by Rachel Rhys
‘Oh, we didn’t have our own rooms.’ Seeing Helena’s eyebrows shoot up, Lily feels herself flush and quickly launches into an explanation of the sleeping arrangements, only to be interrupted by Edward.
‘We drank the most wonderful cocktails. Suffering Bastards, they were called.’
There’s an audible gasp from the other side of the table, and too late Edward remembers about Mrs Mills and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Peggy.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry, please forgive me.’
In the ensuing fuss, the apologies and the protestations, the conversation about their brief sojourn is forgotten, to Lily’s immense relief.
But now the captain is doing his rounds, and Lily steels her nerve to talk to him. George Price professes his own intention to make good use of the captain’s ear. The Italians are too noisy, he informs them all. His cabin is directly over theirs and all night he is kept awake by their infernal yabbering.
The captain, when he arrives, listens in respectful silence to George’s grievances. Then he summons a steward, who has accompanied him and is currently lurking near the door to the dining room.
‘Mr Hodkin here will make a note of your complaint,’ he says. ‘Be assured, we will be looking into the matter most thoroughly.’
Afterwards, George seems mollified, proud even. He puffs out his barrel chest.
Now it is Lily’s turn, but still it is only when the captain is just about to take his leave that she finally finds the courage to address him.
‘I just wondered, Captain,’ she says, ‘whether there has been any progress with the investigation into the’ – she glances at Peggy Mills then lowers her voice to say – ‘assault that took place up on deck the night before last. I am a friend of Maria Katz. The victim.’
The captain, whose gaze has before merely grazed Lily politely, now looks at her with interest.
‘Miss?’
‘Shepherd.’
‘Well, Miss Shepherd, I’m afraid we have abandoned our investigations into the … incident.’
He really does have a voice that invites blind trust. She finds herself nodding, though there is nothing to nod about.
‘We made enquiries among the other passengers who were sleeping on deck that night and I’m afraid we have it on good authority that there was no assault.’
Lily stares at him, uncomprehending.
‘But I was there,’ she says at last.
She tries to think back to that night. Waking up in the darkness, Maria’s scream.
‘I saw …’
But what had she seen? A shape? A shadow that could have been something or nothing.
‘I heard footsteps,’ she says.
The captain holds her gaze. ‘Someone screamed. Of course there would have been footsteps.’
Still Lily cannot make sense of it.
‘Whose authority?’ she asks. ‘You said you had it on good authority.’
‘One of the other passengers who was lying nearby told my purser that they were suffering from a stomach pain and didn’t sleep the whole night. They were wide awake when Miss Katz started screaming and swore there had been no intruder.’
‘Oh my,’ says Clara Mills, her tiny hands once more on the move about her chest and throat. ‘Are you saying she’s an hysteric, Captain?’
‘One must not try to guess what drives another person, Mrs …’
‘Mills. It’s Mrs Mills and this is my daughter, Peggy. We are travelling quite alone, which is why the news of the attack came as such a shock to me.’
‘Well, now you need worry yourself no further.’
‘But they must have got it wrong,’ Lily says. ‘Maria is such a sensible sort of person. She wouldn’t invent something like this.’
The captain holds up his hand.
‘As I say, Miss Shepherd, it’s not up to us to ascribe a motive. It was very hot that night – perhaps the lady was suffering from some sort of heatstroke.’
‘More likely she just wanted to stir up trouble,’ says George Price. ‘Her people are known for it.’
The captain raises his hand again, as if to halt the conjecture.
‘I don’t suppose we will ever know the real reason. The best thing we can do is put the whole unfortunate affair behind us. But be assured, ladies, the deck is perfectly safe for sleeping.’
After dinner Lily has coffee with Helena and Edward in the lounge. The shock news about Maria has temporarily pushed aside any lingering awkwardness about what happened in Cairo, and now the three of them can talk of nothing else except what a strange affair it all is.
There is some mistake. Lily is sure of it. Maria would not make up such a thing. She is not that kind of a person.
And yet, asks Helena gently, how sure can she really be?
‘Think of it, Lily. All of us are thrown together here on this ship in such close proximity with no way of escaping and so much time to kill, and we become intimate much more quickly than we ever would in the real world. But what do we really know of each other? Only what we choose to share or to reveal. Maria could be anyone. So could we, for that matter. None of us has any way of knowing who the others are.’
Feeling deeply unsettled, Lily looks around the lounge. Most passengers are now familiar to her, even those she hasn’t yet spoken to. There’s the family from Kent over there with the three rotund sons who are always first in the queue for cakes and sandwiches at suppertime. And the newly-weds over in the corner who met just six months ago at a dinner-dance in Bexleyheath and are off to Australia to begin a new life, away from the interference of her parents. Might they all be inventing themselves? It hasn’t occurred to Lily not to take her fellow passengers at face value. Has she been too trusting, believing in the tiny fragment they present to her, not realizing the full extent of the iceberg hidden under the water’s surface?
One of the male passengers has sat down at the piano and starts playing a tune that Lily doesn’t recognize. To her surprise, his two male companions join in, singing along lustily.
‘They’re Aussies,’ says Helena, noticing her stare. ‘They came aboard at Port Said and have already scandalized half the passengers.’
Lily turns to look again more closely. Two of the men are young, not much older than her, she guesses, with fair hair that looks quite shocking against their deeply tanned skin. The third looks to be in his forties and, while also brown as a polished nut, has brown hair, slightly greying at the sides. As they come to the end of their song there is a round of applause from the passengers nearest to the piano, and they retake their seats, laughing and making mock-bows.
‘The older one keeps looking at you,’ Lily tells Helena.
Helena’s cheeks colour instantly. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘He just did it again.’
‘Lily’s right,’ Edward joins in. ‘There was definitely a look.’
The three of them play a game of whist and Lily is glad things are seeming more normal between them. It’s as if the kiss never happened, she lies to herself. After a while the band sets up and there’s dancing out on the deck. Though it’s completely dark outside, the air is as hot and sultry as if the sun were still beating down and the couples glide languidly around, hardly picking their feet up from the floor.
Lily wonders if Edward will ask her to dance and simultaneously longs for him to do so and dreads it happening. She watches him light a cigarette, holding it between his beautifully shaped fingers, and has to look away when he puts it to his lips. Just over two weeks ago she did not know Edward Fletcher existed, yet now she is aware of every single movement, every change of position, every soft, shallow sigh.
When she met Robert it was his voice she first responded to. He had a way of saying her name as if he were swilling it around his mouth like fine wine. Of course, she’d had no concept that first time they met that there could ever be anything between them. She’d already been working as housekeeper for his parents for six weeks when he came home from university for the Christmas h
olidays. They’d been friendly. Nothing more. But the following Easter, he’d sought her out more, talking to her in that way, as if everything they said to each other were a huge private joke. Saying ‘Li-ly’ as two separate musical notes, the first higher than the other. She’d known – obviously, she’d known – that it couldn’t be anything, that they couldn’t be anything, but his voice had been like a silken thread, too fine to see, that he’d wound around her again and again until, by the time she grasped what he was doing, it was impossible for her to get away.
Why is she thinking of Robert now, when she has come halfway across the world to escape from what he did?
Someone approaches, standing behind the sofa where she sits.
‘Three is such an awkward number for cards, isn’t it? Could I persuade you to accept a fourth player?’
It’s the older Australian. Up close, Lily can see that, while he is not handsome, he has a kind face, with fine white lines in the outer corners of his eyes where laughter has prevented the sun from tanning his skin.
‘By all means,’ says Edward, and a look passes between the two men that Lily has started to recognize, an unspoken question – ‘Are you a threat?’ – followed by, in this case, an instant lowering of guard.
The newcomer introduces himself as Ian Jones. He and his two friends are engineers in the Australian military who have been in Egypt carrying out some sort of reconnaissance in the event of war breaking out.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says, seeing Lily’s face. ‘It’s just a precaution.’
In turn, they tell him a little bit about themselves, the potted histories they choose to define themselves by. Lily watches the lines around his eyes crinkle as he finds out Edward and Helena are brother and sister. So that’s how it is. She is happy for Helena, hopes Helena can set her sadness aside, at least for the duration of the voyage.
After three or four hands, their motivation wanes. Despite the slowly rotating fans, the air is still soporifically warm.
‘Would you care to dance?’ Ian asks Helena in his strange, rough accent. Wouldya keh ta dawnce?
After a moment’s hesitation Helena rises, reaching up to repin a lock of hair that did not need repinning, a nervous habit Lily recognizes from her own arsenal of similar tics. Ian puts his hand under Helena’s elbow to lead her through the dancers. Edward and Lily are alone.
‘I’d forgotten what Helena’s smile looked like,’ says Edward, watching after his sister until she has disappeared from view.
‘Has she always looked out for you?’
Edward looks pained. Nods.
‘I never asked her to. You know, Lily, sometimes love can be as great a burden as disinterest.’
Lily wants to ask him what he means, but finds she cannot. The word ‘love’ coming from his lips has sealed shut her own.
They watch the dancers until Lily feels she might burst from the silence.
‘I think I might turn in,’ she says, rising hastily to her feet. ‘I did not sleep particularly well last night.’
Instantly, she wishes it unsaid. Might he think she is referring to the scene on the Pyramids?
‘Nor I,’ says Edward, and she sees, to her chagrin, that his cheeks are stained a dusky pink, suggesting that his thoughts have taken him along the very path she feared.
On her way down to her cabin, however, her mood takes a swing upwards. Didn’t he say that he also had trouble sleeping last night? Might that not indicate that he also was replaying what happened in his mind? Then she remembers what Maria said about his family expecting more for him and her spirits plunge.
You are ridiculous, she tells herself. Going up and down, just like the ship itself. She resolves to be more level-headed. The voyage is nearly half over. She must be sure to enjoy the time she has left.
Even so, when she looks at herself in the mirror and realizes she’s mislaid her silk scarf at some point in the evening, it’s enough to make her lay her head against the bed frame and weep.
15
13 August 1939
THE SWIMMING POOL has become a lifeline, the only respite from the relentless heat. The passengers gather in listless knots under the awning, leaving the shade only to dunk themselves in the cool water for a few minutes, like hippos at the zoo, before retreating again.
Lily has lost the self-consciousness she felt at first at appearing in public in her bathing suit. Now it’s being dressed that feels wrong, putting layers on top of her already burning skin.
All but the most stuck in their ways of the men have started wearing shorts, and the women waft themselves with colourful fans bought in the bazaars of Port Said. The older women who insist on corsets under their clothes stay in the lounge, beached on the sofas, complaining about the ‘intolerable’ weather. At mealtimes they all eat half the amount they did before, as chewing seems to require too much effort. Even the family from Kent with the three chubby sons no longer arrives in the lounge early to be first in line for cakes and sandwiches.
‘Now I know how bacon must feel when it’s cooking in the pan,’ says Audrey. Annie giggles and Lily can’t help thinking that if Audrey feels like bacon, Annie is the one who looks like it. Audrey’s red-headed shadow is wearing a cloche hat tied under her chin with a headscarf to shield her white skin from the sun. She has already burned her shoulders, causing the skin to blister and then peel, revealing a shiny surface underneath, pink as boiled ham, and now wears a long-sleeved cotton blouse to stop it happening again. Whenever Lily looks at Annie’s headscarf, she feels a pang of regret for her own lost silk scarf. Though she has asked around all over the ship, no one has found one, or had one handed in.
Ian Jones is telling them about Australia. They have already heard about his tough upbringing, working in the outback as a teenager and sleeping in a barn. But he assures them conditions have changed now and that all employees are paid an ‘award’ wage, which means there is a set minimum to how much a person can earn. He tells Lily that Lady Help, as apparently domestic servants are now called, should get at least thirty-five shillings or two pounds a week and probably a separate flat as well with their own bathroom.
Though Lily is pleased to hear it, the conversation makes her feel rather gloomy, reminding her that the voyage is not, in fact, reality but rather a lovely dream, a world where things like work and money have magically ceased to exist, and that when they get to Sydney they will be plunged straight back into real life. She will have to go back into service, which is something she swore she would never do when she closed the door on Robert’s family’s house that last time.
She and Mags had once had such ideas of what they might do with their lives. Office work to start with. Or maybe nursing. Save some money. Travel the world. ‘I don’t mind what we do, as long as we’re together,’ Mags had said. ‘If I wasn’t with you, I’d never have the nerve to leave the county, let alone the country.’
And now here Lily is. Seeing the world alone.
Edward is complaining about the taste of the salt tablets they’ve been given. At first Lily didn’t understand why they needed them, but then Ida explained it was to replace salt lost through sweat, which made her wish she’d never asked. The salt tablets are left at their place settings at mealtimes. ‘I feel embarrassed taking them, though,’ Audrey has confided in Lily earlier in the day, ‘because everyone will know I sweat.’
They are all arranged, as usual, under the awning next to the swimming pool. Lily was relieved, when she first came out, not to find Maria here. And then she was ashamed of herself for being relieved. Maria is her friend. She needs to have faith in her. Still, Helena’s words echo around her head. On the ship, they don’t know about each other’s histories. They can’t check up on each other’s families. Or consult each other’s neighbours or bosses. All they have to go on is what they choose to tell each other. But what if it’s not quite the truth?
Lily is filling in her diary and finds herself posing just that question. Then she scores it out, hotly, in case anyone else
should ever read it.
Helena gets up to go into the pool. Instantly, Ian is there beside her. Since they played cards the night before last, Ian has hardly left Helena’s side. His infatuation is painfully obvious, and Lily finds herself half delighting in it and half wishing he would shield himself a little, not leave himself so open. Her experience with Robert at least taught her that much.
‘Was it all lies?’ she remembers asking Robert that last time she saw him. ‘All those things you told me, all those things you promised me?’
And he had the grace at least to look abashed. ‘I meant them all,’ he said. ‘At the time.’
One advantage of having Ian attach himself to their little group is that his presence has the effect of dissipating any tension between Lily and Edward. They are still, on the surface of things, friends, just as they were before. Most of the time, she can make herself forget about that sand-dusted kiss on the steps of the pyramid. And even when, in weaker moments, it comes unbidden into her mind, it already has that sense of being something once removed, something that happened to a different person or in a different life. Still, despite their best efforts, things cannot quite return to normal between them, something has become lodged, some gritty grains of sand, in the once smooth shell of their relationship.
As Lily is watching Helena and Ian she becomes aware of a disturbance in the torpor of the afternoon, a picking up of energy, a tensing of slack muscles.
A steward appears, a young, acne-ravaged man, looking stiffly self-important, closely followed by the most extravagantly brimmed straw hat Lily has ever seen. Attached to the hat is Eliza Campbell and she does not look happy.
‘Thank heavens I’ve found you,’ she says, coming upon Lily and Edward. ‘I was beginning to think there was no civilized company left on this ship and I should have to hurl myself into the water and swim back to Cairo!’
Eliza has on her dark glasses again so it is impossible to judge her expression, but no one is looking at her face anyway. The attention of the entire population of the swimming-pool deck is focused on what Eliza Campbell is wearing. Or rather not wearing. She has on a red halter-neck top which completely reveals her shoulders, and black, tight-fitting, high-waisted shorts that stop at the top of her thighs and barely conceal her bottom. On her feet she is wearing high-heeled black pumps.
