Noose (3 page)

Ian's story came out under the main headline ‘TWO MINUTES FROM DEATH' plus beneath, in smaller type, ‘TV Star's Miracle Escape', then ‘by Ian Charteris' although it wasn't quite all his own work: subs didn't get bylines and were paid more in lieu. In the Daphne West coverage, a head-and-shoulders picture of her from the
Mirror
archive occupied three columns to the right. The report began: ‘Glamorous TV, film and stage actress Daphne West told me yesterday from her hospital bed of the night she almost died alone and helpless in her luxury apartment. “If neighbours had not smelled gas and broken down the door it would have been too late. I could not be more grateful to them,” whispered still-in-shock Daphne, star of TV drama series
The Whitfields
and movies
Loving
and
Mid-Atlantic.
'

To report lavish thanks for being saved was another tabloid device that indicated someone had been trying to kill himself/herself and felt enraged with the damn nosy twerps who'd intervened and done the decent, life-saving bit. The sub-editor had rejigged Ian's copy, placing her quotation up near the start. This meant the reader could be whacked very soon with ‘gas' after the opening ‘Glamorous'. In Ian's version he had slackly used the second sentence of the story not for gas but to elaborate on the nature of Daphne's beauty – complexion, natural blondness, green-grey eyes. This could all come later.

The guts of the piece remained approximately his, though. At the fifth or sixth paragraph now it said: ‘Twenty-year-old Daphne nervously tugged at her long, corn-coloured hair and described the accident with her gas stove that proved so nearly fatal. “I had put a saucepan of water on one of the rings intending the water to boil and remove some stains on the inside of the saucepan. I sat down in the kitchen to wait and must have dozed off. I have been working very hard on my new film,
Light Years
, and getting up at four o'clock every morning for weeks. The water must have boiled over and put out the flame. But the gas continued to flow and fill the room.”'

In the afternoon, he had a telephone call from his father. ‘I saw your byline on a
Mirror
story, Ian, about the actress Daphne West.'

‘Yes, Dad?'

‘Is she all right?'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘I've always taken an interest in that girl.'

‘Yes?'

‘Her career.'

‘Yes?'

‘A very talented kid. I've followed her successes. Did she have love trouble? That's how it sounds in the paper.'

‘No, no, an accident.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Absolutely.'

‘When newspapers write about something in that way it generally feels like a suicide attempt.'

‘Is that right?' Ian thought he heard a door open behind his father's voice and then a woman, almost certainly Ian's mother, yelled something aggressive and curt, but he didn't get the words. The phone at his father's end was put down with a real smack.

That sounded very absolute and final – topic closed. But, of course, it wasn't – the opposite, in fact. Why was the conversation hastily and definitively cut like that? The past had a lot of answering to do.

F
ragments of that past – fairly important fragments – lay in Ian's childhood. Occasionally during those gone years it would be reasonable to say Ian starred – for instance, getting a man hanged. As the sister at St Thomas's Hospital had said, there'd been quite a fuss made of him because of his part in that incident. Children who got someone hanged were rare, even though hanging itself then was not.

But at other times in this period, it would be his father who captured the spotlight. Mr Charteris liked best to talk of those episodes. What Ian's father loved speaking to him about as a boy was ships. Mr Charteris described very exciting moments, and Ian knew some of them must be true. Ian used to listen and didn't get completely fed up, even though he had heard these memories before, especially that terrible sad stuff starting when the weight of the young woman's wet clothes pulled her under in dark water close to the pier. This tragedy happened a long time before the war and that air-raid shelter murder mentioned by the angry hospital sister. Ian's father was definitely the one who figured big in the pier event, but it would have mighty effects on Ian's life also, although he didn't realize it while only a youngster. It affected his mother's life too, as could be seen outside the prison that day following the execution in 1941, but he didn't understand this either at the time. Just after they'd read the door notice saying everything had been as it should be, his mother suddenly wanted to leave and go home. Eventually, he was able to guess at why his mother refused to linger in that crowd at the gates. He came to realize she had glimpsed a woman she loathed and feared and wanted no contact with.

As a boy, Ian would never show by making a face or yawning that he'd like a change from his father's ship stories, please. He believed he should be good to his father and try to enjoy the yarns about tides and spray from the bow so high it hit the wheelhouse. Every boy should be good to his father because fathers were so much older and really thought they were interesting when they talked about the same past things nearly every time they opened their gob. Ian felt certain his father did not deliberately try to bore Ian as a punishment for something, although he did bore Ian. His father thought he had to go over and over this stuff because Ian found it really thrilling, and he did, first time he heard it.

Ian realized he might be lucky in some ways. Not many boys had fathers who'd been in sea adventures and could talk about tides and spray from the bow so high it hit the wheelhouse, or a woman struggling in the sea where her soaked clothes dragged her down and down under the hull of the ship. When Ian thought of this he was reminded of something in a film called
Mutiny on the Bounty
, which he had seen in the Bug and Scratch, where the cruel Captain Bligh could punish men by having them thrown over one side of a ship and pulled on a rope under the vessel and out the other side. This was called keelhauling. Or if the captain thought someone had been really bad they would be pulled under the whole length of the ship, not just the width. The men on deck tugging the rope would try to get the man on the other end out from under the ship as fast as they could or he would drown. Captain Bligh didn't care. He had a lot of breadfruit to take somewhere and plant, and so he thought the crew should behave themselves. Even if the men did not drown they would be cut all over their bodies by being banged against the hull as they were pulled. Ian's father could tell a tale which was nearly as good as a film, Ian had to admit this.

His father worked on a sand dredger in the Channel because of the war. But before it started he had a job on a pleasure paddle steamer. Those ships stopped sailing after 1939. They would have used coal needed for the war effort, and, in any case, there might be dangerous magnetic mines dropped by German aircraft in the Channel. Instead, Mr Charteris had joined the crew of the dredger. It brought sand from near Flat Holm island, needed to make new airfields and shelters and defence posts. Of course, the dredger might get blown up by a mine, but there'd only be six men on board, not a lot of passengers. In any case, after a raid by German bombers the dredger used to go into dry dock to be what was referred to as degaussed. This meant the boat would be given some electric treatment that stopped it drawing magnetic mines towards itself. If a magnetic mine was pulled against a ship, one of its spikes would get broken and allow chemicals to mix and cause an explosion, blowing a hole in the hull. Most paddle steamers were ‘mothballed' as soon as the war began – that is, kept in a dock or a river somewhere until peace came again. A few did other kinds of work carrying cargo, instead of passengers.

‘The ships were known as the Masthead fleet,' his father would say. ‘There were four. All pleasure paddlers are laid up now or converted to small freighters owing to what's known as “hostilities”. I worked on one called …' He would pause and snap his fingers in a fond, encouraging way then. ‘But perhaps I've told you that before, Ian, and you'll remember the name of the vessel.'

‘You used to work on the
King
Arthur
, Dad.'

‘The P.S.
King
Arthur
. The Paddle Ship
King
Arthur
. In the old days, many ships, even the biggest, relied on sails. So, ships with engines powered by steam took the P.S. in front of their names, if they had paddles, or S.S. – meaning Steam Ship, if they had propellers. And later, when some ships used oil instead of coal, they had M.V. meaning Motor Vessel. But the
King
Arthur
was steam, a paddle steamer, closed stokehold, burning coal at more than two tons an hour when flat out. It's as if I can see her now – a proud, bold-looking craft, two silver-painted funnels, the paddle boxes making her broad amidships, of course, sort of tubby, and on a good summer's day the decks crowded with passengers, off to a holiday in, say, Ilfracombe or Weston-super-Mare, or returning. Or just an afternoon and evening non-landing cruise around Lundy Island, sometimes a choir outing, with singing of famous pieces from
The Messiah
and
Chou Chin Chow
,
which would resound above the noise from the engine room and the paddles digging into the waves.'

From adulthood, Ian would occasionally still look back to those days when Mr Charteris did his reminiscing, and could recall that as a boy he had a foolish, very limited idea of what words could do. He'd detested it when people said ‘as if' and especially when his father did. Always what he considered rubbish came next. ‘As' and ‘if' – each of these meant not really, so two of them must mean
really
not really. Of course, his father couldn't see the
King Arthur
and her funnels then. Ian and Mr Charteris would be talking in the kitchen at home. His father might be looking at a cupboard or the sink, and they were nothing like a paddle steamer.

‘“Weather and circumstances permitting” – advertisements for the trips carried this caution, Ian. The Bristol Channel can be diabolical. There might not be all that much of it, and some called it only the Severn Estuary, but the Channel could produce real mischief. A ship might set out in fine conditions and the barometer reasonable. Then, suddenly, a squall, or even a storm. Spray up from the ploughing bow so high it hit the wheelhouse. I say wheelhouse, but it had no roof or walls, just rails all round with tarpaulin lashed on to give the helmsman and captain some protection against the hurtling water. And, also during rough weather, the sea would sweep over and soak passengers' shoes on deck, but some of them didn't notice because all they wanted was to stand there chucking up into the waves, and feeling so rotten they'd like to chuck themselves over, too.

‘Although these craft were called pleasure boats, sometimes the passengers did not get very much pleasure, Ian. And they'd be sick in the lounge and the dining saloon as well. Such a job, clearing up when we docked. It might be a quick turn-around trip, new passengers waiting, and you could not have public rooms in that condition, the prickly stench of recent ample vomit – often, admittedly, high-quality vomit, with a French touch from the dining salon: genuine
hors d'oeuvres
,
steak tartare, Camembert. And not always neatly piled, but strung out in long, many-coloured, glistening lines on the floor and across the upholstery. People threw it up uncontrolled when staggering about with the swell, or against it, maybe having had, yes, a four-course luxury meal with all the trimmings, plus wine – perhaps
red
wine, usually dark red, but sometimes brighter, burgundy or claret.

‘A ship could lose its passenger licence if an inspector came aboard and found wholesale, prevalent puke. This was understandable. The ship would not seem comfortable or homely. A pleasure boat had to look like a pleasure boat and smell like a pleasure boat, not a disgorge site. The
King Arthur
was over six-hundred gross tonnage. She could take a thousand passengers. Not all would be aboard and sick every trip, though still quite a quantity sometimes. But on a nice day, such a brave sight, the
King
Arthur
! Unusually high potential horse power for such a vessel then. This would be quite a few years ago, now, Ian.'

‘Horsepower meaning the energy used to drive the paddles.'

‘And a speed touching twenty knots.'

‘A knot, or nautical mile, is two thousand and twenty-five yards – more than an ordinary mile, twenty knots being twenty-three miles an hour.'

‘There were races, Ian.' Mr Charteris would sound a little ashamed and confidential about this.

‘Not proper races, with judges and a starting gun, Dad.'

‘Races of a commercial nature to get first to where passengers waited ashore and pick them up, and collect their fares. That was the objective, Ian – collect their fares. The Masthead was not the only fleet. Hardly. Some did very well indeed. People who had some money meant to enjoy themselves after all the troubles of the Great War. Excursions in the Bristol Channel between south Wales and the west country, and vice-versa. Popular. That's what I mean about the racing. Competition. It wasn't supposed to happen – of course it wasn't. It could be dangerous, boats nearly ramming each other to get in ahead at a landing stage. But it did happen. You could call it greed, you could call it enterprise.'

‘And so, that terrible bad accident,' Ian would say.

‘Very bad. Not necessary. Never take the sea lightly, Ian. There's a lot of it, with its own way of doing things, such as swamping, battering, rearing high. The Bristol Channel might be limited, but it's joined to all kinds of other seas and oceans covering much of the globe. The decline of the Masthead
operation started here. We won the race that day, but the death – it broke company morale, it put a pall over the fleet for a while. I think the company might have failed, even if the war hadn't come. I got this dredger job then. It wasn't any longer a time for cruising and enjoyment; it was a time for sand and gravel.'