Читать книгу Voyage of Innocence - Elizabeth Edmondson - Страница 16

Vee hesitated that night. If she took her pills, then the night brought the past back to her, memories she didn’t want. If she didn’t take the pills, then the dark hours of the night were a torment, an endless hour of the wolf with beasties and ghoulies coming out of the woodwork to fill her tired mind.

Exhausted in mind, body and spirit, she decided not to take her customary pills, trusting to the roll of the boat and her fatigue to bring her sleep. In an odd way, she found the huge motions of the vessel soothing, like being rocked in an immense cradle. Lulled, she slept for a few hours.

Until the nightmare began. It wasn’t a nightmare at first, in fact it was a gentle dream, of a summer’s afternoon, a memory of a drive, with Lally and Piers Forster. Kind, clever Piers, who had wanted to marry her; but this was before he proposed. They were going to Stratford, to see a Shakespeare play. Lally, the passionate Shakespearean, was sitting beside Piers, talking about Macbeth, they were going to see Macbeth. Some rational part of her mind, still wakeful, told her that was odd, reminding her that she had never seen Macbeth at Stratford, not with Piers or Lally.

The tranquil summer landscape blurred and dissolved, and they were in the theatre, taking their seats. The clarity and detail of the dream was extraordinary, the numbers on the velvet seats, the shape and feel of the programme, Piers’s head tilted towards Lally as she made a comment on one of the actors, with the smile she remembered so well.

The house lights dimmed, the curtain rose, the theatre vanished, and Vee was standing on the upper steps of a stone spiral staircase in a Scottish castle, with the wind howling and whistling through the tower. A huge raven perched on the wide ledge of an arrow slit, its cold eye fixed on her. Pressed against the wall was Macbeth, blood dripping from his hands, his face, the dagger in his hand. Words whirled about her head, desperate words of violence and torment and pain.

Macbeth had murdered Duncan, whom had she murdered? She had a bloody dagger in her hand as well, and she was overwhelmed with anguish, with the knowledge that she had struck a fatal blow and sent a soul into eternity, irretrievably lost, beyond her reach, a deed that could never be undone, guilt that couldn’t be assuaged or borne.

She struggled into wakefulness, overwhelmed by fear and panic and remorse, and unsure for a while where she was, in the darkness, with the creaking of the boat and the swaying motion and the sound of the sea. She switched on the light above her bunk, heavy-eyed and tired, but with no intention of letting herself go back to sleep, not until grey dawn sent its half-light filtering into the cabin, and the day brought its sense of normality and relief.

She didn’t feel sleepy, anyhow. Her mind was clear and sharp, all sleep driven away by the anguish of her dream.

Had Pigeon locked the door behind her? It appeared to be slightly open. An invitation to anyone walking by … Vee wasn’t thinking of visitors with amorous intent, she was afraid of quite a different kind of caller. She slid out of bed, and, holding on to the table as the ship paused for a moment at the height of a roll before plunging back the other way, reached out for the door and locked it. She had been wearing an eye-mask, which had ridden up on to her forehead; now she pulled it off and tossed it on to the bed.

Where had Pigeon put the notebook that Claudia had given her?

‘Voyages can be a most dreadful bore, Vee, plenty of time to write the story of your life.’

Vee had thanked her and had dutifully packed the journal together with a bottle of ink and her fountain pen. She had done so mechanically, with no intention of writing a word. Now she was desperate to find them, they must be there somewhere.

Here they were, in a drawer with her hankies, stowed away in a stupid place by Pigeon.

She cleared the table in front of the mirror of books, packets of cigarettes, magazines and a jar of cream and took out the bottle of ink and the leather-backed notebook, and sat down. Then she unscrewed the barrel of the fountain pen and dunked it in the pot of ink, squeezing the filler and watching the dark liquid being drawn up; she’d loved fountain pens ever since she was a girl.

It was a good pen, it suited the paper. Now all she had to do was to write.

My life, she said to herself, doodling the figure of an angel on the receipt for the ink. Who was she writing this for? For posterity? For her family? For Henry? To explain herself to an astonished world?

Or for protection. No diaries, no written records, never commit anything to paper, no letters, nothing that anyone could ever find that would reveal a scrap of information about your private life, that was the rule. Only, if she put it down in writing, with all the details, then if anything did happen to her—

She winced as she thought of the great propellers and the foaming water around them, and that ghoulish little boy of Henry’s, so like his father to look at, telling her with enthusiasm how anything that got in the way of propellers would be sliced up and the ship would barely register a judder in its deepest workings, nothing that anyone would ever notice.

‘Even if you managed to keep clear of the propellers, if you went overboard, then you still wouldn’t drown,’ he’d added. ‘It’s the sharks who get you first, long before you drown.’

She wasn’t going to think about it. She was deliberately keeping clear of the decks, of the rails, where once her delight on board ship was to stand for hours at the rails, looking down into the shifting colours and movement of the sea, green and foaming, or darkest blue, or even, as so often in the Atlantic, grey and forbidding.

‘Mummy will die one day,’ he’d said, his face suddenly troubled. ‘Everybody will. They get old, like people do, and then they’re gone. That’s everyone, even Mummy and Daddy.’

She’d consoled him. ‘Mummy and Daddy won’t die for years and years, not until you’re grown up and have children of your own to worry about.’

‘If there’s a war, and Daddy goes to fight the Germans, then he could be killed.’

What could you say to that, except that it was the truth?

‘Sometimes, very important soldiers, like your daddy, don’t get sent out to fight. They’re too valuable to lose, so they stay at Headquarters and make sure things are done properly.’

‘Not Daddy. He isn’t a coward, he won’t want a desk job, not if there’s a real war.’

Probably not.

She was writing it for herself. So that, if anything happened to her – and she thought again of those great, relentless propellers – someone might read it, and say: ‘I understand.’

Perhaps Alfred was in her mind at that moment, although she wouldn’t admit it to herself. Of all the people she knew who deserved an explanation, Alfred was the one whose opinion she most cared about. Although she hoped that Lally, if she ever came to read it, might think of her with compassion rather than hatred. It would take a saint to be so forgiving, but then Lally was a remarkable woman.

And Claudia? Claudia was out of the same mould as herself, although their fanaticism had taken different directions, it was, at root, the same. A burning desire for a cause greater than oneself. Perhaps her cousin Lucius’s madness came from his mother’s side, after all, and not from those generations of lunatic earls, perhaps folly was in her blood, and in Claudia’s.

There was no excuse there for what she had done.

Well, she would write it down. As her dream had shown her, her life over the last few years would come pouring out in a wave of painfully sharp memories, given half the chance. Those would fill her mind, while her pen could trace the mere bones of her life during those eventful and mistaken years.