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him.
    â€˜Forgive me, my boy. What a damnably stupid thing to say!’
    â€˜Don’t send me away, sir,’ Ralston pleaded quietly. ‘I know it sounds—well, it sounds corny, selfpitying, but the truth is I’ve nowhere to go I belong here—on the Ulysses . I can do things all the time—I’m busy—working, sleeping—I don’t have to talk about things—I can do things . . . ’ The self-possession was only the thinnest veneer, taut and frangible, with the quiet desperation immediately below.
    â€˜I can get a chance to help pay ‘em back,’ Ralston hurried on. ‘Like crimping these fuses today—it—well, it was a privilege. It was more than that—it was—oh, I don’t know. I can’t find the words, sir.’
    Vallery knew. He felt sad, tired, defenceless. What could he offer this boy in place of this hate, this very human, consuming flame of revenge? Nothing, he knew, nothing that Ralston wouldn’t despise, wouldn’t laugh at. This was not the time for pious platitudes. He sighed again, more heavily this time.
    â€˜Of course you shall remain, Ralston. Go down to the Police Office and tell them to tear up your warrant. If I can be of any help to you at any time—’
    â€˜I understand, sir. Thank you very much. Good night, sir.’
    â€˜Good night, my boy.’
    The door closed softly behind him.

TWO

Monday Morning
    â€˜Close all water-tight doors and scuttles. Hands to stations for leaving harbour.’ Impersonally, inexorably, the metallic voice of the broadcast system reached into every farthest corner of the ship.
    And from every corner of the ship men came in answer to the call. They were cold men, shivering involuntarily in the icy north wind, sweating pungently as the heavy falling snow drifted under collars and cuffs, as numbed hands stuck to frozen ropes and metal. They were tired men, for fuelling, provisioning and ammunitioning had gone on far into the middle watch: few had had more than three hours’ sleep.
    And they were still angry, hostile men. Orders were obeyed, to be sure, with the mechanical efficiency of a highly-trained ship’s company; but obedience was surly, acquiescence resentful, and insolence lay ever close beneath the surface. But Divisional officers and NCOs handled the men with velvet gloves: Vallery had been emphatic about that.
    Illogically enough, the highest pitch of resentment had not been caused by the Cumberland’s prudent withdrawal. It had been produced the previous evening by the routine broadcast. ‘Mail will close at 2000 tonight.’ Mail! Those who weren’t working non-stop round the clock were sleeping like the dead with neither the heart nor the will even to think of writing. Leading Seaman Doyle, the doyen of ‘B’ mess-deck and a venerable three-badger (thirteen years’ undiscovered crime, as he modestly explained his good-conduct stripes) had summed up the matter succinctly: ‘If my old Missus was Helen of Troy and Jane Russell rolled into one—and all you blokes wot have seen the old dear’s photo know that the very idea’s a shocking libel on either of them ladies—I still wouldn’t send her even a bleedin’ postcard. You gotta draw a line somewhere. Me, for my scratcher.’ Whereupon he had dragged his hammock from the rack, slung it with millimetric accuracy beneath a hot-air louvre— seniority carries its privileges—and was asleep in two minutes. To a man, the port watch did likewise: the mail bag had gone ashore almost empty . . .
    At 0600, exactly to the minute, the Ulysses slipped her moorings and steamed slowly towards the boom. In the grey half-light, under leaden, lowering clouds, she slid across the anchorage like an insubstantial ghost, more often than not half-hidden from view under sudden, heavy flurries of snow.
    Even in the relatively clear spells, she was difficult to