The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Page 4

‘At least they didnae hear it too, what I heard,’ said the man in overalls.

  So who had done it? Not a lone enemy aircraft, that was certain. Maybe a U-boat which had found a way through the boom which sealed the estuary, down at the Cloch lighthouse? More likely, a German spy. The whole place was full of foreigners; who could keep track of them? Maybe spies who didn’t even look like foreigners, wearing impenetrable disguise. In this war, you just never knew who it was standing next to you.

  ‘That’s right enough,’ said a young man in a duffle coat. ‘See, a fella came to me after the explosion looking terrible, drooking wet and all over oil, and I was just fuelling up the post launch. That’s the boat that takes the mail to the ships outbye in the Holy Loch and the Gare Loch. He says: “I’m a survivor from the French destroyer, and I’m needing dry clothes?” I says: “Sure, pal, there’s trousers and a jersey in the cabin”, and he went below for them. But then I thought: he’s no a survivor, he’s no French, and there’s something out of order here. He came back up, in the dry clothes, and I says: “How come ye’re no French?”

  ‘He didnae like that, but he says: “I never telt ye I was on the ship, I was out fishing in a wee boat, a wee coggly boat that was knocked over by the explosion, and I got wet...” Anyhow, he stayed with me on the post launch and handled the mailbags hoisted up to the ships, until we got to the pier over at Dunoon. I went below to check the bilge pump, and when I came back up he was away. The dry clothes, the oily duds he took off, everything gone. And by God he’s taken the money oot ma jacket too, and my identity card, and the biscuits and jelly oot the cabin cupboard!’

  ‘I hope you told the police,’ said an English voice. Everyone turned to look, and I recognised the small man in the army mackintosh from that night at the Tontine. He was standing at the bar holding a drink, but when had he come in?

  He turned to the young ferryman. ‘Very interesting story, that. New one on me, too.’ When talk around them had resumed, he added: ‘Good idea if you didn’t go on spreading it, for the moment. But I do suggest you ring this phone number, today or tomorrow latest, and ask for Eric. That’s me. We need to talk. Eric, got it?’

  5

  The funeral of Lieutenant Johnston Melville was a bleak proceeding; a few uncomfortable people standing in the cemetery above the town and a cold spring wind blowing. They brought the coffin up from the West Kirk, but I didn’t go to that part. Maybe there was a bit more ceremony there. But by the time they got to the cemetery, they had run out of ideas.

  We crunched up the path past the statues of James Watt and Highland Mary. The grave was just a black slit, without greenery or music or holy water to scatter. There was a wreath of red, white and blue flowers from the brother officers at the base, and a heavy bunch of lilies from Mrs M. The minister began to mutter some words. There were so few men around that I took one of the cords when it came to putting the coffin down. Another cord was held by Peter, the young naval lieutenant who had first told Helen that Johnston was missing. A third was held by an elderly uncle, Mrs M’s brother, who had come through from Edinburgh. The fourth was held by Dougie, one of the undertaker’s men.

  Helen wore a black suit with a skirt – in my view, too short. She held Jackie by the hand. Jackie was holding a china doll, which she had rescued from a cupboard after abandoning it several years before. She had lost weight since the explosion, and she had taken to talking to herself at night and sometimes screaming instead of sleeping. You could read Jackie’s sleeplessness in Helen’s face as well. The two of them just looked at the grave, tearless. Mrs Melville stood a little apart. Once she moved over to tug Jackie’s woollen pixie-hood and straighten it. Then she moved back to where she had been before.

  Son, husband, father. Funerals at which women stood to attention like black lamp-posts were something new to me. The other mourners, in contrast, showed signs of feeling. The lieutenant, whom we now knew as Peter, sighed and blew his nose when the coffin was in the ground. Another man present, whom we had also got to know all too well in the last ten days, was in civilian clothes: a fawn trench coat. Eric widened his eyes quite theatrically, and nodded his head as the minister spoke.

  The only person who seemed to be behaving naturally was Dougie, from the undertaker’s. A gaunt old creature, he gave me a wink as everyone else turned to go. We’d already had dealings. As nobody else seemed able to take the initiative, I had done the funeral arrangements, and Dougie, breathing heavily through a cigarette gripped in his teeth, had helped me to fill out the forms. Now he turned to look back at the grave, which nobody was preparing to fill in.

  ‘Johnston Melville, eh?’ he said. ‘I widnae bet on it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ach, we just shoogled all the bits and pieces around and filled up the boxes wi a shovel.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Wee secret frae the family. But youse just a fuckan Pole, I can tell youse.’

  ‘Thank you, Dougie. Maybe his soul is in the right place.’

  ‘You cannae believe that shite. Gie yer brain a chance.’ He set off down the hill.

  The other reason for the bleakness was that the funeral came as an anticlimax. We had spent more than a week with interrogators discussing Johnston and remembering him, and we had nothing left to feel.

  The morning after the explosion, with glass and rubble fragments still on the steps, the bell at Union Street had started to ring. The visitors got rapidly through condolences to questioning. Peter, the little naval lieutenant, established himself at the kitchen table with an exercise book. The man we learned to call Eric, who did not explain his position, trotted round twice a day for what he called ‘a cuppa and a little chat’ with Helen, who loathed him.

  A dark, very handsome capitaine de vaisseau, Jean-Marie something or other, whom I remembered seeing at Fort Matilda, turned up on the second day. Le Gallois had asked me to help him, as he spoke almost no English. But his first action on entering the house was to order Peter to leave, on the grounds that this was an internal French enquiry. An afternoon of shouting and telephone consultations ended with Peter holding his ground. Jean-Marie took to pacing the pavement outside and waiting for Helen to emerge, so that he could harangue her in French on her way to the Co-op in West Blackhall Street.

  He questioned me, too. Was I a Communist? On the other hand, perhaps I was a Nazi sympathiser, an agent of the National Radicals or the Falanga. I took no offence, being almost flattered to find that French naval intelligence knew something about Polish right-wing politics. But most of the interrogations were about poor Johnston. Was his French fluent, and how often had I heard him speaking German (no and never)? Had he shown signs of lunacy or mental breakdown? Did his hands shake at breakfast, and how much did he drink?

  In the Tontine bar one evening, Jean-Marie asked me whether Johnston’s mistresses tended to be right-wing or left-wing. I thought of Johnston’s well-combed red hair and his golfing friends from Greenock Academy, and began to laugh. Jean-Marie scowled and then began to laugh too. ‘Mon cher Chouski, but give me something I can tell the Commandant!’

  ‘Tell him how to pronounce my name! Like this: Szczucki.’

  ‘It sounds like frying, maybe black pudding with bacon. No, be practical.’

  We were in amicable mode; I was supposed to be laughing. Suddenly, I didn’t want to smile any more. I saw in my head the immense, unprotected late-summer sky of my country, and a car shimmering with fire in a ditch, and women kneeling over a blood-spattered child in the roadside grass.

  Why did I see this? I have no idea. Was it a memory? It could have been, because I had passed through many such scenes that September. But it’s not, so to speak, a memory I remember. I looked at Captain Jean-Marie, his blue uniform neatly pressed, his gold wedding ring shining from a brown finger. For him, there were still so many inviting ways to the future. His roads were not yet blocked; his hatchways leading up to the deck and into the fresh air were still wide open. But on my people, the hatches
had closed. I had escaped, but for them the fire was creeping nearer, the waters were rising.

  ‘My name is not a joke. It is not funny. Don’t dare to laugh at my name. Don’t dare.’

  I went out of the bar, and back to Union Street. It was afternoon, but Helen was hanging a sheet to dry on the back green. It wasn’t the first time. Jackie had begun to have accidents in her troubled nights.

  ‘What’s wrong wi’you, then?’ I said nothing, but went into the kitchen. Peter was writing his notes and supping a mug of tea, his officer’s cap on the table beside him. I asked: ‘Why are you still here? You make enough notes, enough questions. Why still?’

  But I already knew the answer. Peter, impressed by my own uniform, had confided in me. An enquiry into the disaster had been postponed, while two navies and at least two intelligence services were fighting over the blame. At the centre of the fight was whatever remained of Lieutenant Johnston Melville and whatever he had thought he was doing on board Fronsac. Peter was simply hanging on at Union Street, making work for himself, in order not to leave us alone with his rivals.

  The Royal Navy version was that Johnston was in no way responsible. The explosion was an accident waiting to happen. Its cause, Peter had been told, was almost certainly a defective French torpedo, ill-designed and carelessly produced, coupled with the crew’s complete disregard for the safety-lock routines on both the missile and the tube. Lieutenant Melville had been instructed to inspect the equipment, after complaints in the anchorage that Fronsac’s insecure torpedo array was a threat to other warships.

  The French view, as expressed by Captain Jean-Marie, was that the explosion was demonstrably the result of sabotage. The suggestion of lax weapon discipline was outrageous. Nothing but skilled and deliberate interference could have overridden the locking mechanisms and fired the torpedo. As a British officer was the only stranger on board at the time, and as he had been seen apparently handling the tube’s breech, it was obvious that he was responsible for the explosion.

  Nobody was sure that his presence had been cleared by, or was even known to, the destroyer’s captain. It therefore remained only to establish that the intruder was genuinely British and not a disguised German, and that he had no personal involvement in Communist organisations. If that was confirmed, it would leave only one possibility: that the warship had been blown up by agents of British intelligence.

  When Captain Jean-Marie recounted all this to me at a previous Tontine session, I had asked him if he had a logical, Cartesian structure of motives to explain why on earth the British would wish suddenly to deprive themselves of a modern Allied warship. He looked down at the cigarette he was stubbing out. ‘In Paris they will know why.’

  The third inquisitor was Eric. But in a way he was not an inquisitor at all. The other two asked us questions about Johnston’s health, behaviour and opinions. Eric simply talked – ‘chatted’. It was not clear what he was after. He would spend hours sitting with Mrs M, making conversation about the weather or books or the behaviour of the young. She had almost stopped speaking to the rest of us, but one day I saw her talking to Eric and smiling. Another day, she went to the living room and sat with Eric on the sofa to show him family photograph albums: Johnston as child, adolescent and Boys’ Brigade marcher, Johnston with relations and friends.

  With Helen, he was less successful. His pointless, goofy small talk got on her nerves. Once, as he came indoors, he asked her what had happened to the coat that had been hanging in the hall the day before. ‘That’s Johnston’s coat and it’s hanging in the press in my room, it needs a button sewn on it.’ Later, she said to me: ‘That wee bastard’s just watching and waiting. He’s got me down for a German spy.’

  Eric never chatted to me. ‘Keeping well, old chap?’ That was about it. One fine morning, a week before the funeral, he said: ‘Great day for the race!’ I was puzzled. The horses at Ayr, or a sprint somewhere? What race? ‘The human race, old man.’ He laughed triumphantly. I did not. ‘Eric,’ I said, ‘I have a question. Why the undertakers won’t give us Johnston’s body? Each day, they are saying: sorry, there is hitch. What is the problem? I think you know these things.’

  He pulled that concerned, big-eyed face of his. ‘Matter of identification, I expect. Between us, some of the bodies were in quite a mess. You can’t rush that sort of thing, but it should be sorted out by now. I’ll have a word.’

  On the afternoon following the funeral, Commandant le Gallois telephoned me at Union Street. ‘I have had a report from Capitaine de vaisseau Guennec. Yes, Jean-Marie. He – we – are not satisfied that your position as a witness at the enquiry has been entirely clarified. More preparatory work is required. Be kind enough to present yourself at my office tomorrow at nine tomorrow morning.’

  When I got to Fort Matilda the two naval sentries with fixed bayonets surprised me by taking my pass away and examining it in the guardroom. In the headquarters, le Gallois was wandering restlessly up and down the corridor outside his office, smoking. ‘Hello, Shoosky, mon cher Chouski.’ Nothing remained of his stiff manner on the telephone.

  ‘Did you hear the news?’ I said yes, I had listened to the BBC at breakfast. ‘The Boches are across the Meuse. Well, at least it means that a war of movement can begin now, and we can forget about all that impregnable Maginot nonsense. They are making a big mistake. When they run out of petrol, then our armies slicing behind them from the south, with the British from the north...’

  I said nothing. That was a morning when I wished badly to be somewhere else, with people who spoke my own language or who had seen what I had seen.

  ‘Shoosky, why are you here? Ah, yes... do excuse me. I think we will do this another day; I will let you know. Jean-Marie left a message; he took a travel warrant off my desk and is on his way to Paris. To do what, I cannot imagine. Certainly, there is nothing we can do here. For the moment.’ I saluted and turned to go.

  ‘Shoosky!’

  ‘Commandant?’

  ‘You think this will be Poland all over again. It won’t! Unlike you, we have been preparing for this for years. We have more tanks, more men than the Boches. And good generals. Well, some.’

  ‘Good day, Commandant.’

  6

  After the funeral, everything grew quiet at Union Street. Peter had taken his notebooks and gone, although he telephoned once or twice and asked to speak to Helen. The handsome Captain Guennec was in Paris. Only Eric continued to call, every few days, for his pointless chats. Once he brought a bottle of cherry brandy for Helen. She complained that it was ‘exotic’, and put it away in a cupboard.

  For several weeks, Jackie refused to go back to school. Eventually Mrs Graham came down from Campbell Street with a box of Duncan’s best soft centres (‘Duncan, The Scots Word for Chocolate’) and a letter to Jackie decorated in red, white and blue with a black border, signed by the whole form. Mrs Graham pointed out to Jackie that nobody else’s father had been killed in the war so far. Britain was proud of him for making this sacrifice, and proud of his daughter. The school was proud too.

  Jackie said nothing, but looked at the floor and put her thumb in her mouth. ‘Daddy would wish you to be brave now, like a wee sailor yourself, and to resume your studies with us,’ said Mrs Graham. Tears began to run down Jackie’s face, but she still said nothing. The next morning, she let Helen take her back up the brae to school.

  That day, when Helen came back to the house, we sat down at the table with tea and cigarettes as we used to. That seemed a long time ago. There was a line at the corner of her mouth I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘I’m no good with Jackie. There’s nothing I can do for her. She’s away out of her mind.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She’s saying it’s her fault. Whatever I’m telling her, she’s just no hearing me. She says she did a wrong thing and she turned the key in the main door and that was it – the big bang, and her daddy dead, that was the punishment for it.’

  ‘She can’t believe that. It’s
crazy.’

  ‘Aye, right, so she’s crazy, because she does so believe it. Every night now, the bed soaking again.’

  ‘The doctor?’

  ‘Dr Forsyth, he says she’s fine, just needs a while to get over the shock, she’s to get radio-malt twice a day.’

  ‘Please?’

  Helen brought a huge, dark jar from the cupboard where she had put away the cherry brandy. She hadn’t even tried to open the jar. I unscrewed the lid and sniffed the contents: something like the stuff we used to spoon into sick artillery horses.

  ‘I telt Dr Forsyth, she’s needing to see a specialist in Glasgow, maybe a mental doctor at Gartnavel. Turned the key, blew up a ship and killed her ain faither? She’s no shocked, no, she’s dead sure of it. And when I tell her she’s daft, that it’s against the laws of nature, that she’ll get locked up and put away if she carries on this way, she looks aside and it’s the thumb back in the mouth. I pull it out, but back in it goes.’

  ‘Jackie’s only nine. She probably needs...’

  ‘I know there’s a war on,’ Helen said, ‘but I cannae cope wi this. I’ve not been a good mother to her. We never... I never got a right grip of her, know what I mean? She’s cold to me. She disnae tell me things, never has. Once I said to her: “D’ye not want me around then?” And she says: “Mum, it’s you disnae want me around, that’s how you could ask me that.”’

  There was a silence. Then she went on: ‘See, when the big bang came, I thought it was a bomb. I thought: Jackie’s killed or under the ruins, that’s me punished for a bad mother. I ran to the school; I ran to the house. And when I found her, I thought: God gave me a second chance, I’ll be a real mum to her now. And how long did that last? Ach, Mike.’

  She blew her nose.

  ‘Did you worry about Johnston, too, when you were running?’

  She glanced up at me.

  ‘Mind yer ain biz, cheeky Pole.’

  ‘Why don’t you think more about Jackie, and less about you being bad mother?’