The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Read online

  Sometimes I told her stories which made her laugh uncontrollably, even alarmingly. I am a good story-teller, but her laugh was a dishevelled, unpractised sound, nothing like those ‘golden trills’ heard in Kraków drawing rooms or on Paris café terraces. Sometimes it was Helen who told me jokes, often too Scottish to understand, or sang me songs from the wireless or the Alhambra in Glasgow – songs which all the girls in the office would sing until the chief stamped in and shouted at them to hold their row. I liked her singing voice. It was straight and confident, like her short yellow hair.

  Once Helen tried to show me a card game, but that went nowhere. By now we were absorbed in our words and wanted no silences. Instead, we began to argue. Over the next few days, she tried to make me talk about my life before the war. But she was reluctant to talk to me about hers. This much I gathered: that her father had worked in several shipyards, that she had been hungry as a child, that her mother had died of tuberculosis when she was twelve, that she had met Johnston Melville at a Boys’ Brigade picnic at Loch Thom. I learned that Mrs M considered her right common, and no way good enough for her son.

  But Helen preferred to talk about issues. She would steer the conversation off herself and towards her views in general. I found her ideas incredible. She told me what she thought about the war (‘big business selling guns, nothing in it for the workers’), life at sea (‘men wanting free food and away from their wifies’), Communism (‘fair shares’), God (‘just for old ladies feared of death’).

  Wasn’t she afraid the police would come for her? ‘Plenty folk think like me,’ she said, surprised. ‘It’s a free country, you know.’

  Sometimes we got vehement. I told her she was ignorant about Russia and Russian Communists. She said I was blinded by privilege. ‘Is that no right, all Poles are Roman Catholics who skelp their serfs with big sticks?’ ‘Quiet, be quiet, you know nothing about this!’

  We stared at one another over the tea cups. She ran her hand through her hair, but kept her narrow blue eyes fixed on mine. I realised that in some way I had come quickly close to this woman, and yet I had no idea what was going on in her heart. The rules we seemed to have set up forbade me to ask. But I asked myself if I wanted her, and for the first time in my life found that I wasn’t sure of the answer. I dropped my glance. She was wearing a plain blue blouse that showed her neck, strong, with beautiful muscles, very white. How could I be so uncertain of my feelings? What might hers be?

  She began to smile. ‘How are you so touchy? But then you’ll probably be some sort of an aristocrat – baron, count?’

  ‘My father inherited a certain rank, description... but to me it’s nothing. I never remember or use that. Yes, I have title: I am Major Maurycy Szczucki in the Polish army. Enough!’

  ‘Mike, being a baron or count or whatsoever, that’s with you for life, like it or no. Don’t they say: once a knight, always a knight but once a night is enough?’

  While I was struggling to see the joke, Helen laughed. But when the pun was explained to me, it hurt me in the way her noisy laughter sometimes did: discordant, unworthy. And the stupid joke was wrong, too. Once a count but no longer a count – hadn’t I proved that with my own life until now?

  She got up to make some more tea. She was away from the table for two or three minutes, and I resented them. When she returned with the pot, I pushed the cigarettes across the table but only halfway, so that she had to reach towards me to take one. Then she showed me how to play the game in which I had to shut my eyes, the game of words for tears.

  3

  Commandant le Gallois had never opened a window in his office before. When the explosion came, it took him several minutes struggling with the sash before he discovered that it gave way upwards, not outwards. He squeezed his head and shoulders through the opening. Fresh air blew in, scattering cigarette ash and papers across his desk.

  Colleagues stumbled into the office. As I had been standing out of doors, I arrived last.

  ‘It’s a bomb,’ le Gallois said, backing into the room.

  I shook my head. ‘No, too big, too far away.’

  ‘Commandant, there was no siren, no alert!’ said the French officers.

  Le Gallois grabbed his binoculars from a hook behind the door, and went back to the window. A tall mushroom of yellow-brown smoke had appeared beyond distant roofs and cranes. A fire engine began to clang its bells. The Commandant turned round to face his officers and seemed about to speak when the headquarters air raid warning went off. The boots of running men could be felt rather than heard. As the siren finally died down, the telephone turned out to be ringing.

  ‘Ah, no! It’s the Fronsac? Yes, at once. Move, move!’

  *

  Already the streets near the waterfront were cordoned off. British sailors with slung rifles halted the car. Le Gallois waved his pass and screamed at the sentries in French; we lurched onwards, tyres crunching on scattered slates, until we reached a chained and barred dock gate.

  A naval officer in a tin hat raised his hand. The Commandant heaved himself out of the car and strode up to him. I went the other way. I walked uphill, pushing through crowds already lining the seaward tiers of streets as if they were the stalls and gallery of a theatre. The stench of burning fuel oil stung my nostrils. After climbing for a few minutes, I turned and looked down.

  The smoke from the sea was black, with scarlet slashes. It was flowing from a ship only visible in glimpses, as the breeze rose and relapsed. A din of sirens, close and far. A British destroyer, standing in close to the burning hull. A crowd of small craft alongside, and a fire float blasting plumes of water. Now and then loud cracks and sparks – deck ammunition exploding.

  The wind fell away for a moment; the smoke rushed upwards. A slanting, littered stretch of deck appeared. Some of the litter was men, trying to help other men. Moving heads gleamed in the water. From one of the launches alongside, arms were reaching up towards a line of portholes, trying to touch something or pass something.

  Then the ship vanished and the stinking cloud poured back over the watchers. There was coughing; women clasped headscarves over their noses. I noticed girls in a group next to me crossing themselves. Looking uphill, over my shoulder, I saw children lining the railings of a school on the terrace above me; their teacher was holding binoculars to her eyes. I could see her lips beneath the binoculars, forming words and then sagging open. The children beside her were silent, staring down.

  I made my way back to the dock gate, but the car was no longer there. Instead, there was an ambulance. The gate opened. Four men backed out with a stretcher, carrying a body dark with oil and sea water. They stopped as the ambulance doors were being unfastened, and suddenly the body vaulted off the stretcher and ran with its head down into the crowd. There was shouting, an eddy of caps turning as the man pushed through. But then came more stretchers, this time carrying bandaged shapes with uniformed nurses trotting beside them. The crowd surged against the rope barrier and began to shout questions.

  ‘You, son, whaur ye gaun, son?’ I realised that some of the shouts were for me. ‘Mister, whit kinna uniform is that?’ ‘See he’s a German, see the wee collar-patches, only fuckan Germans wear that.’ I walked, neither too fast nor too slow, across the front of the crowd towards a group of British naval doctors. ‘The saboteur, that’ll be him,’ said a woman’s voice. Something hard smacked off the kerb behind me as I reached the doctors. They were standing around a wooden street bench, on which several civilians were hunched over mugs of tea.

  Keeping my back to the crowd, I shook hands with a surprised medical lieutenant and went to sit on the bench beside a child with a bandaged leg. Her face was so dirty and her hair such a mess of plaster and twinkles of glass that I took several seconds to recognise her. She looked back at me, quite blankly. Her spectacles were intact.

  ‘You know her? Great. Know where she lives? Great. Get her back to her mum, do us a favour.’

  At Union Street, the main door was hanging ope
n, a key still in the lock. I kicked some of the debris off the steps. ‘Whose key, Jackie? Whose key?’ She had said nothing on the walk home, answering no questions, and had moved her hand away when I tried to hold it. Now she cleared her throat. ‘Mine, that’ll be mine.’ She pulled the key out of the door and dangled it. I followed her into the house and ran the kitchen tap while she filled a glass with water and drank. Then I tried to wipe her face, but she avoided the wet cloth and walked out to the steps again.

  There were many people on the street, getting busy with brooms and buckets or riding cycles in swerves among the slates. In the distance a woman was running, her coat flapping. I had never seen Helen running before. She was fast, her knees together and her ankles flying out sideways as she ran.

  Jackie began to cry. As her mother came up the steps and grabbed for her, she retreated into the dark hallway. Helen went after her and they sat on the bottom stair together, hugging and sobbing.

  Mrs Melville materialised, holding her shopping bag. She looked slowly around and began to nod, as if she had been expecting disaster for a long time. I said: ‘Jackie is not hurt, only some scratch, I think.’ She took no notice, walked through to the sitting room to inspect the windows there – still intact – and then returned to the hall, where she lifted the telephone.

  I heard her begin to instruct a glazier about glass to be put aside for her broken panes.

  Helen was wiping Jackie’s face as they sat on the stairs. ‘Whatever for did you leave the school? There was the bang and all the windows in the office came in, and then it was Mrs Graham ringing for me to say you werena accounted for.’

  ‘I turned the key, I never meant it, I turned the key and it began to happen.’

  There was a knocking at the open door. A young naval lieutenant had leaned his cycle against the steps. ‘Mrs Melville? Oh, sorry, I mean the younger Mrs Melville. My apologies. Mrs Melville, have you seen your husband today?’

  ‘Johnston went to work after his breakfast. Did he not come to the base?’

  ‘Yes, apparently he reported in, but... Can we have a word in private, if that’s convenient?’

  Helen walked out with him, and stood for a few minutes on the pavement while the lieutenant talked. She shook her head, and passed a hand across her eyes. Then she came back alone up the steps and into the house.

  ‘Mabel, it’s about Johnston. Mabel... they think he was on the French ship. There’s a list, it’s just a provisional list, of who got identified as rescued or as... He’s no on it, dear God, he’s no on the list, he’s missing.’

  4

  Next day, the Commandant let me see the draft of his report to Paris and Toulon. No U-boat, no unseen German dive-bomber. Fronsac, an unusually big and modern destroyer of the Vauquelin class, had been sunk by one of her own torpedoes, somehow launched along the deck, which had detonated the forward ammunition store under the bridge.

  Somehow? ‘What am I supposed to say? I mean, torpedoes don’t launch themselves. I must report it as an accident, but...’

  Twenty-five members of the crew were posted missing so far, presumed dead – twenty-one of them trapped in the burning hull as it sank. The captain too. ‘He had many friends here, in the British navy; they want to meet me tonight at the Tontine. I need you there too. You speak better English.’

  Had he heard any news about a British officer who might have been on board? Nothing. But he would be getting a more detailed account from his own staff later in the day.

  In the Tontine bar, when I got there, le Gallois was sitting uncomfortably on a bench, a row of officers in Royal Navy uniform confronting him. Several civilians peered over their shoulders. A bearded lieutenant commander was talking at the Commandant in a carefully loud voice.

  ‘Look, I’m a submariner and I know! Tubes simply don’t fire from the inboard position on a surface ship. And there would have to be a launching charge in the breech, which there never is in port. And then the firing interlock and the safety range interlock would both have to be disabled.’

  The barman, who had been listening as he polished glasses, said: ‘Aye, that ship had seen a fair bit of fun. Did you know she escorted the French bank gold to Canada, and then put up a grand show in Norway? Just back from shooting up Jerry destroyers at Narvik and Namsos. And next she was due to...’

  ‘I say, you’re jolly well informed,’ said a small man in a raincoat. ‘Wish I was. Who told you all that stuff about Narvik and Namsos? I’d be really interested to know who. Me? Oh, just a civvy who keeps an eye on local gossip.’

  The submariner gave him a cold glance. Then he went on: ‘So sabotage? German agents in the French navy?’

  I hadn’t been sure how much of all this le Gallois understood. Now his eyebrows began to jump.

  ‘But of course with French warships, you can’t rule out bungling. No offence to the dead and all that, but the lack of training, the junk they serve up as ammunition, the way deck ratings ignore orders and light another Gauloise... No, sit down, sir! Somebody tell the Commandant to sit down. No, nobody is insulting anybody! Vive la France!’

  I pushed to the front of the group.

  ‘Hello, Major Mike! Just in time, can you take over your French friend? He seems to have lost his sense of humour.’

  I followed le Gallois out into Robertson Street and we set off to walk back to Fort Matilda. After a long silence, the Commandant said: ‘I forbid myself to be discomposed by people like that.’ He took out a pair of dark glasses and fitted them over his eyes, although it was raining. ‘Safety devices, launcher charges! I do not exclude sabotage, naturally not. But I do exclude dishonour – which is to talk about good men who died like drowning rats, maybe burning rats, as if they were unskilled idiots incapable of turning the right switch. Yes, somebody is responsible for what happened to Fronsac yesterday. I assure you: this somebody was not French.’

  We walked on for a few minutes. ‘Our intelligence is investigating. You didn’t know that we had our own security here? Well, already we have something interesting. When the explosion happened, there was indeed a man in English navy uniform on board, and – you know what? He and a French seaman were doing something with the torpedo tubes. What exactly, none of the survivors seems to be sure. He was blown overboard, or maybe blown to pieces. We have to find out who this was.’

  ‘I know who it was,’ I said. ‘We have just passed his house.’

  *

  The Auchmar Vaults were not far from the elegance of the Tontine lounge bar, at the bottom of a flight of steps off Cathcart Street and within spitting distance of the water. One of its two gaslights was out of order when I looked in there a few days later. In the half-dark, men were talking loudly over their pints of heavy.

  ‘Did ya hear aboot the bell – the ship’s bell? Ach, the sheer damned energy of that blast! It lifted the bell high, high up into the air and it flew clear across the river – jingling away the while, folk could hear it – and it came down at the feet of Highland Mary’s statue that’s in the cemetery.’

  ‘And the heat of it melted the metal to liquid consistency, I’m telling ya, and when it came doon it was just a perfect sphere of bronze, birling aboot the park, the firemen wis kicking it roon like a fitba.’

  ‘Ye’re a pair of idiots, it never happened. That’s an auld grannie’s tale, ye heard it when ye was weans. It did happen right enough, but fifty years ago when the Auchmountain brig blew up off the Tail of the Bank, cram full of blasting powder. And her bell banged down in a field up behind the town, the ship’s name on it yet, and the Captain’s photie album was lying in the street at Kilmacolm, that’s six miles direct flight.’

  ‘It wisny the bell that fell in the cemetery. It was a human heid, I’m telling ya, a French human heid of a sailor still wearing a blue bunnet with a red toorie on.’

  There was laughter. A big man in overalls, who hadn’t spoken, pulled off his cap and rubbed his hand through his white hair. ‘I was there at the French ship maself, boy. Ye shouldna
e speak of it that way. I was in the Great War. But no, I never saw the like of this, never.’

  He paused. I was standing at the end of the bar, and he gave my uniform a suspicious glance.

  ‘We took a boat, the buoy lighter, and went alongside. There was plenty other boats too. There was sailors leaping down to us, and others swimming and others, casualties, just creeping about. But the hatches on the deck was jammed. The lads below in the mess decks, they couldnae get out. The bridge above was burning, the deck was burning, ye could feel the heat coming off the steel plates as ye came close. And she was going down, listing over and just slowly sinking, ye know? The water was coming up inside around the lads, and the fire was cooking them. They couldnae get out. There was all these portholes and scuttles open, and they could get their arms out and that was all. Oh, God, the crying and screaming of them.’

  ‘Is that right, the men in the boats reached...?’

  ‘Well, aye, first there was a doctor lying on the deck and leaning down to those waving arms; he was jagging them with a morphine syringe. But the deck was getting too hot, he couldnae stay. And then some of the boys with me, they were reaching razor blades up to the hands waving there. Ye know, so the lads could... There was no escape for them, no escape at all. Ach, the hell of a thing.’

  Silence fell on the pub. After a while, there was talk of how the injured had been brought ashore and laid in the nearest halls. Women had run out of their closes to comfort them and wash them in clean water, until they could be uplifted by ambulance and taken to the Infirmary. The dead found above deck were taken too. Often, the undertakers were not sure which body parts to put in which coffin.

  ‘There wasn’t a soul in the town or the Port that didnae see it all,’ said someone. ‘Thousands of folk, just staring like at the movies. All the naked men with their clothes burned off. And those arms waving through the portholes. It wisnae fair to let the weans, the school kids, see that.’