by Rachel Rhys
‘You found the brothel then?’ whispers Maria, amused, when Lily rejoins them. Lily feels instantly as if she will dissolve in a pool of embarrassment. She has heard of such places, of course. She is not naive. Not any more. But she has never heard the word said out loud. And by a woman!
‘I had no idea,’ she says, noting how Maria’s amusement seems to grow in step with her own mortification. ‘How did you—?’
‘I researched it before we came,’ Maria says. ‘It’s lucky that London has such excellent public libraries.’
There is a small shop on the way back to the coach, selling exquisite cameos carved either from shells or from Mount Vesuvius lava. Though they are too expensive for her, Lily runs her fingers over them, enjoying the smoothness of the finish and the delicate bumps of the reliefs. By the exit, Edward and Helena are deep in conversation with Maria. Still unsettled by what she saw in the ancient brothel, and by her own reaction to it, Lily lingers, glad of a few moments of solitude.
‘Excuse me.’ The voice belongs to an elderly woman wearing a velvet suit in a deep plum colour that looks good quality but in which she must be, Lily thinks, roasting on a day like this. The woman has on a matching hat, beneath which her cheeks, as if affected by the proximity to the rest of the outfit, have taken on a similar red-wine shade.
Lily gives a hesitant half-smile.
‘I recognized you from the other day,’ the woman goes on. ‘You and your husband were in the first-class lounge playing cards.’
‘Oh, he’s not my husband.’
Lily doesn’t know why it should feel so important that she explain herself to this stranger, but she cannot bear the idea that Edward might overhear and think she is deliberately misrepresenting herself – and him.
The woman raises her eyebrows and pulls back her chin so that it nestles in the cushion of her neck.
‘I see. Whatever the case, I feel I must speak to you.’
She saw me in that building, Lily thinks, hot-faced.
‘I’m sorry if I –’
It is as if she hasn’t spoken. The woman ploughs on, cutting right through the middle of Lily’s sentence.
‘I don’t know how much you know of the Campbells, but I must tell you that in society – that is, polite society – they are very much avoided. There was a terrible scandal.’
‘Josephine!’A disgruntled man is bearing down on them, irritation exuding from every one of his large pores. ‘I’ve been waiting outside in the blasted sun for so long it’s a wonder I haven’t got heatstroke. Are you coming?’
He hardly glances at Lily. The woman takes his arm to leave, but hesitates.
‘You seem like a nice girl. Trusting. I couldn’t live with myself if I hadn’t warned you. They might seem glamorous and exciting, but the truth is the Campbells are very dangerous people.’
Lily makes her way back to the coach in a state of agitation and is relieved to see that the woman and her husband are not joining them but have hired a private taxi and guide. Still, she cannot shake off the memory of those mottled cheeks and the way she’d said that phrase, ‘terrible scandal’, in a voice so loud it might have awoken even Pompeii’s two-thousand-year dead.
In one way the new information clears up a few mysteries. It explains why the other passengers were scrutinizing them so intently and also the Campbells’ frequent appearances on the lower deck. Not because the company in first class is so stuffy but because they are excluded from it. But while it answers some questions, it creates still others. What scandal could have made the Campbells so thoroughly ostracized? And why are they dangerous?
Maria also seems preoccupied as the coach begins its descent back towards the streets of Naples, the fingers of one hand worrying at the skin around the nails of the other.
‘Just think of it,’ she’d said to Lily as they walked to the gift shop, ‘a whole community obliterated.’ And Lily knew she was thinking of her own home in Vienna and her parents still clinging stubbornly on while the city empties around them.
Lily is in a window seat on the wrong side of the coach, where the sun blazes in and there is no hiding place. Edward and Helena are two rows ahead, and she finds herself staring at the back of Edward’s head, where his hair curls over his collar and at his narrow shoulders, so expressive when he is talking, like an extension of his hands. Her mind flits, before she can stop it, back to one of the frescoes in the brothel in which a naked woman was lying back with her legs spread wide and there in the centre was the back of a man’s head, with dark, curling hair, just like Edward’s.
No, she tells herself firmly. No, I must not.
And yet.
She remembers Robert and how his hands had worked their way under her skirt, his fingers thick and probing. ‘It’s all right,’ he’d said, his breath uneven against her ear. ‘I’ll be careful. We’ll get married.’ But Lily had thought of her parents and her job and her friend Molly, the only other scholarship girl in her class, forced into a marriage at sixteen with a boy she didn’t really like because there was a baby on the way. Of her mother’s shame. And she’d pushed Robert’s hands away. Though she hadn’t wanted to.
What if that is to be her only experience of sex? Those fumblings with Robert that left them both panting and unfinished? She closes her eyes against the fierce sun so her thoughts are painted orange. They turn to the frescoes again, and she remembers how that one had seemed like Max Campbell, broad and bronzed and overspilling with lust. And now she’s seeing again the back of Edward’s hair, but the woman whose legs it is buried between is no longer the woman in the painting but Eliza Campbell, head thrown back in pleasure.
‘Are you all right, Lily?’ Maria is looking at her curiously. ‘You fell asleep and cried out.’
‘Yes, I am fine,’ Lily says, the words snapping out sharply.
Maria leans back in her seat and looks away.
When they arrive at the ship the dock is crowded with people, many of them carrying large bundles. ‘The new Italian passengers. Our steward told us they’d be boarding at Naples,’ Helena whispers as they make their way through the voluble crowd.
‘There seem to be a great many pregnant women,’ Lily observes.
Maria explains that most of the Italian women will be going to join their husbands, who are working as cane-cutters in Queensland, so they time their crossings to make the most of the ship’s doctor. The four of them fall to speculating about what nationality the children would be, born of Italian parents onboard a British ship, and Lily begins to relax. She wonders whether she should tell Edward about her strange encounter in the shop in Pompeii but she doesn’t yet trust herself to talk collectedly about that place. I will tell him at dinner, she thinks, imagining an amusing conversation where they will all take turns at guessing what the Campbells might have done, this ‘terrible scandal’.
But when dinner arrives Edward seems in no humour for conversation, amusing or otherwise, sitting wrapped up in his own thoughts two seats away, while Helena takes the place next to Lily.
George Price is in full flow, holding forth about the ship being overrun with ‘Ities’, even though, as far as Lily can tell, there aren’t more than thirty on board, and their cabins are on a lower deck even than tourist class, with a separate, smaller dining room all of their own. ‘You’d better keep an eye on your valuables,’ he says. ‘They’re like magpies. Known for it. And don’t any of you ladies let yourselves get in a situation where you’re on your own with an Itie man. They simply have no self-control when it comes to that sort of thing.’ He glares meaningfully at young Peggy Mills, as if stopping himself saying more on her account.
Clara Mills, who looks even more fragile and bird-like than she’d first appeared after her long bout of seasickness, makes a gasping noise.
‘If I’d known the voyage would be so fraught, I’d have insisted my husband come back to accompany us,’ she says. ‘It’s so hard being a woman alone.’
Then she glances at Lily and Helena. ‘What I mean is a woman alone in
charge of a child.’
Throughout all this, Edward remains silent and, though he smiles at Lily when he catches her eye, it lacks its usual warm energy. Lily remembers what Helena had said that morning about him never being completely cured and worries that he has overdone things. The day has been so long and the sun so strong, and the plaster figures twisted in fear were indisputably disturbing.
Finally, he speaks.
‘I wonder what the Campbells got up to in Naples today. It feels strange to have no word from them this evening when we have all been so much in each other’s pockets these last days.’
So this is the cause of his despondency. The absence of the Campbells. Lily feels her spirits deflate.
‘It certainly makes a change,’ Helena says, ‘to have a day to ourselves. Don’t tell me you haven’t enjoyed it. Remember the stillness up there in that ruined city, that sense of history.’
‘But everything is so much more fun when Max and Eliza are around,’ says Edward, and once again Lily gets a hint of Eliza’s voice and intonation in his speech.
‘You don’t need fun, Edward.’ Helena says, perhaps more loudly than she intended, because she softens her voice for the next sentence. ‘What you need is calm. Do you want to end up back at the sanatorium?’
Edward has been examining the back of his hands but at this his head snaps up. He’s terrified, Lily senses now. Up until now she hasn’t thought properly about how it must have been. To be so close to death for so long, and surrounded by people whose lives hang similarly in the balance so that each newly empty bed is a horrible reminder of your own mortality.
What an enigma he is, this Edward. So full of contradictions and complications, light and shade, softness and strength. He is unlike any man Lily has ever met. She wishes she could tell him now, about the Campbells and the information she was given in the Pompeii gift shop. But as soon as the thought occurs to her she realizes it would make no difference. Edward is intoxicated by Eliza. Lily recognizes that feeling only too well. It’s how she once felt about Robert.
That night, when she sleeps, she has a terrible dream in which she and Edward and Robert and the Campbells are transfigured into stone, trapped for eternity. Ida shakes her awake. ‘You’re shouting,’ she says. ‘In your sleep. How are any of us going to get any rest with that racket going on?’
Alert now, Lily lies in her bunk, turning the events of the day over in her head and listening to the sea whispering outside the cabin porthole. Glancing down, the fine hairs on her arms stand up in shock when she sees the whites of Ida’s eyes glinting through the darkness.
10
8 August 1939
WHAT A COMMOTION.
Lily has gone down to the laundry with a modest pile of clothes to wash, only to find the place in disarray. Normally, the laundry rooms, which include a dedicated ironing room, are well ordered and calm and Lily hasn’t minded saving money on paying to use the ship’s laundry service by doing it herself. But this morning everything is different. The Italian women who came aboard the previous afternoon have brought down great bundles of washing, with which they are filling and refilling the tubs. Washing belonging to the other passengers, which had been discreetly hanging on the drying rails, has been swept on to the floor, where it lies shamefully exposed.
The Italian women, and their enormous bellies, have arranged themselves around the rooms and are chatting away to each other, quite content and seemingly unaware of having caused offence, while several of the original passengers huddle together, discussing in animated tones how to deal with this outrage wreaked upon their petticoats and underthings.
‘Have you seen?’ says Clara Mills, spotting Lily in the doorway. Once again her tiny hand flutters at her throat, like a baby bird trying to take flight. ‘George Price did warn us, but I never thought … Oh, to think I’m to do this whole voyage completely alone, with no one to protect me and Peggy!’
‘I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding,’ Lily says, although she is mortified to spot one of her own brassieres among the muddle of ejected clothes in the middle of the floor. ‘They don’t know yet how we do things.’
But Clara and the others won’t be mollified. A deputation is despatched to talk to the captain and reappears after ten minutes in the company of the purser and two stewards. The purser is an austere-looking man of around sixty with silver hair and a regal posture to complement his impressive starched uniform. As he addresses them in their own language, the Italian women listen quietly. After a while they start muttering and a couple start to speak, only to be silenced once again by his air of authority.
He comes over to join Lily and Clara and the others.
‘They have been given an hour to clear the laundry and told that, from now on, they will only be allowed to do their washing between four and six in the afternoon. At all other times the laundry is reserved for the other passengers.’
Behind his back the Italian women have started talking excitably among themselves and gesticulating towards the others.
‘They seem very angry about it,’ says Clara.
‘That’s as may be,’ says the purser. ‘But they are on a British ship and they must respect the British way of doing things. The sooner we make that clear to them, the better.’
The scene leaves Lily feeling disconcerted. For the last week and a half the ship has been like a world within itself, a vast floating city outside of normal rules. But the longer the journey continues, the more confined it is starting to feel, deck upon deck, passenger upon passenger, all of them churning around each other without anywhere to go.
It doesn’t help that it is getting so hot. Not just the burning midday heat of Naples but a permanent dampness that coats Lily’s skin, causing her cotton blouse to stick to the small of her back and sweat to pool behind her knees. She makes her way to the small swimming pool, where she takes off her shoes and dangles her feet in the cool water. There are two young girls in the pool. Normally, the children are looked after by the stewardesses in the onboard nurseries, where there is organized entertainment to keep them amused, so it makes a pleasant change to watch these two splashing around with naked delight. She wonders whether they will look back one day when they are fully grown, grandmothers, perhaps, and pluck a memory out of the air of a boat and a swimming pool and a cloudless sky. I will be dead by then, she thinks, and the thought is an unexpected punch in her sternum.
Alerted by a shout from the front of the deck, she makes her way, barefoot, to see what is happening. ‘There,’ says an Italian man, pointing off to the left, where a volcano rises steeply out of the water like a giant pyramid, smoke swirling around its peak.
‘Stromboli,’ the man says. As if reacting to its own name, the volcano belches out a flame into the air.
‘He is angry,’ the man says, and smiles, revealing several missing back teeth. The ship will soon be sailing into the Straits of Messina. Already, Lily is in mourning for the quarter of the voyage that is behind them.
At lunch, Helena is once again absent. ‘The trip to Pompeii exhausted her,’ says Edward.
‘Is she ill?’ asks Lily. ‘She seems always to be having to rest.’
‘I think it is just her heart that’s ill,’ says Edward. ‘And that is my fault. It’s for me that she had to leave everything … everyone … behind.’
‘You couldn’t help that,’ says Lily, leaping in to defend him. ‘You couldn’t help getting tuberculosis. You can’t blame yourself.’
Edward sighs and then smiles. ‘You’re so kind, Lily. But you must know by now that guilt is another of my many unattractive features.’
Despite this exchange, Lily is pleased to see that Edward seems, on the whole, to be in a lighter mood today. Even George Price trying to get them to join in his damning condemnation of the events in the laundry that morning doesn’t seem to dent his mood. Edward is attentive to her, almost to the point of making her embarrassed. When Audrey bumps into her in the Ladies, she says, ‘And now you have two admirers
at your table. It’s so unfair,’ and when Lily gets back she cannot look Edward in the eye.
Afterwards they sit in the shade on the deck and Edward fans Lily with a straw hat he bought in Gibraltar. ‘I’m so glad you came,’ he tells her. ‘You’re the best thing about this whole crossing.’
It is as it was that first evening, and Lily is enjoying Edward’s company so much she is almost irritated when Maria appears and asks if she can join them. But before long they are chatting, the three of them, about Pompeii and the scene at the laundry room, and the infernal, unrelenting heat.
‘How can they bear to be wearing all those clothes,’ asks Lily, pointing out a small group of Jews further down the deck, the men dressed in dark suits and collars and ties. She has noticed before that many of the Jewish women wear the same dress day after day, regardless of the changing weather.
‘That’s all they have,’ says Maria. ‘Many of those who have come directly from Germany or Austria or Czechoslovakia had to leave with only the clothes they were standing up in. I am lucky that I was able to work in England, so that I can treat you all to my wonderful collection of haute couture outfits.’
She gestures with a flourish to her dress, a drab brown thing that looks to Lily to have been made for a woman much bigger in the bust than Maria.
‘And why do the men carry their briefcases around all the time?’ Edward wants to know. ‘Are they doing some sort of business here?’
Maria takes off her spectacles and cleans the lenses on the material of her skirt.
‘Some of these men were doctors or lawyers. I’ve even met one who was a composer. Another who owned a string of factories. And now here they are with nothing. The briefcases, even empty, as many of them might be, are all that connects them to the people they once were.’
Lily tries to imagine how it would be to know she was never going home. Never again to walk through the front door in Reading to give her mam a kiss, or argue with her brother. Never again to be the person she had always been. She can see how she, too, might feel impelled to clutch on to whatever object might link her to her past.
