by Rachel Rhys
But mostly she wants to get away from the Campbells, with all their confusing complications, and even from Edward, who has been curt and moody ever since they all gathered in the hotel lobby at six o’clock that morning. Max, who pronounced himself as having the beast of all hangovers, has also been monosyllabic. Only Eliza, who had slipped back into the hotel room just half an hour before they were due to get up, is bright and breezy. Lily doesn’t ask her where she was. Better not to know.
On the way from the coach to the ship they are followed by a group of children, who seem especially interested in Eliza.
‘Meeses Seeempson,’ they chant, pulling on her arm and smiling up into her face then bowing deeply.
‘You remind them of the lady who stole King Edward,’ says Anwar, who is accompanying them to the gangway. He is different this morning. Subdued. Unable to meet anyone’s eyes.
‘Wallis Simpson?’ laughs Eliza. ‘That’s hardly a compliment!’
‘It is only your hair,’ mutters Anwar.
When he takes his leave of them at the edge of the quayside Anwar shakes each of their hands in turn and only when he comes to Eliza does he finally raise his eyes from the dusty floor. There is something in them that Lily cannot read, some question which hangs in the air until Eliza turns away and starts up the gangplank.
‘Max, make sure you give Anwar a nice, fat tip,’ she calls over her shoulder.
Back on board, Edward and Lily stop on the tourist deck, where the staircase continues up to First.
‘I really can’t thank you enough,’ Edward says, addressing a spot somewhere between Eliza and Max. ‘I shall remember my trip to the Pyramids for the rest of my life.’
Lily hopes her face does not give away the flush of embarrassment she feels when he mentions the scene of their kiss which, already, is seeming as if it happened in another life.
‘The same goes for me,’ she tells them. ‘I am really so grateful.’
‘Nonsense,’ says Eliza. ‘You did us a favour. Without you we should literally have died of boredom. Shouldn’t we, Max?’
Max says nothing, but the look he shoots at Edward before he follows his wife up the staircase is unexpectedly cold and Lily wonders if he resents them having muscled in on what should have been an intimate night away with his wife.
‘Right. Well, I think I’ll go and drop my things at my cabin.’ Lily makes to leave, but Edward puts his hand on her arm.
‘Lily? I just wanted to say, about yesterday. I should never have –’
‘Don’t worry. Really. It’s forgotten. It was the heat.’
‘It’s not that you’re not utterly wonderful, it’s just that I haven’t been –’
‘I know. You haven’t been well. And the last thing you need is a complication. It is the same for me, too. We just let the sun and the place carry us away.’
How pompous she sounds. How stilted. But she cannot bear to stand here, not daring to look at him for fear of the pity and embarrassment she should find in his face, not wanting him to see how her hand is shaking.
‘We’re still friends, Lily, aren’t we?’
Such appeal in his voice. How badly he wants for everything to be all right again, for yesterday’s kiss to be forgotten. What can she say, except: ‘Of course. I’ll see you at lunch.’
And now she is released, and hurrying down to F Deck, where she carefully puts her overnight things away, and then climbs the ladder to her bunk, curls up facing the wall and sobs without making a sound.
She is disturbed by the cabin steward bringing letters that have been picked up in Port Suez. If the man wonders at her swollen eyes or rumpled appearance, he doesn’t show it.
‘Good to have you back, miss.’
She has a letter from Mam, and a second one from Frank. She reads Frank’s first, smiling at his careless writing, the characters all different sizes and liberally decorated with ink splodges. The letter is typical Frank. He starts by telling her how boring it is at home, and how his job at the biscuit factory isn’t much better and he hopes there is a war because then he would at least get to travel, then he launches into a long-winded and confusing anecdote about his best mate, Geoff, and how he had too much to drink in the pub and then tried to liberate his elderly neighbour’s racing pigeons on his way home, before ending abruptly with ‘Mam’s just put my tea on the table so I’d better go.’
Her mother’s letter is longer and just seeing her laboured writing on the page makes Lily long for home so acutely it’s like a cold needle passing between her ribs. She thanks Lily for her last letter and tells her they are all following the progress of the ship in the atlas they have at home. She likes the sound of Edward and Helena Fletcher, she says, and warns her not to get on the wrong side of Ida: ‘She seems the sort would hold a grudge.’ She tells Lily that they are still optimistic that war will be avoided and that Chamberlain ‘hasn’t the appetite for it’. She describes her most recent visit to her sister Jean in Basingstoke and how Jean’s daughter-in-law had visited with her toddler. ‘Jean calls her “bonny” but quite honestly, Lily, I think “fat” would be more truthful.’ She talks about Lily’s dad and how the daily talk about war is affecting him badly.
Lily was only two years old and Frank just a baby when a grenade went off just feet away from her father, tearing off the bottom part of his right leg and sending him into a coma, from which he emerged two weeks later, suffering nightmarish flashbacks and with no memory of his earlier life.
Gradually, with the help of Lily’s mother, the flashbacks went away, and he’d learned to walk using a prosthetic leg. But he’d had to relearn his entire life, and he’d never spoken again. ‘Is it because he can’t or because he won’t?’ Lily would ask her mother as a child. One of the older neighbourhood children had once told her his tongue had been cut out by the Germans, and for weeks she’d kept that horrible thought to herself, hardly daring to look at her father when he ate or yawned for fear of seeing some disfigured stump in his mouth, until, finally, she told Frank and he told her mother, and her mother had her father stick his tongue out to show them it was still all present and correct.
She’s never got a proper answer from her mam on the question of whether her father’s muteness is self-imposed, and now his silence is as much a part of the fabric of her life as the little terraced house in Reading or her mam’s old brown leather handbag.
When Lily comes to the end of her letters, she reads each one again, slowly, homesickness building in her throat. Just as she is readying herself for another bout of crying Audrey bursts into the cabin, with Annie following on like a red-headed shadow.
‘You’re back! I thought you must be when I saw everyone else getting on board. The Pyramids! You lucky thing. I feel like I might explode with jealousy. Tell me everything. Don’t leave a single thing out.’
Lily looks at Audrey’s wide, good-natured face and is instantly flooded with shame. What right has she got to be feeling sorry for herself when she is having the adventure of a lifetime? She remembers all the nights in her lodgings in Bayswater when she’d let herself into her room after a late shift and the cold and damp would be waiting in the dark to meet her like a reproachful husband, and her heart would shrivel a little as she wondered, Is this it? Is this all? And now here she is on a ship, with Africa on one side and Asia on the other, surrounded by interesting people, having just spent the night in Cairo’s most glittering hotel and visited one of the Ancient Wonders of the World.
I’m an idiotic woman, she thinks.
Taking a deep breath in, she places the letters between the pages of her diary and climbs down the ladder and joins Audrey and Annie sitting on the spare bottom bunk, where she talks them through the events of the last twenty-four hours, leaving out only the kiss with Edward and the dance with Max, and Eliza’s footsteps padding out of the hotel room in the early hours of the morning.
By the time she finishes she is feeling much cheerier and resolves to put all her confused feelings behind her and
focus solely on what is in front of her. Back up on the scorching deck, she stands at the railing for as long as she can bear, watching the coast of Egypt roll past with its ridge of sandy mountains, reflecting almost pink in the hazy heat. The ship is passing slowly through the Red Sea on its way to its next stop, Aden, and all around there is a sense of life suspended, of people waiting out the heat. Regrouping.
She locates Maria at one end of the ship, sitting with a circle of Jewish women talking in German.
‘Lily!’ Maria exclaims, and gets up to greet her, but not before Lily has sensed a hesitation.
‘How are you?’ Lily wants to know.
Now that she sees Maria’s face, with purple shadows under her eyes and a line down her forehead that wasn’t there before, Lily feels more wretched than ever about having left her, but when she tries to apologize Maria quickly shuts her down.
‘Lily, if you had given up the chance to see the Pyramids on my account, I should never have been able to speak to you again, and that would be a terrible tragedy. Now, tell me all about it.’
And once again Lily gives an account of the journey to Cairo and the Pyramids, which, already, is starting to take on the quality of a dream, or something that happened to someone else.
As she talks she and Maria parade up and down the deck under the shade of the awning. From the dining room comes the clatter of cutlery being set out for lunch, while from the passengers draped listlessly over deckchairs there’s a quiet hum of chatter, broken by the soft thump of cards being laid down on tables or the rustle of pages being turned.
‘And how did you get along with Edward Fletcher?’
Maria glances sideways at Lily, a smile twitching at her lips, and Lily is hot with embarrassment. Is it that obvious? Does everyone know? Anxiety makes her more abrupt than she intends.
‘We’re friends, of course.’
Maria says nothing, just waits, and soon Lily gives in.
‘There was a moment when I thought, perhaps, we might be more than friends. But …’
She tails off. Once again Maria waits in silence, not pressing Lily for more information but leaving a space for her to be more expansive if she needs to.
‘Well, I think, after a night to think it over, he had second thoughts.’
‘And you don’t know why?’
Lily shrugs miserably.
‘I’m just not the right person for him. I know he likes me, but he doesn’t … well … look at me the way he looks at Eliza Campbell, for instance. But really, that’s fine. I’m not looking for an onboard romance.’
Her intention of injecting a note of firmness and finality into the last sentence is thwarted by her cracking voice.
Maria reaches out for Lily’s arm and draws it through hers.
‘Did it ever occur to you, Lily,’ she says eventually, speaking slowly, as if deliberating each word before delivery, ‘that it might be a question of – how to put it? – class? Helena told me her family are professionals. Her father is in the – how do you say this? – service of the government. Edward himself was studying to be a lawyer before he became ill. Please don’t be offended, dear Lily, but you are travelling to Australia in order to go into domestic service. Might his parents not have been expecting what they might consider to be a better match?’
Lily stops still, conscious suddenly of the overwhelming heat and the new burning sensation at the back of her eyeballs. Now that Maria has mentioned it, she can see that it must be so. She has allowed the ship, with its blurring of social boundaries, to convince her that they are all on the same level, but now she realizes how naive that is. Even though Helena and Edward are travelling in tourist class, just like she is, back in England they would move in completely different circles. How would Edward ever be able to write to his parents and tell them he had an involvement with a housemaid?
‘Of course, you’re right, Maria. I hadn’t thought about it like that. How silly of me.’
Now Maria looks stricken.
‘Lily, it was not my intention to make you upset. I merely wanted to make you understand that it might be nothing to do with how Edward feels about you.’
She wishes to cheer Lily up, but nothing can override the feeling Lily has of foolishness, of having allowed her schoolgirl fantasies to overrule her common sense. She’d been so sure that, after Robert, she would never again let herself be carried away by the notion of a real-life love story, and yet here she is again, as if she has learned nothing.
As they reach the stairwell leading down to the lower deck an anguished cry floats up to them, jolting Lily out of her self-absorption.
‘Another Italian baby on the way,’ Maria tells her. ‘Our steward told us this morning.’
‘That makes three so far. The ship’s doctor must be exhausted.’
Fitting, nevertheless, to think of new lives beginning as old lives are being left behind.
Anxious now to steer the conversation away from her Cairo tour, Lily risks bringing up the assault.
‘How is the investigation going? Have they found out who did it?’ she wants to know.
Maria is quiet, gently pressing her lips together.
‘I don’t think there has been any investigation. When I saw the captain yesterday afternoon he said he was very sorry but there wasn’t very much he could do. He suggested that if I’d been at the other end of the deck with “my group”, it would never have happened.’
‘Your group?’
‘The other Jews, I think he meant.’
‘But that’s nonsense.’
Outrage has ground Lily to a stop.
‘Someone attacked you, Maria. They have an obligation to find out who it was. They need to talk to everyone, in case anyone saw something.’
‘It’s fine, Lily. It’s finished.’
‘No, it’s not fine. I’ll find a steward. I’ll ask him to draw up a list of who was sleeping on deck so they can start interviewing the other passengers.’
‘Lily, leave it.’
Maria has spoken so loudly that a couple playing cribbage at a nearby table look over in their direction, frowning.
‘It’s fine,’ she repeats, lowering her voice. ‘It’s forgotten.’
But all that afternoon Lily can’t shake off a bristling sense of injustice. On some level she is aware that she is focusing on this in order to avoid thinking about Edward, but nevertheless she finds it intolerable that, instead of finding out who was responsible so that they might all feel safer sleeping outside in the future, the ship’s authorities seem to be trying to lay the blame at Maria’s feet.
It’s the custom on board for the ship’s captain to appear in the dining room once a week and go from table to table, making conversation with the passengers. It’s designed, Lily supposes, to put passengers at their ease, knowing that the ship is in such capable hands. The captain is a short but nevertheless imposing figure with a calm, deliberate manner and a way of speaking that invests his words with instant authority. Tonight’s dinner will coincide with his weekly appearance and she resolves to question him about what he is doing to investigate what happened to Maria, even though on the previous occasion she has found herself too awestruck in his presence to say much about anything.
She spends a good time getting ready, telling herself it is because of the captain and not in any way because Edward will be sitting just inches away from her. The bathroom steward is pleased to see her.
‘I reserved your bathroom yesterday, as usual, miss, but you never came.’
Lily apologizes and makes a mental note to give him the other half of his tip, as they are almost halfway through their journey. He puts her in mind of her brother, Frank, with his touching mix of inexperience and cocky cheeriness. On a ship peopled with unfamiliar types it is reassuring to find someone who reminds her of home.
Sitting in the bath, she scrubs herself with the treated seawater, relishing how the sting of it makes her skin feel alive, as if it’s washing off the dust and the dirt from the Cairo
trip and the residual flakes of shame that seem to have attached themselves to her. Afterwards, she rinses herself well with the warm, fresh water from the basin at the foot of the bath. It’s forgotten, she thinks, as she watches the water drain between her toes. All of it.
She wears her navy linen skirt, which is freshly laundered, together with a sleeveless white blouse and her gold silk scarf around her neck, noticing only when she is dressed that it is the sort of outfit a librarian might wear. She thinks for a moment of Eliza last night in her coral dress and almost changes but then stops herself. If she resembles a middle-aged librarian, so much the better.
At dinner, Helena insists on sitting next to her so that she can hear all her news. Lily is grateful to have Edward safely one seat away.
‘He hasn’t told me anything,’ Helena complains. ‘Just that the Pyramids were “big” and “old” and everything was covered in sand. Well, what a surprise – I think I knew that much already!’
So Lily talks a bit about the tour and Anwar and the way the coach had no sooner passed the last buildings of Cairo before the Pyramids appeared there, looming up on the city’s very doorstep. She talks about the narrow passageways inside the Great Pyramid and the chill in the King’s Chamber.
‘And did you climb up the outside?’ Helena wants to know. ‘Up all those ancient blocks?’
Uncomfortably aware of Edward sitting to Helena’s right, Lily tries to keep her tone light and breezy.
‘Yes, a few of us climbed a little way up. It’s harder work than it looks!’
‘And the hotel?’ asks Helena. ‘Was it very grand? It must have cost a lot more than six pounds for you to have a room each.’
