Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge Page A

I caught a glint of sliver slime and realised it was a species of mollusc.
    ‘Please don’t pull it,’ cried the woman. ‘It must be detached with the utmost gentleness.’
    My efforts weren’t altogether successful; there was an audible plop as I prised the thing free.
    ‘What is it?’ I asked, thinking she must be some sort of authority on crustacea.
    ‘Possibly a snail?’ she questioned, looking at me for affirmation.
    We both stood there, gazing down at the object cupped in my hand. I wanted very much to get away and join the others on the bridge. I made as if to tip it into her own hand but she drew back, clutching her furs about her throat.
    ‘Young man,’ she said, ‘I’m late for luncheon. Be so good as to take the creature indoors and place it in the earth of one of the potted palms.’
    I stood at the rail and watched her go, and when the doors swung to behind her tossed the snail overboard. The day was dull, a long smudge of pale light dividing the grey sea from the grey sky. On the horizon a toy boat sat beneath a scribble of smoke. Sprinting back along the deck I was in time to see the design team descending the companionway and moments later our patrol was dismissed.
    I went immediately to the smoke-room, found Scurra alone reading a book, and ordered a drink. He observed I looked put out. I told him I’d been all over the ship and having come within yards of the one place that interested me, namely the bridge, had been sent off to deal with a crazy old woman mooning over a snail.
    ‘She ordered me to take it to the lounge,’ I said. ‘To feed off the palms.’
    ‘But of course you did no such thing. You threw it overboard.’
    I was startled, suspecting he’d actually seen the incident.
    ‘And that’s not all, is it?’ he added. ‘Come now, be straight with me. Conversation is useless, don’t you think, unless one addresses the truth.’
    Though hesitant, at first, scarcely having known until then that the truth was at issue, or indeed in what way I’d been evasive, I soon got the hang of it and poured out more than I intended. This was partly due to his skill in drawing me out and partly because of the heady satisfaction to be gained from talking about oneself. I told him of the fire in the stokehold, my dream of the night before, my involvement with Tuohy in Belfast, my glimpse of Ginsberg with his hand on Wallis’s waist. I left out, in connection with the fire, Tuohy’s belief that it was legitimate to use sabotage in the struggle for Irish Home Rule, along with his conviction that the ends always justify the means.
    Scurra interrupted from time to time, seeking clarity on this or that statement, demanding further details, correcting assumptions. For instance, when I said the Socialist meetings I had attended had shaken my soul and convinced me of the truth of Marx’s theory that the real value of commodities lay in the labour embodied in them, he brought me up sharp, insisting that the value of any given product was in direct proportion to demand, and though the theory of surplus value was generally expounded with special reference to capitalistic production, in reality it was independent of the system.
    ‘One must distinguish,’ he said, ‘between use-value and exchange-value. The air we breathe seldom has exchange-value, but always high use-value, being necessary to life. Philosophically speaking, life may be said to have use-value, but only for the individual. Its exchange is death, which has no value whatsoever unless one is in severe torment.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘one should substitute worth for value, the latter word leaning too strongly towards the notion of goodness.’
    ‘A point well made,’ he said.
    At which I glowed with pleasure, though not for long, for he proceeded to tear my new-found beliefs to shreds, not by demolishing the ideas themselves but rather by questioning my own capacity for sound judgement, the young, he asserted, being prey to