A Dangerous Crossing

by Rachel Rhys

  And now Lily has Ida’s thin, one-note voice lodged like a mosquito’s whine in her ear. Climbing up to the deck, footsteps clanging on the metal staircase, her blood pulses with the things she ought to have said. She has never liked confrontation, picking her way around it as though stepping around a puddle, so often it is only in afterthought that she becomes brave enough to say what she thinks, stand up for what she believes to be right.

  She has no knowledge of what it is the Jews are supposed to have done. Maria is the first she has ever got to know. But she resents Ida telling her who she can and can’t get close to. Ida, of all people, who has not made a single friend on the voyage.

  Up on deck, Maria is already waiting on a camp bed near the end of the row. Lily wonders whether she chose that position on purpose, feeling safer somehow nearest to an escape route. Lily understands that feeling. After Mags, she slept with the light on for weeks. She waves to Maria. As she makes her way towards her, she passes Mrs Mills with her daughter, Peggy, heading in the opposite direction, towards the cabins.

  ‘Aren’t you tempted to spend the night out here, in the fresh air?’ asks Lily, although in truth the air cannot be described as fresh, only less turgid than the air down below.

  Clara Mills shakes her head.

  ‘I shouldn’t feel safe,’ she says. ‘With all the’ – here she lowers her voice – ‘foreigners we have roaming around the ship.’

  ‘Please, Mama,’ whinges Peggy. ‘It’s so suffocating in our cabin. Sometimes I wake up in the night and feel like there’s an elephant sitting on me, smothering me, and I just can’t breathe.’

  Peggy has put on weight over the last two weeks, Lily thinks. The breakfasts, the lunches, the dinners, the tea and cakes, and sandwiches before bed. And no exercise beyond walking from cabin to dining room to lounge.

  Clara looks as if she might burst into tears.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she says, ‘but I cannot take the risk. A woman travelling on her own with a child is just the sort of person they would target.’

  Maria has saved Lily the bed next to hers. Though the makeshift camp is under an awning, once they’re lying on their backs they can look straight up and see the stars pricking the black velvet sky with light. Now that everyone has settled for the night, they can hear the gentle, reassuring slap of the sea hitting the underside of the ship and the dull rumble of the engine. Someone is whispering to someone else further along the row, and the shushing sounds hang for a moment before dissipating into the breezeless air. The wood of the deck itself is creaking in its own soft rhythm, while from the men’s side of the deck comes a low growl of snoring. Somewhere in the kitchen, beyond the dining room, Lily can hear the far-off clinking of the night dish-washer finishing his shift.

  ‘Doesn’t it make you feel small?’ she asks Maria. ‘Knowing that here we are, two little specs of nothing on this tiny boat, surrounded by this vast ocean under this endless sky?’

  But Maria is already asleep, her glasses folded on the pillow next to her head, white sheet pulled up to her chin, with one slender arm lying over the top.

  This is me, Lily reminds herself. This woman lying under the stars in a boat skimming the coast of Africa. It scarcely seems possible.

  As if unwrapping a secret treasure, she allows herself to think about Edward, sleeping just a few yards away, looking out on the same stars. She remembers how Eliza had said, ‘Of course he’s in love with you,’ as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. After Robert, she swore she would not lose her heart again. But Edward is as different from Robert as it is possible for two men to be: kind, where Robert was often thoughtless; considerate of others, where Robert was so consumed with himself. When at last she closes her eyes Edward’s face shines through her thoughts as bright as the moon and she dreams of being in a small boat with him and Maria, the three of them drifting oarless and engineless away from the ship.

  She is awoken some time later by a scream that seems at first to be pulled out from her own dreams. There is a muffled thud of footsteps, then another scream that wrenches her fully into the present.

  Sitting up, she looks wildly around, surprise at finding herself outside soon giving way to concern as she sees Maria standing, dishevelled, by her bed, with her sheet wrapped around her and her hair standing out like dark foliage around her pale face.

  ‘What?’ Lily urges. ‘What happened?’

  Around them, other people are stirring, whispered words carrying over to them. What’s going on? I heard a scream.

  ‘Someone was here,’ Maria says, and her voice is choked and lumpy. ‘Someone … touched me.’

  ‘What do you mean, “touched” you?’ asks Lily.

  Mrs Collins, the chaperone, has arrived, summoned by the commotion from wherever she has been sleeping. She is wearing a long white nightgown that reaches to the floor and carrying an old-fashioned oil lamp. Her round face is slack with worry.

  ‘I suspect your friend means she was touched inappropriately,’ she says.

  Maria has by this time slumped down on to her bunk and is hunched forward, hugging her sides with her arms crossed, crying silently.

  ‘Did you see anyone?’

  Maria shakes her head. ‘I woke up feeling hands on me, touching me there. There was a dark shape crouching next to me, and I screamed and he ran. Oh, Lily, it was so horrible.’

  Lily sits down next to Maria on her bunk and puts her arm around her. She can feel her thin shoulders shuddering under the thin sheet. Lily’s own heart is racing inside her, chasing away the last vestiges of sleep. ‘I’m here,’ she tells Maria, not knowing what else she can say. ‘I’m here. It’s all right.’ She tries to forget that she has said these words before to someone else, in different circumstances, and it proved to be a lie.

  A steward appears and Mrs Collins takes him to one side, relating to him in lowered tones what has taken place. He is a portly man and his ruddy face first registers shock, but it seems to Lily that when he sees who the victim is his outrage subsides into something more resembling duty.

  ‘I’ll need to ask you some questions, miss,’ he says. ‘And the purser will have to be informed.’

  His voice is polite but distant.

  Lily offers to go with Maria, who has stopped crying, although her body still shakes, in spite of the sultry night air. And Mrs Collins insists on accompanying them both: ‘You are in my charge, Lily,’ she says. ‘Your mother would think me a poor supervisor if I let you go through this alone.’ Lily thinks it strange that Mrs Collins is lavishing concern on her while it is Maria who has been assaulted.

  They sit in the lounge while the purser is summoned. Mrs Collins seems anxious to assign blame. ‘Perhaps you recognized something about him, Miss Katz? Was he known to you?’

  Maria shakes her head. ‘It was dark. I didn’t see. I only felt his hands on me.’

  Mrs Collins sighs, looking pained, as if Maria is somehow remiss in not being able to shed further light.

  Finally, the purser arrives, his silver hair sleek and neat as ever, his manner calm and unruffled. Lily relaxes, feeling as if, finally, here is someone in control.

  ‘A very unfortunate business,’ declares the purser after hearing what Maria has to say. ‘I offer you my apologies that this should happen on our ship. Rest assured, I will be making full investigations in the morning and, in the meantime, I will station stewards on both ends of the ladies’ deck so that there can be no risk of further incidents.’

  They return to their camp beds. Maria says she would prefer to sleep in her cabin but she doesn’t wish to disturb her cabin mate, an older woman she does not know well. A few feet away, at the end of the row, a steward lowers himself into a deckchair, rubbing his eyes as if recently woken from sleep.

  Lily lies awake, watching the stars, but now the sounds of the slumbering ship no longer seem reassuring but, rather, ominous. The creaking of the deck sounds like someone creeping towards her bed, the tossing and turning of restless passe
ngers becomes the scuffle of retreating footsteps. Next to her, Maria gulps, as if choking back a sob. When Lily turns towards her, she sees that her friend’s face is glazed with tears which glisten in the moonlight.

  12

  10 August 1939

  ‘JOHN, GET OUT of bed, you lazy lump. Come look!’

  The shouts of the thickset woman standing at the railings wake Lily with a start. For a moment she thinks she is in her own cabin and wonders who the woman is, then the previous night’s events come back to her and she swings around to look for Maria, only to find her companion’s bed empty, the sheet neatly folded on the end, as if no one had ever been there.

  Light-headed from lack of sleep, she makes her way over to the railings, where more people have now gathered, some still in pyjamas and shaking off the last clinging vestiges of dreams. ‘Didn’t I say it was worth seeing?’ says the thickset woman, hearing Lily’s gasp of surprise.

  Sometime over the course of the dark night the ship has arrived at the entrance to the Suez Canal. The place is awash with ships and boats of all sizes and, beyond them, splayed across a peninsula of land, are the houses of Port Said, their next destination, fronted by a distinctive white colonnaded building with arched porticoes and domed roofs. The water that stretches between the ship and the land is dotted with hundreds of other ships, some of them belching out black smoke.

  ‘Bet you never saw anything like that,’ says a bald-headed man, who Lily decides must be John.

  He gestures towards the quayside on their left, where a huge ship is berthed and, next to it, a long string of men with blackened faces are running with enormous sacks on their backs towards the ship and then back in the opposite direction once their sacks are empty, all keeping pace with one another in an endless human chain.

  ‘Coal steamer,’ says Probably John. ‘Those are Lascars, Indian sailors, loading their ship with coal so it can get to the next port. Dirty old business, isn’t it?’

  Lily wonders what it would do to a man’s back to be running up and down bent under that weight of coal, what the men think about as they scurry after the heels of the man in front. Or does the nature of the work allow them no space for thinking of anything apart from ‘Run, run, nearly there; back, back, and again’? How tenuous is this matter of birth that sees some born into a life of luxury, paying a hundred pounds to travel in a first-class state room from London to Sydney, and others running up and down a quayside with bent backs and coal-grimed faces.

  Lily tears herself away from the sight of the port in order to go down to her cabin and prepare for going ashore. As she reaches the stairwell that leads down from the deck she sees Ida getting up from one of the camp beds further along, a dressing gown pulled tightly around her middle.

  ‘I thought you were staying in the cabin?’ Lily says, remembering with a jolt of displeasure the altercation of the previous evening.

  Ida shrugs, her bony shoulders rising up and down like piano keys.

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  In the cabin, Audrey is agog with excitement.

  ‘I cannot believe that we’re about to land in Africa,’ she says. ‘If only my parents could see me. They wouldn’t believe it.’

  ‘The place is teeming with Arabs,’ declares Ida. ‘I, for one, won’t be going ashore.’

  Thank heaven for that, thinks Lily.

  Audrey wants to know how Lily’s night under the stars went, and Lily explains, in the broadest of terms, what happened to Maria. ‘You were sleeping up on deck,’ she says to Ida. ‘Surely you must have heard something?’ It seems inconceivable to Lily that such a momentous happening might have passed straight over the other passengers’ heads.

  But Ida insists she slept ‘like a baby’. ‘I don’t like to say “I told you so”,’ she says, ‘but I did warn you about consorting with all sorts.’

  There is an organized tour leaving from Port Said. It will travel to Cairo and then take in the Pyramids before picking up the ship at its next destination, Port Suez. When the details were first announced Lily’s heart had skipped like that of a child on a hopscotch grid, but the price – nearly six pounds – was out of her reach, as it was for most of the other tourist-class passengers. She must manage her expectations, she knows this. Already she has done more than she could have dreamed possible a few months ago. She must learn not to ask for too much.

  For those not on the trip, the ship will be docking only for a few hours. Time enough to load up with fresh food and provisions and pick up the waiting mail. Time enough to take in the noise and the activity, to smell the coal-thick air and have photographs taken at the place where Africa and Asia collide.

  The Orontes berths right up at the quayside so the passengers need only descend the gangway to be upon Egyptian soil. As they gather on deck, vendors start massing on the docks, clutching their wares. Lily is fascinated by their long nightshirts and turbans, their dark skin and the strange, throaty language that carries upwards, harsh as gulls’ cries.

  ‘It’s as if I went to bed in Europe and woke up in a different world,’ says Helena, who is finally over her sickness, although she still looks pale, her white skin fragile as the shell of an egg. Lily was so happy to come up on deck and find Edward and his sister looking for her. She is wearing a different dress today, made of pale green cotton that feels daringly skimpy with just her brassiere and knickers underneath. As she put it on, she had thought of Edward, trying to see it through his eyes. And it was worth it to hear him say, ‘Lily, how well that colour suits you.’ Like his sister, he was also looking wan, she noticed, and full of solicitude for her.

  ‘I heard something happened last night,’ he said. ‘And then I saw you and Maria being led off to the lounge. Is everything all right?’

  So Lily filled them in, and there were gasps, and ‘Oh, no’s, and Helena’s hands were clasped to her mouth. They looked around for Maria but could not see her, and when Lily approached the woman who shares Maria’s cabin she was told her friend was ‘resting’ and treated to a long, unsmiling stare, the meaning of which she could not decipher.

  As they prepare to descend the gangway there is a stir behind them. Not a noise exactly but a sense of movement, of new alertness, a smell of roses, a frisson travelling like an electric current from person to person.

  ‘Lily! Edward! Thank God! I’m so glad to see you two.’

  Eliza has pushed through the scrum of waiting people and has arrived by their sides in a blur of motion and ill will from those displaced in the queue behind them. Max ambles after her, a benign smile on his handsome face, as if to say, I know, but what can you do? What can you do?

  ‘Where have you two been? We’ve been going out of our heads with tedium. We even had to play cards with each other – and you can imagine how that turned out! We didn’t make it past the first hand before having the most enormous row.’

  ‘Well, you were cheating, my darling,’ says Max.

  ‘Nonsense. You just don’t know the rules.’

  Eliza is wearing the yellow dress again today, and she draws attention like the sun.

  ‘I jolly well hope you three are coming on the trip to the Pyramids,’ says Eliza, and the word ‘jolly’ sounds odd in her American accent. Forced. As if she’s reading a line from a play.

  ‘Particularly you, Lily,’ whispers Max. ‘At least then I’d have something nice to look at, instead of a load of old stones in a desert.’

  He is leaning in so close to her that she can almost feel the bristles of his moustache scratching her skin. He smells of smoke and sweat and something else that she cannot put her finger on. Instinctively, she pulls back.

  ‘Leave poor Lily alone, darling. You’re practically smothering her.’

  Eliza is smiling but her voice is flint-sharp.

  Lily glances over at Edward in time to catch a frown darkening his face. Pleasure creeps over her like a rash.

  When the Campbells hear that no one else is to join them on their trip they are volubly upset. />
  ‘But you must come!’ says Eliza, linking arms with Edward as they proceed down the gangway. ‘If it’s a question of money, don’t even think of it. We will buy you the ticket.’

  ‘I wouldn’t hear of it,’ says Edward.

  When they arrive on land they are instantly surrounded by hawkers, many of them carrying trays of trinkets. The air is oven-hot. They flock around Eliza in her canary-yellow dress as if magnetized there and she, in response, clings more tightly to Edward. She glances around and catches Lily’s eye, and gives her a strange half-smile. Lily is confused, thinking back to Eliza’s cabin and how she’d allowed Eliza to glimpse her feelings for Edward – yet now she seems to be going out of her way to claim him for herself.

  ‘Max!’ Eliza calls. ‘Will you please tell Edward that he has to come with us?’

  Max gazes at his wife with his ice-chip eyes. Something unsaid passes between them. Then he steps forward and hooks his arm around Edward’s shoulders, steering him away from his wife.

  ‘Of course you must come, old chap. And the two ladies, too.’

  Helena, following on with Lily, shakes her head so violently two of her pins come loose, causing a hank of straight, mousy-brown hair to fall down her back.

  ‘No. I don’t want to. That is to say, it’s very kind of you, Mr Campbell … Max … but I should be far happier staying here. I haven’t been well. And my brother, too.’

  To Lily’s surprise, Helena grabs Edward by the arm and yanks him towards her. She’s taking her older-sister role too far, Lily thinks. Edward’s furious expression indicates that he feels the same.

  Lily, too, starts to protest, even though she is not entirely convinced the Campbells aren’t toying with them. Wouldn’t it be just like Eliza to toss out a statement like that just for the amusement of seeing them all flustered?

  ‘I’m perfectly content to stay in Port Said and visit the bazaars,’ she tells Max, although the pressing of the vendors around them, all of them talking loudly, in that strange language with its harsh, throaty sounds, is starting to make her nervous. She looks around for Eliza, who seems to have become separated from them, and briefly glimpses through the throng a flash of sunshine yellow before the crowd closes in again.