Down The Hatch by John Winton

submarines. “Leonardo da Vinci had a design for a submarine. . . .”
    “Ah!” cried the Undertaker triumphantly. “But he kept it a secret, didn’t he? He was afraid of the use evil men would put it to! “
    “Yes, that’s true,” Dagwood admitted, wishing he had never mentioned Leonardo da Vinci.
    “And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the deep. Luke, eight, thirty-one.”
    “When are the Oozemouth Festival playing again?” Wilfred enquired of the alderman sitting opposite him.
    “Which league do they play in, lad?”
     
    While his seniors wrangled, the most junior member of Seahorse ’s wardroom was being very well entertained. Having dined very successfully en famille with Miss Elizabeth Warbeck and Sarah, the Midshipman had ventured to ask Sarah back to the submarine for a drink. To the surprise of them both, Miss Elizabeth Warbeck agreed.
    Derek was very glad to see them. The public had gone, except for some odd pockets of sea cadets who were being mopped up by the duty watch. He was bored with his book (the hero’s submarine was plunging, out of control, towards the bottom of the Timor Sea, the hero being baffled) and he was bored with being by himself while the rest were ashore.
    Recognizing the situation at a glance (Derek had been entertaining ladies in submarines while the Midshipman was still at his preparatory school), Derek knew exactly what was required of him. He opened a panel in the woodwork by his bunk and made a cunning two-way switch, installed by the builders at his personal request, which simultaneously extinguished the white lighting and replaced it with two dim red lights in opposite corners of the wardroom. He switched on Dagwood’s tape recorder which began to play soft dreamy music of the kind defined by Dagwood himself as “Eine Kleine Smooch Musik”. Lastly, he opened the wine cupboard, took out some bottles and clinked them invitingly.
    “Chez Seahorse , we never closed,” he said to Sarah. He was vastly taken with her. He admired the Midshipman’s taste.
    “What’ll you have?”
    The Midshipman and Sarah were both a little taken aback by the speed and facility with which Derek had converted the wardroom into a very fair facsimile of a sordid night-club.
    “Well, I don’t know what to have,” Sarah said. “What have you got?”
    “Anything you like.”
    “Except beer,” said the Midshipman.
    “How about some Contreau, Sarah?”
    “Yes, that would be nice. But only a small one.”
    “We don’t have small ones here.”
    Conversation came reluctantly at first, so reluctantly that Derek had to work hard to keep it going; he began to wonder indignantly why the Midshipman had bothered to invite Sarah down to the boat at all. But after a time the conversation started to flow freely, so freely that Derek began to feel superfluous. When the Midshipman took Sarah’s hand and the conversation lapsed altogether Derek wished that he could tactfully retire to bed. But there was nowhere for him to go. Sarah was sitting on his bunk.
    Derek’s dilemma was solved by the arrival of Gavin and Rusty. They had succeeded in penetrating back-stage at the Intimate Theatre and had carried off two members of the cast, Gavin a brunette called Rita and Rusty a large blonde called Moira.
    Rita was one of the occupants of the revolving pedestals. She was twenty-eight and had been occupying pedestals, wings and window ledges in the nude since she came to London from her native Birmingham at the age of twenty. She had never been very intelligent academically but she had already sized up Gavin. His technique, which had laid waste so many hearts, rebounded from her as though from bloom steel. She had already made the decision not to make any decision about the evening’s outcome but to wait and see.
    Moira was a female xylophonist and a minor celebrity in the show, her name actually appearing on the bill, in the bottom right-hand corner. She might have been