by Rachel Rhys
This time, when she steps on to solid ground, she is expecting that sensation of her body still imitating the movement of the sea. Even so, she sways for a few seconds until Ida, of all people, puts a hand on her arm to steady her.
‘Still feel like you’re rocking? When you’ve travelled as I have, you don’t notice it any more.’
Ida has not mentioned her fall the previous day, and Lily knows better than to bring it up.
Some of the passengers have prearranged coach tours to Nice. As she watches them file on to the waiting buses, Lily is grateful she isn’t one of them. Just the thought of spending hours on a coach negotiating the hairpin bends she has seen on the map makes her feel nauseous. Instead, they follow the rest of the passengers and head in the direction of the town. To the surprise of the others, Ida announces that she speaks French but, when they stop some local women to ask directions to the post office so that they can mail their letters home, Ida’s speech is sparse and halting, and the women at first shrug their shoulders before launching into a torrent of incomprehensible words.
‘They said this way,’ says Ida, pointing up ahead, but Lily has seen her expression and knows she is guessing.
After Audrey approaches an elderly man and shows him an envelope, pointing to the space where the stamp should be and miming the question ‘Where?’, they make it to the post office and, after that, to a small café. As they thread their way across the terrace, Lily’s eye is drawn to a folded newspaper someone has left behind on a table. The headline is in French, so she cannot understand it, but there’s no mistaking Hitler’s furious stare in the accompanying photograph, and a chill passes through her. The four women settle themselves down and try to order tea but, on being met with blank looks from the waiter, a good-looking young fellow with a strutting walk, switch to lemonade instead.
The first sip feels wonderfully cooling to Lily’s fevered head but, by the time she is halfway through the glass, she is already shivering.
‘That waiter is looking at you, Lily,’ whispers Audrey. She and Annie glance over towards the bar and giggle.
‘I’m sure it’s not me he has his eye on,’ says Lily. ‘I don’t think anyone would be looking at me in the state I’m in now. Except maybe a doctor wanting to study me for medical research.’
They all laugh, but Ida fixes Lily with her black eyes, glittery as marbles.
‘Nonsense. You’re an attractive girl, Lily. In fact, I’m quite surprised you haven’t left anyone behind. A husband or sweetheart. How old are you? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? You’re not getting any younger.’
Despite her physical debility and feelings of self-pity, Lily nevertheless finds herself fighting a sudden surge of laughter at Ida’s bluntness. She puts her hand to her mouth as if to stopper it up.
‘Oh, Lily, I hope we haven’t upset you,’ says Audrey, misinterpreting her gesture.
After Lily reassures her that this is far from the case, Audrey returns to the subject, shyly, as if she is testing thin ice to see if it will hold.
‘So has there been someone, Lily? Someone special?’
In anyone else this might seem like prying, but there is something so artless about big, ungainly Audrey, with her mess of fair hair, and those blue eyes so pale, like they’ve been washed too many times, Lily can’t find it in herself to object.
‘Please tell,’ says Annie, sweeping a lock of red hair from her face. They want romance, Lily thinks to herself. Girls like these are alive to it.
‘Any proposals?’ adds Annie eagerly.
And now, here in Lily’s fever-fuelled mind, she is sitting with Robert in the park while he ties a blade of grass around her ring finger. ‘We will get married,’ he tells her. ‘One day.’
‘No,’ she says abruptly, snapping closed the shutter to the past. ‘None.’
Ida has been watching with her usual intense stare, as if Lily is a rare bird she wishes to inventory and tag.
‘Well, I think there’s someone on the ship who has taken quite a shine to you,’ she says now. Ida has a way of talking as if she is calculating the weight of each word as she goes along.
‘Who?’ Sniffing a love story, Annie is desperate to find out more.
‘That one from her dinner table.’ She turns to Lily. ‘I’ve seen the way he looks at you.’
She makes it sound like something unsavoury, something Lily has invited that she should not have. But still it doesn’t stop the rush of pleasure Lily feels, piercing her aching bones, her heavy, broiling body. All through her incarceration in bed, she had not allowed herself to think of Edward Fletcher. She remembered how taken he’d seemed with Eliza Campbell, and told herself it was as well she had discovered that now, before she allowed herself to get carried away, imagining things that didn’t exist. But Ida’s words have ignited a treacherous flare of hope.
‘I really don’t think Edward has any interest in me,’ she says.
‘Edward? Is he the one with the dark curls? Oh, he’s very handsome,’ says Annie, smiling, so that the freckles over her nose join together to form one continuous brown stain.
‘Not him.’
Ida makes a movement with her hand as if swatting a fly.
‘I’m talking about the other one. Him with the squashed-in nose and the raspberry cheeks.’
And, just like that, the pleasure drains from Lily as suddenly as it arrived, leaving a hollow in its place where the cold now gathers. They are sitting at an outside table but the sun is still masked by cloud and Lily shivers when the gusts of cool breeze hit her skin.
She wishes she could go home. Not to that narrow bunk in that airless, constantly moving cabin. Not even to the damp room in Bayswater. But to the terraced house in Reading where her mother would sit on the side of her bed and stroke the damp hair from her eyes and tell her that soon she’d be right as rain.
‘I think we should get you back now,’ says Ida, and, not for the first time, Lily has the disconcerting idea that the older woman can read in her face exactly what she is thinking. Such a strange mixture she is, this Ida. Astute but intrusive, tactless but sensitive to things others do not seem to notice.
As they get to their feet and make their way out of the café Ida’s fingers curl tightly around Lily’s arm, as if she might crack it like a nut.
9
7 August 1939
HOW QUICKLY ONE becomes accustomed to an alien reality until it is the old, familiar world that now seems unreal. It has been scarcely more than a week, but when Lily thinks about her life in London – the buses, the fog, the crowds at Piccadilly Circus on a weekend night – it has the feel of something imagined from a book or remembered from a film, not anything that touches her personally. Instead, what is real is this: the clean brightness of the day as she steps out on the deck in the morning, the gentle movement of the boat under her feet, the way she feels cleansed by that first breath of fresh, salty sea air.
Lily makes her way to the railing and leans out, enjoying the cool patter of the spray on her face, the endless blue carpet of water stretching in every direction.
‘Can you see Italy yet? Not long until Naples,’ comes a voice from behind.
She turns and sees Maria Katz seated in a deckchair, her cloud of hair tethered down by an emerald-green headscarf, a book open face down on her lap.
Lily looks again. Now that Maria has mentioned the possibility of Italy, Lily starts to doubt her own vision. Might that not be land? That dark streak on the horizon?
She pulls up a chair next to Maria.
‘You have been ill once again, Lily?’
Maria has a way of angling her head down when she talks to you so that her eyes are looking up into yours and her brow is raised as if in a perpetual question or wonder.
Lily finds herself telling Maria all about the ill-fated trip to the café in Toulon, about Ida and Audrey and the staring waiter. When she mentions the folded newspaper and Hitler’s face, Maria grows still.
‘Do you mind if I join you?’
/> Helena Fletcher stands by the empty chair next to Lily. Today she is wearing a severe black skirt with a plain white blouse. It is an outfit Lily’s mother might have worn. Why does Helena insist on being old before her time? Lily asks herself again. She supposes it has to do with lost love and with nothing seeming worth the effort now that he is no longer there to see.
Lily makes the introductions between Helena and Maria and is pleased to find that they seem instantly to take to one another. They have a similar quiet intelligence. And both have suffered, though Helena wears her suffering wrapped around her like a blanket, buffering her from the world, while Maria’s is like a hair shirt that only she knows to be there.
The two discover they have something else in common. Maria, too, has taught children, though she had to stop when she came to England. They talk happily together, comparing amusing stories about naughty pupils and demanding head teachers. While they talk, Lily leans back in her chair and allows the sun to warm her face, burnishing her closed eyelids orange. She remembers how Edward had said, ‘Everything about you is the colour of honey,’ and how the corners of his mouth lifted up and tiny lines appeared around his eyes like tucks in a skirt.
‘Have you seen my brother today, Lily?’
Lily starts. Has she been speaking aloud? The thought makes something tighten in her chest.
‘No. I’ve only just got up.’
Helena frowns. There are deep purple grooves at either side of her nose that are visible only when she lets her face fall. Lily watches as she worries at one of them with the end of one of her long fingers, rubbing the pad hard against the discoloured skin.
‘You are looking for the man who is always with you, Helena.’
Lily is beginning to realize that, when Maria makes a statement, it is just as likely to be a question. Something lost in the translation from German to English, she imagines.
‘Forgive me. I don’t wish to sound like a spy, but I like to observe people.’
‘Maria is a writer,’ Lily tells Helena, with a degree of pride.
‘Lily is too generous. I am someone who wishes to be a writer. I have seen you and he often together, Helena. He was here earlier, sitting very close by. But then he went up to the top deck.’
Lily has been listening alertly to this exchange, but now her spirits flatten into disappointment. It seems to her as if Eliza Campbell believes she can summon him like a little dog. She pictures her now, with her taffeta eyes and that heavy floral scent and her intoxicating, lazy way of talking. Why wouldn’t he come running? she thinks.
Helena’s thoughts appear to be following the same lines. Her grey eyes look slack with worry and a deep vertical line has appeared on her forehead.
‘Was he with Mrs Campbell?’ she asks. ‘The lady with the black hair?’
Maria shakes her head. ‘No, it was a man. Big, with a loud voice and a moustache.’
Helena doesn’t seem much comforted by the news.
‘I wish he would keep away from there,’ she says, her grey eyes darting up in the direction of the upper deck, as if she might be able to see him through the decking and the railings and the rugs and the velvet and the curtains.
‘I worry that they aren’t very kind people. The Campbells,’ Helena tells Maria. The words come out in a rush, as if she hasn’t had time to consider them. ‘Edward is too trusting. He gets involved with people too quickly. He isn’t well, still.’
She addresses this last to Lily.
‘But he’s cured, surely?’
Lily seems to have taken a leaf from Maria’s book, her question emerging from her lips as a statement of fact.
Helena raises her hand to her hair, which is again piled haphazardly on her head, seemingly without care.
‘I fear he won’t ever be completely cured,’ she says.
Lily wants to ask more but a shout goes up from a child standing by the railings.
‘Land! I see land! Italy!’
The three of them get to their feet and join the other passengers peering over the side of the boat. And oh, but it is beautiful. Lily’s unasked questions die on her lips as the boat draws nearer and they can make out the towering cliffs, some topped with green trees, others studded with houses clinging perilously to the sides. The city of Naples itself is slung across the bay like a hammock, and there, hulking in the distance, the dark mound of Vesuvius, silhouetted against the blue sky.
Edward appears behind them.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ says Lily, for once not caring if she gives herself away as a sheltered girl from the provinces who has seen nothing of the world.
‘It is, Lily,’ Edward replies, smiling. He rests his hand briefly on her bare arm – she is wearing a short-sleeved blouse today with her navy linen skirt. Her skin burns under his light touch.
Lily has booked in advance to go on a tour of Pompeii. She remembers sitting down with her parents with the information the shipping company had sent spread out on the table in front of them, deciding which trips to take, and how her mother had pored over the photographs of the destroyed city. ‘I can’t believe my daughter will be seeing all these things for herself,’ she’d said. ‘All these wonders.’
To Lily’s delight, it transpires that the Fletchers and Maria are also booked on the tour. After much fussing and to-ing and fro-ing to cabins for cameras and watches and jackets, they assemble on the dock, along with another fifteen or so passengers. Lily feels guilty when Audrey and Annie walk past with Ida tagging behind, and Audrey makes a face as if to say, Look who we’re lumbered with! Their guide, an excitable Italian called Antonio who speaks impeccable English with a musical accent, assures them they are about to see one of the greatest sights in the world.
‘You will be astonished, I think,’ he tells them. Lily repeats the words in her head. Aston-eeshd.
After leaving the wide, open space of the docks, where the sun sparkles off the sea and the sky seems never-ending, the coach turns into the city, where the roads grow shabbier and darker and peeling ‘Viva Il Duce!’ posters are plastered over the lamp posts and walls, until they reach the backstreets, so narrow Lily doesn’t know how in the world the driver manages to pass through them, with washing strung out across the top of them like tattered vines, from the windows on one side to the windows on the other.
‘I didn’t realize it would be so poor,’ Lily tells Maria, who is sitting next to her, as they pass two undersized children dressed in rags sitting on a step, watching the bus with impassive faces. She has seen poverty in London, of course, but somehow this seems more unpalatable, butting up grey and ugly against the glittering jewels of the coast.
‘Poverty is always shocking,’ Maria says. ‘And if that stops being the case, then there’s no hope for any of us.’
Lily is relieved when the bus starts to wind its way up out of the city, leaving the grime and the grubby, sharp-boned children behind. As the bus climbs higher, she becomes aware of an unpleasant smell, like bad eggs.
‘If you are smelling something at this moment and hoping it will go away, you need to get used to it, because this is sulphur,’ the guide tells them, explaining how poisonous gas that had built up inside Vesuvius caused it to erupt, burying the city under volcanic ash and pumice.
When they arrive at Pompeii itself, Lily is silenced by the feel of the place, the bones of the city so perfectly preserved, its secrets open to view nearly two thousand years after it was destroyed, and by the sinister, looming presence of Vesuvius in the distance, belching out smoke. As the relentless sun beats down, she and Maria follow Edward and Helena in the shadeless dust through what had once been streets teeming with life, looking into houses, many still with their intricate mosaic floors intact. They see the plaster casts of people frozen for ever in time by the molten lava and ash, their bodies contorted by fear. There is a man reclining on a marble slab, naked apart from a fig-leaf posthumously applied to cover his modesty. There is even a little dog, which Lily gazes at for a long time, wondering whethe
r it knew something was about to happen to it, whether it was scared.
For some reason the little dog makes her think of Mags, and how frightened she was. Scarcely more than a child. Her eyes stretched wide, locked on to Lily’s own. Am I going to die, Lil? And Lily shaking her head. What else could she do?
‘If the ladies would like to enter into that house there, you will find some cooking things that might interest you,’ says Antonio, the guide. Wilting with the heat, Lily watches as he then leads the men, including Edward, into another building a short distance away.
When they reconvene, some of the men are smirking, but Edward looks embarrassed and doesn’t meet her eye.
‘What was in there?’ asks Lily, desperate to know, but he just shakes his head.
‘Nothing you’d want to see.’
When everyone else has gone on Lily doubles back and ducks inside the two-storey building the men have visited. At first she cannot see what might have deserved such interest, then she notices the walls of the largest room are covered in frescoes. On closer inspection these are revealed to be pictures of naked men and women engaged in sexual relations of a type and variety that make Lily clasp her hand to her mouth. Couples, groups, even animals. Though she knows she should leave, Lily stands rooted to the spot, like the stone villagers themselves, and despite the coolness of the interior she blazes with heat. One picture in particular holds her attention. In it a powerfully built man kneels up behind a pale woman who is leaning forward on her hands and knees, her face almost on the floor. Though his face is indistinct, in the long seconds before she finally tears herself away, she clearly sees Max Campbell’s features superimposed on it.
