A Touch of Insomnia
By WILLIAM GOLDING
THE unaccustomed susur- ration of the ventilators reminded me vividly of things I would sooner forget; and in any case, the enormous meals, the day-long indolence, had made great nature's second course unattainable. It was not Cunard's fault, bless them. They tried, I%i fir's with the boundless but unimaginative good will of all nannies, to give their charges a routine which was what those charges wanted, and at the same time did them good. "1114Y knew, to egin with (f she had been 4 44 °re once, whenb there was noor servant problem its nice people had begun to accept the horse- er ' carriage), ann knew hat God had the preNcisey structure of Edwardian and that any change would be for the ke rse. She petted us. She prepared us for, then us in, that station to which the Company I called us. Moaning beneath the ventilator, I 'cursed the exactness of the social image which the called a ship. te lere the class system was axiomatic. You ild not invade a plusher bar simply by readi- s to pay more. Nor could you descend to a. Ilfortable pub if you wanted to pay less. be 'Where you were born, there you stayed. At the 41, 'inning—a sort of privileged babyhood—you glimpse the other worlds. You could pass 4101 doors marked First Class and see the w'de bedrooms, the stupendous still lifes of pa food on the side tables of the dining-room. haPs this was a concession to our brief stop rePublican France—for after that, the doors m'e locked. We had to be content with our btile station, right aft, where you got any wartttion that was going. And I supposed there Ole! s°ole sealed-off hold where the base of our q11.41. Pyramid rested; where tourists were t4sktilledill to the kelson under the whips of savage Qietasters, while their flesh was subdued by a of weevily biscuit and stale water. Nevertheless, I had to admit this was a Brave New World; for why should anyone repine at the more luxurious fate of another, or take thought for the unfortunate, when he was lulled by soft-foot service, by preposterous food and glitter into acquiescence? Turning restlessly be- neath the ventilator, I fingered .fly belly again and understood why a photograph of an Ed- wardian shooting party is little more than a display of stomachs. Here, there were five courses for breakfast, with a coaxing steward who seemed genuinely disappointed if the master preferred only one; six courses for lunch; seven for dinner; in between times, cups of tea, bowls of nourishing soup; and all tendered with the gentle implication that you were convalescent after a long illness and should build yourself up. Then there was the bar—if you were inured to the bumble of a screw—where you could sit and subject the wake to an empty-headed examination.
Was it . . . not the sickness, but the sadness, the weltschmerz resulting from the constant movement of the ship which made me so drearily aware of our company? We were, as far as I could discover, the professional classes. We were doctors, lawyers, junior diplomats, supporting actors, scholars, writers not of best-sellers but of books with reclame. We were scientists—but not physicists, who by the logic of history, travel First. We had a' fair share of American widows who had taken the trip because Elmer always
'Yes, it's becoming a real social problem!'
wanted to go; and these were insultingly eager to get back to the States. We had many old people and few children. We could afford to fly, but either feared to or did not care to. Our drinking habits were abstemious, and if we had wine with our meals we generally ordered the half-bottle. Though full of good will, we did not make friends easily. We patronised neither the swimming pool nor the gymnasium, though we talked of doing both. Sometimes we went to the cinema, but with the avowed intention of passing the time. We knew we were not going to enjoy what we saw very much. We wore a darker lounge suit for dinner and found getting out of a deck-chair just that little bit difficult.
Dear Nanny—I thought, as I belched indeli- cately—should we ever escape from your lavender'd apron? There was Gala Night, for example, a festival for the whole ship. Perhaps deep in her bowels the tourists suddenly found their chains struck off, were given a double help- ing of pea-soup, a tot of rum and freedom till the clock tolled twelve. Down there, we had thought—with the nearest we permit ourselves to bitterness—down there, they were probably drinking Guinness and dancing Knees Up, Mother Brown, or doing The Lambeth Walk. Up there, on the other hand, and 200 yards nearer the bows, were lucullan orgies and neronian debauch. Film stars and directors, tycoons and Ministers of the Crown were vying with each other in gross expense. What gods and maidens loth? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
In our precise enclave we were hardly party- minded, for our migrant scholars were not wan- dering ones. Yet Nanny did her best. All her charges should have a party, like it or not. At the second sitting for dinner, each person was provided with a small paper hat. We wore miniature shakos, dunces' caps, bonnets and top-hats, while our eyes avoided all human contact and a confused, British silence deepened, broken only by the steady champing of 400 sets of false teeth.
Really, it was too 'much ! I sat up testily, crashed my head against a steel beam and felt for the watch and then I understood.
Going from east to west across the Atlantic, you catch up an hour a day on the sun. The day is twenty-five hours long, a fearsome con- sideration to me who already find days quite long enough. But this midnight that had come upon us was a hiatus, a suffocating interlude when the clocks stopped and stayed so for an hour. I scrambled out of my bunk, dressed and made my way up to the promenade deck, through a blaze of deserted lights. What lights they were, with their interminable multiplication in veneer and mirror! Austin Reed's, the Library, the Main Lounge had everything but people. In the bar, when the ship felt a swell, a hundred cases of liquor clashed and rattled. This was The Strand Palace Hotel dumped on Brighton Pier and the whole cut adrift. Because there was no one about, the air was heavy with a sense of Grimm or Poe or SF.
Don't you understand, Swithin? Formula X was too successful. We are the only men left alive in the universe!
Was I the Flying Dutchman, condemned to sail for ever without landfall? All the clocks, standing grimly to attention at midnight, had THE SPECTATOR,, OCTOBER 27, Mopped time in its stride. Only one other thing Moved, Astern, outlined against our stationary /wake, a catwalk ,stretched from one side of the Ship to the other; and here, a robot paced, its seaman's hat sliding along the upper edge of the Canvas windbreaker as it moved from side to side and paused occasionally to inspect the Sheer walls stretching 300 yards ahead of it. It saw my lonely figure and stopped. It watched me Closely. Had I perhaps lost my all at Bingo? 'ad my brain been turned by an hour's talk with Wree aged widows? To reassure it, I tottered irldY and splay-legged under cover again. I re- membered those midnight liners one sees from the deck of a small boat. They draw their effulgent length across the night and seem so eroWded, such a funfair, a town; but I knew now they were deserted automata with the minimum machine-minders about; and a robot pacing the .4twalk astern lest one of the thousand sleepers 'lluuld decide to end it all.
, Still twelve o'clock. In the main lounge the headless chairs discoursed together. It would always be twelve o'clock and we were getting :where. We were going very fast on the tread- ", we were sitting immovably in the exact Middle of that tilting, weltering. slopped sea- plate which is all the sailor can ever know of the Atlantic Ocean or any other ocean. Up there, the heights of our society at the captain's table,, they might hope for reassurance, and see 1 eir pilot face to face; and down there, in the „"old, they could not care less; but here, here in halfway house with its marshal for suicides— I was sweating absurdly when every clock the ship gave a hiccup. Time started again. ;Irea.-1 Already, it was thirty seconds past twelve. We ‘,‘71.e getting somewhere, of course we were. ias it my fancy that the figure on the catwalk had at that moment, as if knowing we Twenty-eight some indefinable crisis, some danger? li,W,e,ntY-eight knots, westward ho, and all was ea//e, The Master-at-Arms emerged from some 8//e, on his rounds. He walked busily, but 1(IPPed to greet me. Not able to sleep, sir?' thillere was a shade of rebuke in the greeting, you implication that if Nanny could not rock '°11 to sleep, your case was grave indeed. Firmly determined to be mySelf, in spite of Nanny, I ;turned to the promenade deck and started to 11121P op and down. Faster and faster I went th"ng a hundred yards of careful caulking, from hiL °Pen door at the afterdeck to the public- dress system in the waist. Up and down I. ;tits—doing, after all, what Nanny would ap- e of—chasing, catching, outdistancing that 0,4 t7astly procession of good meals, in puri- i4htlieal fervour to crucify my belly—almost as °41), since I was taking exercise, I might ex- pect to hear from the public-address system my captain's Min's loud 'Well done.' The clocks speeded 13 with me. Before I had noticed the trickles , sweat in the crooks of my knees, it was three trelock, If I were not so learned a navigator, my sii,g°1tometry so spherical, I could have per- wuadedmyself that the greyness over the wake as indeed the dawn. I was sleepy at last. Of ever We were getting somewhere—onward, er onward to some morrow which would be 4n ventilators today and so forth. In my bunk, the sounded positively soothing.
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