‘I’m sorry. Who did you marry?’
‘A gang leader who gave me a dose on our wedding night. I walked out a month later, and divorced him exactly a year and a day after the wedding . . . with my new passport in my hand.’
‘Poor Grace.’
‘Poor us. I should have grabbed you while I could.’
Pause. How would it have worked out if she had? The band was playing ‘That old feeling’, which could have been just plain sentimental, or simply one of God’s bad jokes: suit yourself.
I meant to ask her to dance, but found myself saying, ‘I’d like to sleep with you again.’
I don’t know whether the smile she shot me was sad or cheeky. Maybe both.
‘I’ll settle for that.’
I didn’t want to smuggle her into my hut as the others would be bound to hear us. Grace was sharing a room with her mother, but they had a key to one of the beach huts, and Grace, being Grace, had it with her. We spent the night there. After we had made love, we sat on a thin mattress on the floor at the back of the hut, and through the open door watched the reflection of the moon on the sea. I hugged her to me. Her body was as spare as I remembered, and she had made love like a tigress. I had remembered that too.
It was round about then I asked her, ‘What are you doing over here?’
‘Having a couple of weeks off from making a new country, and enjoying a holiday with Mummy.’
‘That’s probably a load of bollocks.’
‘. . . also unofficially negotiating favours between the State of Israel and the lords of the British Army. My new Israeli friends have found they need me, actually – I’m the stepdaughter of a lord, after all; and you dear Brits are still madly impressed by a title and a double-clanger.’ That was a bit of slang we used in the Fifties – it could mean either a double-barrelled name, or a bicycle’s derailleur front gear change. Take your choice.
‘Negotiating what kind of favours?’
‘If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.’
We didn’t speak for a minute or two, and then I asked her, ‘Did I teach you that, or did you teach me?’
She squirmed around to face me, said, ‘Does it matter?’ and then, ‘Kiss me again: we’re still very good at it.’ Everywhere my hands ran over her was naked and cool and tanned. She was almost olive-green in the moonlight, like a bronze statue of a pagan goddess. Grace’s small body had never failed to overwhelm me. Her sensuality was a real thing.
She spoke into the hollow of my shoulder, ‘Don’t start falling for me again, darling. Not allowed.’
I think I murmured, ‘ . . .’s too late.’
I never bleeding learn, do I?
Exactly the same thought that later came to mind as I was leaning over the lee side of Her Majesty’s corvette Wallflower, vomiting into the Med. The friendly CPO who had been detailed to look after me had protested, ‘You can’t get seasick in the Med, sir! Nobody can.’
‘Just you bloody watch me, Chief,’ I told him, and made another dash for the rail. The curious formality of the Navy demanded that I was in day uniform, but they made me wear my plimsolls underneath so as to not scratch the paintwork of their shiny ship. After a day I realized that ninety per cent of the life of a sailor consisted of cleaning his bloody ship. The nasty cow was spotless.
Corvettes started their lives as cheap anti-submarine escorts for convoys; they should have ended them there as well. Whoever had been given the job of designing them had been asked to produce a vessel that would roll alarmingly, and pitch and toss in even the calmest of seas – and he hadn’t made a bad job of it. I reckon you could get seasick in a corvette tied up alongside, while resting on the harbour bottom at low tide. She was, in three words, an utter bastard. Corvette crews, of course, loved their vessels with a passion that passed all understanding, but that’s the Navy for you: as mad as monkeys.
They spent the best part of three days bouncing around the Med looking for Port Said – I think we passed it twice during the night, but to be honest I was too sick to care. One odd occurrence was the smell that we steamed into on the last night: a sort of invisible fogbank of fetid mustiness. I understand that I was not the first to remark on it.
‘What’s that smell, Chief?’ I asked the CPO. ‘It’s horrible.’
‘That, sir, is the smell of Africa – more specifically, it’s the smell of Egypt.’
‘It’s horrible! Is it always that bad?’
‘Usually it’s worse: we’re still half a day away.’
I wandered back to the rail: just in case. You ask any veteran the first thing they noticed about Egypt and they’ll tell you it was the stink of the fucking place. I know someone who was there just last year – she tells me it hasn’t changed a bit.
When I rolled out of my bunk in the morning, the dear old Wallflower was pitching less – in fact she was rubbing herself to pieces against an endless stone wall that stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions. As I began to stuff what little I had unpacked into my kitbag, the friendly CPO put in an appearance. He definitely had that And where the hell do you think you’re going? look in his eye.
‘Problem, Chiefy?’
‘Don’t think so, sir. Hungry?’
‘As a matter of fact, I rather am.
