by Derek Beaven
The wind eased. On the unabated swell they were running eastwards now, level with Gibraltar. The creaking and groaning sounds lessened slightly, and the following motion was different: longer, less aggressive. He had begun to find exhilarating the sudden compression of the ship’s lifts, and the remarkable weight loss next, by which he could cross the assembly area in only four or five strides. As the children did. Indeed, he felt like a boy again, and looked gingerly around to check that no one had seen the excitement on his face, and, once, when the space was momentarily empty one morning, the wheeling of his arms.
A link with Penny had forged. Imperceptibly, out of nothing, amid all these fantastical comings and goings it had taken shape. He knew it. She must know it. They had flashed signals in each other’s eyes. Surely they had. She kept appearing in his thoughts, would not be displaced. He imagined the entwining of her legs. She was a mermaid.
‘We’ll be docking at Gibraltar only to refuel, I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen.’ The Chief Officer made the announcement. ‘And that’ll be tonight. As you’ll all be aware, the conditions have been somewhat exceptional, we don’t mind saying so, even us toughened old salts.’ He laughed. ‘We don’t often find ourselves in forty – or fifty-foot seas on this run. More like Cape Horn, to be honest.’ He grinned again at the few people gathered round the board marking the mileage of the ship’s daily run.
So at least they were admitting it, Robert thought. Once he grasped that they had weathered a storm which the crew also had struggled to cope with, then the large number of breakages, the several days of slips and spills and sliding became indexes of their courage, rather than of their own mere landlubberliness. He recalled his conversation with the steward of the Verandah bar. And felt better about it. In all probability the Armorica would not turn over now, for all the extra demands that had been made on her tanks. They would make it.
The Chief Officer continued. ‘To be perfectly frank I don’t recommend Gib in both the middle of winter and the middle of the night.’ The small group, which included Penny, responded with a polite chuckle, while the deck moved under them as usual. ‘We’ve lost several days, you see, and shall have to make up for lost time. As to disembarking procedure …’
But Robert’s attention became diverted because Penny spoke separately in an undertone to her neighbour. ‘Not so long ago I’d have given almost anything to set foot on dry land, but if it’s just during the small hours, I don’t see the point either. Do you? It would just be nothing at all.’
‘We shan’t be going,’ the neighbour replied, a woman called Mrs Burns who had once, with her husband, shared Robert’s table for dinner. Since the storm, she had been absent. He suspected she had been able to eat nothing at all.
‘It would be like, I don’t know, Eastbourne in the blackout springs to mind,’ Penny said. ‘I think I’ll concentrate on a good night’s sleep. Picking up the pieces almost. I just hope my violin’s safe; hasn’t broken loose, or been crushed by some huge thing that has. I wish there was some way I could look.’
‘Oh? Do you play?’
‘Less than I’d like to, what with my young family. It was possibly going to be a career, but I’ve had to give up all that. Probably wouldn’t have come off. Still …’
Robert made himself turn away. He went off through the double doors to get a Scotch, and resolved to resume his schedule of work, swell or no swell, Joe or no Joe. And anyway, Joe was up now, and going about his business.
In the main lounge there was a large decorative mural showing what had been explained as an Armorican scene. A party of lords and ladies in medieval costume looked at the sea from the rocky coast of Brittany. A sailing cog ploughed the distance. The painted waves, with their tender, painted crests, looked all too easy. It was a naive offering.
Allowing himself to be swept towards the other end, he braced himself against a pillar, and then sat down on the piano stool. He opened the keyboard, rested his fingers idly on the keys, but did not press them down. From a nearby table, three older ladies, heavy with pearls and in severe grey perms almost identically decayed, dared him to play. Duly annoyed, he moved off again.
She was a mermaid, of course, and he would probably make a fool of himself, as he had done some years before. The signs were the same. It was the close, tempting fit of mutual attraction within a cluster of people all getting to know one another. And surely, surely there was some indefinable link between them, in the air. But it went together with the absolute impossibility of their clashing circumstances. The more he discovered about her, the more he was drawn to think of her. The more he learned about her world, the less it offered any firm ground where they could meet.
Yet here they were, in the same bewitched boat. Why should it be that when there were plenty of ordinary, nice, pretty women about the towns and cities of England, he must eschew them? He supposed there must be some cause; but did not wish to discover in detail what grubby quirk it might turn out to be. Probably to do with a nasty-minded God, and better left untouched. He would study. He must just take care not to ruin everything, the whole future. Four weeks or so of the high seas, then Adelaide and up to Woomera, a corner of untillable soil named after the aboriginal word for a spear-thrower, because the military used it to launch guided missiles into the very centre. To see how well they worked; how well the tactical armaments of the deterrent might deter. There he would attend the tracking station, looking up at the stars with radio equipment, tracking … who knew what exactly? And on this basis he would build a new life for himself, a better life than the grubby, rainy, pompous, clapped-out little island of his birth could offer.
Scotch in hand, he stood outdoors from the bar on the promenade deck with his back to its cold steel wall, looking out as he had grown so accustomed to. The interminable ridges stretched off into the north, grown oily, now, under a darkening afternoon sky. Penny Kendrick swam in them, holding her beautiful violin in front of her breasts and slinking her hips to the deep like a wild sonata. Sharks swam with her, nuzzling her side, rasping her lovely belly with their sandpaper skin. ‘Damn!’ he said aloud. ‘Damn!’
15
The Med had an altogether different feel to the Atlantic; it flattened as it warmed. One day, morning was open like a dish, a glazed Greek wine bowl, and as shallow. Though this was midwinter, Penny had the strong sense that not so very far away – maybe just out of view on either side – coastal people were sitting out, drinking coffee, eating olives.
Past Crete the light hardened and clarified. The sun became an active agent. It was as if the cord in a slatted blind above them had been pulled. She found herself unprepared, having cast her predictions of the voyage according to the south coast of England – not her own childhood, but seaside holidays in Devon with Hugh after the war, and with the boys, when they came along. She had expected blue: the air was white, the sea very dark, and reflective as broken glass.
Clutching her straw bag, in which she had placed, on top of a thin layer of odds and ends already there, her compact, her great aunt’s pince-nez, a French edition of de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, her journal, her cigarettes, and her pen, she made her way to the forward saloon, the observation lounge.
High nautical windows set tightly together in a continuous strip wrapped right round from port to starboard. Sitting close to them, where the chairs were laid out together, Penny could look down over the nursery and the enclosed play-deck area for little ones, on to the whole of the bright foredeck beneath her.
Once the storm had passed its height two or three days before, and she had learned that they might not all die but could endure sitting down to consider the next hour as well as the next wave, she had found the prospect far brighter here. More recently she had come to read, or write, or simply to watch the nose dipping and rising, gently enough now, as it stitched through sky to horizon, and back, and back again. It was quite hypnotic. Pure light poured in from the sky, and whelmed up from the water surfaces. It was like being ins
ide the faceted eye of some fabulous ocean-going insect, homing to Arabia.
There was an Australian couple who had decided to take her under their wing: Clodagh and Russell Coote. ‘Penny. How are you this morning?’ Standing at the bar, drinks in hand, they were looking for where they should place themselves. ‘Let me get you something,’ Russell asked.
‘Coffee would be lovely,’ said Penny. ‘Russell, thank you. Are you sure it’s not my turn?’
‘Nonsense.’ Russell nodded to the barman. The Cootes were both tall and fine-featured. Clodagh tended to fragility. She wore a belted dress, white, with a print of large flowers – the sort of casual success which cheap fashions tried to imitate, achieving only cheapness. Penny was slightly in awe of them both, and wished to resist the feeling, but was unable to find any means of doing so. She was intrigued by them. The power of other people: her reading of de Beauvoir had amazed her, stirring up forbidden political emotions. She had not yet quite perceived herself as a dutiful daughter. With the assured couples around her, she thought constantly of everything she was leaving behind.
There had been a ballroom evening the previous night. Russell Coote had offered to dance with her. It was the first time the sea had settled down enough for social functions even to be thought of. Russell’s immediate gesture, and the execution, were displays of an old-world gallantry she had never come across. He danced out of duty; his wife expected of him that he should ask a woman travelling alone to partner him and to join them at their table. He expected it of himself.
The two wives had shared him all evening. It was utterly chaste, the sort of manners one always thought of as English but, to be strictly honest, never found in England. At any rate not these days, she could hear her mother saying. Not since the war. Only in older men, Penny, for all one tries.
Her mother always romanticised the past. Here were manners from the new world. One would have said simply ‘public school’, except that was virtually synonymous with first class anyway, and not everyone had offered to dance with her. Besides, that phrase in a man meant all sorts of English things, like mud and dogs and father and teas and tears, and the smell of certain rooms and days, special words rooting back into a coterie that was home. There could be nothing like that anywhere else. Russell certainly lacked any such connection. He was perhaps in his late thirties. His family owned a grain-exporting concern in Victoria, he had said; they lived in the suburbs of Melbourne.
‘Let’s go and sit down.’ Clodagh steered Penny towards the view. ‘Russell can bring your coffee over.’
The accent was detectable, the intonation somewhat languid and cultured. Never having met any Australians, never having heard Australian speech – beyond a few newsreel fragments and one or two well-known radio voices – Penny still found herself perplexed by these faintly altered vowels. Penny almost ‘Pinny’, though not quite.
Her mother, owning the little prep school, had always laid great stress on the maintenance of vowels. She was a righteous, bitter woman. Nevertheless, Penny found it hard to believe that her future life would be among these people. She realised that this subject of accent, though it should have been appropriately trivial, was quite out of the question for polite small talk. She wanted to ask Clodagh Coote how she could make those sounds; but it would have been as unthinkable as commenting upon her name.
Yes, it seemed a very trivial matter – she knew it was – but it preoccupied her, and distanced her both from her own folk and from the Cootes. As if they belonged, Russell and Clodagh, in an unexpected and partly botanical oil painting.
She placed her bag and other materials beside the lounger-chair, and hoisted herself in via the sloping footstool.
‘Well, we shan’t see any more of that, thank goodness.’ Clodagh waved dismissively at the sea as if it still contained the imprint of forty-foot waves. ‘Penny, I can’t tell you how bad I am at motion. I was completely wretched, wasn’t I, Russell?’
‘Oh, absolutely wretched, Penny.’ Russell placed her coffee on the small, fixed table in front of them and slid into a chair himself. ‘Clodagh wasn’t cut out to be a sailor, I’m afraid. She’ll be very glad to get it all over. She’s longing to find herself back at home and on dry land.’
And churches, Penny thought. Until the young man had mentioned them, she had been unable to put her finger on what precisely it was she would miss. Home, England, was churches; quiet, grey guardians of the past, set like kindly and unalterable waymarks in a network of villages and towns. Why, you could virtually navigate in some parts of England by the spires and church towers. It was almost magical.
A girl of about ten came into the lounge and stood beside Clodagh’s chair. She was neat and perhaps a touch overdressed for the warm morning, in a check woollen dress with a collar. Her hair was dark, unlike Clodagh’s, and secured in two careful plaits.
‘Mummy, I told Mitchell he had to take me with him, but he just went off with the others.’
Clodagh put her glass down and turned to her daughter. ‘Which other children, dear?’
‘It’s those two boys from the deck beneath ours and another one. They’re all going to play ping-pong and they said they didn’t need me.’
‘I’m sure there’s something else you could do?’ She adjusted the girl’s collar.
Russell said, ‘Go and tell him, Finlay, that he’s got to let you play and that’s all there is to it. Go along, now.’
‘But they don’t want me around. They say I don’t know how to hit the ball.’
‘Tell Mitchell he’s supposed to be looking after you. He knows that.’
Finlay left uncertainly. Clodagh leaned back in her chair with a faint gesture of exhaustion. ‘It’s really wonderful for children, a voyage. There’s so much for them to do, and see. It’s very educational.’
Penny, still mildly disoriented by the names she had just heard, replied, ‘Oh, yes,’ and thought of Peter and Christopher.
An older man, another Australian – some sort of businessman, she believed – sat down beside Russell and drew his attention. She found herself watching, for a moment, the slight tip and fall of her coffee in the cup on the table.
Clodagh said, ‘They are a constant anxiety. One just doesn’t realise how much, until they come along. I quite envy someone in your position. But then of course they do have their compensations, I suppose.’
‘In my position?’ Penny said. Then she realised. ‘But I do have children. Two boys.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Penny. I had no idea. You didn’t seem … Oh, that’s lovely. Are they already in Adelaide … with your husband, then?’
‘No. They’re in England. Peter’s the older one, he’s about Finlay’s age; and Christopher is six. They’re with my mother.’ Penny felt exposed, though she had no reason to be. ‘Hugh, my husband, wanted me to join him out there as soon as I could, after it was settled that the move was for good. At least for the foreseeable … The boys can come out later, when the school term’s finished, probably. When everything’s settled and there’s a home for them to go to. They’ll fly out. They’ll like that. I’m with the furniture, you see.’ She smiled. ‘That’s why I’m going by sea. Apart from the experience itself, of course. Hugh thought I’d enjoy it. It would relax me … And the firm were paying. So why not, we thought?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Clodagh. There was a pause. ‘Why not, indeed, Penny. So pleasant last night, wasn’t it? We were so pleased to have your company. Russell’s quite a good dancer, isn’t he; though I shouldn’t say so.’
‘Certainly. Yes, he is.’
‘I do like to dance.’ Clodagh sipped her drink and gazed out through the panoramic glass at the drench of Mediterranean light. ‘But I find it tires me.’
Seasickness, homesickness – are they not just labels for what no two people experience in quite the same way, as the stomach rises to the heart? What to do about tears? Looking firmly ahead at the view through the window, she felt in her bag beside the chair for a handkerchief, then prete
nded to be dabbing her brow and cheeks. And then she swallowed nearly everything back down again behind her coffee cup. Why had she been so uncharacteristically weepy the last two days? It seemed more than the situation called for. And, of course, she was relieved, actually, to be getting away from her mother at last.
‘Excuse me one moment.’ She pretended she needed to check their position.
In this saloon, in a special glass-topped desk, set in the exact centre of the windows’ curve, a new white chart was clipped each morning. Penny allowed her eye to roam over it. Yes, she would not cry now. Coloured pins recorded their progress. She could recognise, in large type, Greece, and the thin, eaten slab of Crete. Jerusalem surprised her. She had never taken much notice of geography. The Holy Land, for example, had not been represented to her at school as a country in relation to others, but as a place in itself, a sort of first draft for the Home Counties.
She leaned forward to get a better view. She was surprised to see their route pointed at a corner of it. But there next to it of course was the Suez Canal, and that would imply Egypt. And of course in the Bible they were always swerving down into Egypt, for one reason or another – famine, the sword, tax, or tax avoidance, that sort of thing. The thought was in bad taste, she knew; but it had come to mind. Like the moment at which Robert Kettle had said ‘lavatory’, and people had changed the subject.
Repressing a smile: ‘I’m so ignorant about where countries are.’ Then another thought struck her. ‘I suppose you really only find out by going there, don’t you?’ She said it out loud, now quite composed as she resumed her seat.
‘I suppose you do,’ said Clodagh. ‘The Canal is vile. Take my word for it. Russell and I shan’t be going ashore at Port Said.’ She looked across at her husband, and then turned back. ‘I wonder have you seen that extraordinary woman? My dear, so frail she can hardly walk. I mean the woman who appeared in the dining-room the other evening. I’ve seen her on one or two other occasions as well. I mean the woman who’s excessively thin.’
