Читать книгу A Quiet Life - Natasha Walter - Страница 7

Although Laura had said, time and again, that there was no need for Mother to come on board, in fact, when the moment came, she was glad that she was not embarking alone. They knew the steamer would be half empty, but half empty was quite crowded enough. Holding her smaller suitcase and pulling her muskrat coat around her, Laura had to push through a throng of middle-aged women just to get onto the pier on the Hudson River. She stumbled on an uneven step as they walked up to the tourist class entrance, and as she righted herself she realised how breathless she felt. Still, Mother being there made her determined not to show her uncertainty, or even at this last moment the whole plan might collapse, and she might be ordered home to wait out Ellen’s recovery. So once on board she tried to walk with more confidence, as if she knew where they were going, up to the information desk where a steward rattled out the directions to her cabin so quickly that she had to ask him to repeat them.

‘Take the elevator down one floor, along the corridor to the right, through the double doors …’ As he was talking, Laura couldn’t help noticing the sign above the desk: ‘The company’s regulations prohibit passengers from passing from one class to another. Passengers are therefore kindly requested to refrain from applying for this privilege and to keep within the confines of the class in which booked.’ The steward noticed the direction of her gaze. ‘We do tours, you know,’ he said.

‘Tours?’

‘Every day, you can visit the first-class deck. Or if you go to the movie, you’ll go into their side.’

‘Do they visit us?’

He laughed as if she had made some kind of joke, and then turned to the impatient elderly couple behind them.

The smell of old cigarette smoke hit her when she opened the door to her cabin and, putting her toilet case on the bed, Laura stood irresolutely beside it.

‘Look, your trunk is already here,’ Mother said, gesturing to the shiny brown box which they had given to a porter at the pier together with her cabin number. Mother always pointed out the obvious, was always fussily one step behind. But Laura was suddenly reluctant for her to leave. It would be so final, to be left here with these things that didn’t look like her things at all. They were all brand new, that was why, bought in the splurge of shopping that had followed the sudden decision that the girls must go to London. Only Laura’s name, written in her carefully neat lettering on the tag, told her the brown trunk was hers. The other bed – that would have been Ellen’s – was a rebuke, but at least it looked as though no one else had booked it. Laura had quailed at the thought of sleeping with a stranger.

Mother was once again going through things that she had told her before, about how there would be a female steward who would look out for her, how she mustn’t be afraid to let the steward know if anyone bothered her, and how Aunt Dee’s maid would be at Waterloo to meet her. The thought of the maid brought Laura’s anxiety up more sharply than ever. She was almost ready to interrupt the stream of admonitions about telegrams and underwear, food and gratitude, and say that she had changed her mind. Indeed, she had just turned to Mother, about to speak, when they heard the shout along the corridor, ‘All ashore that’s going ashore,’ and Laura’s face reverted to the still expression her mother hated. Contained, as Laura thought. Sulky, as her mother had described it only that morning. Laura opened the door to the corridor.

They walked together up to the point where the corridor split in two. All of a sudden Mother put her arms around her. They never embraced, and Laura stepped back without thinking. The abruptness of her move was tempered by the press of people converging at that very point; it was not a place to stand, not in the middle of the friends and family who were returning to the pier and the passengers making their way up to the deck. And so the two of them were carried forward in separate streams of movement. Laura thought to herself, I’ll make it better, I’ll wave. She saw herself in her mind’s eye on deck, blowing kisses, borne backwards.

And she was leaning on the rail, looking for that grey fur hat in the crowd, when a woman beside her stepped right onto her foot. ‘Sorry,’ the woman said without turning, and Laura found herself looking at the curve of a cheek and curls of hatless hair rather than out to the pier. ‘Why is leaving so—’ the woman said, her last word lost in the scream of a whistle that rent the air. Her gesture was not lost, however. She seemed to sum up and then to dismiss the jagged Manhattan skyline as she brought her hands together and flung them apart. The view was full of sunshine and watery reflections, but Laura could not make out where Mother was standing, and she narrowed her eyes at the knots of people, pulling her coat tight around her neck. Then the wind was sharp in her face as the ship began to move, and she took a deep breath. The voyage had begun.

The woman next to her was wearing only a cloth coat, open over her dress, and a drab knitted scarf, yet she didn’t seem cold. Laura turned to look at her again, but she couldn’t have been more surprised when the woman turned too, and said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘How about getting a drink?’

Of course Laura had imagined meeting people on board; no young woman could step onto a ship that year and not think of Elinor and her doomed onboard romance in Till My Heart Is Still, which Laura had read in a creased paperback lent to her by a school friend, but she had not imagined such a quick advance into acquaintanceship with a woman who did not seem quite her kind. A part of Laura wanted to go on standing on deck, taking the measure of her solitude and the start of her journey, but the woman’s nonchalance was appealing. So Laura found herself following her into a low-ceilinged, airless lounge on the floor below. As soon as she saw the people – mainly men – at the tables, she paused at the door, but the woman walked forward without hesitation, putting her purse and a book she was holding on a table and sitting down in one of the worn, tapestry-covered chairs.

When the waiter came up to them, the woman ordered a beer immediately. Laura was slower. She could not pretend that ordering alcohol would be natural for her, and she was thirsty and tired. ‘A cup of coffee, please. And a glass of water.’

‘Funnily enough, I was here yesterday – not on the boat, on the pier – welcoming those boys home—’

‘You mean—’

‘The boys they brought back from Spain. Heroes, one and all.’

‘They were brave, weren’t they?’ Laura’s comment was uncertain. She came from a home that was so lacking interest in politics that her father rarely even took a daily newspaper. He voted Republican, she was pretty sure, but she had never felt able to ask him about his views, or why, whenever he mentioned Roosevelt’s name, he sounded so disparaging. As for her mother, an Englishwoman who was proud to understand little about America, she often shook her head about what the world was coming to, or expressed grave misgivings about one leader or another, but she had never – in Laura’s memory – stated any positive political view. Growing up in a home so insulated from the world had left Laura ignorant, but also curious, so she responded in a vague but friendly manner to the woman’s statement about the heroism of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The woman continued to talk about one of the boys who had come home, and his experiences at the hands of the Fascists in Spain. ‘No,’ Laura said at the right moment, ‘How – how terrible.’ But she could tell that her responses were limp.

‘There are lots of them still over there, you know – desperate to get home. I’ve been helping to raise the money. Shall I tell you something else? Such a strange coincidence, I’ve been thinking and thinking about it. The last person I know who sailed this way on this actual ship was a stowaway. This guy wanted to get to Spain, he didn’t have a cent, so he crept in behind a wealthy family, just as if he were one of the entourage, and then kept walking once he was on board.’

‘Really?’ Again, Laura’s expression was encouraging, although she was unsure of the right thing to say. ‘Where did he sleep?’

‘He said there was a steward involved – sympathetic to the cause, I guess, who slipped him food too.’

‘It’s hardly believable,’ said Laura, whose imagination was suddenly stirred by the thought of a lonely man attempting invisibility on a crowded ship. She leant forward to ask more, but just then they were interrupted.

‘It’s true enough, though,’ came another voice. Laura turned. At the table next to them was a young man sitting alone. Although he wasn’t unattractive, with a mobile face and dark hair falling over his forehead, both women frowned as they realised that he had been listening to their conversation.

‘How do you know?’

‘I remember seeing a report about them. They were arrested when they landed in Le Havre, though, poor boys. Didn’t have the papers, didn’t have any money.’

‘The man I’m talking about, he wasn’t arrested. He got to Spain and fought and was wounded and now he’s in southern France somewhere. Can’t get home, but he’s written to his mother to tell her he’s safe. That’s how I know all about it.’

‘That’s a great story – do you know his name?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘Hey, don’t be suspicious.’ The man rose and stepped over to their table. ‘Mind if I join you?’

‘We’re happy as we are.’

‘Well, you won’t mind if I perch here,’ he said, sitting down anyway and tapping his cigarette in the empty ashtray. ‘I’ll be honest with you – I’m a journalist. Name’s Joe Segal. I like stories like that. Wouldn’t hurt the man to have the story told now.’

‘What if the line came back at him for the stolen passage?’

‘The French Line’s got more on its hands than chasing a stowaway from years back.’

‘Last year—’

‘Tell me more about the story without the name. I can tell you’re sympathetic. Wouldn’t you like to inspire others to do what he did?’

‘It’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it?’ The woman shook her head. ‘To be honest, I don’t know a lot more. Just what I said: he stowed away, a steward helped him, brought him food – some of the best food he ever ate, you know, stuff that the people in the top suites hadn’t bothered to touch – caviar, you name it. He had to hunker down in some equipment room most of the time, and then when he got to Le Havre the steward tipped him off to come out only when the staff were getting off, so everyone assumed he was from the engine room. He looked pretty grubby, you can imagine, by then. Apparently the staff here is so huge that he got away without anyone really knowing him. This steward just walked alongside him – and then someone met him at Perpignan station, and you know, there were loads of boys going over then. It’s not impossible …’

The journalist smiled, and Laura saw how the story tickled him. ‘The idea of a Red holed up in this ship – have you seen the first-class decks?’

‘I’ve heard about them,’ Laura said. Although in the rather down-at-heel tourist-class lounge it seemed unlikely, in fact the ship that they were travelling on was a byword for glamour. At this, the man seemed to notice Laura for the first time, turning his attention to her. He told her that he had seen someone he thought was Gloria Swanson getting onto the ship on the first-class side, and although Laura just raised her eyebrows at the thought, this, too, stirred her imagination. She thought of the lonely star, drinking martinis in her suite, perhaps, or taking a shower and feeling the warm water fall onto her ageing body, and the whole boat seemed to contain the extraordinary multiplicity of adult life and desire in a way that made her feel how right she was to have come, to have insisted to Mother that even now, even without her sister, a trip to London would be safe.

‘If you walk through the engine room, you come out on the first-class deck and no one’s going to stop you if you want to go have a look at those palatial surroundings …’ the man was saying.

‘Is that so? Will no one mind?’

‘They say girls do it all the time – though the stewards might not be so pleased about the boys drifting over.’

Laura had finished her coffee by this time, and just then the boat dipped alarmingly in the swell. She felt, to her horror, a heat rise through her stomach. ‘I’m going to lie down,’ she said.

‘You’re not feeling ill already, are you?’ The woman was looking at her with what seemed like real concern.

Laura shook her head. At not quite twenty, she still had all the awkwardness of adolescence. Although she didn’t want to be rude to these strangers with their interesting stories, equally she had no idea how to talk to them. She got up. To her surprise, the woman stood too, saying that she was going to go to her cabin.

‘I’m Florence Bell,’ she said, as they walked down the corridor. ‘You?’

‘Laura. Laura Leverett.’

‘I didn’t want to ask just then in front of him – seemed like he might be thinking of getting fresh – thought it would be better if he thought we knew each other.’

This statement, innocuous as it was, seemed to turn the woman suddenly from a stranger into an ally, so as Laura got to her cabin she turned to Florence. ‘Will you knock for me when you go up for dinner?’ The way the words came out, there was something needy about the request, and Laura braced herself for a dismissal, but Florence’s assent was so matter-of-fact it reassured her.

Alone in her cabin, Laura still felt self-conscious, almost as though she were being watched. She even found herself, as she put her purse on the bed and took off her coat, composing the first few lines of a letter to Ellen. In her mind, she presented the cabin as having a certain charm – ‘blue as the sea should be! With quite enough room to swing a cat!’ – although in reality it was small and ugly. The fact that all the furniture was bolted down and the room carpeted in a springy felt only added to its claustrophobic feel, and here, she noticed, the reverberations of the engine seemed exaggerated, thrumming through the soles of her feet. Looking for the lavatory, she opened a door in the side of the room. It revealed a tiny toilet and shower stall, which smelt reassuringly of disinfectant. She stripped and got under the shower. For a while it puzzled her that her lavender soap would not lather, until she realised that the water was salt.

After her shower she dressed, but then lay down, and the exhaustion engendered by all the strange new impressions pushed her into a half-sleep, so that when the rap on the door came and she heard the clear voice of her new acquaintance calling through it, she had to ask her to wait while she rebelted her dress. ‘I fell asleep,’ she said apologetically, opening the door, ‘can you wait a second?’

She was looking for her lipstick, clipping on her earrings. ‘Are you the only one in this cabin?’ asked Florence, stepping inside. ‘The boat isn’t even half full, is it?’

‘Actually we booked this whole room.’ Laura explained how she and her sister had been intending to travel together, but how Ellen’s sudden appendicitis had put paid to that plan. ‘Mother was going to call the whole thing off, but I managed to convince her I’d behave myself for three days on a ship …’ Laura paused, suddenly conscious that her mother’s protectiveness might sound ridiculous to this independent woman. ‘She still sees me as a child,’ she said weakly.

But Florence, who was looking at the magazine Laura had left on the bed, hardly seemed to have heard her. It was a magazine about Hollywood stars, and Florence flicked through it for a few seconds while Laura lipsticked her mouth and slid her feet into her patent shoes, and then she dropped it on the floor. ‘Come on, I’m hungry as a horse. Haven’t eaten all day.’

They were early, so that only a few of the tables were taken, but rather than pausing for the waiter to show them where to sit, Florence walked directly to the table she wanted, in the middle of the room.

‘Funny how your magazine puts that actress on the cover and doesn’t say a word about her politics,’ she said suddenly as they were sitting down and shaking out their napkins.

‘Her politics?’

‘She is committed, you know – signed a petition a few months ago for aid for Spain. I guess the studio doesn’t want anyone seeing her as a Red, but even so, they could mention it.’

‘Did you see her last film?’ Laura asked. Here, she would be on familiar ground, since she had seen it and had decided views on it, but Florence shook her head and started telling Laura about some other actors who supported aid for Spain.

When the waiter came up with the menus, Florence took them from him with a quick nod, hardly interrupting their conversation, and even when she knocked a fork to the floor as she opened it, she seemed unflustered. Watching her read the menu, Laura realised that she was one of the first women she had ever met who appeared to have no physical uncertainty. Her dress was shabby, her hair unwaved and her eyebrows unplucked, but her gestures were expansive and her voice determined. Laura had been brought up into the certain knowledge that a woman’s body and voice were always potential sources of shame, that only by intense scrutiny and control could one become acceptable. Hairy shins, stained skirt, smudged lipstick – anything could mark out one’s failure. Laura thought she was doing all right this evening, in her wool crepe dress with the bow at the neck and the navy belt, with her pearl earclips and her unladdered stockings. These had all been bought for this voyage, and allowed Laura to take her seat in the restaurant feeling reasonably confident that she would fit in. Florence, however, seemed to be unaware of such concerns. Planting her elbows on the table, even though one sleeve was actually torn at the wrist, as the restaurant filled up and the waiter hovered to take their order, she went on talking to Laura as if they were alone and no one was watching them.

As she talked, Laura realised again that Florence was not the sort of girl she usually mixed with – not one of us, as Laura’s mother would put it. She had been working since she was fourteen; first, she explained, in her uncle’s glove-making business, and latterly in the offices of a large shipping company. But all the time her real work had been ‘organising’, as she called it. Organising. That could mean almost anything. But in Florence’s stories – she had told two or three stories by the time they had eaten their soup and their tough little chops – it was all about battles, of the powerless against the powerful. She told a story about how she had tried to insist on better conditions in her own uncle’s factory, which had led to her banishment from that side of the family. ‘But Father stuck by me. He is a Party member himself.’ Laura said nothing at that, too incredulous to speak.

Indeed, at first Laura’s role seemed to be only that of the listener. But after a while she began to ask questions, all of them positive, and at one point led Florence back to the story about the stowaway which had so flared in her imagination. After dinner both women felt too keyed up to go back to their rooms, and Laura agreed quickly when Florence suggested that they go up to the deck.

Out there, under the night sky, the wind came shockingly against the girls’ faces. They struggled over to the railings, where they stood looking down into the foam-patterned ocean. ‘You’re going all the way to France, then?’ Laura said, assuming that Florence would be trying to get as near to Spain as possible.

‘No – just England.’ There was a pause, and then she continued. ‘I was really keen on my last job, it was just office work, but I was organising the girls, the typists, the kind of thing that a lot of boys in the Party don’t really understand, but it’s – important, frankly. To get them to understand. But I got into real trouble—’ Then she stopped and looked at Laura. ‘Hell, I don’t know why I’m even thinking of telling you this.’

Laura was entranced. Was she going to be given a confidence already? Girls at school had rarely invited her into their circles of intimacy. Although she was trustworthy – as she saw it – there was something that put girls off giving her the linked arms and whispered secrets that they gave to others. Perhaps because she never shared confidences herself, being too scared that if she once let others scent the dismal smell of failure that hung around her own family, no one would like her, or perhaps because, as one girl once said to her, ‘You’re such a good girl, Laura, you wouldn’t understand.’ But here was this warmly energetic stranger, ready to entrust Laura with her inner life.

Laura had had an unaccustomed glass of wine over dinner, and it had made her movements more open than usual. She put out her hand and touched Florence’s, where it lay on the rail. It was an untypically expansive gesture from her, but Florence was not to know that.

And so Florence launched into another story, about how she had been onto such a good thing with the girls in the shipping company, and how they had taken their demands for job security and paid holiday to their boss, and how he had pretended to give in, and then sacked Florence and some of the others and taken back his promise. She had been so humiliated, she said, after all the girls had put their faith in her, and one night, fired up by fury after visiting one of the girls who had been sacked and who hadn’t eaten that day as she was so worried about how to pay her rent, she, Florence, had broken into the office and destroyed a whole lot of invoicing files. ‘It felt good,’ she said, obviously remembering with some pleasure and then catching herself up, ‘but – ugh, it was the wrong thing to do.’

In Laura’s mind, the action unfolded like a comic strip: the dastardly boss, the daring night raid. But Florence was now describing something much more real and complicated. ‘He obviously suspected me, and the police came to question me. Luckily I was out when they called – I moved to a friend’s apartment, but then I had to move again, and when I told someone in the Party, they called me in to discipline me. Very unhelpful for the revolution, they said. And when I went for other jobs the last few months I didn’t get anything, I felt people knew about it – it was all horrible. Well, this girl I met a couple of years ago, this English girl, has been writing me and encouraging me to come over to Europe. She was in Spain but she’s back in London now, working in a printers. I just thought that it was time to make a fresh start. My uncle, the one who cut me off ages ago, gave Father the money for my ticket. I think everyone thought I’d gone too far in New York.’ Her voice, which had been so strong and certain, seemed thin now, blown back in the wind.

‘It sounds like you did the right thing.’

‘No, no, the Party told me – I mustn’t make things personal like that. We have to organise for collective action, not go off on our own.’

Despite the darkness that surrounded them, Laura was intensely aware of Florence’s physical presence as she spoke, of her little sigh as she leaned backwards, her hands gripping the rail, and the scent of her – sweat, wine, laundry soap – which seemed so warm even in the chilly night air. She shivered.

‘I’m cold too,’ Florence said. ‘Let’s go down.’

‘Are you tired?’

Laura was disappointed at the thought of the evening already coming to an end, but Florence said immediately, ‘We can get a drink in that bar again.’

In her flat shoes, Florence was sure-footed on the iron stairs that led from the deck to the lower floor, but Laura clung tight to the rails. Florence said over her shoulder as they went down, ‘So why are you going to London – family, did you say?’

‘Yes, my mother’s sister – my mother is English.’

‘You sound English yourself.’

‘Do I? That’s only because of Mother.’

‘You remind me of an English actress I once saw in a movie—’

‘Who?’ She was desperate to know how she might be seen by others. Was there someone she was like? How did she strike people? But to her disappointment they were already at the door of the bar and Florence did not reply. There were not many tables free in the lounge now, but Joe waved to them from a table to their left, where he was sitting with two women. It would have been too pointed to ignore him and so, after a quick look at Laura, Florence walked forwards and Joe pulled chairs up to the table.

Introductions were swift; the two new women were called Maisie and Lily, and Laura commented immediately on their English accents. These two women were clearly sisters, with tightly marcelled auburn hair and wide-apart eyes and small mouths, which gave them a look of almost doll-like innocence. That look was belied by their conversation. One of them was telling a tale about a casting manager for a big New York show where they had been working, who thought he was owed favours by every woman in the chorus.

‘But he could never do the job,’ Maisie said with a mocking tone. ‘What he really liked was being told off for being a naughty boy …’

‘Isn’t that the English vice?’

‘Oh, American men are quite as bad,’ Lily said. Laura and Florence fell silent during the conversation, and quite soon Laura got up to say good night, and again to her pleasure Florence got up too and they went down the corridor together.

‘Wait a minute,’ Florence said at the door of her room, and Laura stood uncertainly as she went in and came out again. ‘I thought you might like to read this – yesterday’s now, but anyway.’ It was a copy of the Daily Worker, which Florence obviously thought more suitable reading for Laura than the Hollywood magazine she had seen in her cabin. Laura thought she might feel criticised, but as she walked down the corridor to her room, she realised that what she actually felt was – what was it? – noticed, singled out, even if found wanting.

And that was why, after carefully wiping the make-up off her face with cold cream, the way that she had learned to do from magazines, Laura lay down in the hard, narrow bed and, despite the discomfort of the swell of the boat, she started reading the newspaper that Florence had given her. Most of the headlines, about delegates and conferences, policies and speeches, were too alien to hold her attention, but on an inside page she found a column about women’s lives, by one Sally Barker, which mentioned the importance of men taking a role in domestic work if their wives were to take their place in the revolution. The writer talked about how too many women were trapped at home in America, while in Russia women were able to take their place next to their menfolk in the factories. ‘There we see no selfish husbands who expect servants rather than companions, and no nagging wives who realise life has passed them by. We see women who proudly go out and put their shoulder to the wheel, and men who are not ashamed to rock the cradle.’ Laura read it idly, but after she had put the newspaper down and turned out her light, its words kept drifting through her mind.

And as she slept, the words of the article seemed to thicken and take shape in her dreams, so that Sally Barker took on the form of one of her old teachers from school. She was sitting, in her dream, with Laura in her own living room at home and they were watching her mother sewing a skirt, but then gradually she realised that her mother was stitching the skirt onto Laura’s own body, and she felt ashamed in case her teacher could see the little stains on the skirt where her blood was seeping. It was a surreal, nonsensical dream, she thought when she woke in the small hours, her heart pounding, but she could still feel her panic. As she woke properly, she realised that it was physical discomfort that had woken her, and she struggled out of the bed and staggered to the bathroom to retch over the toilet. As she lay back down again, the ship’s swell seemed greater than ever, and the room horribly claustrophobic in the darkness, and she lay uneasily until she heard the sounds of people coming and going in the corridor and thought it might be time for breakfast.

In the restaurant there was no sign of Florence or the journalist, and so she sat self-consciously on her own. When the waiter put the toast and coffee in front of her, to her horror she realised that she was feeling ill again, and she had to rush out of the restaurant to the nearest bathroom. As she washed her hands and mouth in the little basin, she saw how tired and pinched her face looked in the mirror, and rather than return to the restaurant she went out onto the deck.

‘Feeling okay?’ a voice said to her from a deckchair, and Laura turned to see Joe sitting there.

‘Not my best,’ she muttered.

‘Sit here and eat this,’ he said, offering her a bag of saltines with a casual gesture. Her instinct was to refuse, but then she realised she longed for one. ‘You’ll feel better soon. The weather’s calming, it was a bit of a rough night, wasn’t it? This ship has the worst vibrations of any I’ve ever known.’

‘Have you done this journey before?’

‘Just once. And once from Southampton to France, and down to Morocco and Egypt.’

Laura asked nothing about his travels, but someone as determined to talk as Joe was not to be put off by a lack of direct questions. He told Laura about the boat he’d taken to north Africa, about the film playing that afternoon in the ship’s cinema, which he had seen the previous week in New York, and he called the steward over for hot coffee. In such loquacious company Laura could relax a little, knowing that nothing was expected of her.

At one point he stopped and looked at the newspaper which Laura had put down at her feet. ‘You’re not a Red too, are you?’

‘Florence gave it to me—’

‘Still, they’re right about some things,’ Joe said, taking the newspaper and looking at the front page. ‘At least they get what’s going on in Europe. They don’t do the “if only, if only” – you know, “if only he was a nicer guy or he would accept this or that” – they can see that kind of stuff is all baloney, that there’s got to be a showdown sooner or later.’

At this, Laura said nothing. She and her mother and sister had all convinced one another that war was a long way off, and even if they had done so simply because they wanted to believe that a trip to London was still possible, the conviction was now hard to throw off. Joe went on talking, about what he couldn’t stand about communism, how they wanted everyone to toe the line. ‘They want everyone to be the same,’ he was saying.

To her own surprise, Laura found herself shaking her head. She had only that one article to go on, but she found herself saying something, which sounded inarticulate even to herself, about how it was everyone else who wanted women to be the same, and it was good if the communists thought that they could be free. Almost as soon as she had started to speak, she tailed off, and Joe laughed and started to tell her she was wrong, and that women wanted to be real women, not workers, but she was hardly listening. It was as though only on saying the word ‘free’ had she realised what she had been thinking all night – and not just that night, but forever, for as long as she could remember – about her home life, about her mother … yes, it was Mother who loomed in her mind, Mother’s nagging, her carping, and even, from time to time, on dark nights full of awful yells and worse silences, her sobbing. She had always resented Mother, always blamed her, but that word ‘free’ had hurt her as soon as she had tried to say it, because it was the word that Mother had spoken once, on the one occasion she had tried to speak to Laura seriously, she had told her not to give up her freedom as she had done. Freedom. What had Mother given up? As the unbidden memories crackled through Laura’s mind, she closed her eyes, the cracker she was eating an inedible lump in her mouth, and she heard Joe asking if she was going to be ill, and she made herself open her eyes and smile. That’s what you do, you stay quiet, you open your eyes, you smile. Whatever you do, you never open the door to the place where the yells and the sobbing can be heard. ‘I guess you’re right,’ she said quietly, as Joe told her that women didn’t want to have to work in the same way men did, and that communists had no idea what women really wanted. ‘Fashion, families, you know.’

‘They have fashion in the paper,’ Laura said, looking down at the newspaper that had caused the argument, and then knowing that she had been much too combative already, she smiled a dismissive little smile and asked Joe another question about what he was going to do when he got to Southampton – or Le Havre? He was happy to keep talking, and Laura found she didn’t have to speak much more, while he was so eager to air his views and experiences.

As the swell did indeed die down, and the sun appeared weakly, one of the auburn-haired girls, Maisie, joined them. She complained of a headache, but she was still breezy company, one of those people who worked hard to match each anecdote in a conversation with one of her own, so that between the two of them Laura could sit more or less in silence, her fur coat buttoned up to her chin, beginning to feel better as the wind blew over them.

‘Florence!’ she called, seeing a tall figure, her hair whipping back, walking along the deck.

‘Did I have a bad night …’ Florence said, sitting down heavily beside them.

‘Me too.’

‘The woman in my cabin was being ill all night … ugh. Listening to sounds of someone else vomiting when you’re trying to sleep … It stinks in there this morning, too.’

Laura commiserated with her, but Florence seemed less friendly than she had the day before, shrunk into herself. ‘It’s too cold to sit here, how can you stand it?’ she asked and Laura could see her shivering in her cloth coat.

‘We did the journey the other way in the summer – much better,’ Maisie said. ‘We went swimming – look at it now.’

They all looked down at the open tourist-class swimming pool, its water whipped into waves by the wind.

‘Didn’t you say that people go over to the first-class side to swim?’ Laura asked, and Joe told them again that he had heard from other passengers that there was an easy way to the indoor swimming pool through the engine room. She found herself unexpectedly intrigued by the idea, and so, clearly, did Maisie.

‘We could go,’ she said, glancing at Laura. ‘Not to swim, I suppose – just to look.’

‘Are you coming, Florence?’ Laura asked.

‘You’ll have to change – you can’t go over in that dress, they’ll see through you in an instant,’ said Maisie, eyeing Florence’s drab dress and worn shoes.

‘I’m not going to dress up and pretend to be something – for what?’ Florence said crossly. ‘I’ve got a headache, anyway.’

‘Why don’t you lie down?’ Laura said, regretting the words once they were said, for their fussy tone.

‘Go back to that cabin? The smell of vomit?’

Laura was delighted by her next thought, which was to offer Florence her own room, since there was an unused bed in it. Florence accepted without any particular graciousness. All three women got up, and Laura walked back to her cabin with Florence while Maisie went to change, telling Laura to meet her by the engine room. Laura opened up her brown trunk to find a better dress than the one she was wearing.

‘You have so many clothes.’ There was a kind of rebuke in Florence’s voice, and Laura looked awkwardly down at the folded piles of jersey and velvet and crepe, cerise and grey and peacock blue.

If she hadn’t been with Maisie, there was no way that Laura would have crossed into first class. The roar in the engine room echoed in her stomach and almost seemed to lift her into the air. The couple of men at work on the engines did not seem to think it was their job to ask what they were doing, and when the two slipped through the huge double doors on the other side, it reminded Laura of being in a school play and coming suddenly out of the dusty, dark wings onto a brightly lit and confusing stage. Now the ceiling was twice as high above them, and the musty smell of cigarettes and old food was replaced by scents of lilies and polish. The wide, gilded corridors seemed to have been designed by a film director with delusions of grandeur, but you felt as though it had been flimsily realised, as if the marble might turn out to be painted and the inlaid wood just veneer. There were few people around, and they were moving slowly, a couple of elderly men walking with shaky steps down a staircase, a very overweight woman standing uncertainly in a doorway, as if each of them was overwhelmed by the decor. The pool room was the icing on this heavily sugared cake, a sweep of blue lined with multicoloured mosaics.

Once there, the girls perched on two of the white and gilt chairs by the side of the pool. Maisie got out her cigarettes and Laura found herself imitating the way that Maisie was sitting, with her legs crossed and her hand holding the cigarette out to one side, but it was a poor pretence of nonchalance. She asked Maisie questions about what she was going to do back in London, and learned how she had tried to start a career in the New York shows over the last few years, but things had not gone according to plan. After a while they lapsed into silence, and Laura found her gaze arrested by a woman who was swimming determined laps, up and down, up and down. Eventually she stopped and got out, a tall, straight figure in a belted white swimming costume, who removed her cap to show a bob of almost white blonde hair.

‘Who’s she?’ said Maisie. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen her before. Is she in the movies?’ Laura didn’t know. ‘Or is she some society girl?’

It seemed more than likely. The woman walked to the side of the pool, her chin lifted, her shoulders back. ‘Hughie,’ she called to a tall man, who was reading a newspaper at the bar with a friend. ‘I’m off to the hairdresser. See you for cocktails later.’

‘At the bar upstairs?’

‘Absolutely not. Come to my suite. The Landers will be along too.’

Ebslutly naut … Her voice was struck glass, ringing with a brittle tone, and as she walked past them again, her towel trailing slightly on the ground, her gaze hovered about a foot above their heads. Laura could swear she knew they were in the wrong place. She felt that it was time to go back, but Maisie started talking to her again, this time about London, and despite herself Laura started to ask her questions about the city they were steaming towards, which she had never seen.

‘Is this yours?’ It was one of the men to whom the blonde woman had spoken, a man with a young face but thinning hair, and Laura automatically shook her head and avoided his eyes. But Maisie was leaning forward, looking at the silver cigarette lighter he was holding.

‘No, it’s not mine,’ she said, smiling up at him.

‘I say, I haven’t seen you around before.’

‘Haven’t you?’

Laura flushed. The man’s voice had sounded mocking to her and it seemed clear that he knew they were not in the right class, but Maisie was oblivious as she introduced them.

‘Are you having a good voyage, Miss May?’ The man sat down next to them, unbidden, and Laura noticed him raise his eyebrows at his friend by the bar, who drained his drink and walked over to them. The conversation between Maisie and the first man seemed to be moving along quite easily. They were even laughing by the time the other man sat down. ‘And we have drinks and you don’t,’ he was saying. ‘Martinis?’

‘I’ll have a whisky sour,’ Maisie said.

‘I’m fine. I don’t need a thing,’ Laura said, in a voice that was too quiet perhaps to be heard, as the man seemed to take no notice and ordered them all drinks, which came quickly. In Laura’s mouth, the spirits were bitterly strong, but she drank anyway, because it seemed to be expected of her.

‘You’re a quiet one, aren’t you?’ the other man said, leaning towards her, and Laura smiled, but it was a tight little smile.

Maisie and the first man, Hughie, were by now discussing various shows in New York, and he was talking about which of the actresses he had seen had the best shape, as he put it. He looked very obviously at Maisie’s breasts as he spoke, and Maisie arched her back. ‘I’ll tell you who does better martinis than you’ll get at the bar,’ he said and his friend laughed. ‘Mine are the best on the boat.’

Maisie immediately said something with a double entendre that Laura did not understand, but from the roar of the men, Laura could see it went down well. Before she quite realised it was happening, Maisie was getting up and the men were putting down their drinks, and they were all walking together from the pool room. Laura fell into step with Maisie and told her she was going to go back, and Maisie told her not to be a spoilsport. She turned away from her as she did so, and towards the men, and Laura felt hot with embarrassment and uncertainty. The suite turned out to be even more oppressively ostentatious than the public rooms – all gilt and glass and satin curtains, and even a baby grand piano at the edge of the room. Maisie sat down immediately on one of the blue velvet sofas, and crossed her legs so that her dress rode up to her knees.

Maisie asked them about the woman they had seen at the swimming pool. ‘Amy?’ Hughie said, as if they obviously knew who she was. ‘She’ll be at the hairdressers for the next couple of hours.’ It was that statement, as though he had been let off by Amy for a little amusement, and his amusement was going to be these girls from tourist class, that made Laura flush up with embarrassment again. She replied monosyllabically to everything that was said to her, until the second man gave up on her and lay down on the floor, smoking a cigar.

Meanwhile, Hughie was talking to Maisie about shapes again and how he had once known a dancer with ‘curves like watermelons’. ‘Are you saying mine aren’t?’ Maisie said, and the man leant over and cupped his hands around her breasts and pretended to judge. ‘That’s just your brassiere, isn’t it?’ he said at last, and she laughed in a high, yelping voice.

At this, Laura got up. ‘I must go,’ she said, ‘my friend’s waiting for me,’ but the man on the rug seemed to have fallen asleep, while Hughie was now engaged in a struggle with Maisie. Just as he managed to release Maisie’s breasts from her dress, immediately putting his head down to lick one rosy nipple, Laura turned the handle of the door and went out into the corridor.

Out of the room, she realised that she was unsure where to go. She started walking to her left, but the corridor split in two. Seeing a steward coming towards her with a large tray, she stepped to the right, but after a while she realised she was walking down a passage she had not seen before. She saw an elderly gentleman walking towards her, and finally summoned the courage to ask where the pool room was. Once there she managed to retrace her steps back through the engine room and into tourist class again. The smell, the low ceiling and the dingy felt carpet in her cabin seemed more lowering than before. Florence was asleep in the spare bed, her face squashed into a flat pillow, and Laura sat down heavily. After a while, she watched Florence wake up, yawning.

Although she had thought that she was dying to tell Florence about the experience she had just had, and about the way Maisie had behaved, once she was awake Laura realised she didn’t want to talk about it. She was no longer sure that she had behaved in the right way, leaving Maisie there. Part of her wondered if Maisie was all right, and the other part of her was full of hot anger. In her confusion, she said nothing about it.

‘The other side of the boat … you wouldn’t believe …’ was all she said in a blank voice, ‘more gilt than you can imagine.’

Florence sat up and stretched. ‘Why aren’t you travelling on that side anyway – your family must have quite a bit of dough?’ Laura realised that she was looking again at the pile of dresses on the trunk.

‘We’re okay now. Not rich like those women in first class. But it was only last year we got our money. And we have been struggling.’ Laura felt as though she were trying to excuse herself, to explain away the clothes, the earrings and the fur coat hanging on the back of the door. It was true, they had struggled. It wasn’t the kind of poverty that Florence would be used to, of course – being hungry or cold – it was nice people’s poverty. It meant that your clothes were last year’s, faded and mended when the girls at your school came to class every term in clothes that were fresh and scented and glossy with newness. It meant that when there was a leak from the bathroom into the living room, there wasn’t the money to make it better, and the ceiling and wallpaper stayed stained and a piece had to be cut out of the carpet, so that you didn’t invite girls home. It was about saying no to invitations that you longed for – to the theatre, to parties – because you couldn’t return them. It was about not going to college, but taking a secretarial course and then a little job at a real estate office, where you ate your lunch out of a paper bag every day. It was about your father being out of work and coming home smelling of drink late at night, every night. And it had gone on, day after day, year after year, the little miseries of nice people’s poverty.

Until suddenly, last year, with the death of her English grandfather whom she had never met, there was a lurch into a kind of wealth: shopping trips into Boston, the planned vacation in Europe, so many plans, so much chatter, which should have drowned out those years of humiliation. All that is behind you now, Laura reminded herself. Across miles of water now. This is where you are now, with this new friend.

At that thought, Laura smiled at Florence, and asked her if she wanted to stay in her cabin for the rest of the journey. Florence responded in a characteristically matter-of-fact way, and went to her old room to get her things – which turned out to be just a big old carpet bag, and when she came back in she said she was going to shower. Putting the bag down on the floor, she stripped carelessly. Laura and her sister had always observed a careful propriety with one another, and Florence’s beautifully modelled back and buttocks and legs and, as she turned, the slopes of her breasts and stomach flashed into Laura’s sight and stayed there even after Florence had gone into the shower room.

That evening they went up to the deck again after dinner and found a place behind a glass screen, where the wind was less bitter and they could sit for hours. Laura told Florence about the article that had made such an impression on her, and Florence immediately responded by agreeing that this was what things were like in Russia for men and women. ‘A friend of mine made a trip there last year,’ she said. ‘She told me all about it.’ The way Florence described her friend’s experiences, everyone was able to participate in the happy-ever-after of equality. ‘Everything that’s so demeaning about relationships between men and women in America – gone.’ Laura tried to grasp what this would mean, but Florence had already moved off onto other themes – dignity, fair wages, work.

Work. Florence asked Laura if she had ever worked. The memory of those months in the real estate office flooded back into Laura’s mind. Of course she had been told many times how lucky she was to find a job, any job, that summer of 1937. It had been a humid, languid August to start with, and in Stairbridge almost everyone she had known from school was off on vacation, out on airy hills or beaches. Only Laura, it seemed to her, was condemned to this miserable office, where the summer days fell away pointlessly, unfulfilled, behind the windowpanes. She typed invoices and contracts line after line, page after page, rattle, rattle, rattle and bang, until she felt like a vase fretted all over with fine cracks, as though she would shatter at a touch. ‘I hated it,’ she said, a little shamefaced. ‘I don’t think I’m any good at working. It was so – repetitive.’

‘That’s the whole point.’

‘What is?’

‘There’s so much …’ and for a moment Florence seemed to hesitate, as if everything she wanted to tell Laura was too large to contemplate – and then she plunged in. She told Laura about the alienation of labour, and how capitalism reduced the worker to being an instrument rather than a person, and made work an endless sequence of repetitive actions. She told her that in a communist society every man and woman would be able to engage in meaningful work that really did spring from their personality. The alienation of labour. For some reason this abstract idea suddenly sprang into life for Laura, as she remembered those summer days and the sense, new to her and one she would never forget, that she was looking down at herself from far above, that she was not part of the life mapped out for her.

She made Florence talk more and more, as the swell rose and fell beneath them, and even when Joe stopped to speak to them, she shrugged him off. As Florence spoke, a gull momentarily landed on the railing like a white emissary from the future and the pared moon was suddenly naked as the clouds left it behind. Or was that just how Laura remembered the scene afterwards? Because she replayed the conversation in her mind for weeks and years to come, remembering over and over how she listened to Florence’s words and how freighted with meaning they seemed. The promise of the new world that was mapped out for her that night seemed almost like a personal promise that Florence was making to her, that the petty humiliations of the life she had left behind would never return. More, that the bitter failures and pointless successes of ordinary middle-class life were unimportant, and there was a place ahead of them where women and men could find nobler and more vivid activities.

They went to their cabin late. But that night the sea was calmer, or maybe it was just that the girls were used to the motion. They slept deeply and woke more refreshed. There was an impatience in the air when they went up to the deck after breakfast, Laura thought, as if everyone was eager to get to the end of the voyage. But Laura did not want it to end. She watched Florence as she walked fast, as if with some purpose, around the deck. Bareheaded, her hair’s natural curl tended, in the damp wind that blew constantly, to frizz around her temples and the nape of her neck. But the way black and brown and auburn seemed to mingle in the curls of her hair, the way the wind blowing at her eyes made them water and sparkle – something of the sea itself, some deliquescent light, ran over her and through her. In years to come, when events had irrevocably parted them, it would always be this Florence, this girl blown by the salty wind, who came back into Laura’s mind.

Suddenly Laura saw Maisie and Lily talking to Joe, and felt a shyness rise up in her. But Joe called her over. They were all talking about what time the boat was likely to get into Southampton the following day, about how the bad weather at the start of the journey had held them back.

‘You rushed off yesterday,’ Maisie said in an aside to her.

‘Well …’

‘We had a wild time,’ Maisie said confidently, and Joe said, ‘So I heard.’ Laura found Maisie’s face hard to read. Was it all pleasure, or was there knowledge of how Laura had judged her? Laura could not be sure, but at least there was no anger there, and so Laura was able to stay talking. As they stood there together, Laura saw how intimate Joe seemed with Lily, touching her hand as he lit her cigarette and teasing her about how she seemed unable to throw off what she would call seasickness but he would call a plain old hangover. As she noticed how Lily shook her head at him in a mixture of laughter and annoyance, Laura wondered if there was something more than friendship now between the two of them.

But when Joe turned to Laura and started to ask her about whether she was going back into first class, his energy moved easily away from Lily and towards her, and she realised that there was no particular intimacy between him and Lily. He was just one of those people who wanted to create a flirtatious warmth with everyone he met. It was unusual in a man, Laura thought as she answered him, to see this constant attentiveness to every person. No wonder he had collected this little group around him in the few days on the boat.

And so she stood quite happily, chatting with the others, until she saw Florence again, now in conversation with a steward on the other side of the deck, and moved away to join her. The steward was, to Laura’s mind, a rather unprepossessing man, a short dark boy with a bad squint. Florence and he had spoken briefly to one another before, Laura had noticed, and now with a transparent pretence of asking for coffee, Florence was talking to him again. As Laura walked up to them, she heard the words ‘conditions’, ‘hours’ and ‘wages’ and knew that Florence was becoming exercised about some injustice that the boy was telling her about. She should have been pleased, she knew, that this was what Florence was doing, but instead she felt irritated that Florence’s attention had shifted away from her, and was not sorry when the boy moved off as she approached.

In the evening a band was playing in the tourist-class restaurant, and after eating their steaks and apple tart Florence and Laura sat watching a few couples on the little dance floor. Florence was talking when Joe stopped at their table to ask her if she wanted to dance, and she shook her head. He raised his eyebrows at Laura, and she bit her lip. ‘I can’t dance like that,’ she said, motioning to where Maisie and Lily were dancing with a couple of men. They were fast and slick, turning and turning on neat lines.

‘Who cares?’ Joe said, catching her hand, and on an impulse Laura stood up. He was not a great dancer either, and Laura felt that they were the clumsiest people moving in the room. There was something so exposed about dancing while people were dining, looking up from their plates to watch you turn and step. At one point she looked back at their table and saw that Florence was no longer there, and she loosed her hand from Joe’s. ‘I must just find Florence—’ and then turned to smile at him politely, ‘but thank you.’

She walked up the stairs to the deck, and sure enough there was Florence, her voice was clear in the night air. ‘I think that you should be standing up to them,’ she said. She was talking to the steward again. ‘If they are really trying to bring down your wages because of that, well—’

‘Florence!’

Florence waved to her, but turned back to the steward. Their voices were lowered as Laura walked towards them, but she heard Florence tell the man something about someone he needed to talk to in New York. As Laura came to stand next to them, she told them not to mind her, but the man looked at her with some embarrassment and then moved off.

‘Was I interrupting?’ She heard how her voice sounded, reedy and uncertain. Florence shrugged. They stood at the rails, but the urgency of their conversations over the last few days seemed to have left them. As they stood there, the music from the swing band downstairs was heard through an open door, spilling out onto the deck and the ocean. Laura felt its rhythms again, and remembered the touch of Joe’s hand and his clumsy energy as they danced.

‘There will be so much to do when we’re in London,’ Florence said, and Laura realised all of a sudden how near her aunt’s house was. Her aunt, and the cousins, Winifred and Giles, who had sounded so formal in the letters they had written, were waiting for her in that grey city, ready to take her back into the embrace of family life. Florence, she knew, was thinking of a different London, a city that she thought was readying itself for war, a city where she thought she could be useful. They talked idly for a while about when the boat was likely to get to Southampton the next day, and then Florence said that she thought she would go back to the cabin and finish her book. ‘Damn, I left my scarf in the restaurant,’ she said.

‘I left my handkerchief too,’ Laura said, although she knew perfectly well that her handkerchief was in the pocket of her coat, back in their cabin, ‘I’ll go.’ She left Florence on the dark windy deck and went back down. Through the doors to the restaurant, it was all warmth and light. A number of couples were dancing now, but in the centre of them were Maisie and Lily dancing together, moving even more sharply than when they’d danced with the men, the fastest rumba Laura could imagine. The music seemed to be shaking off their bodies as they tripped backwards and forwards.

‘They’re not bad,’ said Joe, suddenly at her elbow. ‘You rushed off …’

Laura apologised. ‘I had to find Florence.’ She saw Florence’s scarf on the back of a chair, but rather than moving over to pick it up, she turned back to Joe. ‘Dance again?’ she said. This time they moved together with more ease, and as the number ended Laura could feel the sweat springing up under her arms. ‘I must take Florence her scarf,’ she said, but she said so looking at Joe, and this time they went together out of the restaurant. Upstairs, however, the deck was empty. Instead of moving back downstairs to look for Florence, Laura paused.

‘Smoke?’ Joe’s voice was very near to her ear.

She took one although she hardly wanted it, the freshness of the salt air was so keen. As he lit it, Joe looked into her face, and Laura felt that their bodies were even closer than they had been when they were dancing.

‘So, your comrade’s preparing another lecture for you?’

‘She doesn’t lecture me.’

‘I’ve heard her.’ Joe flicked a match into the water. It spun, a tiny bead of light, in the darkness. Laura caught anger under his words, but before she could ask him about it, he turned back to her and smiled. ‘Your eyes are shining in the moonlight. Has anyone ever told you what pretty eyes you have?’

Nobody ever had, but Laura laughed in what she hoped was a sophisticated way. She didn’t know what to say, and felt shaken by the desire that rose up suddenly in her, a desire for his compliment to be not just an easy line but something that he had found hard to say, something that bore testament to his view of her. And then he did what she realised she was waiting for him to do, and put a hand behind her back and slid it down, over her dress, over her buttocks. Laura was unable to move as pleasure, so forceful it seemed to deny her a sense of consciousness, flooded through her, loosening her joints and heating her skin.

‘What your friend wants,’ he was whispering, ‘I can see that … But what you want – what do you want?’

She hardly heard his words, she was so focused on his touch. He threw his cigarette away over the side, and put his right hand up to Laura’s face, stroking his thumb over her cheek and then putting it against her mouth. To Laura’s own surprise, she did not move away from him, and her lips opened against his thumb, and tentatively her tongue touched it. ‘So you do know what you want,’ he whispered urgently into her ear. The hand that had been on her back was now between her thighs, and as it moved up to the skin above her stocking top her mouth opened suddenly wider, and a groan escaped her.

‘Come on then,’ he said, pushing his hand up to her underwear, which had become so wet that his fingers slid on the silk. Lost in the molten pleasure that his touch was giving her, Laura was unaware of anything but the pressure of his fingers, but then he stepped away and took her hand. ‘Come on,’ he said again. ‘No need to provide the entertainment,’ and to her shame she saw a steward walking past them and realised that Joe was smiling at her, as though she was amusing him. ‘Let’s get some privacy – my cabin mate is drinking in the restaurant, we can be alone for a bit. Long enough, anyway.’ He raised his eyebrows at her, and suddenly his obvious amusement at what was happening made her feel ashamed.

‘I must go and find Florence,’ she said. Her words were clipped.

‘Come on,’ his hand held her wrist now, and it was too tight. Laura tried to pull away, but his grip tightened even more.

‘Stop it,’ she said, horribly aware that she could still feel the wetness between her thighs, that she wanted his hand back there, and that her voice sounded half-hearted.

‘Don’t go back to the lectures.’

‘She doesn’t—’

‘What, does she give you any of this?’ His left hand pushed up again, under her dress. ‘Does she? Or is she just teaching you about how to be a good little worker, how to forget what you want for the good of the masses?’ The hand still gripping her wrist was hurting her, and the other one was pushing her legs apart again, and though the sparks of pleasure were intense, so too was the anger, coming hard on the heels of the pleasure. He was smiling at her, and his teeth, which looked yellowy with nicotine stains in the daylight, were white.

Making a huge effort, she pulled away from him and smoothed down her dress. ‘You have no idea—’

‘No, Laura, you have no idea. You have no idea what she’s talking about, all that claptrap that the Reds are trying to feed people while they knock down everything that’s good in the world.’

‘You’re telling me about being good?’ It was a quicker comeback than Laura knew she was capable of, and Joe laughed.

He went on talking, but he had lost her. She shook her head and told him she was going inside. As they walked to the stairs, Maisie and Lily came up laughing with another man, and Joe joined them. The four of them started dancing drunkenly on the deck, and Laura felt heavy and disappointed as she turned away from them to go down the metal staircase and back through the corridor to her cabin. She walked slowly, dragging one hand against the felted walls. There was something that had shocked her not just about the embrace and her overwhelming reaction to it, but in the lightness with which Joe had treated the sudden surge of desire. She felt confused, wrong-footed. How could he experience that energy, which had come across her with such an all-consuming force, as if it would fuse them together if they gave into it, as something so light and impersonal?

She opened the door to the cabin. Florence was sitting in her bed, her knees drawn up, reading. ‘I’ve got your scarf,’ Laura said.

‘I thought you were still dancing.’

‘No, I – I stopped.’

Florence said nothing, turning a page. Laura walked over to her and put the scarf down on her bed. ‘Do you think—’

‘What?’ Florence’s voice was not unfriendly, but it was rather clipped, as though whatever she was reading was more interesting to her than what Laura was thinking, and so Laura said nothing. She took off her clothes, facing the wall and pulling her nightdress over her body before taking off her underclothes. As she took off her garter belt, she remembered Joe’s fingers, and she looked over her shoulder at Florence, but all her attention was on whatever she was reading, and Laura got into bed.

‘Tell me if you want me to turn out the light,’ Florence said in the same tight, reasonable voice. Laura told her not to worry and lay in the light with her eyes closed for a while.

But the rustling of Florence’s pages and the shivery sense of her own body’s warmth made sleep elusive, and she pulled herself up on an elbow and opened her eyes. ‘Tell me about what you’re reading,’ she said to Florence sleepily, and as the girls’ conversation began again and footsteps and laughter came and went in the corridors, the steamer pressed forward through the night ocean, and England came nearer in the dark.

When they went out on deck the next day, the coast of England was visible on the horizon. Clouds had come up in the night, and a drizzle obscured Laura’s view as she stood watching the grey streak of land come into focus. About half of the passengers were disembarking, and in the crush to get down to the landing boats and the muddle of finding porters and a place in the queue for customs, Laura and Florence lost one another. After they had all gone through customs, she found Florence again, and Joe and Maisie and Lily, standing beside her, on the station platform. She saw that Joe looked terrible, as though he had been drinking all night. His face was dull and oily, and when he spoke a little line of spittle from his top lip to the bottom gleamed in the station lights. And yet there was a clench of desire in her stomach as she looked at him.

Suddenly the train came in with its great roar and shadow, and at the same time there was a press of urgent movement on the platform. It was the woman whose self-assurance had impressed Laura at the pool, walking swiftly, a maid and a porter behind her with stacks of luggage, a small red hat pulled down over her forehead. A pop of flashbulbs was going off in front of her. ‘Amy!’ ‘Lady Reynolds!’ came the shouts.

As the ripple of interest spread along the platform, the woman was being pressed on to the train with a man holding her arm, trying to push back the photographers. ‘Do you remember her?’ Maisie said to Laura. ‘That Hughie told me all about her. She went away without her husband. The reporters will want to know if she’s getting a divorce. They think she won’t be Lady Reynolds much longer – but Hughie, he said her husband will forgive her anything. He said, she can do whatever she likes, and she does. Hey Joe,’ she persisted as they found their seats together in one carriage. ‘Call yourself a journalist? You missed the only story on board – these reporters have been waiting and waiting for Amy Parker.’

‘I’m not here to do society gossip,’ Joe said. ‘I’m here because of the war.’

Maisie was scornful, sitting down and taking out her compact to check her face, as though the sight of Amy Parker had made her self-conscious. ‘You’d think some people actually wanted a war.’

Joe started to tell Maisie that she couldn’t bury her head in the sand forever, but there was a desultory feel to their talk. Laura was remembering Amy by the pool, and just now. ‘She is lovely,’ she said.

‘She’s got charisma, all right,’ Joe allowed.

‘Charisma – phooey!’ Florence said, thumping her old carpet bag onto the rack above them. ‘She’s got money. Money, money, money – and they all come running to sniff it.’

‘It’s not just money,’ Maisie said. ‘There were rich girls used to come to our show, lots of them nobody would look twice at, for all their minks and diamonds. Someone like Amy Parker, you’d look at her even if she was wearing your dress – though not so much, I give you.’ They all looked at Florence’s old purple smock dress, and even Florence laughed.

Laura said nothing, thinking both of them were right. There was the glistening, acidic aura of money around Amy, which gave her essential components of her glamour – the desirable brightness of her fashionable clothes, the scurrying maid, the piles of luggage. But there was also the strange character of the woman, the way she forged through that crowd, her tiny hat like a flag, daring the photographers to follow her rather than submitting to the shame she was meant to feel. In a way, Laura thought, that lack of self-consciousness was not entirely unlike Florence’s, although in other ways they could hardly be more different. But both had a confidence born out of complete self-sufficiency, as though the approval of others meant nothing to them.

Once the train started, Florence closed her eyes and fell into a doze. But Laura looked out to the country that her mother had always spoken of as a kind of dreamland. There was the desolate flatness of the fields and the lowness of the sky which ran from grey to subtle turquoise, but seemed to be devoid of light, even though the fields themselves gleamed here and there with an almost unearthly sheen. By the time they reached London the shine had gone out of the air, and a heavy, freezing rain had begun to fall against the windows.

At Waterloo, people everywhere were hugging and saying their goodbyes. Laura put out one hand to Florence, but instead of embracing her, Florence smiled in her matter-of-fact way, picking up her big carpet bag and shaking her head at the porter who had moved towards her.

‘You’ve got my aunt’s telephone number,’ Laura said. ‘You will call?’

‘Well, of course, there’s so much to do – I’ll let you know exactly what’s going on.’

Laura nodded, unable to say more. As Joe wished her goodbye, she saw a questioning look in his eyes, but she turned away. She saw a dark, neat figure walking up the platform towards her with a porter, and as the woman approached her, calling her name, a current of knowledge of what was expected of her ran through her and she straightened her back and walked forwards.