Kitabı oku: «Voyage of Innocence», sayfa 3

FIVE

The next morning, the passengers on board the Gloriaría awoke to lowering grey skies and an increasing wind. The waves were dark and menacing, with foam from their breaking crests sent whipping across the surface by the angry wind.

‘In for a bit of a blow,’ a cheerful young officer with a cherubic face remarked to Vee as he met her at the door to the dining saloon. ‘Won’t be too full in there, I don’t expect.’

He was right. Even allowing for those passengers who were having breakfast trays brought to their rooms, there was only a thin scattering of people in the huge dining room. Down in the bowels of G-deck, it had brilliant cut mirrors mimicking windows; the bronze-flecked pillars and rows and rows of empty tables, set with white napery, were reflected and multiplied, giving the room a vast and surreal appearance.

Vee, after a restless, unhappy night, didn’t feel like eating anything; she stared at the menu printed on crisp white card. Juice, porridge, eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, omelette … the list went on and on.

She ordered coffee.

‘Aren’t you going to eat anything?’ asked the other occupant of the table. ‘Are you feeling queasy because of the boat? It’s amazing how it rolls, one minute there’s nothing but sky to be seen, and then it’s down, down, and walls of grey sea. Dramatic, I call it.’

Vee had hardly noticed her fellow diners the previous evening. Overcome with tiredness and despair, she had gone through the motions of meeting and greeting the strangers at the table, the men and women with whom she would share all her meals for the next two and a half weeks, without noticing much about them; thankful that the watcher on the quay wasn’t there. After all, he could have boarded at the last minute, when she’d been down in her cabin.

This child, for she was hardly more, must have been one of them. Bony, lanky, gawky, a young lady who had still to stretch her wings. Yet, now Vee was paying attention, an interesting face. She would be a beauty one day. And, come to think of it, where had she seen her before? It wasn’t a face you’d forget.

‘I’m having the lot,’ the girl said. The waiter arrived with a heaped plateful of bacon, eggs, sausage, two little triangles of fried bread, a tomato, mushrooms and a ring of apple. ‘Perfect. And then lashings of toast and butter and marmalade. Heaven. I haven’t been hungry for ages, and I can’t believe I suddenly just want to eat and eat. It’s the sea air. I say, there aren’t many people about this morning.’

Vee sat back as the steward poured her a cup of coffee.

‘They’re affected by the motion of the ship, miss,’ the steward said, with a grin. ‘We won’t see most of them until we’ve passed through the Bay.’

Perdita swallowed a mouthful of sausage. ‘Bay?’

‘Bay of Biscay, miss. Terrible place for storms, especially this time of the year, and the equinoctial gales are severe this year. Even some of the old hands among the passengers are complaining. Still, things are tricky back home and I reckon a storm or two will seem like nothing compared to what’s coming, so they’re better off where they are.’

Perdita watched him go. ‘Awfully clever the way he keeps his balance. I suppose, if there are going to be real storms, that’s why they’ve put up these little wooden things around the table. To stop everything sliding to the floor. Do you suffer from seasickness? I don’t think I can do, not feeling as hungry as I am. I’ve never been on this kind of a voyage before, only sailing boats and steam yachts, that kind of thing. It’s been blowy, and it never bothered me, so I suppose I’ll be all right.’

‘York Minster,’ Vee said suddenly.

‘What?’ Perdita looked up from her plate. ‘What about York Minster?’

‘That’s where I’ve seen you before. Just before Christmas, 1936. The carol service, for the Yorkshire Ladies’ College. It was held in the cathedral every year.’

* * *

‘Don’t forget you’re due in the Minster at twelve-thirty for the rehearsal,’ Mummy called after Vee.

‘I won’t.’ She wrapped a muffler tightly about her throat, and pulled on fur-lined leather gloves. Under her warm tweed coat she was wearing a woollen suit over vest and jumper; how cold it was in Yorkshire, and it would be icy, as usual, inside the cathedral. No power of God or man could warm that cavernous interior.

She crossed the yard where two stonemasons were surveying a large block of limestone with ropes looped round it, ready to be hoisted up to some distant place above one of the great flying buttresses. Keeping the cathedral in a state of even moderate repair was a year-round task. The masons recognised her, the Dean’s daughter, and touched their caps as she went past.

Vee pushed open the door and went in. Mary Becket and Mrs Lancaster were in the flower room, snipping and cutting and sorting a pile of Christmas foliage. They looked up and called out a greeting; they had known her since she was a little girl, running in and out of the cathedral and the stone yard, fascinated by the Minster’s immense size, the glowing colours of the windows, the stone statues of the kings of England, the carvings and effigies on the silent tombs, the memorial slabs underfoot, the crypt, with the stream running far below. How odd to build over a stream, she always thought. One of the masons, bent from years of labour, told her that it was because streams were sacred for the old folk, and that was where they put shrines, and then, when the Christians came, they built their churches in the same places.

She’d told her father about that, and he’d frowned and said that was pagan nonsense and she shouldn’t gossip with the masons, they had a job to do.

She believed the mason, though. It was obvious the building went back a long time – there were Roman walls under there as well, the vergers had told her, in answer to her questions. And once, they said, the whole cathedral would have been painted and gilded in reds and golds and blues. It was hard to believe, when you saw the austere Protestant stone soaring up into the tower and along the great nave.

‘Idolatrous,’ her father said, dismissively, when she said how wonderful it must have looked, glowing with colour. With the cynical eyes of her grown-up self, she saw it all as part of a centuries-long endeavour – a very successful one – to dazzle and oppress the lower classes; to keep them in awe of their betters, fearful of this life and doubtful of the next, to allow them a glimpse of a more glorious world while teaching them their place in this one.

The sound of a choir reached her ears. ‘Are the boys practising?’ she asked Mary Becket, who came past with an armful of greenery.

‘They aren’t the choristers,’ said Mary Becket scornfully. ‘It’s girls, an end of term service.’ She gave a sniff, and went back to beating a stiff sprig of holly into submission.

Vee slipped into the side aisle of the choir and walked towards the transept, treading softly because of the service in progress. She caught a glimpse of a sea of grey hats, familiar hats, with the purple initials – YLC – embroidered above a purple grosgrain riband. A uniform that was utterly familiar to her. This was her old school, Yorkshire Ladies’ College, in its habitual act of carols and collective worship at the end of the Christmas term.

A senior girl was reading the lesson. ‘And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child …’

The carol service came to an end with the thundering chords of ‘Hark the Herald Angels’. The congregation knelt for final prayers, and Vee noticed a tall man in a tweed coat who had ignored this ritual and was edging his way along the row of seats. Eager to escape, probably. No, he was heading up towards the choir, engulfed in a swelling crowd of schoolgirls in their grey uniforms, he was searching for someone. There, he’d spotted her, a lanky girl coming out of the choir, a surplice draped over her arm.

‘Perdita,’ he called out. She was his sister, that was evident; with those bones, she’d grow out of her plainness and be a beauty by her twenties.

The habitual sound of the upper classes let out of church sang about Vee’s ears: greetings, enquiries, exclamations, farewells. The congregation moved like a sluggish river out of the great west doors, until only a few lingerers were left: a girl, the choir prefect, checking the hampers containing the choir gowns, a chubby, pink-cheeked girl dashing back in to retrieve a glove, a mistress stopping to talk to a verger.

‘You were in the choir, and a young man had come to meet you.’

‘That’s right. Goodness, how clever of you to remember me, I don’t have a very distinctive face. That was my brother Edwin.’

‘I was at Yorkshire Ladies’,’ Vee said, helping herself to more coffee and reaching out, without thinking, for a piece of toast. ‘You’re Perdita Richardson. I was Verity Trenchard then, and when I was in the sixth form, you were a first-former, all round cheeks and pigtails.’

‘Not round cheeks,’ said Perdita. ‘I’ve never had round cheeks. I grant you the pigtails, though. What a coincidence. Did you hate it there? Lots of people did.’

‘Did you?’

‘Not really, home was pretty ghastly a lot of the time, and so I didn’t mind too much.’

Vee laughed. ‘Snap! I couldn’t wait to get back to school after the holidays. Although it was rather awful there. I minded the cold most, in winter, that window open five inches rule.’

‘I took the nail out of the window in my bit of the dorm,’ Perdita said. ‘Or rather, loosened it, so matron wouldn’t find out. Then after lights out, I’d close it. Only I had to wake up before she came clumping round and whip it up again.’

‘Did you never get caught?’

‘No, never,’ said Perdita with pride. ‘With my family, you had to do things for yourself and do them discreetly. I had – well, have, only I don’t see her any more – a ferocious grandmother. More or less everything I did was wrong, so I learned cunning.’

Vee took another piece of toast. Cunning? No, she hadn’t learned cunning from her family, she had simply learned to be self-contained, to pretend that all was well, that she was a member of a normal loving family. Reserve was natural and native to her parents’ generation and class, no one need ever know that the reserve and cool well-bredness was more than skin deep, that beneath the unruffled surface there were no depths of affection or feeling of any kind: nothing but indifference and dislike, at least for their daughter.

Perdita finished her substantial breakfast, wiped her mouth, gave a satisfied sigh and stood up. ‘That was wonderful,’ she said to the hovering steward. ‘Goodbye for now, Mrs … I say, I am sorry, I don’t know your name. It isn’t Trenchard any more, is it?’

‘Hotspur. I’m Mrs Hotspur.’

‘I’m glad we’re at the same table, Mrs Hotspur. Anyhow, I must push off, I’ve got to practise.’

‘Nice to see a young lady enjoying her food,’ said the steward. ‘Is there anything else I can get for you, madam?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Vee. She lit a cigarette and sat there, gazing out over the almost empty dining room, a field of white linen and silver cutlery, flowers at every table – where did they get flowers when they were further out at sea? She had no idea, she realized, of how a ship like this functioned. She knew it had a gymnasium, and a swimming pool – that was a joke in this weather – and a beauty salon and library. And the crew and several hundred passengers, all having to be fed and laundered for days on end. She watched the smoke from her cigarette drifting away. It must be interesting, working on board. She asked the steward.

‘I love it, madam. Wouldn’t consider any other job. I’ve always worked the lines, every since I was a nipper and took my first voyage as a page. My dad’s in the business, too, he’s on the Liverpool-New York run, White Star. He’s in the engine room, he never did stewarding. He wanted me to sign on with White Star, but I said, No, it’s the old Peninsular and Orient Line for me, Dad. I prefer the East, you see, I always had a yen for the East.’

He deftly collected the coffee pot and her empty plate, swaying with a dancer’s ease as the ship began another of its wallowing rolls. ‘Course, it’ll all change if there’s war. They used the liners for troop carriers in the last war. My dad served in a mine sweeper, four years, and never a scratch. Then the first day he was back on the liners, a bolt worked loose and broke his toe. Isn’t that typical of life?’ He went on his nimble way, and Vee, getting up, discovered that she was a good deal less steady on her feet than when she had come into the dining room. Presumably the blow was getting stronger. She would go to the library, she decided. Find a book, something to while away the hours and take her mind off Hugh, and the man with the bony face, and everything else – the many many things that haunted her waking and sleeping hours and which she longed to drive out of her head, if only for a few merciful moments.

Vee walked along endless corridors, down steep flights of stairs, past linen rooms, the sweet smell of fresh linen wafting out. She met no one on her way, bar a hurrying steward. It was eerie, the emptiness of the ship. She reached the corridor where her cabin was and walked past the row of shut doors, counting them off, fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one. She stopped abruptly outside number sixty-two, a few yards from her own cabin, number sixty-seven.

The door to sixty-seven was slightly ajar, and someone was in there.

The corridor stretched away, deserted, no cleaners to be seen. Who was in her cabin?

Vee, her nerves tingling, made herself walk silently to the door. Then, with sudden vigour, she pulled the door wide open. ‘What …?’ she began.

Pigeon looked round, surprise on her face. ‘I’m just tidying away your things from last night,’ she said, shutting a cupboard door with a neat click. ‘I can’t linger, I’ve got that many of my ladies poorly.’

‘Thank you,’ Vee said, her back to the door.

‘I’ve left the passenger list on the table, madam,’ the stewardess said. ‘I expect you’ll want to look through and see if you’ve friends on board. My ladies are always surprised, it never fails, there are always people they know on board, and didn’t expect to see. “Oh, look,” they say, “I had no idea that the so-and-sos were going out to Egypt.” It always makes me laugh, how amazed they are.’

She whisked out of the cabin, and Vee sat down in the armchair, her heart still thudding. She was irked by the fright Pigeon had given her, irked by feeling so jumpy, constantly looking over her shoulder and starting at shadows. She should have guessed at once that it would be the stewardess in her cabin, about her duties.

She took her cigarette case from her handbag. She was smoking too many cigarettes in an attempt to soothe her nerves. She took one out, lit it, then picked up the typewritten list. There was Perdita Richardson’s name. An unusual girl. Might prove a bore, but she didn’t think so. How old was she? Probably seventeen or eighteen, if she’d left school, but no more.

Vee closed her eyes, overcome with a sudden terrible longing to be seventeen again. At seventeen, she’d been uneasy, perpetually hurt by her mother’s dislike of her, but still full of hope, with life a white and shining canvas, a tablet of possibilities. A daubed and messy canvas now; what part of her life had she not made a mess of, whom of her family and friends had she not in some way hurt or distressed or betrayed, or even, God help her, destroyed?

She wondered for a moment if she were going mad, for this bizarre image to float into her mind, but decided, regretfully almost, that there was no escape that way. She turned her attention back to the list.

The name jumped out at her, as though it had been printed in bright red letters.

Messenger, Mrs Henry, and beneath that, Messenger, Peter.

For a moment, pure joy flooded through her. Lally was on the boat. Lally, her incomparable friend. And she’d brought Peter. Had Harry relented? Had the boy had a relapse, was he not well enough to go back to school? She must find Lally immediately, what was the number of her cabin?

Then reality struck, and her sense of pleasure and excitement evaporated.

Lally, her friend. Yes, that was exactly what Lally was, but she, Vee, was no friend of Lally’s. Not after what she had done, what she was planning to do. If Lally knew, or even suspected … How could she ever face Lally again?

Lally didn’t know, surely she couldn’t have kept so calm and serene, if she’d had the least idea.

No, Lally didn’t know, and for Vee, it must remain one of those grim secrets that couldn’t be told. Even though at times she felt that to confess to Lally, to tell her friend what she had done, would be such a relief.

But, even if Lally didn’t know – and Vee had tried desperately to be discreet, flaunting instead her other liaisons before a scandalized world – then how could it be kept a secret from her in Delhi?

Had Klaus known that Lally was going out to India on the Gloriana? It was so obvious, so natural, after all, that she would go out to join her husband. She would have gone with him when he was first posted to Delhi, if Peter hadn’t still been ill.

No, Klaus hadn’t known. He’d told Vee that Lally was staying in England until the boy was safely settled back at school, that she would wait until after Christmas before going out to India.

Lally herself, in the one, unsatisfactory conversation they’d had – a hurried phone call, with Vee pretending she was in a rush, would telephone her back – had said nothing about sailing to India. Vee hadn’t telephoned again, of course, what could she possibly say to Lally, one of her closest friends, whom she had so utterly betrayed?

What could she say to her now, face to face?

Her eyes skittered on down the list.

Joel Ibbotson.

So it had been Joel she’d seen on deck. Joel, for heaven’s sake! What could he be doing on board the Gloriana? Had the watching man been on the lookout for Joel? Impossible, the very idea of Joel getting mixed up with that lot brought a smile to her lips. She’d be fascinated to find out why Joel, wrapped up in mathematics and college life, should be going to India. When had she last seen him? Berlin, 1936. And of course, Yorkshire last year, for the funeral. Another blink, another memory to be refused admittance to her mind. Keep to the present, keep to the here and now.

Another name leaped out at her: M. Q. Sebert, Esq.

Marcus, on board? How odd, had the BBC come to its collective senses and sacked him?

It was a ghost ship, that day. Peter was everywhere, exploring, questioning, bothering the staff, who took it in patient good humour, with so few passengers about, they had time to listen to his endless questions. Only the cabin stewards and stewardesses and the doctor and nursing sister who staffed the tiny hospital were kept busy as the dark grey of sky and sea turned imperceptibly to twilight and night.

Vee spent most of the day in the library, alone and undisturbed, reading War and Peace, grateful for the chance to spend some hours in a different world entirely, her own problems shut out by the far away and long ago world of Napoleon and Imperial Russia. History, however complicated, seemed to make sense in a way that the contemporary world – at least, her contemporary world – didn’t.

A waiter brought her coffee, she went to the cafe for a light lunch, taking Tolstoy with her, then back to the library, soft lights lit over the desks, the potted plants somehow fixed in position, how did they keep upright with the incessant roll of the ship? It was only a momentary thought, then she was once again in Moscow, in the thick of war, following in Pierre’s questioning footsteps, caught up in the sweep of history.

Would some profound novelist in years to come pen an epic of her time in a book like War and Peace, a novelist with a brooding mind and a sense of the power of history, writing about Hitler and the Czechoslovakia that wasn’t worth a war, and Stalin and weak, unworthy Chamberlain, and an island people who clutched at any straw of peace, but who would fight like terriers when war came knocking uninvited at the door?