by Derek Beaven
And of course the steward was propelled into action, partly by sycophancy – probably; but Penny would have liked to think, compassion – and partly by the momentary angle of the ship. ‘Directly, your ladyship.’ And, proud it seemed of his white uniform, and the braid in colours-of-the-line looped at his left shoulder, he rescued her theatrically past them all, one arm for the dowager and one for the ship.
The dowager nodded politely to Penny. ‘I went through the Suez Canal for the first time in thirty-seven, and since then I’ve done it eighteen times, this way and that, regular as clockwork. Not counting the war, you see – and the Arabs. Isn’t that so, steward?’
‘Certainly, your ladyship.’
And certainly she was remarkably good at the alternate steep climb and drop which they had settled into: ‘Just take it carefully, and keep your cabin. That’s my advice, if anyone wants it. Keep your cabin, keep your head, and thank God you won’t be stuck in Kensington all winter.’
Yes, the extremity of the movement could begin, Penny supposed, to be something they might at least accept, if not adjust to. If there were really no alternative, and if the ladyship, whoever she was, could do it. Think of England indeed. Indeed she tried.
Most of what was loose and fragile had now broken; most of what could be spilled, had spilled. Most of those diners who were still making up their minds about how to leave and where to go had found regular fixtures to help them – in the reciprocating cling and brace that was necessary. So when no one else mentioned that it sounded more and more as though the vessel were on the point of ripping in two, Penny clenched her teeth. Nevertheless, in that very act her thoughts turned first to the boys, at her mother’s school in Essex, and next to Hugh, already on the other side of the world. If she were to drown she would be of no use to any of them.
And the next thing after the thought of imminent death was the awareness of fear. Close upon that, nausea. And between the first consciousness of sickness and the worst feeling imaginable were about three suffocating minutes amid the smells of pheasant, liver, mayonnaise and chocolate.
D was one of the lower decks. Its floor and walls staggered by; its door heaved open. She managed to find a closet on that level; though, regrettably, she was not the first. Monstrous, her mouth like a burst porthole. Like an act of recall; but so painful, all the confused past springing through, still fully formed. And with that over she felt drained, but just about in command – and in the greatest need of air.
6
A good open-air walk ran along the whole length of both sides of A deck. It was the kind of broad, sideless corridor Penny was familiar with from popular ocean films in which five days of love culminated in New York. It ran along the whole length, that is, except for the steerage class – that old label for poorer travellers. On this level, she noted, the steerage was sealed off from the main part of the vessel, to port and starboard, behind impenetrable steel dividers in the bulkhead.
Coated and belted now, wind-whipped, with hands outstretched, she made her way towards the bow – along the scrubbed planking where in undreamable fair weather deck-chairs might be set. It was to press uphill for several seconds, march deceptively level for a moment, and then loom dangerously giant-strided. Wiser to stop and hang on to a frame or to the rail when the ship’s nose went down. Queenie Parsons’s last words kept running through her head, ‘But this is a liner!’
Truly, Penny had not imagined the white floating city which had so taken her breath against the drabness of Tilbury dock could be subject to anything like this. If they were not exactly storm-tossed – the ship was too grand and provident for that – yet it was obvious their assurance was being very seriously examined. Astride the huge ridges of complex and crazing black, the Armorica was undergoing, yes, something of an inquisition. The groaning and creaking, so audible in the dining-room and now mingled with the debate of sea and wind, were proof enough of that, if proof were wanted.
There, up ahead, the part of the bow she could see had gone in, and a wash of foam came over all the great steel winches and fittings, flushing and draining away as she watched. She would never have thought so high a point as that strong, curved prow could be at risk. Surely this could not go on. Surely. The grown-up in her told the child not to be silly. But she remained unconvinced.
She passed a Lascar with a mop, a small figure, of brown imagined bones inside his maroon jacket. Dealing, presumably, with some mess, some distressed passenger’s sick, he seemed hardly to be holding on to anything. He stared at her with opaque eyes, then looked away. These outdoor folk, diminutive, cropping up like sad, solitary djinns, she had already found them unsettling. Should she speak? Technically they fell outside the ship’s account of itself, they did not exist. Yet everyone knew the terminology: Lascars. How was that? She found herself several yards past him in only two steps. And she worried about the life-jacket instructions. Would she get the ties the right way round? The diagram was confusing.
At the forward reach of A deck she came with surprise on the Sinhalese couple tucked away in a protected nook. She had seen them about, of course. But, like everyone else, had not yet found it possible to speak. They were standing with their backs to the steel, the woman wearing a coat over her blue sari. He, smiling, smaller than his wife, was neat in his Burberry jacket and fawn slacks. Penny stopped about a yard from them. She leaned on the rail and looked out at the same prospect, comforted a little that they seemed in no immediate hurry as regards lifeboats. Indeed, the man was about to raise a pair of binoculars to his eyes. On seeing her he stopped, took the strap off and volunteered them. She shook her head and smiled queasily. Now she had ceased her struggle along the deck, it might be that the nausea was about to return.
‘No, please. Have a look.’ He insisted, holding the glasses out.
She looked. The horizon, looming nonsense for half the time, did her stomach good; though to tell the truth there was little to focus on that was not frenzied water, or ragged grey cloud. She stood, resting her elbows on the rail, in those moments when she had not physically to cling to it. She surveyed the waves, broke off. It was quite dismal. She looked again, held on, and then again. Momentarily she caught sight of something far off in the whelm; which promptly disappeared. Maybe flotsam, the corner of a box, waterlogged, she thought. A tea-chest, possibly, like the ones her own belongings were packed in. A piece of wreckage, or something thrown overboard from a tanker. Nothing worth looking at, really, but even rubbish gave the eye a mark. Like a gravestone. She suspected no life-form could live in all that desolation; they were utterly abandoned.
‘My name is Piyadasa. Is it your first trip?’
‘Yes.’ She managed a weak smile.
‘It is very rough.’
‘Yes.’
‘Please carry on looking.’
Magnified, each wave was colder and more intimate. She found herself noticing the skid, of water over water, the detachment and reattachment of drops and strings, the innumerable facets of unnameable colours – unnameable because they were all the same colour, and yet clearly not. She thought less about the depth.
She handed the glasses back. ‘Thanks very much. Not feeling too good.’
‘You should drink tea.’ The lady smiled.
‘I don’t think I could drink anything, just at the moment.’
‘Perhaps without milk or sugar. Perhaps even gunpowder tea.’
‘Gunpowder tea?’ Penny felt her eyebrows rise.
‘Any kind of tea you like.’
‘Oh. Do you think so?’
‘Ask my husband. Even beef tea.’ Mrs Piyadasa laughed. ‘Why don’t you come along with us. We’re just going inside. They will bring you something. Come with us. My husband knows everything there is to know about tea. He grows it, and then he sells it.’
Her husband acknowledged his expertise with a wry expression.
Penny was on the point of demurring, as if she ought to be seen to deal with her fear and nausea alone.
‘
This way.’
Thus she found herself back inside, kidnapped, as it were, by kindness. Yet the gunpowder tea, brought by a steward to where they sat in the main lounge, helped. As did the polite conversation. She took to the plump, smiling lady. ‘Yes, we live in Colombo. You must visit us there.’ Mrs Piyadasa seemed in no doubt that they would make it safely home. Penny was impressed.
‘She misses her children,’ said the husband.
‘Yes, I do.’ Mrs Piyadasa mimicked a sigh of grief and turned up her eyes. ‘Not seasick, but homesick. I have three boys, one girl.’
‘I miss mine,’ Penny said.
‘You have children?’
‘Two boys.’
Mrs Piyadasa took a small book of photographs from her handbag. They sat for some minutes, comparing ages and characteristics. Then there was a pause.
‘So you have never travelled abroad?’ Mrs Piyadasa adjusted her sari under her large cream cardigan.
‘I went to France with my parents before the war. Several times. We took the boat train; but it was nothing like this.’ Penny smiled.
‘Ah, before the war,’ Mr Piyadasa said. ‘The war changed everything.’
Penny nodded and found herself smiling again. Then she felt disconcerted. It was an obvious remark, the sort heard in all sorts of small talk. It was a conversation filler; and yet it struck her peculiarly now. She was an educated, articulate woman, but it had never quite occurred to her as it did now, the effect of the war. She had come to womanhood through the conflict, and at home the scars had always been patent, everywhere. Even now, more than a decade on – could it be so long? – London still had enough gaps in its blackened fabric, still had bomb-sites, was gritting its teeth, flexing its sooty muscles and struggling on. And out of town there was the accelerating attempt to put all that in the past, rebuild standards, families; she and Hugh and the boys growing up with a new town on their doorstep. And there was the rhetoric of course; of starting again, an end to poverty, the promise of the Commonwealth.
But now she felt the words shake her. If the ship did not sink she might be the guest of oriental strangers in a city she could not begin to imagine. What would their house be like? Would she be expected to take off her shoes? She would make some religious faux pas. But no, it was not that. It was that everything really was different, absolutely and completely different – because of the war. She had thought it was over and done with. She had not realised. No one had realised. She looked around at the few uncomfortable-looking occupants of the main lounge, the chairs heaving to ludicrous angles, the low tables that would now shed whatever was placed on them. No one had realised. And herself: she had never actually spoken before to anyone who was not white.
Mrs Piyadasa was saying something about shopping in Oxford Street. Penny pulled herself back from her reverie. The nausea returned, distinctly flavoured now with intellectual disorientation. She found herself craving air again. She got up and made her excuses, pulling a grim face and holding her midriff by way of explanation. The Piyadasas smiled and nodded as she struggled towards the exit. There was a need to be close to the terrible water, to see it and know its extent – in order to be ready for it, perhaps.
7
The young man came and stood a yard or so along from her. She had wedged herself in a half-plated nook which ended A deck’s forward reach, in order to look over the spray-tormented bow. It was the starboard reflection of the place she had met the Piyadasas; where now in fact rode opposite her, clutching the steel section of rail, a boy. She could not see me, of course, because her view was blocked by the stair housing dropping from above to the lower foredeck. And in any case we had not met, so I should have meant nothing to her. Nor had I learned yet to play with the young girl who cultivated her attention. I was convinced I should never get to know the other children on the ship. My imagination was stirred, too. I was afraid of the cold, the anonymity, of drowning.
Penny regarded the man briefly before nodding and turning her gaze back to the sea. They had spoken once or twice – at coffee – at least she thought so. He was young, younger than herself, still in his twenties, maybe. Tallish, with bones regular enough, a nice smile and ample dark curly hair, now made somewhat nonsensical by the wind. His eyes were kind.
The eyes, yes. Maybe he was the man she had encountered at the purser’s office, when she was spending the first few mornings going here and there about the ship, getting her bearings, discovering all its mahogany-panelled passages, its labyrinthine secrets; before this extraordinary movement had exerted prior claim over everything else. She could not be certain. For, in the days of the voyage so far, faces had only just begun to assemble themselves, names to enter her reckoning. One could easily get appearances confused. And she could certainly not remember his name.
So Penny endured a few more minutes. The seasickness receded a little.
‘I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get away. Are you scared?’
‘Of course.’ She swallowed. ‘Is it obvious?’
‘No. I was just trying to find someone else in the same boat.’ He pulled up the collar of his coat with his free hand and held the lapels closed under his chin. ‘So to speak.’
She laughed in spite of the joke and her stomach. The wind snatched a shower of fine icy spray from the summit of one of the ridges and hurled it into their faces, before the next inexorable heave of the decking could lift them. Her companion gripped the end of the mahogany rail. Penny noticed how tightly she herself had hold of an upright steel stanchion that appeared to support the deck above. It must in fact run down like a rib through the whole ship. Her knuckles were quite locked. The stanchion itself was freezing wet but the flange offered a good purchase, and because of its security she could sometimes, daringly, provoking the storm almost, lean out to learn better what was coming.
‘I never imagined …’ she began. ‘That it would be like this, I mean. And the noise. Listen. All that … grinding and groaning. It’s solid metal. How can it do that? I hate it. At least out here in the wind you can’t notice it so much.’
The great structure started its drop away again from under their feet. For a moment they were weightiest.
‘I wouldn’t pretend to have the answer. At all. Oh God.’ Then: ‘It’s just very, very … I don’t know what. In there,’ he gestured to the cabins, ‘it’s like a ship in one of those films.’ He shouted over the weather. ‘Too swashbuckling for me, I’m afraid! That’s why I’m staying out here as long as I can. The sight of what’s actually doing it to you makes you feel slightly less ill.’ His looks belied the assertion. ‘But I do agree. It is the noise that’s maybe the worst of it. It’s the absolute cream on the custard. Sorry!’
They shared a tight smile: another attempted joke and the tasteless mention of food.
‘Sorry. But if it were just the movement … Well, that’s what every sailor sings about, isn’t it? It’s as British as … I don’t know, Trafalgar Square. And being British we ought to be able to cope. That’s what they keep telling us. And if this were a little old battler – with the salt-caked smokestack, et cetera – you’d expect it. But this is huge, and up to date. The latest thing. And cinema liners don’t lurch, otherwise Fred and Ginger could never have danced a step; kissing would have been right out.’ A plunge. ‘You need a level base for that sort of carry-on. I believe.’ He hurried on. ‘It actually sounds as though the damn thing’s going to break, doesn’t it; and nobody warned you, or sang about that.’
Penny nodded cautiously and turned her head. Another sting of spray. She noted with surprise that in all his chatter he had actually caught her own earlier thoughts – about the sound – and voiced them.
He took out his cigarettes, looked at them, met her eye, grinned ruefully, and then put them away again. ‘Ugh. Funny thing. No comfort there.’ They stood, volunteering nothing further for a while, riding it out, watching the intricate variations with which the sea and sky were confronting them. Then she remembered his opening remark.
‘I’m afraid I didn’t quite understand what you said at first. Something about it being difficult to get away?’ Shouting again as the wind tried to snatch the words from her mouth.
‘Oh yes. Difficult to get away from England. Won’t take you to her heart but won’t let you go. Horrible old spider, in fact. She wants the blood out of a man. Sorry.’ He apologised again. ‘I’ve probably said something unforgivable. Perhaps you’re incredibly patriotic and terribly sad to be leaving. I don’t know. It’s just the way I feel.’
‘I am sad. To be leaving one’s home. For good. Don’t you think?’
‘I’ve no regrets. Honestly. A grasping, petty and superstitious land infested with churches. But then I consider myself a scientist – for whom God can’t strictly be said to exist.’
‘I see. And not a very poetical description, either.’
‘I probably shouldn’t be saying this. Probably socially quite beyond the pale; I can never tell. They pull everything out of shape.’
‘What?’
‘Churches. I mean the map, even. Wherever you go. That’s the one good thing about the view here; not a steeple in sight.’
‘My. You do have a chip.’ She felt herself put about. His words provoked a longing for railway lines, green fields, and, indeed, the needle spire of Chelmsford cathedral which had always been visible from her bedroom window at Galleywood.
‘I’m sorry,’ once more excusing himself, ‘I’ll shut up. Bad taste to call religion into disrepute, I know. Digging myself deeper. I shouldn’t have forced my opinions on you. You’re probably a devout something or other and I’ve offended you for ever. Probably the weather.’
Just after the lowest point of the downward plunge, one could sense the very moment when gravity came back through the soles of the shoes.
