Read Online H. M. S. Ulysses by Alistair MacLean - Free Book Online Page A

seven-foot scarf streaming out behind him. But appearances were never more deceptive. For the Kapok Kid, the Royal Navy was his whole life, and he lived for that alone. Behind that slightly inane façade lay, besides a first-class brain, a deeply romantic streak, an almost Elizabethan love for sea and ships which he sought, successfully, he imagined, to conceal from all his fellow-officers. It was so patently obvious that no one ever thought it worth the mentioning.
    Theirs was a curious friendship, Nicholls mused. An attraction of opposites, if ever there was one. For Carpenter’s hail-fellow ebullience, his natural reserve and reticence were the perfect foil: over against his friend’s near-idolatry of all things naval stood his own thorough-going detestation of all that the Kapok Kid so warmly admired. Perhaps because of that over-developed sense of individuality and independence, that bane of so many highland Scots, Nicholls objected strongly to the thousand and one pin-pricks of discipline, authority and bureaucratic naval stupidity which were a constant affront to his intelligence and self-respect. Even three years ago, when the war had snatched him from the wards of a great Glasgow hospital, his first year’s internship barely completed, he had had his dark suspicions that the degree of compatibility between himself and the Senior Service would prove to be singularly low. And so it had proved. But, in spite of this antipathy—or perhaps because of it and the curse of a Calvinistic conscience— Nicholls had become a first-class officer. But it still disturbed him vaguely to discover in himself something akin to pride in the ships of his squadron.
    He sighed. The loudspeaker in the corner of the wardroom had just crackled into life. From bitter experience, he knew that broadcast announcements seldom presaged anything good.
    â€˜Do you hear there? Do you hear there?’ The voice was metallic, impersonal: the Kapok Kid slept on in magnificent oblivion. ‘The Captain will broadcast to the ship’s company at 1730 tonight. Repeat. The Captain will broadcast to the ship’s company at 1730 tonight. That is all.’
    Nicholls prodded the Kapok Kid with a heavy toe. ‘On your feet, Vasco. Now’s the time if you want a cuppa char before getting up there and navigating.’ Carpenter stirred, opened a red-rimmed eye: Nicholls smiled down encouragingly. ‘Besides, it’s lovely up top now—sea rising, temperature falling and a young blizzard blowing. Just what you were born for, Andy, boy!’
    The Kapok Kid groaned his way back to consciousness, struggled to a sitting position and remained hunched forward, his straight flaxen hair falling over his hands.
    â€˜What’s the matter now?’ His voice was querulous, still slurred with sleep. Then he grinned faintly. ‘Know where I was, Johnny?’ he asked reminiscently. ‘Back on the Thames, at the Grey Goose, just up from Henley. It was summer, Johnny, late in summer, warm and very still. Dressed all in green, she was—’
    â€˜Indigestion,’ Nicholls cut in briskly. ‘Too much easy living . . . It’s four-thirty, and the old man’s speaking in an hour’s time. Dusk stations at any time—we’d better eat.’
    Carpenter shook his head mournfully. ‘The man has no soul, no finer feelings.’ He stood up and stretched himself. As always, he was dressed from head to foot in a one-piece overall of heavy, quilted kapok—the silk fibres encasing the seeds of the Japanese and Malayan silk-cotton tree: there was a great, golden ‘J’ embroidered on the right breast pocket: what it stood for was anyone’s guess. He glanced out through the porthole and shuddered.
    â€˜Wonder what’s the topic for tonight, Johnny?’
    â€˜No idea. I’m curious to see what his attitude, his tone is going to be, how he’s going to handle it. The