by Rachel Rhys
She wakes with her heart racing and the skin on her face scorching, knowing that, later, it will be red and angry.
She decides to seek out Audrey and Annie. They alone of all the passengers on the voyage have remained constant, full of excitement and wonder. But a search of the lounge and bar proves fruitless. She stumbles upon Ida, who is on her way down to the laundry. ‘Your posh friends deserted you, then?’ she asks. Up here on the deck, in the white light of the sun, Lily notices the shocking state of Ida’s teeth, yellow like old custard.
Eventually, defeated, her face stinging, Lily makes her way down the staircase to the welcome dimness of the cabin. For once, she does not even mind the stale smell or the sight of Ida’s greying petticoat hanging at the end of her bed.
She finds her wash cloth and wets it under the tap in the sink before climbing up to her bunk and lying down, not even bothering to remove her shoes. Laying the folded cloth carefully against her now flaming cheeks she closes her eyes and wonders why she can still feel the fox watching her through the tissue of her eyelids.
23
27 August 1939
THE ISLAND APPEARS as if from nowhere, a flat disc of land broken up only by a few palm trees – or at least that’s how it seems standing on the ship’s deck. They have been told that beyond it there are more islands – an atoll made up of a cluster of islets – but these are not visible to the watching passengers.
One of the three rotund brothers, always at the head of the cake queue, is the first to see it.
‘Australia!’ he yells excitedly. ‘We’re here!’
‘What a complete berk you are!’ chortles one of his brothers.
Soon everyone is at the railing, pointing and exclaiming, and an excitement spreads, out of all proportion to the island’s size and importance. It’s a relief to finally see land after all these days of only sea, to realize they are not, after all, the only people left in a vast, wet, empty world.
Lily and the Fletchers are back on civil terms, although there is something that sits like a boulder in the very centre of their relationship so that all conversation has to find a way around it rather than flowing freely, as before.
‘The Cocos Islands,’ Edward reads from the printed literature given out by the stewards. ‘Home to the Clunies-Ross family, descended from Scottish captain John Clunies-Ross.’
‘And not just him, from the looks of it,’ says Helena, eyeing the little boats manned by islanders who have come out to collect their mail, which the ship’s staff lower down to them in wicker baskets.
‘But how can they live there, so cut off from everything?’ Lily wants to know.
She can see how the islands might be considered beautiful, idyllic even. The water is turquoise and so clear she can see fish swimming far below the surface, and white sand lies over the island’s beach like a freshly starched tablecloth. But there is something about its isolation that chills her, despite the wet, tropical heat. What would it do to a person to live out here, cut off from everything? What would it do to a society?
‘I’m worried about Maria,’ she says. ‘She does not seem herself.’
‘It must be very hard living with such uncertainty,’ says Helena. ‘No wonder she’s anxious.’
Lily doesn’t state the truth, that she is afraid this is much more serious than anxiety, doesn’t explain about the worrying violet shadows under Maria’s brown eyes.
In forty-eight hours’ time they will be arriving in Fremantle, their first stop in Australia, with just another week before they are due in Sydney. How can it be true that in less than two weeks she will be working again – cleaning, cooking, taking orders, watching the world through a pane of glass in someone else’s house?
The Campbells appear, unannounced as always, except by a change in the energy on the deck, a stirring up of the hitherto torpid air, a hissed whisper that might come from the other passengers or from the sea itself.
‘We have missed you. What purgatory it has been up there.’
Eliza is wearing her shorts with a striped top that is slashed across her neck and clings to her body as if painted on. Her eyes, those peculiar, shade-shifting eyes, are today an intense blue, as if they have taken on the colour of the sea, and Lily squirms uncomfortably when they alight on her, wide and unflinching.
‘Lily, where did you disappear to at the end of the fancy-dress ball? We looked for you everywhere.’
As ever, Lily finds herself thrown into a state of confusion by the fact of Eliza. How loud she is, how careless of people’s feelings, how exhausting. And yet how dazzling. When she is here it’s as if everything that has gone before now was in semi-darkness, like when the day fades so gradually you don’t realize you’ve been sitting in the dark until suddenly someone switches on the light.
Max trails behind her, smoking a cigarette. Today it is he who is wearing sunglasses, and Lily is glad not to see those ice-chip eyes. She thinks about what the woman told her at the dance. That poor girl! Then immediately she pushes it from her head. It’s not true, she thinks. They would have mentioned something.
‘I’m glad you’re here. I need to give you back your things,’ she says to Eliza. ‘I don’t think I will have any call to be Garbo in Australia.’
Eliza makes a lazy gesture with her hand.
‘Keep them. They looked far better on you. Anyway, that fox gave me the chills. I felt like it was judging me.’
‘Perhaps it was, darling,’ says Max. ‘Now wouldn’t that be interesting. Eliza Campbell held to account at last.’
There is a silence that stretches taut across the group like the skin of a drum. Then Eliza’s laughter, shrill and savage.
‘Rest assured, my love, you will have a front-row seat on Judgement Day.’
There is something about her today. Something wild.
‘My darling wife hasn’t slept properly since the dance,’ says Max. ‘Just in case you might all be wondering why she is so fidgety and talking such nonsense.’
‘Really, Eliza?’ Helena is concerned. ‘That’s so bad for you. You should ask the doctor to give you something to help.’
‘Ah, but she doesn’t want to!’ Max is mocking. ‘She thinks not sleeping makes her invincible.’
‘Not invincible, Maxie. Just alive.’
They all go into the lounge, out of the sticky heat.
‘Heavens, Lily, what have you done to your face?’ asks Max, taking his sunglasses off and peering at her closely as they take their seats on the sofas.
‘Burned it. That’ll teach me for falling asleep in the sun.’
To Lily’s huge embarrassment, he reaches out a hand and strokes her cheek, which she knows to be still livid pink. She turns away from his touch and finds herself locking eyes with Edward. He immediately arranges his features into a smile, but not before she has registered the look on his face. He is jealous, she thinks. And the realization sends something warm and liquid shooting through her veins.
Cards are fetched, games played. But Eliza keeps throwing down her cards, jumping up, moving around. The air is too stifling, she says. The voyage too long. She can’t wait to get to Sydney, she declares. New people. New life. New parties.
‘I’m afraid you might find yourself disappointed,’ says Ian, who has joined them at Helena’s insistence, though he normally steers clear of the Campbells. ‘Aussie society is not what you’ve been used to. You’ll find us a very unsophisticated lot.’
‘How long are you staying there?’ Helena asks.
‘Until my wife gets bored,’ says Max.
Though she tries not to, Lily thinks again about the woman from first class with her corsets and her disapproving face nestling into pillows of flesh. No one will have them, she’d said. Though Lily doesn’t move in those circles, she knows enough from working in large houses to imagine how this might be true. The British upper class operates like the sea itself: a stone in its centre will send ripples reaching to its furthest edges. Once one or two key people – key women �
� have refused Eliza and Max entry to their dinners and salons and weekend house parties, they will be closed out of every house in the land. So what then? Keep moving? What a desolate thought.
Lily’s face feels dry and sore, and she excuses herself to go back to the cabin to apply some more cold cream. She is hoping they will all play on without her, but they insist on waiting until she returns.
‘Everything is much duller when you’re not around,’ says Max.
‘You seem to find so many things dull, Max,’ Edward says in Eliza’s voice, both sardonic and hard.
Max gives Edward a look that leaves Lily feeling strangely chilled, although his words are harmless enough. ‘I’m easily bored. That’s why I seek out distractions. But you know, old chap, even the distractions soon become dull.’
On her way back to the lounge Lily finds Maria huddled into a deckchair. She is looking even thinner than the last time they met, her cheeks sallow and sunken into her face. Still, when she smiles Lily can just about recognize the bright, alert woman of a few weeks before.
‘Are you still unwell?’ she asks, aware of how she is looming over her friend but too conscious of the others waiting for her in the lounge to sit down.
Maria’s smile fades, replaced by an anxious, pinched expression.
‘Oh, Lily, I hate to be always complaining, but the pains are getting worse. And now my head aches also. I’m afraid there is no hope for me. I am falling apart like a sandcastle. When you see me next I shall be just a pile of sand in a chair.’
‘But what could be causing the pains?’
‘I think it’s the salt tablets. They don’t agree with me, so I’ve stopped taking them.’
For a moment Lily is confused. Then: ‘They don’t agree with you? But surely it’s dangerous not to take them?’
They are all still taking salt tablets to keep their salt levels up and ward off dehydration.
‘Have you spoken to the doctor?’
Maria nods, and Lily notices for the first time a bald patch on her head, just behind her ear, the size of a shilling. She looks more closely and sees another at the crown.
‘He has given me something for the pain. Tablets. They make me feel so queer, as if I am in a – I don’t know the word for it – the glass box where fish live? I am in there, looking out at the world through the thick glass. I didn’t tell him about not taking the salt tablets. He is not the kind of man who encourages confidences. Will you sit with me a while, Lily?’
‘I wish I could, but I have to get back.’ Lily waves her hand vaguely in the direction of the lounge.
‘Of course. Anyway, I think I might have a sleep now. I’m so tired. The nights are very bad at the moment.’
Back in the lounge, and still deeply troubled, Lily cannot concentrate on the game and comes last three hands in a row.
‘That funny little couple keeps staring over here,’ says Eliza, who has once again laid down her cards and sits there, looking around.
Lily follows her gaze and sees the Neumanns, whom she met first with Maria, standing at the entrance to the lounge. Mr Neumann has taken off his hat and is holding it tightly in front of him as if it is a good-luck talisman. Mrs Neumann catches Lily’s eye and waves.
The Neumanns make their way over to the table, delicately stepping around the sofas and tables and easy chairs where passengers make themselves at home in an attempt to escape the humid heat outside.
‘Oh, my goodness, he looks like an undertaker,’ trills Eliza. ‘Do you suppose he’s got a tape measure in that jacket pocket, and he’s planning to whip it out and measure us all up, just in case we should run into stormy weather?’
Lily says nothing, but the sore, lumpen skin on her cheeks burns.
‘Miss Shepherd?’ Mrs Neumann seems tinier than ever in the grand environs of the lounge with its high ceiling and outsized furniture. ‘We can converse?’
Her accent is thick and harsh, and Lily senses Eliza’s amusement from across the table.
‘Of course.’
She follows them back out on to the deck. They are wearing the same clothes as the last time she saw them, and Lily remembers Maria saying that many of the Jewish passengers have only one set.
‘We worry for Maria,’ says Mr Neumann once they are outside. ‘She has much pain.’
‘And since a few days, she has not taken her salt,’ says his wife.
Lily tells them she knows, and briefly describes her conversation with Maria.
‘You will talk to the doctor?’ asks Mrs Neumann, although, when she says it, it sounds more like a command than a question.
‘Me? But I—’
‘Our English is not so good,’ says Mr Neumann. ‘He will listen more to you. You will tell him about the salt. Ask him what he gives her for the pain.’
How can she refuse? The Neumanns are asking only out of concern for their friend. Besides, Lily is still thinking of Maria’s face when she said, ‘Will you sit with me a while?’ The momentary flicker of hope in her hollowed-out face.
Outside the doctor’s surgery, Lily has to pause to take a few deep breaths. She comes from a family where doctors are venerated, and consulted sparingly, if at all. She is not used to calling on them as if she was just passing and fancied a chat. She is not used to calling on them at all.
Dr Macpherson is sitting at a desk, writing in a ledger. He is a squat middle-aged man with a bald head that is pink as a cooked lobster shell and gleams when Lily opens the door and the sunlight catches it.
‘I am not in the business of discussing my patients, Miss Shepherd,’ he says in his disapproving Scottish way, once Lily has haltingly relayed her message. ‘However, in this instance, I will make an exception, out of concern for the lady’s welfare.
‘The fact is, I do not consider these inexplicable pains to be of a physical nature.’
Lily stares, uncomprehending.
‘But I have been with her when one of the pains came on. She was in agony. She has even stopped taking her salt tablets in case it’s they that are causing it.’
‘I’m not saying Miss Katz does not experience pain, Miss Shepherd. Just that I believe its source is psychological rather than physiological.’
‘But you gave her medicine for her stomach?’
Dr Macpherson shakes his bald, pink head.
‘I gave her medicine for her nerves, Miss Shepherd. From what I understand, it is not the first time on this voyage that Miss Katz has exhibited signs of psychosomatic behaviour.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I believe she reported she had been attacked while sleeping out on deck earlier on in the crossing?’
‘Yes, but –’
‘And the captain was subsequently informed by a nearby passenger who had been awake the whole time that at no point had anyone gone near Miss Katz.’
A dark shape. Footsteps. Already Lily’s mind is converting what she imagined she saw and heard, questioning the order in which it came. Could the shape have been Maria herself? And the footsteps Mrs Collins or one of the other passengers summoned by Maria’s scream? No. But.
‘She wasn’t – isn’t – the kind of person to be affecting a crisis just to get attention.’
‘Not attention, Miss Shepherd. Not necessarily, anyway. I know that Miss Katz has been worried about the safety of her parents. Most of us are able to manage our fears effectively by processing them in our minds but, unfortunately, some people – some women – cannot. In these cases, their concerns manifest themselves in physical ways – a mystery ailment, or an unwitnessed assault upon their person.’
‘You’re saying she’s –’
‘I’m afraid she is an hysteric, Miss Shepherd. That is my diagnosis. However, rest assured, the medicine I’ve given her is quite potent and she should soon be feeling much calmer. And you should encourage her to resume taking the salt tablets. In fact, failing to take them could result in her developing for real the very symptoms she has been complaining about!’
Afterwards, when Lily goes over the conversation in her head, it’s the word ‘hysteric’ – that hateful label first levied by Clara Mills – that lodges there, like a chip of bone in her throat.
When she sees the Neumanns waiting for her out on the deck, Lily slows down, rehearsing what she might possibly say. But when she gets twenty feet away from them she stops altogether. Then she ducks back into a doorway before they can see her.
24
29 August 1939
AUSTRALIA.
What has she been expecting?
Lily doesn’t know. Only that it wasn’t this.
At first it is just a line on the horizon, a sense of land rather than anything concrete. The passengers gathered on the deck strain their eyes, looking for landmarks. ‘Where is it, Mama?’ asks a small girl standing next to Lily. ‘I don’t see it.’
Now a shape distinguishes itself. A lighthouse. And behind that a smudge of something else. The small girl is disappointed. ‘Is that it, Mama? Is that Australia? It’s smaller than home!’
But now a shoreline is materializing and beyond it a town. More a collection of buildings, really. Nothing big or impressive.
‘The nearest city is Perth, and that’s half an hour away,’ says Ian, as if he has to apologize for his homeland’s lack of grandiosity. ‘That’s just Fremantle you can see there.’
Nevertheless, Lily can’t help feeling let down by her first impression of the gateway to Western Australia. Even the wharf, as they get closer, reveals itself to be a modest, sleepy-looking place, nothing like as impressive as Tilbury, from where they’d set off, and with none of the industry and frenzied activity of the other ports they’ve stopped at.
I’m here, she thinks. This continent will be my home for the next two years. But though she forces her mind to process the words, she feels nothing. No sense of excitement or awe or of a new chapter starting.
It’s early afternoon and, ever since she woke up that morning, she’s been aware of a shift in temperature. It’s still hot and sunny, but further out to sea there was a fresher feel to the air, and even here, approaching the dock, it’s clear the extreme stickiness of the last few days is absent. Still, Lily is taking no chances and has borrowed a wide-brimmed straw hat from Helena to protect her sunburned face. And if it also means she feels shielded from the Neumanns and Maria and George Price, well, that wasn’t her intention. No, really, it wasn’t.
