Читать книгу Voyage of Innocence - Elizabeth Edmondson - Страница 10

Peter Messenger loved ocean liners with all the enthusiasm of his ten years. He loved catching the boat train and arriving at the docks where the great sleek white liners were moored with unbelievably huge cables stretching far up into the bows. He loved the oily briny smell and the gulls and the gloomy customs shed and the piles of trunks, all labelled and waiting to be trundled up into the ship, some to disappear into the hold, that mysterious place where the Not Wanted on Voyage went, or to appear in your cabin, waiting to be unpacked and then stowed away by the baggage steward until the end of the voyage, three weeks in the future.

The first time he’d been on a boat, he’d been overwhelmed by the size of it, by the notion that anything that big could sail without sinking. This time, he’d led the way up the gangway with jaunty steps, ahead of his stepmother, Lally, with that Miss Tyrell bringing up the rear.

Miss Tyrell was the one blot on his happiness. What had possessed his mother to bring her?

‘Darling, I’m not bringing her. She’s on her way out to India in any case, to look after her brother and her nephews and nieces. Her sister-in-law died recently, so sad, a tropical disease she said.’

Peter wished Miss Tyrell could be struck down by a tropical disease, right now, before they were even on board. ‘She’s a nanny.’

‘Not any more, and she’s coming to look after me as much as you. My clothes and so on. I shan’t be taking a maid, your father says an English maid is always a nuisance in India, they don’t adapt. Miss Tyrell will be very helpful, and you’ll grow to like her.’

‘I’m far too old for a nanny.’

‘You’re not too old to need some extra looking after, you’ve been so ill, darling. It’ll make me feel much happier when I’m not there to know that Miss Tyrell has you under her eye.’

‘Why won’t you be there?’

‘Well, there’s a social life on board ship, you know that. Bridge and games, and then dancing and so on in the evenings. I don’t want to have to worry about you all the time.’

‘I can look after myself.’

‘Of course you can. You’re the man of the family while Daddy isn’t here, but even so, we’ll be glad of Miss Tyrell. I don’t think she’s a fusser. She seems very practical and down-to-earth.’

Lally kept her own doubts to herself. Miss Tyrell had, although she wouldn’t say so to Peter, been wished on her. Claudia’s sister-in-law had telephoned her.

‘Mrs Messenger? My name is Monica Sake. We met once, in London, when you were staying with Claudia, but I don’t expect you to remember me.’

‘Oh, of course …’

‘I hear from Agnes that you’re going out to India.’

Lally’s heart sank, as it always did when her mother-in-law was mentioned.

‘On the Gloriana.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’d like you to take our old nanny with you.’

Visions of some decrepit family retainer sprang to Lally’s astonished mind. ‘Oh, no, really, I don’t think –’ And why was their old nanny going out to India in any case?

‘We’re desolated to lose her, she’s the best nanny imaginable, been with the family since she was a nursery maid, she was my husband’s nanny. And Claudia’s of course, she was nanny to all of them.’

Monica Sake was Lucius’s wife, that was it; she was the Countess of Sake. And the nanny Lady Sake wanted to foist on her had looked after Claudia, and Lucius, whom Claudia and Vee said was – what was the word they used? Bonkers.

Monica’s voice was quacking away. ‘We’ve tried to persuade her to stay. However, her brother’s wife died a little while ago, some foreign illness, and Nanny Tyrell feels she owes it to her brother to go and keep house for him. It isn’t a particularly convenient time for us, she was due to go to Henrietta and take care of the baby. But I suppose she must be allowed to do what she thinks best.’

Lally began to warm towards this unknown Miss Tyrell.

‘She wants to work her passage out. She’s a thrifty soul. I heard you’d be taking your stepson – sickly, isn’t he, and so not yet up to school? She’ll be perfect, she can take the boy off your hands. You won’t want to be bothered with a boy that age when you’re on board. Or are you taking your own nanny?’

‘Well, no.’

‘Or your maid?’

‘No.’

‘She can do that for you as well. She’s extremely competent, she’ll be a great help to you. That’s settled then.’

And it was, to Lally’s dismay. She still hadn’t told Henry that she was bringing Peter with her, and she hoped that news about the sickly boy didn’t reach her husband through the letters that his officious family wrote to him whenever they had an idle moment. Fortunately, Henry rarely read private letters; she suspected the only ones he looked at with any attention were the ones from her, and she took care to keep them brief.

‘Official correspondence is enough for any man,’ he would say, opening a long screed from his mother, flicking through the pages and crumpling the letter into a ball before tossing it into the waste-paper basket.

This wasn’t Miss Tyrell’s first voyage. She’d crossed the Atlantic more than once, had accompanied the Veres out to Hong Kong – now, there was a strange country – and had spent six months in Bombay. She liked India. She liked the heat and the people and the energy, although the shocking poverty and the skinny animals made her uncomfortable.

She was pleased for the chance to work her passage rather than pay for it herself. For one thing, it meant she would be travelling first class, which was what she was accustomed to. If she’d had to pay, it would have been tourist class, and a shared cabin down in the bowels of the ship, and not at all the kind of company she was used to. She wasn’t sure about this Mrs Messenger, though. Lady Sake had spoken of her in the pitying tone her employers used about half-wits, cripples and social outsiders.

‘Of course Harry is absolutely one of us, the Messengers go back for ever, but Lally, as they call her, I believe her name is actually Lavender, is not. She’s American, well that’s another world, don’t you think? Headstrong, I’d say, by the look of her, but then you’d need strength of character to cope with Harry, I never knew a man with so much energy. Her father’s a politician, from Chicago of all places. He was a doctor before he went into the Senate, Irish, of course, her name was Fitzpatrick. And she’s Catholic. Will that bother you, Nanny?’

Having no religious convictions of her own, merely subscribing to the conventional Anglicanism of her employers, Miss Tyrell said no, in the tone of voice that made Lady Sake feel for a moment that she had committed a solecism by even mentioning religion.

‘I do hope you don’t suffer from seasickness, Miss Tyrell. It can be very bad in the Bay of Biscay at that time of year.’

Seasick? Not her. As the SS Gloriana sailed into what her crew called a dirty night, her stomach was perfectly in order. She gave Peter a dose of tonic, though, just in case there should be any inclination to collywobbles, as she called any kind of stomach upset, and it would help to keep him regular, so important when a child was convalescent. Peter was the nervy sort, you could see that, although that might be due to his having been so ill. And Mrs Messenger? Miss Tyrell felt sorry for her. She didn’t care to see a young woman with those tired eyes and that look of haunted care to her. The child had been in danger, yes, but he was better now, and he was a stepson, not one of her own. Perhaps that was the problem. But here she was, on her way back to India, to be reunited with her husband. This was a time for happiness, not for fretting.

And not a good sailor by the look of her.

‘Run along, Peter, Mummy’s not feeling very well and isn’t in the mood for your chatter.’

‘I was only telling her about some people she knows on board, that’s all.’ It wasn’t for Miss Tyrell to keep him away from his mother. Then he understood. ‘She’s seasick,’ he said with scorn.