A Dangerous Crossing

by Rachel Rhys

  ‘What an unpleasant little person,’ says Eliza. ‘I don’t know how you can stand to be in the same cabin as her.’

  As if the choice is Lily’s to make.

  Lily thinks about what Ida just said. About it being a less than a week until she will have to be looking for work. Then she looks at Eliza, with her sunglasses and her expensive pale blue dress that she is so carelessly splashing with sea water. There was a moment today when she felt like they were practically friends, she and Eliza. But now she sees there’s a gap between them as big as the Indian Ocean itself.

  25

  30 August 1939

  ‘LILY?’

  The voice is hardly louder than a sigh and at first Lily thinks she might have mistaken the sound of the wind blowing up from the now unsettled sea for the whisper of her name. But then she hears it again.

  ‘Lily.’

  She looks around, puzzled. She is once again at the far end of the deck, to which most passengers can’t be bothered to trek and, up to now, she has assumed herself to be quite alone.

  To her surprise, a heaped pile of blankets in one of the deckchairs begins to stir and Maria’s disorderly hair emerges, followed closely by the rest of her.

  Lily swallows back a gasp at the sight of her friend. Maria has always had a sallow complexion but now her yellowing skin is mottled by a violent purple rash and her eyes are huge and glassy.

  ‘What has happened to you, Maria? Surely you are not still unwell? Are you taking the medicine the doctor gave you?’

  Maria nods, and even that slight movement, it seems, is painful, for she places a hand flat against her bony chest.

  ‘Oh, Lily, what is happening to me? I am taking the tablets and yet I feel worse. It is them, I think, that are giving me this terrible skin on my face.’ Her fingers trace her raised, discoloured cheeks. ‘My mind is all the time jumping ahead of itself, as if I have no control at all, and yet my body feels to be closing down, slowing, until I am like those creatures you have in the garden. Black and disgusting. How do you call them? Yes, slugs, that’s right. My body is like a slug.’

  ‘And the pains?’

  ‘Yes, those are still there, but you know, Lily, now they feel almost like a relief. It sounds strange, yes? But that pain, it tells me I still have a body, I’m not this slug that has no feelings.’

  Now Lily is reminded of Eliza and what she’d said in Fremantle about cutting herself with Max’s razor just to feel something. How queer that both of them should be having such similar thoughts, though with Eliza it’s a pain she has afflicted on herself.

  And with Maria? asks the treacherous voice in her head. Could she be choosing to imagine herself afflicted, as the doctor had suggested? For a moment Lily thinks about telling Maria what she knows, that the tablets she’s been prescribed are for her nerves rather than for whatever she thinks is ailing her. Now it occurs to her that perhaps the tablets themselves are producing some of Maria’s symptoms – the rashes, the racing thoughts. She remembers some medication her dad was given that made his skin so itchy he’d scratched it till it bled, and gave him nightmares that left him crouching, terrified, in the corner of the bed, pointing at creatures that weren’t there.

  And now another thought suggests itself:

  ‘Could your symptoms be a result of your body being short of salt since you stopped taking the salt tablets?’

  Maria shakes her head, wincing as she does so.

  ‘I am taking them again, Lily. It’s not that. But you know the worst thing, even worse than the pain? I’m beginning to fear for my state of mind. All the time now, I’m feeling like I’m being watched, and the nightmares I told you about where I am being chased? Those are getting so bad I no longer sleep.’

  ‘Lily? There you are. I’ve been searching and searching.’

  Audrey looks out of breath, as if she’s been running, her cheeks rosy, hair curling with heat.

  ‘Oh!’ She has only just noticed Maria there, under the blankets. Her pale blue eyes widen in shock.

  ‘Mrs Collins sent me to fetch you, Lily. There’s paperwork we need to fill in ahead of Sydney. Forms and that.’

  Lily turns to Maria and holds up her hands in a helpless What can I do? gesture, though part of her – a big part of her, if she is honest – is glad to have an excuse to leave. Maria is scaring her, with that livid rash across her face and her sunken cheeks that look as if there is a drawstring attached to the inside of them, pulling them inwards.

  Maria’s hand shoots out, her bony fingers around Lily’s wrist like a vice.

  ‘Meet me later,’ she says urgently. ‘Please, Lily. I cannot stand to be so much alone. I used to love solitude but now my own company scares me. Please say you’ll come again.’

  ‘Of course.’

  But Maria is not satisfied. She tightens her grip.

  ‘When, Lily? This afternoon? Here? At five?’

  ‘Yes. I will.’

  ‘You promise, Lily?’

  ‘I promise.’

  But as Lily sits in the lounge while Mrs Collins, the chaperone, hands out various papers that need to be read and signed, and explains to them again about the procedure for procuring jobs when they arrive, she feels a creeping sense of dread. The deterioration in Maria’s health is so extreme. Might not the doctor have been too hasty in insisting the illness is all in her mind?

  At the end of the session, while the other girls are filing out of the lounge, Mrs Collins puts a hand gently on Lily’s arm to stop her getting up.

  ‘Can we have a little chat, Lily?’

  Lily sinks back down into her seat.

  ‘Is everything quite all right with you, my dear? I have tried not to interfere in your onboard friendships. You’re young and unmarried and it’s only natural that you should want to let yourself loose a little bit on a voyage such as this. I imagine it’s the first extended leisure time you’ve had since you left school, and why shouldn’t you enjoy yourself? However, I have been greatly concerned about the amount of time you have spent in the company of the Campbells and of Miss Katz. To be frank, I don’t consider either of those parties to be appropriate friends for a girl in your situation.’

  Lily feels herself blushing, as if she is back at school again, being admonished by the teacher.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve heard the shocking rumours about Mrs Campbell and the husband of that poor girl who died. And Miss Katz, I think, too, has misled you. All that bad business in the middle of the night up on deck. And it turns out to be nothing, just a figment of the young woman’s overactive imagination.’

  ‘But we don’t know that. No one knows for sure.’

  Mrs Collins blinks in surprise.

  ‘There was a witness, my dear.’

  ‘Yes, but how do we know they’re reliable? We don’t even know who it is.’

  ‘That’s not true. Surely you’ve been told.’

  ‘Told what?’

  Mrs Collins blinks again and leans back into a shaft of sunlight that illuminates the soft blonde down on her cheeks to which stubborn flecks of face powder cling like grains of wet sand.

  ‘It was your own friend who saw it. Your cabin mate. Ida.’

  Lily does not know what to make of this. Why has Ida not said anything to her? She cannot understand it. Her mind feels befuddled, as if her skull has been wadded tight with cotton wool, leaving no space for thought. She tries to remember that night up on the deck, tries to visualize who was in the beds nearby, but her woolly brain won’t allow her to picture it or to make the connections about what it all means.

  After she leaves the lounge she heads outside, making her way blindly down the deck in the opposite direction to where she last saw Maria.

  ‘Here she is. The very person.’

  Edward has intercepted her by putting out an arm, so that she walks into it like a barrier at a railway level crossing. He and Helena are standing under the awning beside the swimming pool, which is empty today, owing to the choppier conditions. Edward
is smiling broadly and his green eyes are alight, as if there is something metallic glittering on the surface of them. Helena, meanwhile, looks strained. Her arms are folded tight across her chest as if to stop herself escaping.

  ‘Eliza has just been down. She needs another pair for cards and Helena is being a spoilsport and refusing to go.’

  ‘We talked about it. We agreed.’

  ‘Yes, but this is just sitting down in the lounge surrounded by other people. And I’m so bored of this deck I feel that if I have to spend one more afternoon looking at the same old faces, I’m going to explode.’

  Edward doesn’t sound like himself. He sounds, in fact, like Eliza. Lily registers the similarity with a dull thud of recognition. Despite everything that has happened between her and Edward, it is still Eliza who provides his reference points, Eliza upon whom his unconscious mind fixes.

  ‘Edward. You’ve heard the rumours. Everyone has heard them. You know what happened. A woman is dead because of Eliza Campbell.’

  ‘We don’t know that for sure. Anyway, I thought you never listened to gossip. Didn’t you say that to me?’

  Edward is glaring at his sister, and there is something hard and tight between them that is made from iron and cannot bend. Now he turns to Lily.

  ‘Will you come, Lily? Please. Or would you rather spend the next few hours looking at the same old sea through the same old railings while the same old people walk past, saying the same old things?’

  As soon as he says it, Lily realizes she does want, more than anything, to be away from here. And though she’s in no hurry to see Edward reduced to a nervous schoolboy in Eliza’s presence, those hours spent with her in Fremantle have made Lily feel there is, if not a friendship, then at least an affinity between them. She glances at Edward’s watch, which sits loosely on his narrow wrist, the round, silver face bright against his golden skin.

  Three thirty in the afternoon. Plenty of time to go upstairs and play a few hands of cards and breathe a different kind of air before meeting with Maria, as she has promised. ‘I will come, but only for an hour,’ she says. But as she and Edward head for the staircase, Helena’s disapproval follows her like a shadow.

  As always when she hasn’t seen Max Campbell for a few days, the reality of him comes as a shock. The size of him, the breadth of his shoulders. Those blue eyes like a pick, chip chip chipping away at you until you crack like eggshell. The power of him.

  He is in an ebullient mood, presiding over the cards table as if he is hosting a dinner. Even Eliza seems in thrall, sitting quietly by his side, concentrating on the play, not losing patience when she and Max forfeit three hands in a row to Lily and Edward. At one point Lily sees the corseted woman who’d taken her aside to warn her about the Campbells enter the lounge and stop dead as if she cannot believe what she is seeing, before turning sharply on her heel.

  ‘I can’t wait to get to Adelaide tomorrow,’ Eliza says. ‘A sliver of civilization at last. Well, relatively speaking, anyway.’

  ‘What will you both be doing? Have you decided?’ Edward asks the Campbells.

  Lily wishes he didn’t sound so eager. He gives himself so much away, she thinks. And then she thinks, before she can stop herself, if only I had been enough.

  ‘We’re going to go into the city and we’re going to find the nearest bar and we’re going to order the biggest, most expensive bottle of champagne and we’re going to drink to being off the bloody boat, if only for a day,’ says Max.

  For the first time Lily wonders what the Campbells will do when they arrive, finally, in Sydney. How many bars can they sit in, how much champagne can they drink, before they grasp it’s still just them, the same two people they were before they left England?

  ‘That sounds like fun,’ says Edward, and Max turns his smile on him, though Lily can see that his jaw is set tight.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s your scene, old chap.’

  They play on, and Lily watches the clock on the wall as it passes half past four. ‘I must go,’ she says. But she says it in the way people say things they wish to be persuaded out of.

  ‘Don’t be such a bore,’ says Eliza. ‘There’s still plenty of time.’ In twenty minutes I’ll make my excuses and leave, Lily tells herself. And yet the clock gets to four fifty-five and there she still is. Just five more minutes. After all, it doesn’t take any time at all to get down the stairs and along the deck to where she agreed to meet Maria. Still, she watches as the minute hand moves. Three minutes past. Now five minutes. It won’t matter if she’s a little late. Ten minutes. Fifteen.

  ‘I’m late,’ she says, making a half-hearted effort to gather her things together. ‘I promised Maria.’

  ‘Your friend isn’t a child,’ says Max.

  ‘She’s altogether too needy,’ Eliza adds, forgetting, perhaps, all the occasions where she has declared herself unable to survive another second without Lily’s company. ‘You need to detach yourself from her, Lily, or you will get to Australia and find you cannot be rid of her.’

  ‘No. That’s not true. She is getting off at Melbourne. And besides, I don’t want to be rid of her.’

  But still she remains seated.

  At five thirty Lily finally admits to herself that she is not going. She cannot face seeing Maria again. Not just yet. There is something so monstrous about the change in her, that livid purple rash, the way her wasted fingers clamped around Lily’s wrist.

  When she and Edward go downstairs for dinner – too late for a bath tonight – she casts around for her friend. Already she is regretting not keeping her promise, wanting to explain. But Maria is on the earlier sitting and doesn’t appear.

  Now that the end of the voyage is so close, less than a week away, there’s a strange mood at the dinner table. Clara Mills, having spent the journey lamenting being a lone woman in charge of a child, is now worrying about being reunited with her sweet-shop-owning husband.

  ‘He has been in Australia for so long I worry he might have lost some of his refinement. What if he has friends I cannot get along with? And he has taken a house quite some distance from the city. Peggy and I shall be quite alone.’

  Helena is hardly speaking to either Edward or Lily and spends most of the meal with her back turned to them, engaged in conversation with George Price. Well, as engaged as she can be. George is, if anything, more jumpy even than when Lily was cornered by him out on the deck. His hands don’t stop moving, picking up cutlery, putting it down again, smoothing his hair, plucking at the skin of his arm as if he is testing for quality. His eyes roam around the room without settling, even as Helena tries to solicit his thoughts on his forthcoming venture in New Zealand.

  ‘How long will you be staying in Sydney before leaving for New Zealand?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘A day? A week?’

  ‘A night, I think.’

  And all the time his fingers roaming around from head to knife to arm to face and back again, as if there will be some price demanded for staying still.

  She is relieved when dinner finishes and they file out of the dining room, but her improved spirits soon sink again when she sees a familiar couple standing by the railings, anxiously scanning the passengers as they emerge.

  ‘Miss Shepherd? Over here.’

  As ever, Mr Neumann has his grey felt hat in his hands and is rotating it like the wheel of a ship. The outer edge of the brim is dark with grease where it has been touched so often.

  Lily feels the weight of her guilt compressing her so that she walks like a smaller person. She should have reported back to the Neumanns about what the doctor told her. She should not have ducked back and hidden from them. What has happened to her? She used to be so straight in her dealings with people, was known for it in the café where she worked. ‘Ask Lily, she’ll give you an honest answer,’ her fellow waitresses used to say when one or other of them was locked into an argument about whose turn it was to clean out the coffee pots or wait on the table with the man who always gav
e everyone the heebie-jeebies, even though he never quite said anything that could get him slung out.

  Little bird-like Mrs Neumann steps forward and, suddenly, Lily can’t bear to hear the reproach she is about to deliver.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she blurts out, desperate to forestall her. ‘I know I should have come to find you the other night, but –’

  Mrs Neumann has raised her tiny hand, delicate as a dried leaf.

  ‘Not the doctor. No. Not that. We look for Maria. She was not at dinner.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s in her cabin. When I saw her earlier she wasn’t feeling very well.’

  ‘No. We have been to her cabin.’

  ‘She might have been asleep.’

  ‘No.’ Mr Neumann shakes his head. ‘We asked her friend. Not her friend, really. The woman who lives in the room with her. No persons have seen her.’

  Edward joins in now.

  ‘There are so many places she could be. The laundry. The library. Asleep in a chair somewhere hidden away. I’m sure there’s no need to worry but, to put your minds at rest, we’ll help you look for her.’

  It is decided that the Neumanns will explore the lower deck, where the laundry rooms are, while Edward and Lily scour their own deck.

  ‘It’s touching, isn’t it, Lily, how concerned the Neumanns are for their friend?’ says Edward as they emerge Maria-less from the library.

  Lily nods, but her throat feels too constricted to speak. Fear is closing up her airways, making it difficult to breathe, and there is a weight of judgement crushing her chest.

  When they arrive at the far end of the deck there is no one there, only the pile of blankets where Maria once was. The tightness just below Lily’s ribs turns into a pressing ache.

  Edward has a brainwave.

  ‘You said she was unwell when you saw her this morning? Perhaps she is with the doctor.’

  Lily wants this to be true so she ignores the voice that reminds her how dismissive Dr Macpherson was of Maria’s illness, how unsympathetic. She cannot imagine Maria taking refuge in the doctor’s surgery for all this time. And, indeed, she is proved right when she sees that the doctor’s surgery is all locked up and a passing passenger tells them that the doctor is currently in the first-class dining room, having dinner with the captain.