by Rachel Rhys
‘Why so serious?’ she asks them, noticing that even the usually amiable Ian looks hard-faced and grim.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ Edward is looking pale and nervous, and suddenly so agonizingly young Lily has to look away. ‘Someone came aboard with a newspaper earlier. Germany has invaded Poland.’
At first Lily is relieved the news isn’t about someone she knows. But then she looks around at the other passengers on the deck, the expressions on people’s faces, and a hard nugget of dread forms in the pit of her stomach.
‘You know, don’t you, that Chamberlain promised we would go to war if Hitler went into Poland?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean to say that’s what’s going to happen. He could step back, like he did last year.’
‘He could,’ Helena agrees.
‘But it’s not likely,’ says Edward.
Now Lily is thinking about Frank and how, when they were children, they used to play with his toy soldiers and he would always get to be Britain because they were his soldiers, and she would have to be whoever the enemy was that day, sometimes Germany, other times France or Spain or even America. She remembers his excited cries of ‘Attack!’ and the theatrical, long-drawn-out, heroic deaths of his little metal soldiers. Is he now to be a soldier for real? She cannot – will not – believe it.
The news casts a shadow over the group as they go ashore and wait for the train to take them into the city. The friction between Helena and Edward seems only to have grown since the day before and Lily finds herself in the uncomfortable position of mediating, alongside Ian, whose reluctance is obvious in the way he holds himself so tall and stiff and constantly clears his throat as if he is revving up a car engine.
The train is full of passengers from their own ship or the others in the port, and while many of them seem equally solemn and preoccupied, some are resolutely jolly.
‘Aussies,’ remarks Ian, eyeing a loud group of revellers in their carriage. ‘The thing you have to understand is that, though, obviously the ties to Britain are strong, and if Britain goes to war we go too, Europe itself seems like a very long way away.’
‘Well, I feel like turning around and going straight back home,’ says Edward. ‘How does it look for us to be leaving the country at a time like this?’
‘Would you enlist?’ Lily asks.
‘Of course.’
Edward’s comment provokes a noise from Helena that is like an explosion of impatience.
‘For God’s sake, Edward. Don’t be so ridiculous. They wouldn’t take you.’
Edward tenses as if struck. Watching his expression change from pride to hurt to anger, Lily feels stricken on his behalf.
The remainder of the journey passes almost in silence. Lily leans her forehead on the window and looks at the bungalows of Melbourne’s suburbs, all set well apart and of varying shapes and sizes, so different to the terraces of London. As they come into the city itself, the buildings change, with high-rises and office blocks dominating the skyline. Alighting from the train, they find themselves in a busy, thriving city much the same as any city back home, except there are trams going up and down the roads rather than buses.
The main street is full of large stores and there’s a cinema showing Goodbye, Mr Chips, which Lily herself saw in London what seems like a hundred years ago. Similarly, when they pass a record shop, the song being blasted from the open doorway turns out once again to be ‘The Lambeth Walk’, followed by Kay Kyser’s ‘Three Little Fishies’, which has long since worn out its welcome back home.
Lily groans. ‘I feel like I’ve crossed half the world only to go back in time.’
Their dark mood dogs them as they make their way along the main street and Lily finds herself lagging behind, gazing into shop windows just to put some distance between her and the others. The clothing shops are all displaying summer clothes – light cotton dresses in pretty colours, and beach wear. Lily finds it so strange to think that summer will soon be starting when her body is gearing itself up for winter.
‘Gotcha!’
Lily jolts forward with a start, narrowly avoiding smashing her head on the shopfront, and Eliza claps her hands.
‘You should see your face, Lily!’
Eliza is wearing the scarlet dress she had on when Lily first saw her on Tilbury Docks and her dark glasses, which match those of her companion.
‘This is Alan Morgan, Lily. He’s a film star so you must be very, very nice to him so he can make you one as well. Wouldn’t she look divine on screen, Alan? Have you seen those eyes?’
Alan Morgan raises his glasses to better appraise Lily’s camera-worthiness. His own eyes are large and chocolate brown, with thick lashes, jet black to match his hair, and his black moustache is thin as a papercut. Lily is acutely aware of her messy hair and the clothes she pulled on just because they were the first things she could find as she made her early morning getaway.
‘Very English,’ he says eventually.
‘Lily!’ Max is looking at her as if it has been years since he last saw her. He snatches up her hand and kisses it, his lips pressed hard against her skin. He is standing next to a woman who must be the actor’s wife. Not ‘woman’, really, Lily reassesses as they are introduced. Girl.
Cleo Morgan is a waif of a thing with a handshake so limp it feels like Lily is clutching at thin air.
‘I’m an actress myself, actually,’ she says in a small, breathy voice. Then when Lily betrays no recognition, she continues, ‘My stage name might be more familiar. Cleopatra Bannister?’
Lily is saved by an interjection from Alan Morgan.
‘Don’t be an ass, Cleo. You haven’t been in anything for three years and even then you were hardly the lead. I don’t really think your fame is likely to have spread to England, do you?’
They pass a coffee shop, where the customers are sitting on high stools along a bar that looks out across the street, and chefs with tall white hats are frying doughnuts with holes in them. Despite herself, Lily bursts out: ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to try one of those.’
And so they must all go in, although Cleo declares that she couldn’t possibly eat a whole one of those and stares with horror at the one on Lily’s plate, as if it is a bomb that might go off at any moment.
‘She is a sweet little thing, but so terribly vacuous it’s like making conversation with a very pretty piece of wood,’ whispers Max in her ear. He is standing behind her, as there are not enough stools for everyone. His breath is hot and wet and smells of whisky. ‘I’ve had to put up with her for two whole days because my darling wife thought it would be fun to hang around with her husband. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you, Lily.’
His lips brush the tip of her ear. The faint scratch of his moustache.
After they leave the coffee shop Max is never far from Lily’s side, pointing out things as they walk along the main street – advertising hoardings, an unfamiliar style of dress. Everywhere they go people stare at Alan Morgan and he pretends not to see them. One elderly woman stops and asks for his autograph, which he provides with spectacularly bad grace. ‘Why must it always be the old crones that ask?’ he complains.
The Morgans have been touring Europe. They stopped off in Adelaide from an earlier ship to visit Cleo’s sister and are now on their way home to Sydney. Their travels have soured Alan’s appreciation of his home country, which he now finds to be too unsophisticated, too unrefined. ‘When we were in Paris,’ he says, followed by an unfavourable comparison. ‘When we were in Milan …’ He finds the Australian accent impossibly vulgar and claims all Aussie women have ‘peasant hands’.
‘See how insufferable he is?’ whispers Max. ‘And now poor Eliza, having assiduously cultivated the both of them, finds herself stuck with him!’
Certainly, Eliza, walking ahead with Alan, seems very keen to involve the others at every opportunity.
‘What are you saying, Max? Why are you two whispering?’
‘Nothing that would interest you,
darling.’
Eliza glares at him, and then at Lily, narrowing her eyes as if recalibrating something in her head. In response Max moves even closer to Lily, so his thigh brushes her hip.
It isn’t only Eliza who seems put out by Max’s attention to her. Edward, too, keeps glancing over, and with each glance his frown deepens. The pavements allow them to walk comfortably only in twos and Edward has been paired with the vacuous Cleo. Though Lily experienced a pang of jealousy when she first saw them together, noting how even Edward, normally the slightest of the men, appeared to tower over the fragile, ethereal girl, she soon realized they were struggling to make conversation.
At lunch in a restaurant where the waitress stares so hard at Alan she misses the narrow table and has to bring them fresh cutlery, Max sits opposite Lily so that their knees are touching, and she is too tired, too bone-weary, to resist. Alan Morgan is telling them about a meal they were served in Capri, where the lobsters were brought alive and snapping to the table for approval before cooking. He drops the name of an Italian film director Lily has never heard of.
‘They closed the whole restaurant for us. I thought it was because of Righelli, who is like royalty there, but he said, “No, Alan, it’s all for you.”’
Under the table Max’s knee presses harder against her own.
‘Poor Lily has had a hard time. She made friends with a Jewish woman from Germany who turned out to be rather highly strung and jumped off the side of the boat. All rather shocking, so we need to cheer her up.’
Eliza says all this in a conversational, almost sing-song tone, as if she is relating a rather entertaining anecdote, so it takes a second or two for Lily’s outrage to catch up with her. When it does it’s like a white heat flaring in her chest.
‘Maria wasn’t from Germany, she was Austrian. And she wasn’t like that. She didn’t …’
For a moment Lily considers telling them about George Price, and what Ida told her, but something holds her back. Self-preservation, perhaps.
‘They will all be coming here now there’s to be a war,’ says Alan Morgan. ‘All the people Europe doesn’t want. As if this country wasn’t backward enough! I suppose you’ve had a lucky escape.’ He is looking at Edward, the end of his papercut moustache pointing towards him like a blade. ‘Young, single chap like you would be one of the first to be called up to serve your country if you weren’t lying low here.’
‘My brother has not been well,’ says Helena hotly. ‘We’ve come to Australia only for his health. When he is quite recovered, of course we’ll return.’
Edward says nothing but Lily sees his fingers tighten around his knife, and in his cheek a muscle she has never noticed before throbs like a frog’s throat.
Getting off the train at the port ready to get back on to the ship, Lily sees George Price walking on ahead, alone, as he always is. She doesn’t bother to slow down. He will not wish to see her any more than she him. So she is surprised when George, having noticed them coming up behind him, stops for them to catch up. He is holding what looks to be a British newspaper. Lily shivers as she reads the headline: GERMANY INVADES AND BOMBS POLAND. BRITAIN MOBILIZES. Frank, she thinks. My baby brother.
‘Have you seen?’ George is tapping the paper. His eyes glitter, as if lit up by a hundred flickering tea lights. ‘We are going to war. There can be no question. Now everything is different.’
He seems to be addressing his remarks exclusively to Lily, does not even seem to be aware of the others – the Campbells, the Fletchers, pompous, preposterous Alan Morgan and his flyaway wife.
‘We are surrounded by enemies on board. Italians, Germans. I’ve been telling you all that, but no one would listen. Well, now we’re at war. Everything has changed.’
‘You’re not at war, though, are you, George?’
Lily cannot help herself.
‘Your father got you well away, didn’t he, so you wouldn’t have to get your hands dirty?’
‘There’s more than one way to fight a war, Miss Shepherd.’
George is moving, moving, moving, hands, fingers, feet, weight shifting, even the corner of his eye twitching up and down as if in a spasm.
‘It’s just as well we only have two full days left,’ says Eliza gaily. ‘Otherwise, how should we be able to sleep, knowing we’re surrounded by the enemy?’
George does not seem to notice her sarcastic tone.
‘I hope the captain will throw them all off now.’
‘He can’t do that when we haven’t declared war,’ says Helena, exasperated. ‘It might all still be averted. We’ve come close before.’
George is shaking his head. His hair looks greasy and uncombed.
‘It’s war. And we have to be on our guard. Now do you see I was right?’ He is looking directly at Lily again. Those bulging eyes and fleshy lips. ‘Whatever happened to that Austrian woman on board, it means nothing now, not when so many of our own people are going to die. What’s one less of them?’
His words are greeted by a general outcry. One of the men exclaims, ‘Shame!’ in a very loud voice. Lily feels her arm being firmly taken hold of by someone who propels her past George and across the quayside and up the gangplank to the ship. She senses rather than sees the others falling behind them, conscious only of her blood racing in her veins, her breath coming in short gasps.
Once on the deserted deck, she is steered to the opposite side of the ship, facing out to a sea dotted with other smaller boats and fishing craft.
‘Breathe,’ orders Max Campbell. And she obeys, taking in great gulps of salty air.
And when he puts his arms around her she lets him because Edward is nowhere to be seen and all her fight is gone, and Max, in all his undeniable, physical, pulsing, overpowering, blood-pumping self, seems at that moment to be the only thing that makes sense in the entire world.
29
3 September 1939
‘THE THING IS, I know I haven’t treated you fairly.’
Edward is pacing up and down in the library, as he has been since he asked if they could go somewhere to talk privately. There is an air of suppression about him to match his curly hair dampened down into coils, always on the verge of springing loose.
‘I have been inconsistent and so wrapped up in myself I haven’t considered your feelings, and I wish I could take it all back and start again. This whole wretched trip. I’d do everything differently. Everything.’
Sitting in the armchair where, just days ago, she’d surprised George Price, Lily struggles to follow what Edward is saying, but his thoughts seem to be jumping around without a perceivable order. I don’t love him, she thinks suddenly. And the realization is like a bereavement.
In the stark morning light Edward seems pale and suddenly too fragile for Australia’s wide, unforgiving skies.
‘What is it you’re not telling me?’ she asks him now. ‘I know there’s something. I can see it in the way you and Helena look at each other, in the things she says.’
Finally, Edward looks at her, and she feels a part of her crumble into powder that dissolves to liquid and seeps, warm, through her veins at the naked appeal in his eyes.
‘I wish I could tell you, Lily. I want to tell you. Sometimes the weight of what I’m not saying feels like it’s going to crush me so there’s nothing left of me. But I can’t. I promised.’
‘Promised who?’
‘My father. What you have to understand, Lily, is that he’s a very difficult man. Helena and I have always been frightened of him. Not physically, although he can be violent when he’s roused. But he is very domineering. Very quick to anger, with set rules about what is and isn’t allowed. He is not the kind of man you go against.’
‘But you did? Go against him, I mean.’
Edward nods.
‘And lived to rue the day!’
He is trying for light-heartedness. Failing.
‘But please know, Lily, that my despicable behaviour has nothing to do with you. You’re splendid. You’re brave a
nd strong and fair and lovely and you deserve only good things. Which is why I’m urging you to keep away from Max Campbell.’
Ah, so this is it. When they got back from Melbourne yesterday afternoon, and she and Max Campbell had snatched those few moments apart from the others on the far side of the ship, their absence had clearly been noted. Afterwards Edward had retreated into a tense silence while Eliza contented herself with a series of barbed remarks.
Let them, Lily had thought. She was too tired. Tired to the very marrow of her. Max offered her ballast and more than that, he was straightforward in his needs, his wants. She understood what he desired from her and there was no guessing, no looking for hidden meanings. Since Maria’s disappearance everything Lily thought she knew has been knocked off course – George Price openly glad Maria is gone, good people like Mrs Collins advising her to do nothing, say nothing. Edward himself, with his advances and retreats, his ardour and his silences. For a few minutes yesterday afternoon on the deck, with Max Campbell’s broad arms around her, leaning her face against his jacket, she’d felt unburdened. Light. As if she could breathe again.
It hadn’t been long. Lily had pulled away, mindful suddenly of where they were. Who they were.
‘I don’t really think it’s any of your business whose company I keep,’ she says now, and is rewarded with a momentary stab of satisfaction when she sees Edward colour, his skin flushing deep red under his light tan.
‘You’re right, Lily. I deserve that. But believe me when I say I’m only thinking about you. The Campbells aren’t kind people, Lily. There’s something missing in them.’
‘Oh, I see. So I’m to keep away from Max because they’re not nice people, but it’s perfectly all right for you to moon around after Eliza, is it?’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Edward. Be honest for once. You’re a different person when you’re around her. You can hardly speak. You’re a nervous wreck. Just admit it.’
‘No, Lily. It’s not true.’
But she is already moving towards the door. She does not want to hear any more of his dissembling.
