Читать книгу Voyage of Innocence - Elizabeth Edmondson - Страница 11

Perdita Richardson looked around her narrow cabin. She liked the round porthole, it had a distinctly nautical air that was pleasing; if you were going to be shunted off on a sea voyage, then you might as well feel you were on board a ship, and not merely in some floating hotel. She’d seen her friend Tish and her new husband off last year after their wedding. They’d had a stateroom on the Queen Mary – they’d been going to spend their honeymoon with her husband’s family in New England – and Perdita had been disappointed to see how ordinary it was. Plush, but it could have been a hotel anywhere.

This, however, was unquestionably shipshape; fitted lockers beneath the bunk, everything in its place. She took off the shapeless brown felt hat she’d crammed on her head for want of anything better being immediately to hand, and gave her hair a vigorous ruffle. Curly and unmanageable, she kept it in place when she could be bothered with a fearsome array of pins and fixative. Usually, she left it in its natural state; that was one good thing about being a student of music, appearances went for very little. Most of her fellow students at the Royal Academy of Music were young and hard-up and had minds above mundane items of clothing or the nice arrangement of hair.

She’d tried cutting her thick curls short, but in her opinion it made her look like one of the woolly sheep that chewed the grass around her home in Westmoreland, and there was some hope of elegance, just every now and then, if you had hair long enough to be pinned up. She rummaged in her bag for a hairbrush and tugged it through the disorder. It made little difference to her appearance, but she felt she had made an effort.

Not evening dress the first night out, everyone knew that. So she’d wear – what? Despite the small cabin and the untidy hair, Perdita was far from being a poor student, or a poor anything. Her family were wealthy and she had money of her own; she could buy all the clothes she wanted, but found it difficult to find much ready-made that fitted her tall, rangy frame, and had a dislike of the fussing around at the dressmakers, as she put it. So her clothes were an odd collection of what she’d found that fitted her, including some pairs of men’s slacks, which she found comfortable and which fitted her long legs. No one made anything of them at college, but now, throwing open the lid of her suitcase, she did wonder whether they were quite right for a sea voyage.

I expect lots of people will be frightfully posh, she said to herself. Well, they’ll have to be satisfied with their own poshness, how I look can’t affect them at all. She took out a favourite green dress, gave it a shake, and opened the narrow cupboard to find a coat hanger.

A woman in uniform appeared at the door as though by magic. Small and shrewish, she cast a disapproving look at Perdita’s open suitcase and stepped inside the cabin, making Perdita retreat until she had her back against the washbasin, the green dress held in front of her like a shield.

‘I’ll unpack for you, miss. I’m your stewardess. My name’s Merkin.’

‘Oh, thank you. Only, I can do it myself.’

Merkin paid no attention. ‘You go along to the dining room and put your name down for the second sitting. Not the first, mind, that’s for kiddies and people who don’t care for the social side. My passengers always take the second sitting.’

Such was Merkin’s moral force that Perdita found herself outside her cabin and following the arrows guiding her to G-deck.

‘Boat drill half an hour after we sail, miss,’ Merkin called after her. ‘You’re muster station twenty-three, and you’ll need to have your life-jacket with you.’

Boat drill? Lifejacket? This was Perdita’s first voyage, and she was mystified. Not to worry, someone would explain it to her, and say where she had to be and what she had to do. People always were keen to put you on the right path, especially when it came to anything as institutional-sounding as boat drill. Like fire drill at school, only not shinning down ladders in the dead of night and usually in the rain, it was to be hoped.

A sudden tiredness swept over her, irritating her with her weakness. She was completely well, they all said she was fully recovered, only needed time to get her strength back. Hence the voyage, a round trip to India, with a month or so staying with friends in Delhi; it would do her the world of good, the doctors had assured her. She hadn’t been interested, wasn’t interested in going on a voyage, had never wanted to go to India, they were her grandfather’s friends in Delhi, not her friends, she didn’t want to stay with a lot of strangers, and in what she knew would be a very strange country.

Only Grandpapa had been so keen on the idea, and he hadn’t been well himself, and she hated to disappoint him; it would be churlish and unkind to refuse his generous offer of a ticket and all expenses paid.

Not for the first time, she wondered if he was so urgent for her to go, not because of her recent illness, but because of the coming war. If war broke out soon, she could be stuck for the duration in India. Which might suit Grandpapa, but didn’t suit her at all. What music was there for her in India? Besides, if there was a war, she wanted to be where she belonged, in England, not away from all the bombs and terror on some distant verandah. The last war had gone on for four years; she couldn’t imagine not seeing Westmoreland for four whole years.

No, to be fair, Grandpapa would have sent her to America if he were concerned for her safety and wanted her out of England in time of war. He must think that the war he was so sure was on its way wasn’t going to start for a few months yet.

Her friends weren’t much interested in talk of war, but those who talked about it mostly reckoned that it was necessary to do something about Hitler and the Nazis. Others, cynical arrivals from Austria and Germany, Jewish refugees with music in their souls that made the English students sigh and give up hope, said that Britain and France wouldn’t fight for Czechoslovakia or for anyone else, it was all just words. Hitler got what he wanted, always would get what he wanted, and what he didn’t want was to fight England.

Perdita’s mind turned to the here and now, and to her music. The first thing she had to do was find a piano. There were several on board; that was one thing she had insisted on. ‘Grandpapa, I can’t go if I can’t work. I’m hopelessly out of practice, and more weeks with no playing will just be a disaster. If I can work on the voyages out and back, and if your friends have a piano, something at least halfway decent, I’ll be able to practise there.’ Weren’t things like pianos liable to be eaten by giant ants or inclined to warp and go out of tune for ever in the moist heat of the unimaginable east?

The friends did indeed have a piano, a good one, they had assured her in a courteous letter. So possibly not yet eaten by ants. And Grandpapa had spoken to the chairman of the shipping line, an old chum, needless to say, and had been assured that Perdita would be able to practise in one of the lounges whenever she wanted.

Perdita knew about practice and doing it whenever you wanted. That meant, when no one else was around; well, that was all right with her. She was an early waker, distressingly so since she’d been ill, so if she could get a couple of hours in first thing, no one would be about to bother her or to be bothered by an hour of scales and arpeggios. The dining room forgotten, she set off on a piano hunt.