by Rachel Rhys
Lily sees George dressed in some sort of uniform and ducks behind someone so that he does not notice her. She chats to Audrey and Annie, who have dressed up as Spanish señoritas in long black skirts and lace mantillas and hold colourful fans bought in one of the ports en route. They tell her Ida has refused to come up on deck, claiming the party will be full of drunks, but they think it is because she has nothing to wear but the same old black dress. Lily catches sight of Maria, standing with the Jewish couple she met before, the three of them not dressed up at all but wearing their usual drab, everyday clothes. Maria looks pinched and tired. Remembering how upset she had appeared after the rickshaw ride, Lily goes over to talk to them.
‘How wonderful you look, Lily, just like a real film star.’
‘And you, Maria, how have you been?’
Maria’s smile fades, and her companion, Mrs Neumann, answers for her.
‘I am afraid Maria has had bad news from home. A neighbour in Vienna says her parents have been removed from their apartment and taken somewhere. A prison camp of some sort, although nobody knows where or for how long they will be detained.’
Lily can imagine how anxious Maria must feel, being so far away and now knowing that her parents have had to leave their home and been taken to some unknown place. Yet she cannot help thinking that, if this is the worst that happens, it is not so bad. The word ‘camp’ makes her think of tents in the countryside. To be sure, it won’t be comfortable. She has no illusions about that. But surely it is only until things settle down and the German government decides whether they will be allowed back or sent to join their daughters in England.
The fancy-dress competition is judged and the prize given to an elderly man from tourist class who has transformed himself into the cartoon character Popeye, principally by donning a sailor’s cap and removing his false teeth and sucking on a clay pipe. To everyone’s amusement, Max and Edward and Ian are declared runners-up and curtsy deeply to the other passengers while collecting their boxes of chocolates.
This is it, Lily thinks to herself, breathing it all in – the laughter, the th-th-th of a saxophone playing softly, the intoxicating scent of perfume as a woman in a satin gown sashays past, the feeling of Edward’s arm, warm and solid, against hers. This is where my real life begins. Here in the Indian Ocean at the very mid-point of the world.
Lily excuses herself to go to the Ladies. She feels self-conscious using the toilets on this deck so makes her way downstairs, where she feels more at home. She is hurrying along the upper deck on her way back to the party when she all but bumps into the elderly woman she met in the gift shop in Pompeii.
‘I see you ignored my advice,’ the woman says disapprovingly, pulling her chin back into the ample pillows of her face. ‘My husband says I should let you make your own mistakes, but I can see you’re young and probably have no mother travelling with you, so I will once again warn you to stay away from the Campbells.’
Lily, emboldened by two glasses of champagne, dares to reply.
‘If this is to do with the death of their daughter, I already know all about it.’
Now the woman looks confused.
‘No. I know, of course, that their baby died, which is all very sad, but it’s nothing to do with that.’
Lily remembers now how Eliza had told her Max’s family had hushed up the details of exactly how Olivia had died.
‘Then what?’
The woman purses her lips. She isn’t wearing fancy dress and Lily can see she has on a corset under her clothes. Lily herself is sweltering in her woollen dress and she hates to think how constricting a corset would feel.
‘I am not someone given to gossip. However, you should know the sort of people the Campbells are, the sort of woman Mrs Campbell is. Contrary to the story they are putting about, they are not here on some sort of second honeymoon. The truth is, they had to leave London quickly. She – Mrs Campbell – entered into a liaison with a married man. And not just any married man but the husband of Lady Annabel Wright, a second cousin to the king and, more to the point, a relation of Max Campbell’s.’
She pauses, as if waiting for Lily’s expression of shock. Well, let her wait. Perhaps being dressed as Greta Garbo has gone to her head, for Lily, who would normally have been waiting on such a person, unable to leave unless dismissed, now starts to turn away.
‘Thank you for letting me know, but I really should be getting back to my friends.’
‘She died.’
‘Pardon?’
Lily is caught in the act of turning, one shoulder already facing the way she wants to go, to where Edward waits for her by the ship’s railings, the other still pointing towards her interlocutor, so she swivels from the waist.
‘The young woman. Lady Annabel. She took her own life. Could not bear the shame, I shouldn’t wonder. Well, the Campbells had to leave town sharpish after that. They wouldn’t have been welcome anywhere. Lady Annabel’s husband was still chasing Mrs Campbell, if you can believe it. I heard he even followed her to the docks.’
Now Lily remembers the gilded young man who’d stood on the quayside looking up at the ship. Don’t leave. What kind of person would pursue another woman, with his wife so recently dead? It can’t be true, Lily decides. The woman is talking from jealousy or spite. Such things do not happen. Something of it would have shown in Eliza or Max’s demeanour.
‘I really have to go,’ she says, and rushes away before the woman can say any more.
All the way back to find her friends she tells herself to forget what the woman said. She is someone with an axe to grind, most likely, someone who wants to spread nasty rumours. Lily will not let it spoil her evening.
Edward is standing slightly apart from the others, nursing a drink with a tight ‘good sport’ smile on his thickly made-up face. He looks relieved to see her.
‘Where have you been? I thought you’d run away and left me here looking like this! Are you quite all right, Lily? You look pale.’
‘I was talking to one of the other passengers, who told me a most distressing rumour about –’ Lily breaks off to look meaningfully at the Campbells. ‘It’s not true, of course, but still.’
Edward moves forward to take her hand but, just as he is pulling her towards him, there is a commotion and he is jolted away.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
Helena stands not more than two feet away, shaking with barely suppressed rage, and gripping roughly on to her brother’s arm. For a moment, Lily thinks she is talking to her, but then she realizes her furious question is directed at Edward.
‘After everything that happened,’ Helena continues, glaring at Edward, oblivious to everyone around, ‘everything I’ve been through.’
It is as if Lily is invisible. As if she is carved from wood. And Lily understands with sickening clarity that, despite what she’s said before, Helena is ashamed to find her brother here on the first-class deck, embracing a former maid.
Edward, instead of standing up for Lily, seems to crumple under the force of his sister’s anger, snatching off his wig and hat as if embarrassed at being caught out having fun.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think.’
‘You never think, do you, Edward? You never think about anyone else. You never think about me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says again, reaching out his hand, as if he might smooth away the lines scored deep in his sister’s face. ‘Forgive me, Helena.’
Then, just like that, the two Fletchers turn and walk away towards the staircase that leads to the lower deck, leaving Lily standing so perfectly still she may as well be as dead as the fox she wears around her neck.
22
25 August 1939
NOW THERE IS nothing but ocean.
It is there each morning when Lily gets up and each night before she goes to sleep. Water upon water upon water, with no land in sight. It is as if the ship is now all that there is. Despite the vastness of the seascape in every direction, the
world itself has shrunk to the size of the boat they are on.
Lily feels as though she has been hollowed out like a pumpkin, her soft, pulpy insides dug out and discarded.
The day after the fancy-dress ball, Edward hadn’t appeared at all. Helena had come up to breakfast looking drawn and kept her brother’s empty chair between them. He was indisposed, she’d said. He’d been so ill back in England, the slightest over-stimulation was apt to bring on a recurrence of bad health. Afterwards she’d tried to talk to Lily on their way out of the dining room.
‘I’m sorry about last night, Lily. I’d like to explain.’
But Lily does not wish to hear Helena’s clumsy explanations.
The following day, when Edward had finally reappeared, his eyes sunken like moss-covered stones in his chalky face, he could hardly bring himself to look at Lily, although, like his sister, he did make an attempt at an explanation.
‘I have behaved unfairly towards you, Lily. I wish I could explain it properly. It’s just … Helena has given up so much to look after me.’
‘There’s no need,’ Lily said. She even managed to smile, as if a small misunderstanding had been satisfactorily cleared up.
At mealtimes she now talks to Clara and Peggy Mills, as if their complaints about the heat and the manners of the Australian men, and the noise of the Italian babies, one of whom is in the cabin under theirs, are the most absorbing topics of conversation. Sometimes George Price joins in, although he tends not to converse but rather to lambast, seizing on words or phrases they have used and co-opting them into his own relentless narrative, so from talking about Clara’s worries about living in a country so lacking in culture as Australia they find themselves suddenly treated to a lecture on the insidiousness of Jewish culture and the necessity of keeping British culture separate, all delivered with that disturbing, unblinking zeal.
So much has happened since that unpleasant encounter when George tried to kiss her out on the deck that Lily finds herself questioning whether it ever happened, though if she looks too long at his purple, glistening lips, she can still remember how they felt wet and spongy over hers, like the nose of a dog, and how, for hours afterwards, she kept wiping her fingers across her face, as if it still bore the snail trail of his saliva.
The turban and the fur stole languish, abandoned, in Lily’s cabin. She tells herself she doesn’t have the energy yet to return them, not when Eliza will have no use for them until they arrive in winter-bound Australia. The Campbells will be taking it easy after the excitement of the fancy-dress ball, she reasons. They all need a break from one another.
She does not allow herself to think about Lady Annabel Wright, whose heart was supposedly so broken by her husband’s affair with Eliza that she took her own life. ‘Please, don’t leave,’ begged the young man on the dock, his face painted gold by the sun. But no, she won’t think about it. And if she doesn’t think about it, it cannot be true.
So the fox stays hooked over the end of her bed and watches her while she sleeps, with its dead, black eyes. One night it even made it into her dream, wrapping itself tightly around her neck, until she woke up convinced she was being smothered.
On the deck, looking for a quiet place to write her diary, she bumps into Maria, her head bent over a letter she is writing. By the time Lily notices how the ink has run in places where Maria’s tears have splashed on to the paper, it is too late to withdraw.
‘No, stay, Lily, please.’
Maria reaches out to grab Lily’s hand and Lily tries not to look at how the skin around her eyes is pink and puffy or at the wet tracks on her gaunt cheeks.
‘Excuse my ridiculous display of emotion, Lily. I’m writing to my sister. Look at how blurry the words are. She will struggle to make sense of anything. I can hear her now: “You were supposed to be travelling on the sea, Maria, not in it.”’ Maria has exaggerated her accent and adopted a lugubrious expression that makes Lily smile. But soon she is serious again.
‘Is there still no word from your parents, Maria?’
A shake of the head, that unruly hair now so dry that the sun picks out the individual ends, frayed like straw. Chapped lips pressing together.
‘I am sure they will be fine, Maria. Austria is a civilized country. They would treat older people with respect.’
Maria looks at her sharply and opens her mouth as if to speak, then snaps it shut again.
‘And you, Lily? How are you getting on? I haven’t seen you around so much with Edward Fletcher recently.’
‘Oh, that turned out to be nothing. Just a shipboard dalliance. A way of passing the time.’
Lily’s mouth stretches into a painful smile, like a rubber band pulled too tight.
‘I hope you haven’t been too much hurt by it.’
‘No. Not at all. I am perfectly fine.’
She tries to hold Maria’s gaze, until, without warning, Maria’s face contorts into a grimace and she folds her arms over her stomach, head bent.
‘Maria? What’s the matter? Are you ill?’
There is no answer.
Should she do something? Lily casts her eyes around the deck but the only other passengers around, a quartet of Aussie men, are engrossed in their card game and haven’t noticed.
Just as she is thinking she must fetch help Maria’s tightly coiled body relaxes and she unfurls, looking pale but composed.
‘Sorry, Lily. How strange you must think me. I have been getting these stomach pains. They come out of nowhere and it feels as if someone has put his hand inside me and is twisting it around.’
‘Have you talked to the doctor?’
‘What would I say? Unless he happens to be here when it happens, there is nothing to show him. Besides, it is probably nothing. Just the change in the weather or the food.’
Lily walks away, feeling uneasy. The alteration in Maria since she first encountered her those few weeks ago is too marked to ignore. Physically, she has lost weight, but then, many of the passengers have. The heat makes eating a chore sometimes. No, it is more a change in herself. Ever since the night she was assaulted on the deck something has been lost, a certain levity, that keen interest she seemed to have in everything around her. And now this sudden crippling pain coming out of nowhere. Lily is frightened about what it might mean – and how powerless she feels to help.
George Price intercepts her as she makes her way towards the lounge, causing her heart to plummet. He wears a khaki shirt that is soaked with sweat, and sweat drips also from the ends of his hair, which he has allowed to grow so long he is constantly having to flick it out of his eyes, spraying droplets into the air.
‘I would like to explain,’ he says, his face the colour of a beating heart.
Lily stops, clenching each of her muscles in turn, fortifying herself. Everyone, it seems, has something they wish to explain to her.
He guides her over towards the railings. She is taken aback by how agitated he seems, his body constantly on the move, fingers clutching at his hair or at the fabric of his trousers, shifting his weight from foot to foot, even his facial features in perpetual motion, a tic in his left eye, a habitual sniff that wrinkles up that wide, bent nose.
‘I just …’ he begins, then stops, shrugging one shoulder up to his left ear as if trying to dislodge something.
‘I only thought it was what you wanted. The kiss. You seemed to be game.’
Over his shoulder a line of birds sew a black seam across the blue fabric of the sky.
‘You thought wrong,’ says Lily, and makes to leave, but he steps forward as if to stop her.
‘You think me a coward, Miss Shepherd.’
‘No. Why should I?’
‘Because here I am on a ship, headed for New Zealand, when all the signs are that Britain could soon be at war.’
‘No!’ The denial escapes before Lily can stop it. ‘I’ve been looking at the noticeboard. There is nothing that indicates we are any nearer to war.’
‘Of course there isn’t. The ca
ptain doesn’t want a full-scale riot on his hands. Think of all the Ities on board. None of us would be safe in our beds.’
‘My mother’s letters –’
‘Were sent days ago, weeks even. A lot can change in that time.’
Lily doesn’t believe him, knows him to be a fantasist.‘There are people who fantasize about war just as there are people who fantasize about sex,’ Robert had told her, all that time ago, when it first appeared as though Britain might be edging closer to reopening old wounds with Germany.
And yet.
‘I need you to know that this is not my doing. It’s my father who insisted I had to leave. I would have gladly stayed. He is a difficult person. As I told you before, there is no saying no to him.’
‘It’s all the same to me,’ says Lily.
Now there is a change in him, a hardening of features which are already hard enough.
‘It’s because of her, isn’t it?’
‘Who?’
‘Don’t play games. I’ve seen you with her. Everyone on board has seen you with her. The Jewess. You were not like this at the start of the voyage. You were open. Kind. It is she who has poisoned your mind.’
Finally, Lily walks away, turning in the opposite direction so that he cannot prevent her.
George is mad, she thinks. And the thought, now it has entered her head, will not leave it. Frank had warned her about it before she left, the particular madness that comes from being cooped up on a boat with no way off, seeing the same people all the time. He’d heard of someone, he said, who’d tried to kill all his shipmates with an axe. They’d had to lock him up in a cabin until they got to the next port.
Thinking about her brother, she feels a sharp pang of regret. How she should love to see him, now that everything onboard has turned strange and unhappy.
Lily finds a seat on the other side of the boat which is empty, owing to being in the full blast of the sun, and sinks into it. Within seconds the heat begins to prickle on her bare arms. Somehow, despite everything, she falls asleep, and her unconscious mind takes her to that room in a backstreet in Basingstoke and Mags: Am I going to die, Lil? And blood. Who knew there could be so much blood?
