by Rachel Rhys
‘So here’s where you’re hiding!’
Eliza Campbell has stepped out from the lounge and is looking at them over the top of her black sunglasses. She is wearing a coral-pink dress that cleaves to her body, leaving her arms and the tops of her bosoms bare, and white shoes with narrow straps.
‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you two. Doesn’t this heat make you just want to dissolve?’
Lily waits for Edward to reply, for his attention to swing automatically from her to Eliza, but he does not spring to his feet as she might have expected. Hope stirs, treacherous, inside her.
‘Well, now I’ve found you I am not going to let you get away. I insist you two come up to the top deck and play cards with me and Max. Otherwise, one of us is going to end up killing the other and you will be entirely to blame.’
Lily tries to introduce Eliza to Maria, but Eliza’s eyes slide off her, as if she were just a part of the ship itself, or a chair or a wall.
‘I would invite the three of you, but it’s only a game for four. I’m sure Maria won’t mind if I borrow you for a little while, not when she has this wonderful view to look out on.’
Lily is about to say no when Edward gets to his feet. ‘Come on, Lily,’ he says. ‘It will be a relief to have a change of scenery.’
‘And we have far better fans,’ says Eliza. ‘Lovely, delicious, cooling fans.’
‘You go,’ Maria tells her. ‘I shall be quite happy here reading my book.’
Still, Lily hesitates, but at the same time wants to be with Edward and is already imagining how the cold air from the fans will feel against her skin.
‘I will see you later,’ she promises Maria, but she walks away with an unpleasant taste in her mouth.
Upstairs, and subjected once again to the stares of the other passengers, she is immediately reminded of her encounter with the ruddy-cheeked woman in the shop in Pompeii.
Now that Lily knows about the ‘terrible scandal’ she can see how isolated the Campbells are. No one catches their eye as they head towards Max, who is sitting at a table in the lounge, playing solitaire and smoking a cigarette. No cheerful ‘Good afternoon’s or ‘Isn’t it hot?’s. She recognizes the group of young people who were with Eliza and Max in the bar that first night they met. They are splayed out in armchairs near the entrance to the room and look away as Eliza passes.
‘Have you done something different to your hair?’ Max asks Lily as she sits down. ‘You look so well.’
‘It’s because she’s caught the sun,’ says Eliza. ‘I wish I had the kind of skin that went golden, instead of being pale and boring all the time.’
She makes a face like a little girl having a sulk, turning out her lips, which are painted a coral colour to match her dress.
‘Shall we have a drink? Oh, I know, let’s have a cocktail. Max, what’s the name of that one we were drinking at the Savoy all last summer?’
The name is remembered. The cocktails are ordered. Someone is playing the piano, a soft melody of notes that gently ripple across the room. The fans are on full, cooling Lily’s skin down for the first time that day, and through the big wall of windows, the once monstrous Stromboli grows ever smaller. Max smiles his bountiful smile, Eliza charms and pouts and tells funny stories. And just like that Lily finds herself being drawn back into the circle of light that surrounds the Campbells, warming her hands around their fire.
They start playing cards, a new game that Lily has never played before and has to have explained at length, until Eliza gets bored and says, ‘Let’s just start – you’re bound to pick it up.’ This time, Eliza wins, but even so she is easily distracted, keeping up a commentary on the other passengers: ‘See him, he puts his false teeth in a napkin on the table while he eats’; ‘She keeps a bottle of something in her handbag – watch how she reaches in to take a swig when she thinks no one is looking.’ More cocktails are ordered. And more again. Pink Ladies, they are called. They have a sweet flavour that makes Lily think of ice cream in the park on a summer afternoon.
After the next hand, which Edward apologetically claims, Eliza jumps to her feet. ‘Lily, I have the perfect dress for you. I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of it before. You must come to my cabin. I can’t wait to show you.’
Lily demurs, embarrassed. She does not like the way everyone is staring. Does not like the suggestion that she is in need of charity. Eliza appeals to her husband.
‘Max, you know my peach silk? Can’t you just imagine it? With Lily’s hair and eyes?’
And now Max is appraising her, his eyes passing up and down her like he is tracing a map.
‘I don’t think …’ says Lily. She glances towards Edward, appealing for help. He looks closed off, tense. He doesn’t want Eliza to leave, Lily thinks. The unwelcome realization makes her angry, and bold. She stands up. Eliza claps.
‘Come, come.’
‘Just to look,’ Lily says. ‘I have quite enough clothes of my own. Thank you.’
She allows herself to be led away, pretending not to notice Edward’s pained expression or the other passengers’ curious stares. Until now, she and Edward have been confined to one section of the first-class deck. Now she and Eliza pass the formal dining room with its circular tables and polished wood panelling, and up ahead the swimming pool, so much larger, even from this distance, than the one below.
She has no intention of accepting a cast-off from Eliza but she is curious to see Eliza’s cabin. She has heard that a single first-class berth costs seventy-five pounds and a state room closer to a hundred. Such amounts seem inconceivable – a hundred pounds for a journey that will end in a few weeks! Lily’s mother rarely discusses money and, when she does, it is always in lowered tones, as if it is not quite nice, but when Lily’s uncle bought his house in Edgware last year – the first of their family to buy his own home – she told Lily proudly that he had put down a two-hundred-pound deposit and borrowed the remaining one hundred and fifty pounds, so Lily knows a little of the price of things. The notion that two first-class cabins could cost almost the same as a house – well, it makes no sense.
In the event, Eliza and Max’s cabin is almost a disappointment. Not that it isn’t luxurious, with a dressing room and a private bathroom and a huge bed, which Lily tries to ignore, but because Lily has already imagined it to be the size of a palace and festooned with velvet and furs, so that anything less seems somehow unsatisfactory.
‘Oh, the staff have been in tidying again,’ says Eliza with a frown, surveying the neat satin counterpane on the bed and the orderly dressing table, with scent bottles lined up in order of height. ‘Now I won’t be able to find a thing!’
She disappears into the dressing room, flings open the door of one of the vast wardrobes and starts riffling through the hangers, impatiently tossing garments aside that get in the way. Finally, she locates the dress she is looking for.
‘Here!’ She holds it up. ‘Wasn’t I right? Isn’t it perfect?’
‘No. Really. I couldn’t …’
Lily’s protestations die on her lips. The dress is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen, a wisp of peach silk, fine as a cobweb. Eliza thrusts it into Lily’s hands and it spills over her fingers like water.
Still she tries to give the dress back.
‘It’s lovely but I –’
‘Nonsense. Try it on. Come on. I insist. Just to make me happy.’
Eliza throws herself down on to the bed and sits up against the padded headboard, her arms folded, as if waiting for a show to start. Lily has a horrible thought that Eliza is expecting her to get changed right in front of her. Though she had shared a room with Mags and thought nothing of walking around half dressed, the idea of taking her clothes off in the full glare of Eliza’s scrutiny is too disturbing to contemplate.
‘I’ll use your dressing room,’ Lily says. ‘Just in case Max comes bursting in.’
Even though she pulls the door to, she wriggles out of her clothes as discreetly as she can, feeling
exposed even in the semi-darkness. The wardrobe is still open and she notices the red dress Eliza was wearing the first time Lily saw her. Eliza must have pulled it off the hanger while she was looking through her clothes just now, and it lies pooled like blood on the wardrobe floor. There’s something else lying next to the dress, which Lily, at a first startled glance, mistakes for a live animal, before realizing it is a fox stole, rich russet and white. The head is still attached at one end and, as she picks it up to replace it on the hanger, the fox’s dead eyes lock on to hers and she shudders.
As soon as she has the peach dress on Lily knows, even without seeing it, that it is perfect. The way it slips lightly over her body as if it were spun from air and skims her hips before flaring slightly at the hem, the way the slender straps show off her shoulders and the back dips daringly low. It is the first dress she has ever worn that is cut on the bias, and she can tell immediately that it’s a style that suits her slim, small-chested figure. Eliza is a couple of inches taller than Lily, so the dress falls just above the ankle rather than mid-calf but, when she closes the wardrobe door so that she can look into the full-length mirror, Lily sees that the longer length looks good on her. She gazes at her reflection for a long time. She looks like someone else entirely.
‘Aren’t you ready yet?’
A petulant note has crept into Eliza’s voice and Lily hurries out, smoothing the dress down over her hips.
‘I knew it! Didn’t I tell you? You look utterly ravishing. Oh, I am clever, even if I say so myself.’
Eliza crawls forward across the satin counterpane on her hands and knees so that she can stroke the silk over Lily’s ribcage, and Lily steps backwards in shock.
‘Come here, and let’s have a chat,’ says Eliza, pulling Lily down on to the bed beside her. ‘This is what I love about boats. That there are no silly social barriers and we can all just be friends with whomever we choose!’
Sitting stiffly on the end of the bed, Lily looks around the expansive suite and thinks about the tourist deck down below with Audrey and Ida and the Jews huddled down one end wearing their one set of ‘good clothes’, and below that the Italians, the women heaving their huge bellies around across the laundry room, their crossings grudgingly paid for by the owners of the sugarcane plantations where their husbands work. Is this truly what Eliza believes? she asks herself. That here on the ship we are all equal?
Eliza quizzes Lily about herself and her background and, though at first wary, Lily finds herself becoming more garrulous. It feels good to be talking about her family, describing her mother’s quiet stoicism and her brother’s youthful impatience. Even telling her about her father’s war injury and how he has struggled to work since doesn’t upset her.
‘I love the sound of them all,’ Eliza declares. ‘You’re a lucky girl, Lily.’
When it comes to talking about her own family, Eliza is less exuberant. She picks at a seam on the counterpane and seems to be choosing her words with care rather than tossing them out into the air as she usually does. Her mother died when she was a child, she tells Lily. She remembers very little about her – a pair of pale blue shoes with ribbons attached and high heels which the little Eliza would totter around in, a smell of verbena. Lily has never even heard of verbena. She rolls the word around in her head, enjoying its languorous sound.
‘She killed herself,’ Eliza says, gazing right at Lily as if daring her to refute it.
‘Oh!’
Lily has never known anyone to say such a thing out loud. In Lily’s world, suicide is referred to obliquely, as if even to formulate the word is a sin, and always in hushed tones, whispered into someone else’s ear.
‘Her grandmother did the same thing,’ Eliza goes on. ‘It’s part of our family legacy. I dare say I will end up doing the same, too, one of these days. My father married again, with such indecent haste one has to consider the possibility that the new Mrs Hepworth was in the picture while the old one was still very much alive. My stepmother hated me from the first time we met and the feeling was very much mutual so it was boarding schools for me from then on!’
Eliza is struggling to regain her usual brittle tone and Lily’s heart softens. She may have beautiful dresses and jewellery and the money to waft around the world at leisure like a leaf on the breeze, setting down and picking up on a whim, but still Eliza lacks what Lily has, a loving family. A home.
Now Eliza is asking Lily about sweethearts and whether she has ever been in love. Still touched by the honesty of her revelations about her mother, Lily tells her about Robert.
‘I did think I loved someone once, but we broke up.’
‘Oh, my poor Lily. I knew there was a dark, tragic secret in your past.’
Lily looks up sharply, unsure if she is being mocked, but Eliza’s expression is one of concern, so Lily finds herself adding, without even meaning to: ‘He was the son of the family I worked for when I was last in domestic service. So of course it would never have worked out. But I was a lot younger, and naive enough to believe it might.’
‘And he threw you over because of that? How spineless!’
Eliza is outraged on her behalf, and Lily tries to explain.
‘No, not because of that, and it was my choice to end it.’
She is wishing she hadn’t brought up Robert’s name, hadn’t revealed this confidence. The horrible images she tries to keep at bay are prowling like wolves around the edges of her consciousness. No. In her panic to change the direction of the conversation she speaks without thinking.
‘Of course, you must be used to men falling in love with you, Eliza. I think Edward is completely smitten.’
Eliza, who has been leaning forward on her elbows with her face in her hands, now sits up abruptly. Through the hot rush of her own embarrassment, Lily registers that the news seems to have come as a surprise – or else Eliza is a very accomplished actress.
‘In love with me?’ Eliza laughs. ‘Really, Lily, are you completely blind?’
Lily gazes at her without comprehension until finally her meaning sinks in, bringing with it a fresh flood of discomfiture, mixed with acute pleasure. She feels her chest burning under the wisp of the dress.
‘Oh, I don’t think …’ she says. Then, ‘But he’s given me no reason …’
Eliza looks at her strangely, and then laughs again, that same lacquered laugh Lily is used to, which shatters the quiet intimacy of the last few minutes.
‘Well, of course he’s in love with you. Who wouldn’t be? Look at you, you’re lovely. Even Max is quite besotted. Better not let him see you in that dress. Who knows what might happen!’
She reaches out and pulls up one of the straps which Lily hasn’t even realized has slipped down her shoulder. Her fingers are cool like marble against Lily’s burning skin.
Lily leaps hurriedly to her feet.
‘I’d better get this off before it creases.’
Eliza’s laugh follows her to the dressing room and breaks against the closing door.
11
9 August 1939
NOW THAT THERE is no let-up in the heat even after darkness falls, warm air pressing down on you like a hundred woollen blankets, the stewards set up camp beds in pairs on the deck for the passengers to sleep on. One side of the deck for the men and the other for the women.
Lily has never slept outside and finds the idea both intriguing and nerve-wracking. After all those nights in the airless cabin, with Ida’s intrusive presence lending an extra, unwelcome weight, just the thought of sleeping in a place without walls or ceiling, with the sea and the sky stretching infinitely in every direction, fills her with a sense of lightness and longing. But to be surrounded by all those people, many of them strangers, in a place which isn’t her own?
In the event, Lily’s need for space overcomes her fear of the unknown.
‘You will sleep next to me, won’t you, Maria?’ she asks her friend, finding her leaning against the railing after dinner, gazing out at the reflection of the moon o
n the water, shiny as a new shilling.
‘I don’t know, Lily.’
Maria looks down the length of the deck to where the Jews are gathered, as usual keeping largely to themselves.
‘Please say you will. Audrey wants to stay down in the cabin and Helena is still unwell, and I should feel so much better if you’re nearby.’
Maria smiles in assent, transforming the shape of her long, thin face.
‘It will be an adventure, won’t it? I have never been camping!’
As Lily moves around her cabin, collecting various items for her sojourn outside, Ida’s eyes follow her like a sniper’s rifle.
‘I don’t think you should be up there on your own,’ she says. ‘I will come with you. We can get beds close together.’
‘There’s no need. Maria is sleeping next to me.’ Even as the words escape her, Lily knows she has spoken too quickly, too eagerly.
Ida presses her lips tightly together, as if she is squashing something between them.
‘You haven’t travelled much before,’ she says at last, ‘so you haven’t experience of these things, but I must warn you that it doesn’t look good for you to be spending so much time with that woman.’
‘Because she is Jewish?’
Lily’s anger takes them both by surprise.
‘There are a lot of people on this ship who aren’t keen on those people. You’re young and you don’t understand but there’s too many of them in England now, taking over perfectly good neighbourhoods – houses, schools. They’re not the same as the rest of us. They don’t fit. And the ones on here are no different. Look how they keep themselves separate, like they’re too good for the rest of us. And then wearing the same clothes day after day.’
Lily turns her back on Ida, pulling her trunk out from under the bottom bunk in search of the satin pyjamas she has not yet worn.
‘You’re not making yourself too popular round here,’ Ida tells her, as Lily crosses to the cabin door. ‘All that hobnobbing with first class, giving yourself airs and graces, and now keeping company with that Jew. People don’t like that kind of thing, Lily. People don’t like it at all.’
