“No, no,” he protested. “I would not go against you in that way, I swear it.” He was almost laughing, perhaps readying himself to catch her fists if need be.
But her fine fire had burnt down. She turned away, sick at heart, unable to argue with his fixed idea. “You should not have encouraged Kay.”
“I did no encouraging. I made her safer in what she was determined to do. You’d sooner have had her ship as a stewardess?”
“No!”
“Indeed. There was little enough I could do for them, in any case.”
“Do you even know what ship they are on?”
“The Constellation, bound for Wellington. Cable them on board, if you like to throw your coin away, or a letter will reach port before them. Write to Pitcairn and it might catch them earlier, if you like.”
That was an absurdity. Half the time ships could not approach Pitcairn and had to hand on the mailbag, untouched, to the next ship.
But Thea went off anyway, to go upstairs and write to Kay in this first burst of urgent disapproval. She would wait a day before posting the letter, but she could start a blistering note tonight with all her rage intact.
At the newel post she turned back to tell Francis another thing; turning, she saw back into the drawing room, where Roddy had crept out of the window seat and slid his hand into his father’s.
“It was a good thing that you helped Kay,” she heard Roddy say in a low voice. “I wished I could go along, but she said I was too young still, I must finish school.”
“It’s a tough life, old man,” Francis said, cupping the dear head with his other hand.
Thea turned again and went upstairs.
5
At Sea
May 21, a beautiful shining day. It had taken a week to go from New York to Panama. There was a sameness to the days on a steamer that Kay could not remember under sail, when every day was changeable, dependent on the wind.
In the ladies’ bath she found a great horned beetle living under the slats by the tub, but refrained from mentioning it to the American girls, who would have squawked. Perhaps it was only lively in the very early morning, when she had her own bath. It stayed for some days, clicking and rushing, and then was gone. She hoped it had not gone down the drain and into the sea, poor thing.
She was lonely, although she mostly preferred to be alone. She worried about Aren. He usually managed to sneak away for half an hour in a day; once, he fell asleep on his little bit of matting on the floor of her cabin, and she stayed perfectly still for an hour to let him rest. He was working hard in the belly of the ship, maybe harder than he had worked for a while, but he showed her the muscle in his arm proudly, and he did not seem at all unhappy to be down among the workingmen.
So Kay stayed above in the strange limbo of passenger life. Sometimes she talked to the American girls and sometimes she kept aloof.
The Canal made an excitement in the sameness, and she stood at the railing with Julia while they waited and waited to go through. For a while they were held up in the bay that served as the waiting room for the Canal, twisting in and out between the boats. Then the Constellation sidled up to load again at the coaling docks outside the town of Colón, and the passengers were allowed off for a brief shopping trip. Kay was persuaded to go ashore with Elsie and Julia on a quest for sweet exotic treats. After a donkey-cart ride through sweltering, dusty streets, they carried slabs of chocolate and long packages of cakes back to the girls’ cabin, which they had made homelike by littering it with scarves and gaily coloured lingerie. Sitting on the rug as Elsie and Julia chattered, Kay felt like a donkey among show ponies. Elsie read them the draft of her article. She was a flamboyant writer, partial to phrases like the rose-light of a tropical morning.
With a slight headache from the chocolate, Kay found a postcard and posted it to Marion before they left the dock at Colón, saying she missed her, which would probably seem flamboyant to Marion. The postcard had a startling painting of a swaying Spanish lady, to give Murray Judge and the Krito-sophians something to discuss at the next meeting.
She should have written properly to Mr. Brimner, but that was a longer proposition. She drew out and reread his last letter, so as to have an answer ready to post from Wellington.
The movement of the sea today recalls an old note I found in Prior’s notebook on waves, while he was recuperating at Eastbourne, one wintry English summer: “The laps of running foam striking the sea-wall double on themselves and return in nearly the same order and shape in which they came. This is mechanical reflection and is the same as optical: indeed all nature is mechanical, but then it is not seen that mechanics contain that which is beyond mechanics.”
I see that daily here—how the waves double on themselves and return in nearly the same order and shape in which they came. Beyond mechanics.
This doubling recalls Prior to my mind, of course, but it also recalls you and Aren (and your sister and Francis) to my mind—how we double on ourselves and return, return, and how the waves are usefully able to be bent into many such metaphorical shapes to convey the wishes and desires of humans for the company of each other.
The first time she read that, last month, she did not know they would be returning.
But you must know I am not lonely here on Ha‘ano, nor in the least alone! My doorstep is stomped at every hour with some visitor or other, and I am glad to be of service and equally glad to be left alone as the evening shutters quickly down.
Here is Sione now, pounding on my door to say the cricket game is on, and I must go and bowl. Our main expense with the school is cricket bats; please thank your sister and Francis for their kind Christmas gift and tell them every penny went toward replacing broken bats.
Late that night, Aren tapped at her cabin door and slipped inside, but he would not even sit, saying he would soon be missed down below. She gave him the chocolate she had got him on the excursion, and he thanked her but said he would keep it in her sink cupboard.
“It gets so infernally hot down there, it would melt in a moment,” he said.
She searched his face again for signs of strain or misery, and he laughed at her and doused his head under her cold tap and dirtied her last clean towel. He told her not to eat his chocolate under pain of death, and went away again.
Thinking of Marion Hilton, perhaps, made Kay dream of Corcovado. She hardly ever dreamed of land. In dusk or dawnlight she climbed and climbed, following Marion’s white lawn dress, her brown legs and half boots up through a green sea of leaves and up again, up to the highest promontory, Aren unseen behind her following too, climbing too fast for his poor lungs.
All the next day, the ship swayed and hesitated through the Canal, and Kay stood as long as she could at the rail to watch this narrow wonder of engineering, of man’s strange imagination and determination, that had cut a continent in two and saved who knew how many boys from drowning at Cape Horn. At last, at evening, they were out, past the peaks of Darien and sailing free, into the midst of a blinding, stinging sunset shower, out into the blue Pacific—on the other side of the world.
Besides the girls and Mrs. Johns, there were a sprinkling of other passengers. A man called Johnny Ace, owner of a troupe of famous performing poodles, was taking his wife and brother home to Australia because he had not heard a kookaburra laugh for seven years. Mrs. Ace, a short woman with a beaming smile, was almost entirely silent; the younger Mr. Ace, they discovered, was not sullen but only cripplingly shy. Johnny Ace made the dogs perform on the hatches one day for Elsie and Julia to see; but most of the tricks required balancing, and that day the ship leaned to every wave, so it wasn’t a great success. The dogs were mostly kept penned, because they were too valuable to risk on deck. They were not very friendly, and seemed to regard themselves as professionals who had no need to slum by fawning like regular pets. They made Kay sad anyhow, missing her Pilot.
There was a dark-haired, saturnine fellow called Cliffe who wrote scenarios for the movies. When he wasn’t whistle-
snoring in a deck chair, he was forever trying to remember the name of a poem that sounded like a French patisserie. Elsie teased him at every meal with various possible names—“The Croissant Heart” or “Brisée, Brisée, Brisée, on thy cold grey stones, O Sea . . .”—and spent hours coming up with new ones, taking it as a challenge, but Mr. Cliffe seemed to be seriously disturbed by not being able to recall it. He felt it was a sign of the wilting of the brain tissues, and he worried that he would not be able to write any more scenarios. Kay found him incomprehensible and his self-dramatizing a little false.
The last passenger, Mrs. Mannering, was a missionary going out to join her husband in India. Elsie called her the Early Victorian. “Not that she was born in the Victorian era, for she is young and pretty, look how those swooping braids tremble about her face. But she weeps and swoons and is afraid of mice—in this day and age, I ask you!”
Kay could not imagine how Mrs. Mannering would manage in India, if a mere mouse upset her. Her conversation consisted of praise God and no thank you.
All those passengers sat at the other long table, leaving Kay and the two American girls at the captain’s table with Mrs. Johns and whichever of his men were on table duty that evening. The captain quite often begged off and dined in his quarters, not being a naturally gregarious man. He reminded Kay of the woodchuck in the back garden of Francis’s house on Elm Street, who had staked out a certain territory by the creek and stalked it every evening, not fighting unless made to fight.
After finishing her seafoam cake, Kay got up to leave the table, asking, as was correct, “May I be excused, Captain?”
Mrs. Johns, recovered from her mal de mer, enlightened the American girls as to dining protocol aboard ship. “It is from the mess, you know,” she fluted. “You will be acknowledged by the senior officer present with a nod or a reply such as Very well, and you may then leave the mess, remembering to put your rolled napkin back in its place.”
Behind her, Kay heard the captain get up noisily from his own chair and stomp off. There were no reused napkins on the Constellation, wherever else Mrs. Johns might have shipped.
Many nights, they slept on deck. The passengers were allowed—encouraged—to do that once the ship got into the hot latitudes. The first time it was suggested, Kay joined the other passengers lining up at their deck chairs to be bundled into blankets by Mr. Handy and the other deck steward. Each one in turn stood waiting while extra padding was added to the chair, then was eased back and tucked in all round by swift, practised hands. It was a little mannequin factory, assembling sleeping Eaton Beauty dolls and lying them in their boxes.
As the stewards worked their way toward her, Kay found herself tense and could not think why. But once she was wrapped and supine like the others, she realized that it was ominously reminiscent of the TB ward in New York, where she had only been allowed to visit Aren once. And possibly earlier wards, which she had not thought of for ages. After that first night, Kay did not sleep in her deck chair like the others; she waited until the coast was clear and went up to the lifeboat above, where Aren had arranged a nest for them, using cushions from the stewards’ secret trove. There they lay with the cover folded back, listening to the desultory conversation of the passengers on the deck below, and the Indian sailors at their prayers.
“We are Seatons now,” Aren said, and she laughed and stuck one leg over the oarlock. “He was a man of many ways. I remember the day of meeting him, the day I came.”
“Yes,” she said. “I remember that day too.”
“That was a day.” He was sitting upright, staring out to the barely marked horizon.
After a moment, she asked, “Do you remember other people, I mean, from—before us?” She knew he did not like to talk of that. But perhaps they must, now.
“I remember. An old man, who taught me things. I do not have a name for him.”
She waited, as quiet and still as she might be.
“A man who was my . . . A man coming into the boat, holding my knee when I bled. And a woman.”
Kay was so sorry she had asked. She turned her head away and buried it in the cushions. It was too much to make him say those things out loud.
The next night, Kay brought oranges from the dining room and the chocolate from Colón. She was not sure Aren would come, but his hand appeared at the edge of the lifeboat, and then his dear cropped head, and all the rest of him unfolding over the edge and collapsing into the cushions, sighing with tiredness.
She peeled the oranges, letting the orange oil spray up into the black tropical sky, and handed Aren segments one by one, alternating with chocolate. The moon had risen over the dark border of the water, its road just setting out toward them. No wind that night.
Below, she heard Elsie say, “Look, look, Julia—the sea and the heavens, they are like two black bowls touching edge to edge.”
Elsie really ought to be a travel writer, Kay decided. She ought to publish that article and then write many books, and make Julia go with her all over the world instead of letting her marry her stolid fiancé, to whose photo Kay had taken an instant dislike.
It was very hot.
The head chef came out on deck, a hulking, white, pasty man, like a great soft puppet made out of cake, a damp cigarette smouldering in his mouth. He walked across to the bridge with a tray for the duty officers. On his way back, he paused below the lifeboat and one beefy arm reached up, pale, frond-like fingers proffering a dish of ice cream with two spoons.
“Thanks, Frans,” whispered Aren.
The chef said, “No need to sank me.” He was a man who enjoyed procuring happiness.
Kay had had ice cream at dinner, so she pushed the bowl back when Aren offered it, and he dug in willingly. Despite his claim to the freedom of the refrigerators, he was not eating enough.
It was irritating that some people were naturally skinny and others plump. Kay’s own plumpness was a certain source of sorrow to her, mostly as it stood opposed to Thea’s slenderness. On the other hand, she did maintain a certain discipline. If I was not so very careful, she thought, I would weigh five hundred pounds—nobody ever takes into account how hard I’ve worked to be only this plump.
On the deck below the lifeboat, the girls were laughing together. Elsie had a game going that Julia had a hopeless passion for Mr. Cliffe, and was giving her advice on how to attract the Older Man. It was not fitting, Kay thought. And then thought what a prude and a prig she had turned out to be.
She hated everything. She hated most of all that she had a deck chair with her name on it and Aren had a face covered in engine grease. It was the way of the world, and there was no way she could see to get out of it, but that too made her despair; a person of some education, willing to think, should be able to find a way.
Aren scraped his spoon around the edge of the bowl and lay back on the pillows.
“What do you suppose it will cost to charter a boat in Fiji?” she asked him.
He rolled his head away from her.
“Will a hundred dollars do it, do you think?”
He glanced back at her and away again, before saying, “I don’t know! Do you suppose I am an expert in boat charters?”
“Well, there must be someone you could ask, someone who would know down below, or the mate, or someone?”
“Stop talking,” he said. “Stop talking about things! Since we cannot do anything about it until Wellington at the earliest—and the only things to do are to charter or buy passage, and we don’t know and can’t find out yet which is going to be possible—could we just not talk?”
So Kay stopped, even though the thinking would not ever stop inside her own head.
In the steam room, where the passengers went when the bath was not sufficient to remove the grime of the steamer’s gritty smoke, steam bathers sat on benches in a series of white-tiled rooms, each warmer than the last. The final room was so hot it was simply wreaths of smoke. Alone in the far corner of the last room one afternoon, Kay saw the American girls co
me in, laughing with each other over some remembered joke and dancing with their towels like vaudeville girls. Between her lashes Kay saw a face appearing in the steam when Elsie’s towel unfastened, the face of Elsie’s body—the nipples dark pupils glancing from round white eyes, the tiny navel nose, the dark triangular mouth below.
If I were a man, she thought, that is the form and shape I would choose for a wife. So it was a good thing she was not a man. Because Elsie would not be a good wife at all, she was too talkative and too fond of a joke.
Thinking again, Kay thought as she had before that she would not be chosen for any man’s wife herself—she was too ornery, too fond of her own opinion, and she did not have that smiling loveliness of body that might make up for a general prickliness of disposition.
She sat very still. The girls soon got too hot and left without noticing her, and she sat on a little longer, although she was by then so much steamed that her fingers were wrinkly.
In the ladies’ change room, she stood by the mirror half-dressed (combinations on for modesty’s sake, and also to avoid looking at the undressed sofa cushion of her body in the glass). Her braids had matted in the steam and heat, it would take an hour to undo and brush and untangle and rebraid them, and they would still be dun-coloured and plain. Mrs. Mannering the Early Victorian had beautiful glossy braids, great ropes of bronze silk bound about her brow, more pre-Raphaelite than Victorian. She would be a great success with the older Krito-sophians. None of the girls in Yarmouth had bobbed hair, nor would for ages. Fashions from elsewhere always took years longer to filter through the shrouds.
She pulled one braid out straight, away from her head. Two feet long. The manicure tools were on the counter there, and a larger pair of scissors in the sewing box. Without thinking much more than that, she took the big scissors and lopped off her braid, close to her head.
The Voyage of the Morning Light Page 30
