Voyage of Innocence

He deftly collected the coffee pot and her empty plate, swaying with a dancer’s ease as the ship began another of its wallowing rolls. ‘Course, it’ll all change if there’s war. They used the liners for troop carriers in the last war. My dad served in a mine sweeper, four years, and never a scratch. Then the first day he was back on the liners, a bolt worked loose and broke his toe. Isn’t that typical of life?’ He went on his nimble way, and Vee, getting up, discovered that she was a good deal less steady on her feet than when she had come into the dining room. Presumably the blow was getting stronger. She would go to the library, she decided. Find a book, something to while away the hours and take her mind off Hugh, and the man with the bony face, and everything else – the many many things that haunted her waking and sleeping hours and which she longed to drive out of her head, if only for a few merciful moments.

Vee walked along endless corridors, down steep flights of stairs, past linen rooms, the sweet smell of fresh linen wafting out. She met no one on her way, bar a hurrying steward. It was eerie, the emptiness of the ship. She reached the corridor where her cabin was and walked past the row of shut doors, counting them off, fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one. She stopped abruptly outside number sixty-two, a few yards from her own cabin, number sixty-seven.

The door to sixty-seven was slightly ajar, and someone was in there.

The corridor stretched away, deserted, no cleaners to be seen. Who was in her cabin?

Vee, her nerves tingling, made herself walk silently to the door. Then, with sudden vigour, she pulled the door wide open. ‘What …?’ she began.

Pigeon looked round, surprise on her face. ‘I’m just tidying away your things from last night,’ she said, shutting a cupboard door with a neat click. ‘I can’t linger, I’ve got that many of my ladies poorly.’

‘Thank you,’ Vee said, her back to the door.

‘I’ve left the passenger list on the table, madam,’ the stewardess said. ‘I expect you’ll want to look through and see if you’ve friends on board. My ladies are always surprised, it never fails, there are always people they know on board, and didn’t expect to see. “Oh, look,” they say, “I had no idea that the so-and-sos were going out to Egypt.” It always makes me laugh, how amazed they are.’

She whisked out of the cabin, and Vee sat down in the armchair, her heart still thudding. She was irked by the fright Pigeon had given her, irked by feeling so jumpy, constantly looking over her shoulder and starting at shadows. She should have guessed at once that it would be the stewardess in her cabin, about her duties.

She took her cigarette case from her handbag. She was smoking too many cigarettes in an attempt to soothe her nerves. She took one out, lit it, then picked up the typewritten list. There was Perdita Richardson’s name. An unusual girl. Might prove a bore, but she didn’t think so. How old was she? Probably seventeen or eighteen, if she’d left school, but no more.

Vee closed her eyes, overcome with a sudden terrible longing to be seventeen again. At seventeen, she’d been uneasy, perpetually hurt by her mother’s dislike of her, but still full of hope, with life a white and shining canvas, a tablet of possibilities. A daubed and messy canvas now; what part of her life had she not made a mess of, whom of her family and friends had she not in some way hurt or distressed or betrayed, or even, God help her, destroyed?

She wondered for a moment if she were going mad, for this bizarre image to float into her mind, but decided, regretfully almost, that there was no escape that way. She turned her attention back to the list.

The name jumped out at her, as though it had been printed in bright red letters.

Messenger, Mrs Henry, and beneath that, Messenger, Peter.

For a moment, pure joy flooded through her. Lally was on the boat. Lally, her incomparable friend. And she’d brought Peter. Had Harry relented? Had the boy had a relapse, was he not well enough to go back to school? She must find Lally immediately, what was the number of her cabin?

Then reality struck, and her sense of pleasure and excitement evaporated.

Lally, her friend. Yes, that was exactly what Lally was, but she, Vee, was no friend of Lally’s. Not after what she had done, what she was planning to do. If Lally knew, or even suspected … How could she ever face Lally again?

Lally didn’t know, surely she couldn’t have kept so calm and serene, if she’d had the least idea.

No, Lally didn’t know, and for Vee, it must remain one of those grim secrets that couldn’t be told. Even though at times she felt that to confess to Lally, to tell her friend what she had done, would be such a relief.

But, even if Lally didn’t know – and Vee had tried desperately to be discreet, flaunting instead her other liaisons before a scandalized world – then how could it be kept a secret from her in Delhi?

Had Klaus known that Lally was going out to India on the Gloriana? It was so obvious, so natural, after all, that she would go out to join her husband. She would have gone with him when he was first posted to Delhi, if Peter hadn’t still been ill.

No, Klaus hadn’t known. He’d told Vee that Lally was staying in England until the boy was safely settled back at school, that she would wait until after Christmas before going out to India.

Lally herself, in the one, unsatisfactory conversation they’d had – a hurried phone call, with Vee pretending she was in a rush, would telephone her back – had said nothing about sailing to India. Vee hadn’t telephoned again, of course, what could she possibly say to Lally, one of her closest friends, whom she had so utterly betrayed?

What could she say to her now, face to face?

Her eyes skittered on down the list.

Joel Ibbotson.

So it had been Joel she’d seen on deck. Joel, for heaven’s sake! What could he be doing on board the Gloriana? Had the watching man been on the lookout for Joel? Impossible, the very idea of Joel getting mixed up with that lot brought a smile to her lips. She’d be fascinated to find out why Joel, wrapped up in mathematics and college life, should be going to India. When had she last seen him? Berlin, 1936. And of course, Yorkshire last year, for the funeral. Another blink, another memory to be refused admittance to her mind. Keep to the present, keep to the here and now.

Another name leaped out at her: M. Q. Sebert, Esq.

Marcus, on board? How odd, had the BBC come to its collective senses and sacked him?

It was a ghost ship, that day. Peter was everywhere, exploring, questioning, bothering the staff, who took it in patient good humour, with so few passengers about, they had time to listen to his endless questions. Only the cabin stewards and stewardesses and the doctor and nursing sister who staffed the tiny hospital were kept busy as the dark grey of sky and sea turned imperceptibly to twilight and night.

Vee spent most of the day in the library, alone and undisturbed, reading War and Peace, grateful for the chance to spend some hours in a different world entirely, her own problems shut out by the far away and long ago world of Napoleon and Imperial Russia. History, however complicated, seemed to make sense in a way that the contemporary world – at least, her contemporary world – didn’t.

A waiter brought her coffee, she went to the cafe for a light lunch, taking Tolstoy with her, then back to the library, soft lights lit over the desks, the potted plants somehow fixed in position, how did they keep upright with the incessant roll of the ship? It was only a momentary thought, then she was once again in Moscow, in the thick of war, following in Pierre’s questioning footsteps, caught up in the sweep of history.

Would some profound novelist in years to come pen an epic of her time in a book like War and Peace, a novelist with a brooding mind and a sense of the power of history, writing about Hitler and the Czechoslovakia that wasn’t worth a war, and Stalin and weak, unworthy Chamberlain, and an island people who clutched at any straw of peace, but who would fight like terriers when war came knocking uninvited at the door?

SIX

The Gloriana hummed and throbbed as it ploughed its way through the storm. On the bridge, the duty officers were relaxed, quiet in the dog hours, used to the sea and her wild ways.

In their cabins, passengers slept soundly or tossed and turned, or clutched stomachs agonized by spasms of seasickness. In the great kitchens, the first staff were coming on duty, the bakers ready to bake the bread and rolls and brioches for breakfast.

‘Half as much as usual,’ the head baker said. ‘Most of this lot won’t be eating anything for the next day or so.’

‘They’ll make up for it when the sea calms down and they get their appetites back.’

Perdita was awake, relaxed but wide awake. She was still prone to sudden bursts of heat, a relic of her days of fever, the doctors had told her, and they always woke her. Soon, she would drop off to sleep again, and those last two or three hours of sleep were the best she had. In her mind, her fingers played Bach, the intricate patterns soothing her brain in time to the sound of the ship’s engines.

On D-deck, Marcus Sebert came to and eased himself groggily out of his bunk. The floor came up to meet him, and he passed out, contentedly, on the linoleum floor of his cabin.

The chill roused him an hour later, and he staggered to his feet, imagining for a moment he was in the studio at the BBC; why was everything sliding up and down, had war broken out and the Germans bombed Broadcasting House, had there been an earthquake?

This wasn’t the BBC, he wasn’t at work, he was at sea, on a goddamned liner. Was he staggering, or was it the damned boat? It didn’t matter. His eyes fell on one of the bottles of champagne he had brought with him. Champagne was good for seasickness, not that he was prone to seasickness, but you couldn’t be too careful. He eased the cork out of the bottle, and cursed as the wine frothed over him, spattering his shirt. A glass? He looked around his untidy cabin, then decided, as he slid across the floor, that a glass was unnecessary. He carefully climbed back into his berth, dribbling the wine into his mouth from the bottle.

Let the wind roar and the waves lash against the boat. ‘And we jolly sailor boys were up and up aloft,’ he sang to himself. Jolly sailor boys, jolly good idea. He could go and find one right now, ‘Below, below, below. Bugger the landlubbers!’

Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps he’d just have another drink and wait for the storm to blow itself out. How many days to Lisbon? Another two, three? That wasn’t a problem, he’d stayed drunk for a week at a time before now. Alcohol and sleep, the cure for all life’s little difficulties. Blot it out, sink into oblivion, no need to worry about anything in the world.

One deck up, Joel Ibbotson sat glumly looking into the bowl the steward had thoughtfully provided and wishing he were back in the tranquil surroundings of his Oxford college.

‘There’s running hot and cold in the basin, sir. I’ll be back to see if there’s anything you need.’

‘I suppose these liners don’t generally sink?’

The steward was shocked. ‘They do not.’

‘Titanic did.’

‘That was in the past, sir. And she hit an iceberg.’

‘Any icebergs out there now?’

‘Hardly, sir.’

‘Pity,’ said Joel, his face growing rapidly paler. ‘A great pity. I just want the ship to sink to the bottom of the sea as quickly as possible, so we can get it all over with.’

‘I see you like your little joke, sir.’

SEVEN

Lally lay in her bunk, wishing she’d never set foot on the Gloriana, that Harry had never been posted to India, that she’d never been born.

Peter offered advice, before being shooed away by Miss Tyrell. ‘Look at the horizon, and then you won’t feel sick any more.’

There was no horizon to look at.

None of her transatlantic voyages, stormy though some of them had been, had prepared her for the Bay of Biscay in this kind of weather.

Pigeon was kindly, but brisk, she’d seen it all before.

‘Have you ever been seasick, Pigeon?’ Lally asked, reluctantly sipping from a glass of ginger water that the stewardess had brought her.

‘It’s not my place to be seasick. If you can keep a little of this down, you’ll feel much better.’

Liar, Lally said to herself, as nausea swept over her. A few minutes later, she began to think that Pigeon might be right.

‘You try and get some sleep now, madam,’ Pigeon said. ‘Don’t worry about the little boy, Miss Tyrell is looking after him.’

Thank God for Monica, thank God for Miss Tyrell. It would be much worse to lie there, helpless, if she knew that Peter was running free about the ship. Miss Tyrell would keep an eye on him, and she didn’t seem so authoritarian as to drive him to rebellious folly.

Lally didn’t sleep, but she dropped into a drowsy state, eyes closed, trying not to anticipate any of the sudden lurches that were even worse than the steady heaving and rolling of the ship.

Claudia was never seasick, Miss Tyrell had told her. She’d had Claudia from a month old, wild as a monkey, that girl, determined to do things her way even before she could utter a word. Never wanted a vest on, like catching an eel with your bare hands, trying to pull a vest over her head. Headstrong then, and headstrong to this day, from all she heard. Yet at bottom there wasn’t much wrong with her that a few shocks and a bit of growing up wouldn’t put right. Independent-minded, that was Lady Claudia.

Lally wasn’t so sure; to her Claudia’s political views smacked of more than mere wildness and a determination to hold contrary views. And independent-minded? Miss Tyrell wouldn’t say that if she’d seen Claudia hanging on Petrus’s every word.

‘Ah, that John Petrus, now, there’s a wily fellow.’

Surely Miss Tyrell hadn’t been nanny to him as well.

‘No, and I’m thankful for it. But when you’re a nanny in London, you get to know the other nannies, and their charges. Mr Petrus and Lady Geraldine, she’s the eldest of the Vere sisters, they’re much of an age. We use to wheel the prams together in the park, and then the children went to the same parties. Mind you, Mr Petrus wasn’t the same background as the Veres. His father was very rich, some kind of a financier. He had a good nanny, though, in Nanny Fortan. We were old friends.’

Lally wondered where Peter was.

‘Upstairs, drawing, a Miss Richardson, as nice a young lady as you could hope to meet, although I don’t care for the way she dresses, is keeping an eye on him. He likes her, and she won’t let him get into any mischief. I said I wanted to see how you were, and she at once offered to stay with him.’

‘Drawing? With the boat doing these wild plunges?’

‘He’s seeing which way the crayons go. Abstract art, Miss Richardson said. It’s making them laugh. I like to hear youngsters laugh. You didn’t hear Mr Petrus, who we were speaking of just now, you didn’t often hear him laughing. Hé was a serious, self-centred child. Ready smile, and a lot of charm, I don’t care for a child with charm. Still, it got him what he wanted, most of the time. I always felt you couldn’t trust that boy. Now, of course, he’s an important man, advises the government, so Lady Sake tells me, Ministers of the Crown hang on his every word.’

She paused, and Lally opened her eyes for a brief moment, watched a towel on its hook sway through a hundred and eighty degrees and shut them quickly.

‘More fool, they,’ Miss Tyrell finished. ‘The child is father to the man, I’ve always believed that. I’ve seen enough of my charges and their friends grow up to know I’m right about that. There are those you can trust, and those you’d be unwise to believe a word they say, five or fifty.’

‘You’d trust Claudia.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Not Mr Petrus, though.’

‘Never trust a man who looks you straight in the eyes. Either he’s hiding something, or he wants you to believe he’s sincere and interested in you. Either way, take care. Now, I’ll just take this glass away, you don’t want it sliding about.’

The door shut behind her with a soft click. She lifted a hand to push away a strand of hair from her face. Peter said she looked green; well, she felt green.

Claudia didn’t suffer from seasickness, Miss Tyrell said.

Lucky Claudia.

Wild as a monkey? Lally’s mind wandered back through the tossing of the boat, to the day she first met Claudia. Maybe remembering times when she was on dry land would make her less aware of the endless rise and fall of the ship, and the constant sound, creaking and shifting and the crash of waves breaking against the sides.

Oxford, 1932, and the motion of the ship seemed to alter into the steady rhythm of an English train. Tuppence three farthings, tuppence three farthings. American trains, how did they sound? She couldn’t remember, it was quite a while since she’d travelled on a train in her native land. Nothing as old world and romantic as tuppence three farthings, though.

English money was still a mystery to her in those days, fresh from America, used to the simplicity of a hundred cents to the dollar. A pound divided by twenty shillings and each shilling divided into twelve pennies, and then each in half for a ha’penny, which she had wanted to call a halfpenny, and fourths for a farthing. There was a ship on the copper ha’penny coin, no, she wasn’t going to think about ships. The farthing, concentrate on the farthing, with that cute little bird on it. What was it, a wren?

She’d pitied the kids in school when she first wrestled with change. However did they learn to do any math except adding and subtracting and dividing their odd currency?

The train journey hadn’t taken long, from Paddington, London, to Oxford. An hour and ten minutes. The train had been full. Mostly with students, just to see them milling about the platform had given her a thrill. There’d been another woman in her compartment, a young woman in spectacles, who’d opened a fat and serious-looking book even before the train had started.

Lally squinted at the spine. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. Latin. Unquestionably a student.

Pale eyes looked at Lally through the round spectacles. She held the book up so that Lally could see it more clearly.

Lally laughed. ‘I was snooping, I guess. I’m always curious to see what people are reading. Vergil’s impressive.’

A long, considering stare. ‘You’re American?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tourist, I suppose.’

‘No, I’m going to college in Oxford.’

‘College? Do you mean the university?’

‘Yes, Grace College.’

That earned her a longer, more appraising look. ‘I’m at LMH.’

LMH? What was that?

‘Lady Margaret Hall. Another women’s college.’ The pale eyes swivelled up to the luggage rack. ‘Is that a musical instrument?’

Lally nodded. ‘I play French horn.’

That got a look of pure astonishment. ‘The French horn? A brass instrument?’

‘Yes. Is that so strange?’

‘It is in England. Women don’t generally play brass instruments in England. Piano, violin, cello, harp, flute. Not the French horn.’

‘Then they’ll welcome me into the college orchestra.’

The young woman gave a kind of harrumph and returned ostentatiously to her text.

Lally sat back and gazed out of the window, loving the still green countryside that was sliding past: villages with churches, a big house on a hillside, hedged fields, a line of elms on a ridge … The train gave a shriek and dived into a tunnel, smoke drifting past the darkened window, then out into the sunshine.

‘Did England look like this in Jane Austen’s day?’ Lally asked the Latinist opposite her.

‘I don’t read novels.’

‘Your loss,’ Lally said equably. Now they were on the outskirts of a town, rattling past streets of identical terraced houses, built of red brick. Some of the houses were so close to the line you could see into the windows. A woman ironing, a boy on a swing in a tiny garden, a man sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper.

‘Is this Oxford?’

‘Reading.’

‘What’s that building that looks like a fortress?’

A quick flick of the pale eyes from the page to the scene outside the window.

‘Reading Gaol.’

‘Reading Gaol!’ Entranced, Lally twisted to try to catch a better view. ‘Where Oscar Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Did they really imprison him in there?’

‘I don’t read poetry.’

‘Vergil is poetry.’

‘I don’t read English poetry.’

Lally was of too sanguine a temperament to feel dampened by this contempt for England’s great writers. She’d just landed up in the company of a dull girl, the students wouldn’t all be like her. Or maybe they would at – what was it? LMH – but not at Grace.

Lally looked at her wristwatch. Not so long now. Wasn’t Oxford the next station?

This time there was no doubt about it. There were the spires, the dreaming spires, unmistakable, serene against the cloudless blue sky.

‘I don’t suppose you read Matthew Arnold,’ she said to her fellow passenger, who had got up from her seat and was pulling down a battered canvas suitcase with brown leather corners. ‘“Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!” That’s what he said about Oxford.’

‘No.’

Lally was tempted to say a quick prayer to St Jude for this woman, who was so clearly a lost cause, but the train was slowing down and she had her luggage to think about.

Then it was down on to the platform, even more full of jostling people than Paddington. Lally stood wide-eyed, holding her French horn in one hand and a suitcase in the other. She must go to the baggage van, make sure her trunk was taken off.

‘Porter, miss?’

She pointed out her trunk and boxes in the van.

‘You go over the footbridge, miss, I’ll bring this lot across.’

So many of these people seemed to know each other, they were calling out greetings and news. Even the girl from LMH had joined up with an acquaintance and was engaged in earnest conversation a few feet in front of her. Then out into the crowded station forecourt. There was her porter.

‘A taxi, miss?’

‘Yes, please. I guess I’ll have to wait a while.’

‘This lot will soon be gone,’ the porter said comfortably, leaning on the handle of his trolley.

Out of the corner of her eye, Lally saw a gleaming automobile draw up. A blonde got out and came towards her, very assured, very well dressed, followed by a slighter, darker girl in a tweed coat.

‘Are you for Grace?’

And that, thought Lally, rolling over and reaching out for a basin, was Claudia. And there, behind her cousin, was Vee, looking faintly surprised. There was no question in her mind as to whose the car was. Elegant, expensively-dressed Claudia, in that cloud of scent she always wore, was clearly at home in the sleek Daimler. Whereas Vee, all eyes and her hair caught in a scrawny bun at the back of her unflattering felt hat, looked rather as though she’d been kidnapped. With English Oxfords on her feet, brogues, very well polished, you could tell she came from a good home; such sensible shoes, so worthy and practical compared to Claudia’s crocodile high heels.

Even then, Vee gave nothing away. She watched, and listened, but what was going on behind those intelligent eyes? That was for Vee to know, although Lally had come to wonder just how well Vee did know herself. Did any of them? Did anyone, ever? Probably not, which might be one of God’s mercies when you came to think about it. Yet she’d got to know Claudia and Vee, and they her, better than she could possibly have imagined at that first meeting.

The workings of fate, that had brought them together, at that place, at that time. There they were, the three Graces.