye at a jauntier angle still, and added, with a singular leer: ‘It’s not so little either, I can guarantee.’
    ‘Are you really an officer?’ asked the woman on the way out.

    The Captain sat reading a bad thriller picked up from the bookshelf in the lounge of the stuffy hotel on Kelvinside: opposite him, Mrs Ericson was knitting. She was a plump, placid-faced woman of about forty: she always knitted during the evening – pullovers and mufflers for her husband, cardigans for herself, odd garments for odd relatives and their new babies. It sometimes seemed to Ericson that she had been sitting opposite him and knitting, without a break, for nineteen years on end. This was the picture of her he always visualised, when he thought of her at sea or when he was coming home on leave: he warmed to it readily, but its reality often made him impatient and irritated by the time his leave was up and he was due to go to sea again.
    They were quietly happy together: they never quarrelled. He was, he supposed, a good husband and father, and she was the female counterpart: certainly he had never looked more than twice at any other woman. But now, as so often before, he was conscious of the familiar impatience as they sat in silence together. He must have been long enough ashore . . . Grace was a dear girl, but this time his leave had lasted over two months, and the ship and the sea were beginning, as always, to pull him away from her and everything she stood for. It was not unfaithfulness to her: it was faithfulness to the other love, the tough professional one which was stronger than any human tie.
    They had never talked of this, save laughingly when they were newly married. She had come to accept the order of priority, and, being a sensible woman, she had ceased to worry about its deeper implications. For a few days of each leave she gave him all that he wanted – the warm welcome, the tenderness, the occasional shaft of passion, the softness after hard ordeal; then, matching his mood, she faded into the placid background of their lives and, perhaps symbolically, picked up her knitting again. She counted herself happy, and, as a sailor’s daughter herself, she was proud of her husband’s professional skill and standing. Seagoing was indeed a family matter. Their only son, now seventeen, was apprenticed to the Holt Line of Liverpool and was at sea, somewhere in the Atlantic, at that moment.
    It was of their son that she presently spoke, while the clock ticked towards eleven and the shoddy lounge gradually emptied of visitors.
    ‘George,’ she began.
    Ericson laid down his book, without regret. ‘Yes, dear?’
    ‘I’ve been thinking about John.’
    ‘He’ll be all right,’ said the Captain after a moment.
    ‘Oh, I don’t mean that .’ Rarely did they talk of the chances of life and death at sea, and since the beginning of the war they had not mentioned the subject at all. They knew that they both had much to lose, and Grace Ericson most of all. ‘But,’ she went on, ‘with