Читать книгу Acts of Mutiny - Derek Beaven - Страница 21

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 inside 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 pretended 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.’

‘No. I’m afraid I haven’t,’ Penny said.

‘I couldn’t quite believe it at first when I saw her. Really no more than a skeleton in a dress. I didn’t know what to imagine. She looked … I don’t know … like someone who’d just come out of a POW camp.’

The conversation lapsed. Penny worked at her coffee, adding a little more sugar, and sipping, with the saucer under the cup in case the gentle swell should catch her out and ruin her skirt. She sensed from the corner of her eye Clodagh tucking the stray wisps of her ash-toned hair back behind her ears. Penny said, ‘I’d like to know what to expect.’

She turned round involuntarily to look behind her, and found herself staring at Robert Kettle who was standing at the bar. They both looked away immediately. Penny realised with a start that she had completely forgotten having danced once with him last night.