The Ecliptic

by Benjamin Wood

  I shrugged. ‘The research suggests I ought to be wary.’

  ‘Ah, very good,’ he said, nodding. ‘Still, research can be flawed. There are charlatans and scoundrels in every walk of life.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I’ve got to stop doubting myself and just paint. But I’ve got so many voices in my head at the moment. I thought I might be able to outrun a few of them out here.’

  ‘Well—’ He surveyed the limits of the viewing gallery. ‘If you can find any relief aboard this heap of metal, good luck to you. Failing that, I know a very good person in New York who you could talk to. I have his number somewhere.’

  ‘A professional, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, he really is terrific.’ He squinted at me, tapping his chin. ‘What are you? Five foot five, twenty-odd years of age. I wouldn’t think he’d charge you any more than thirty dollars an hour.’

  This seemed to be another of his jokes.

  ‘Look,’ he said, evening his face, ‘you don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to. But this chap is a friend of mine, and he’s helped a lot of people get their muses back. Can’t move for struggling artists in the Village these days.’ He reached into his pocket, as though to retrieve a business card, but came out with a scrap of paper. ‘In case you want to look him up while you’re in town . . .’

  Victor had such a placid temperament, such an innocuous way of inducing conversation that I almost felt obliged to explain myself to him right there in the viewing gallery. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never really believed much in the powers of psychiatry. No disrespect to you. The only thing that’s ever helped me feel any better is painting. And now—well, now I suppose I’ll have to take up squash.’

  ‘Perhaps you will.’ He unscrewed the cap on the steward’s pen and scribbled a line on the paper, holding it to the rail. Then, folding it up, he said, ‘That’s the number, anyway. He’s just a block from Union Square.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I put the paper inside my book without even glancing at it.

  ‘Funny, I don’t think I’ve ever known Jonathan stay this quiet before,’ Victor said, pocketing the pen. ‘How on earth did you manage it?’

  ‘Kryptonite.’

  ‘Please. You’d be amazed how often I hear that.’

  Almost in unison, we moved to check on the boy. He was crumpled in the chair, asleep, with the comic still open at his chest.

  ‘He seems to be out for the count,’ Victor said. ‘Hang on. Don’t say anything—you’ll jinx it.’ He walked over to Jonathan and took the comic gently from his clutches. Then he laid his jacket across the boy, sat down on the chair beside him, and skimmed the pages with a face of consternation.

  The match trudged on below us. I could hear Dulcie grunting like a bull, her thudding footwork, and Amanda’s helpless cries. The ship began to pitch again, and I felt a quiver in my knees, a rising nausea. I gripped the railing, and must have looked unstable on my feet, because Victor called out in a hushed voice: ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Just a little seasick,’ I said.

  ‘There are medicines for that, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I’m taking pennyroyal and honey. Dulcie swears by it.’

  ‘Crikey. That won’t do. You might as well take salt and pepper.’ He stood up, stooping to lift the boy, jacket and all. ‘A little Dramamine is all you need. Hand me that briefcase, would you? I have to get this one downstairs before he wets the upholstery.’ The boy’s legs hung and swayed like wind chimes in his father’s arms. ‘He doesn’t sleep much, but when he does, the bladder goes with him.’ Victor reached to take the case from me; I hooked it over his fingers. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Will I see you at dinner?’

  Victor inhaled, considering my question; his answer came rushing out in one breath. ‘Depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘The result,’ he said, nodding at the court. ‘Mandy hates to lose.’

  When I got back to my suite, I found my telephone had been replaced with a much fancier unit: it had a carved jade handset and a golden stand, like something Fabergé could have crafted. I had asked the crew manager to remove the original phone that morning, as the ability to call London from my room at any moment was too great a temptation. But he had clearly mistaken this request for a complaint about the furnishings and had supplied me with an item several times more alluring.

  ‘Connecting now,’ said the girl at the switchboard. The engaged tone sounded again, and the girl’s voice came back: ‘I’m sorry. It seems to be busy. Should I try it one more time?’

  ‘Yes, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not at all. Connecting now.’

  The warble of the dial tone went on and on, and then: ‘Hello. Connaught Hotel.’ The line was surprisingly clear.

  ‘Oh, good. It’s been hard to get through. Are you closed?’

  ‘My apologies, madam. I’m the only one at the desk at the moment and the phones haven’t stopped.’

  I had forgotten there was a time lag between London and the mid-Atlantic, and I must have been calling in their peak hour. Now what was I supposed to say? ‘Well, I think I left a scarf somewhere in your hotel. About five weeks ago.’

  ‘I see. And where exactly did you lose it?’

  ‘In the corridor. I think it might have been handed in by one of your guests.’

  ‘Do you know the guest’s name?’

  ‘It’s Searle, Wilfred Searle.’

  ‘Ah yes, of course. Mr Searle. I’m afraid he’s no longer staying at the hotel, but if you describe the scarf I’ll see if I can—’

  ‘Did he leave a forwarding address? It’s just that, well, I’d really like to thank him for his kindness.’

  ‘I’ll check that for you, madam. Please hold.’ I could hear nothing for a moment but my own huffing in the earpiece. Then: ‘I’m sorry, he didn’t say where he was moving on to this time. But we do have his billing address. So if you’d like to write to him care of the hotel, we’ll make sure the letter reaches him.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll do that.’

  ‘Now perhaps you could describe—’

  There were three little knocks on my door. ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ I said. ‘Have to let someone in.’

  ‘Of course, madam.’

  I set the phone down on the table and went to answer, expecting to be met by a stewardess with a silver trolley and a little dish of English honey for my tea. Instead, I found Dulcie standing crookedly in the corridor. She was listing to the right, as though missing a crutch, with her tracksuit top buttoned all the way up. ‘I’ve completely wrecked my shoulder,’ she said, nudging her way past me. ‘Have you got any aspirin?’

  ‘Yes. Somewhere, I think.’

  She smelled a little tarry. Her hair was wet and combed, clipped oddly at one side. ‘Sorry, were you in the middle of something?’ she said, noticing the phone was off the hook.

  ‘Oh, don’t mind that. Just calling my mother.’ I went and put the ugly thing back on its perch.

  ‘Well, that’s no way to treat her, is it?’ Dulcie said. ‘Poor woman.’ She fixed herself a glass of tonic water at the bar, one-armed, and sat down on the couch. ‘Anyway, aren’t you going to ask me the score?’

  ‘It was two all when I left. I assume you didn’t lose.’

  ‘Of course I bloody didn’t!’ She downed half the tonic, then rolled her arm about in its socket, wincing. ‘Actually, I thought she was getting on top of me in the last, but then I started to clear a little bit faster to the T, and she didn’t have the energy to keep up.’

  ‘What happened to your shoulder?’ I said.

  ‘Not sure. It’s just muscular, I think. A good massage ought to fix it.’

  ‘I’ll get you that aspirin.’

  ‘You’re a darling. Thanks.’

  I went to the bathroom and dug out a bottle from my vanity case. There were only two pills left. Coming back into the sitting room, I found Dulcie lying on the couch with my fancy phone clutched to her
ear and her dusty squash shoes on the cushions. ‘Mm-hm. All right, then we’ll just have to take what’s available,’ she was saying. ‘Very good of you to fit us in. Thank you.’ Hanging up, she reached out for the aspirin bottle. ‘Is this all you’ve got?’

  ‘Yes, sorry, I thought I had more.’

  ‘They’ll do for now, I suppose.’ She tipped the pills straight into her mouth and swallowed, chasing them with tonic. ‘There’s a dispensary aboard somewhere. Let me know if you need anything.’

  ‘Have you ever taken Dramamine?’ I said.

  ‘No, and I don’t think I want to.’

  ‘I’m still getting the queasiness, that’s all.’ My hands dropped to my belly.

  ‘Always takes a while to find your sea legs, first time round. We’re not far off land now, anyway.’ She gave a timid burp into her fist. ‘Ugh. Sorry. Your tonic’s awfully warm.’

  ‘Who was that on the phone?’

  ‘The Turkish baths,’ she said. ‘I’ve booked us in for quarter past.’

  ‘You’re not dragging me down there with you.’

  ‘Well, I can’t go on my own again,’ Dulcie said. She got up, kneading her shoulder. ‘You never quite know who’s lurking in those cubicles, and, yesterday, I got saddled with the most dreadful Chicago woman. Please don’t be difficult about this. I’m in agony.’

  As we headed down the corridor in our dressing gowns and slippers, Dulcie paused by a room marked electric therapy. ‘I’ve always wondered what goes on in there,’ she said, trying to see in through the keyhole. Narrow strips of ultraviolet light tinged the edges of the doorframe, brightening her face, showing all its downy hairs. ‘I don’t see any electrodes or wires. Perhaps I’ll give it a go.’ She straightened up, clutching her shoulder as though plugging a bullet wound. We moved past the locker rooms towards a line of cubicles screened off with drapes. At the reception desk, an attendant in a white uniform greeted us and ticked our names in his ledger. ‘Mrs Fenton, if you’d like to follow Katarina, she’ll soon have those kinks worked out of you,’ he said, then set his big wet eyes on me. ‘Miss Conroy, is there a particular treatment you’re interested in today? I’m afraid the jet-showers are currently out of order, but everything else is more than shipshape.’

  ‘I’d rather go with Dulcie,’ I said, ‘if that’s all right.’

  The attendant went quiet. He knitted his lips and brought his hands together. ‘Well, there’s only space for one in the massage room—it’s fully booked.’

  ‘You can wait for me in the baths, darling. I shan’t be long.’ Dulcie headed off with her masseuse, calling back to me, ‘Raymond will take care of you, won’t you, Raymond?’

  ‘She’ll have nothing but the best,’ the attendant said. He turned to me, presenting the empty corridor. ‘Let me show you to the hot rooms, madam.’ He walked on, reeling off a very practised script about the levels of pampering that were available to me, and I trailed behind, pretending to be tempted by all his talk of ‘alcohol rubs’ and varieties of soap. The further we went, the drier the air became, and my forehead began to mist over. I could not tell if I felt more or less seasick, but I was building up a serious thirst. ‘Tell me, madam, how much heat do you favour?’

  I thought it was a very strange question and did not know how to reply.

  The attendant smiled, as though familiar with this type of silence, as though it were the lifeblood of his working week. ‘If I might make a suggestion?’ He paused here, quite dramatically. ‘Most of our female guests prefer the caldarium—we keep that running at a hundred and seventy-five, Fahrenheit, that is. But if you like it a bit warmer, we have the laconicum.’

  ‘And how hot is that?’

  ‘Well, we’d never let you cook all the way through,’ he said, tittering. ‘We keep it around two hundred degrees. As I say, most of the female guests prefer—’

  ‘The caldarium,’ I said. ‘That will be fine.’

  ‘Lovely. You’ll find towels as you go in. It’s just this door to your right, madam.’

  Nobody will teach you this at art school, but there are many ways to paint a room from memory. You can construct it from delinquent parts: take a fixture from the ceiling of your childhood bedroom, a fall of light from the refectory of a hospital you once attended with your mother, a carpet borrowed from a rented flat in Maida Vale, and assemble them like scraps. You can add flesh to a skeleton of facts: keep the magnolia tiles you know for sure were there and colour them in grey; thicken the mist with candle wax; steal the women from the first-class poolside, paint them lounging chest-down on those tiles in swimming costumes, shine their hair, fatten their legs, shade their backs a different pink. With enough thought and industry, you can paint a room that has no visible joins, which reveals more truth than any photograph could capture, because who could ever dispute what you have seen with your own eyes? Only by painting it this way—grinding it to powder and rebuilding it, particle by particle—can you fully understand what a room means to you. But, sometimes, all this does is reconstitute a whole that would be better left in fragments, like fixing up a shredded letter just to read your old bad news. If you construct a room in paint, you haunt it. Your life rests in every stroke. So paint only the rooms that you can bear to occupy forever. Or paint the stars instead.

  Sitting down to lean my head against the tiles, the tension in my breast began to ease, and I could feel the heat drawing the dirt of London from my body the way that sunshine teases oil out of tarmac. The caldarium was almost empty. On the tiled shelf that skirted the far wall, two women lay frontwise with their arms bent out, their heads a yard apart, just close enough to talk without raising their voices. I could not see their faces, only the scoured pinkness of their backs, the long wet knots of hair that fell over their shoulders. There was a soothing scent of rosewater, a kindness to the light. And it occurred to me that I had found the one space on the ship where I could be at peace: a priestly kind of sanctum between decks, not quite silent, not quite vacant. So what if it was hot enough inside to raise a soufflé?

  I spread a towel upon the shelf and lowered myself onto it. The air was thick as plaster and I had to concentrate on breathing. Ten-second inhalations through the nose, out through the mouth. As the rhythm of my heart slowed down, so did my mind. I shut my eyes, surrendered to the heat. It was as if my thoughts started to pearl and separate, like a paint that rests too long inside a can. Everything relaxed: my limbs, my tongue, my neck. And soon I was envisioning things in the bleary heat. I was outdoors, walking in a field beneath the high noon sun. There were fairground rides in the distance. A rag-and-bone man was ambling up the grassy slope towards me, his horse beleaguered, nostrils steaming. It was pulling a cart with a pile of old rocking chairs and balusters. And then I heard the women stirring near by, and this picture fell away.

  My pulse felt like a dripping tap, and I was strangely cool inside. The ship’s engines were juddering the shelf I lay upon. And the attendant was calling over a loudspeaker: ‘Would you describe it as an aggravating scarf, madam? Is it meek and insubstantial?’ The tiles looked greyer when I opened my eyes.

  Such heat.

  In through the nose, out through the—

  My body was laced in sweat—strangely cool—but mostly it was underneath me, in the creases of my thighs. I tried to sit up, and I felt the bones lurch out of me, slip right through my skin— ‘Let me show you the On Highs, madam. We’ll soon have those kinks worked out of you’—or perhaps I had just skidded off the shelf and dropped onto the carpet—‘There, there’—because, when I glanced up—strangely cool—Dulcie was standing right over me, wrapped in a towel, squeezing my hand—‘Don’t you ever stop criticising? No, it’s a permanent vocation’—and she was padding my forehead with a cold flannel, and saying, ‘I’ll wait with her. You go.’

  The sweat between my legs was heavy, cloying, cold. I thought I gave an answer: ‘No, it’s just a cheap thing from the market, not even real silk,’ but I must not have got the words out. I
must only have murmured something meaningless. And she shushed me— ‘There, there, darling, your work will get better’—and padded my brow and squeezed my hand tighter. Then, reaching down, I felt my belly sink and spill.

  ‘Ellie, don’t move now, you hear?’ Dulcie said, and she tore off the towel from around herself and pushed it on my thighs. I did not understand. What difference did it make? I was not seasick any more. ‘Just lie still,’ said Dulcie. ‘The doctor’s coming.’ She was a scrawny, chicken-boned woman, old Dulcie, but she had a lot of strength—‘No doubt she’s tenacious’—and she stopped me touching what was all over my calves and ankles. I thought I answered her again: ‘She never even used that icing knife, you know.’ But I did not hear the noise come out of me, and the next face I saw belonged to some man I did not recognise. He said, ‘Miss Conroy, I’m just going to slip these off you now, all right?’ Then I felt him cut the sides of my swimming costume briefs and watched as he slung them, red and heavy, like the tresses of a butcher’s mop, onto the rolling floor that held us.

  Another room, a different ceiling. The ship was full of them. I woke up in the hospital bay with the doctor and a po-faced nurse about my feet. My mouth was parched, my lips felt raw. It took effort just to hold my eyelids open. I was curtained off in blue. A tube was in my arm, feeding me what looked like seawater, and the quiet consultation of the voices at the end of my bed was giving me the sense that I had not yet fully come to.

  ‘Miss Conroy, good evening,’ the doctor said. He stepped onto my starboard side and strapped me with a blood pressure cuff. ‘You’ve had a bit of an ordeal, my dear, but everything will be fine now.’ He told me his name—Dr Randall—and explained that he was making his very first voyage as the ship’s physician. ‘I thought it would be easier than joining the Navy,’ he joked. ‘I was wrong.’ Smiling, he pumped at the rubber bulb inside his fist until there was a tightness in my arm and the flesh beneath my elbow seemed as numbstruck as the rest of me. He waited, nodded slightly at the reading on the dial, and hummed. ‘That’s looking better.’ The pressure released, tingling my fingers. ‘You know, if you’d made someone aware of your condition,’ he went on, all the good humour fading from his voice, ‘they could have warned you against the Turkish baths. It’s such a shame this had to happen to you.’