That was the river I knew; an oilscape of docks. Even the sun – I lived in sepia, my growing up here was an unbroken stream, brown as varnish, leading inevitably to the sea.
I swear the boy looks up. Is it me he is afraid of?
My scalp tingles. I remember another time back there on the doorstep with Erica my mother. We too are hesitating to go in, having hauled our suitcases to the top of ‘the ladders’. She grips my arm. We are coming home. I remember it well. Clear, in fact, as daylight. It is from my first voyage in a voyaging life. But – this is the astonishing thing – in forty years I swear that particular scene and that childhood sea-passage have never once entered my head. Of course, it is coming to me now, there was a whole year I did not live here at all. Had gone to the ends of the earth with … Mr Chaunteyman was his unusual name. And I am caught up suddenly in a romance of names: Penny Kendrick, Robert Kettle; and the Indian Ocean. Clear as you like.
It was January 1959. They met on the journey out. Before Port Said they pretended there was nothing between them. After Aden it was undeniable. Yet ‘nothing’ of it had been spoken. Penny was joining her husband in Adelaide. Robert was going up-country.
‘I’m starting with a team at the observatory, the tracking station,’ he had said. Every sentence in each other’s hearing took on an extra meaning, like a jewelled, coded gift.
Now they and the Madeleys stood together near the aft end of the boat deck, past the run of white lifeboats. The sun dropped without ceremony into the Indian Ocean just to the left of the ship’s wake, scorching it for a moment or two with orange flares. On cue, there rose a warm, slightly scented breeze from the sea.
‘I suppose we really ought to be getting ready for dinner, if you’ll excuse us, Penny, Mr Kettle,’ Mrs Madeley said. ‘Come along, Douglas, I think.’ She picked up two of the empty glasses with their fruited cocktail sticks, as if to include the pair of them in her command.
‘Calm as you like.’ Douglas addressed the sea but was following his wife with cautious, elderly steps.
Penny seemed to comply. ‘Yes. I must decide what to wear. So uncomplicated for the men, isn’t it. They can just rush down at the last minute and hurl themselves into a dress suit.’
Robert felt desperate with her; then hated himself for it. They strolled back as a foursome, past the housing for the smokestack, towards the stairs in the white steel wall of the bridge. To their right the shapes of five lifeboats were slow white moments running out.
Penny stopped to rummage in her bag. He waited beside her.
‘We’ll see you shortly, then? Perhaps a drink before?’ Mrs Madeley raised her voice from the companion-way door, which she held open. Strains of some light string trio crept up from below. Douglas, his long tropical shorts unflattering above brown knees and scout socks, had reached it now and was edging inside.
‘Probably see you in a minute,’ Robert called. He dreaded the next ritual Pimm’s. ‘Isn’t there a film tonight, Douglas?’ Penny’s words ‘so uncomplicated for the men’ mocked him. His feelings were jangled.
Yet Penny had managed to contrive them a moment; effortlessly, daringly – unless she was only checking her bag for her compact, or whatever, and actually did intend to follow the Madeleys away.
‘Not our sort of show, Mr Kettle,’ Douglas answered. ‘We like musical comedies. Can take any amount of them, can’t we, dear?’ They disappeared downwards. Penny straightened, and allowed her straw bag to hang from her shoulder again.
So at last Robert was alone with her; really alone for only the third time on the voyage.
‘In Adelaide?’ She continued the conversation several days old. He read her tone, as if the intervening time with its meals and games and the ship’s daily run had collapsed. ‘Did you mean an observatory in Adelaide? There would be one?’ she asked.
‘Oh no.’ His nerve wavered. They had missed each other. She had not known where he would be going. She had not allowed for it. ‘Well, yes, there is one in Adelaide. But I meant up in the salt lakes. Beyond the hills … North. The desert. The Flinders Range.’ Some anxiety made him forbear to trot out the government name of the town-cum-missile-base, although there was no real reason why he should not. There was no secret. Nothing to feel ashamed of. For a moment his sunburn from the Red Sea began to itch again, and to ache.
They waited for a moment in the deck tennis markings. Then she moved under the boats to lean on the rail; and he stood next to her.
‘When I mentioned the tracking station, I thought you’d know’
‘I don’t. Tracking what? And what lakes would they be? I don’t know anything … about the lie of the land.’ She shifted her hands on the rail, through which as always the churn and drive of the engines could be felt, a constant background.
‘I thought he might have told you. Your husband. You said he’d gone out to Adelaide “in the weapons interest”.’
‘To the research establishment at Salisbury, yes. But he doesn’t write to me about that sort of thing – they’re not quite supposed to, are they? Anyway, it isn’t really an interest we’ve managed to have in common.’
Robert laughed and caught her smile, the lipstick now star-glazed. How unfamiliar it was still, that here, close to the Equator, day just switched off, and then it was dark; without lingering or pause for reflection. What did he write to her, then, was what he wanted to ask. But dared not.
He looked up at the swinging, coruscating lightfield itself, and tried to-make himself consider it professionally. But it had such a personal quality – as if the huge stars were curving down to meet them and the dusted blackness was only something rushing the other way.
Besides, more intense even than the visual drama above was the knowledge that her hand on the rail was a mere inch from his own. But he would not look at that. Achernar, the southern tip of Eridanus, River of Heaven. Follow the jab down: Reticulum, the Net, just rising. If they could stay out here all night, they would see the Southern Cross. He had waited to see it last night. It reminded him that a difficult and salty continent lay somewhere down there, under the dark line of the horizon. Keeping still, they could hear the subdued crash of the bow wave, and feel the ship’s eastward movement. It was dodging sideways in order to call at Colombo, and then Singapore. It gave them some time.
Her voice: ‘I didn’t have the courage to ask you before, exactly what on earth we’re going to do when we get there. Because it makes a difference to what we do now, doesn’t it.’ She stated it flatly, not as a question.
So they were a fact. She had just given it form and lodged it in between sunset and dressing for dinner. He was amazed, full of joy; that people could do that, and it was them. And he was also afraid. Shouts and laughter reached them from just below. Late for their high tea, a party of children, myself the last amongst them, could be heard along the promenade deck. They funnelled inside somewhere, chattering. Robert felt for her hand, and held it, touching his fingertips cautiously round to her palm.
She returned the pressure. ‘You can change your mind. If you’re not sure.’
‘I never imagined. I’m sure, but I never imagined.’ He noticed how snatches of illumination leaked out from the decks below or crept between cracks in the fittings.
‘Liar, darling.’ She smiled again.
Ventilator cowlings, pipes, davits, and a spice wind from behind them: their astonishment continued, as the ship slipped on into the tropic dark. He felt they were bathed in a wordless beauty that did not belong in the world. Yet it was palpable; it was all around them.
For the first time in his life he felt at home. ‘You are braver than I am.’
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