The Invitation(31)

This speaks to Hal. Now, for the first time, he can imagine a real man sitting down to write, trying to make some order out of the jumble of his thoughts. He recognizes the impulse. He had kept a diary himself, on board Lionheart. He had tried to get it all down: the mundane and the extraordinary. How the ship had smelt – a mixture of canned food and disinfectant; the hours of boredom sailing through still waters and then the sudden nighttime violence of an engagement; the cacophony of the guns, which they could hardly load fast enough. Watching that first enemy ship, the German destroyer – which everyone begrudgingly agreed had fought valiantly, even when the game was up – go down with every member of her crew. Drowned before any could be rescued as POWs.

After the thing that had happened, he had tried to put it down on paper: what he had done, how he felt. And found that he couldn’t. To write it out, even if it were for his eyes only, was too shameful. He reads on.

A strange occurrence this evening, nearing dusk. So strange that I find it hard to put into language: but I must try, in order to make sense of it within my own mind. We found a woman in the water, a mile from shore. It was an experience in no small way affecting. I have not seen a woman in a long while. Nor have many of the men. I must keep her from them, protect her from their lechery. I will watch over her until we reach Genoa, and then …

The handwriting trails away. The captain, apparently having lost his train of thought, goes on to describe her instead:

… her hair like the black ink of a squid [nero di seppia], her eyes too. A mark on her white cheek, tiny, like a drop of the same ink. Her skin with a sheen to it like the inside of a shell. She seems a creature of water, as though it runs inside her veins instead of blood.

Now the writing has life to it. A kind of desperation too. Over the next few pages it becomes less rational, more a meandering stream of consciousness. And yet somehow it makes for easier reading: perhaps because Hal finds himself constructing a narrative from it. The strange thing is that it seems almost to come as much from somewhere inside himself as from the page in front of him.

A LARGE SHIP. The men on board are tired and homesick, some of them nursing injuries or sicknesses, some of them mourning fellows slain. The only man not showing the signs of strain – he hides them well – is their commander. A young man, but a powerful one, scion of one of the Republic’s foremost families.

They are on the homeward straight now. The men can almost taste the cooking of their mothers, see the faces of their beloveds. From here, the rest should be plain sailing. The familiar coast is almost in sight: that fertile rich dark green. It is nearing dusk, and the ship is preparing to drop anchor only a few miles from Genoese waters. The captain finishes his supper, and decides, on a whim, to head up on deck, to look upon his homeland. It has always looked its best to him at this time. That beloved dark line, the same mountains he could see from his bedchamber as a child.

But now something else catches his eye: something nearer to hand, on the surface of the water. He peers through the gloaming, squints to bring the object into view. When he does, he does not want to believe it – but he is certain of what he sees. It is a man’s head, bobbing in the water. For a few seconds, full of the horrors that he has witnessed, the young man believes that he is looking at a head that has been severed from a body. Not here, he thinks, not so close to home. But as he watches, an arm breaks the surface. He suddenly understands that he is looking not at the remains of some terrible mutilation, but a living human: swimming. What can they be doing here, so far from the coast, in such deep waters?

He calls to his second-and third-in-command, who come up on deck. He points to the figure. One man’s eyesight is so poor that he cannot make anything out, but the other’s is keener than his own.

‘He’s swimming, sire,’ the man calls, ‘but he’s tiring. Keeps slipping beneath the waves. He won’t be afloat for much longer.’

‘We’ll go for him.’ If he is Genoese, it is their duty to save him. If he is a Pisan, they can make him their captive, and plunder useful information from him about their near neighbours.

The captain orders a tender made up with all possible speed, and boards it with two of his men.

‘Pray that we get to him in time.’

Luckily, with the relative calm of the sea, it is easy to keep the figure in sight, and with the wind behind them the little craft moves swiftly.

It is only when they are a few arm’s lengths away, beginning to reach hands out towards the water, that the men see what had not been apparent to them before. The figure is nude. And then they see the other thing. Not a man, but a woman. The men’s hands drop – they are unsure of what they should do. None of them have seen a woman in weeks – and a woman like this? Perhaps never. The captain is not so easily defeated as his men, however. He reaches over and grabs the girl beneath her armpits, hauls her – even as she flails against him, almost threatening to pull him over with her – into the craft. She lies there, breathing in great gasps, sounds that might be made by some dying animal. The captain struggles not to look at the slender, nude white body, at the dark hair that seems to bleed onto the wood like black squid’s ink.

‘That’s not a woman,’ one of the men whispers, almost to himself. ‘It’s a mer-creature.’

The captain scolds him for his whimsy, but he can understand the fellow’s meaning. The woman’s beauty is unearthly, and the extreme whiteness of her skin seems suited to some submarine lair.