her gaze back to the sea. They had spoken once or twice – at coffee – at least she thought so. He was young, younger than herself, still in his twenties, maybe. Tallish, with bones regular enough, a nice smile and ample dark curly hair, now made somewhat nonsensical by the wind. His eyes were kind.
The eyes, yes. Maybe he was the man she had encountered at the purser’s office, when she was spending the first few mornings going here and there about the ship, getting her bearings, discovering all its mahogany-panelled passages, its labyrinthine secrets; before this extraordinary movement had exerted prior claim over everything else. She could not be certain. For, in the days of the voyage so far, faces had only just begun to assemble themselves, names to enter her reckoning. One could easily get appearances confused. And she could certainly not remember his name.
So Penny endured a few more minutes. The seasickness receded a little.
‘I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get away. Are you scared?’
‘Of course.’ She swallowed. ‘Is it obvious?’
‘No. I was just trying to find someone else in the same boat.’ He pulled up the collar of his coat with his free hand and held the lapels closed under his chin. ‘So to speak.’
She laughed in spite of the joke and her stomach. The wind snatched a shower of fine icy spray from the summit of one of the ridges and hurled it into their faces, before the next inexorable heave of the decking could lift them. Her companion gripped the end of the mahogany rail. Penny noticed how tightly she herself had hold of an upright steel stanchion that appeared to support the deck above. It must in fact run down like a rib through the whole ship. Her knuckles were quite locked. The stanchion itself was freezing wet but the flange offered a good purchase, and because of its security she could sometimes, daringly, provoking the storm almost, lean out to learn better what was coming.
‘I never imagined …’ she began. ‘That it would be like this, I mean. And the noise. Listen. All that … grinding and groaning. It’s solid metal. How can it do that? I hate it. At least out here in the wind you can’t notice it so much.’
The great structure started its drop away again from under their feet. For a moment they were weightiest.
‘I wouldn’t pretend to have the answer. At all. Oh God.’ Then: ‘It’s just very, very … I don’t know what. In there,’ he gestured to the cabins, ‘it’s like a ship in one of those films.’ He shouted over the weather. ‘Too swashbuckling for me, I’m afraid! That’s why I’m staying out here as long as I can. The sight of what’s actually doing it to you makes you feel slightly less ill.’ His looks belied the assertion. ‘But I do agree. It is the noise that’s maybe the worst of it. It’s the absolute cream on the custard. Sorry!’
They shared a tight smile: another attempted joke and the tasteless mention of food.
‘Sorry. But if it were just the movement … Well, that’s what every sailor sings about, isn’t it? It’s as British as … I don’t know, Trafalgar Square. And being British we ought to be able to cope. That’s what they keep telling us. And if this were a little old battler – with the salt-caked smokestack, et cetera – you’d expect it. But this is huge, and up to date. The latest thing. And cinema liners don’t lurch, otherwise Fred and Ginger could never have danced a step; kissing would have been right out.’ A plunge. ‘You need a level base for that sort of carry-on. I believe.’ He hurried on. ‘It actually sounds as though the damn thing’s going to break, doesn’t it; and nobody warned you, or sang about that.’
Penny nodded cautiously and turned her head. Another sting of spray. She noted with surprise that in all his chatter he had actually caught her own earlier thoughts – about the sound – and voiced them.
He took out his cigarettes, looked at them, met her eye, grinned ruefully, and then put them away again. ‘Ugh. Funny thing. No comfort there.’ They stood, volunteering nothing further for a while, riding it out, watching the intricate variations with which the sea and sky were confronting them. Then she remembered his opening remark.
‘I’m afraid I didn’t quite understand what you said at first. Something about it being difficult to get away?’ Shouting again as the wind tried to snatch the words from her mouth.
‘Oh yes. Difficult to get away from England. Won’t take you to her heart but won’t let you go. Horrible old spider, in fact. She wants the blood out of a man. Sorry.’ He apologised again. ‘I’ve probably said something unforgivable. Perhaps you’re incredibly patriotic and terribly sad to be leaving. I don’t know. It’s just the way I feel.’
‘I am sad. To be leaving one’s home. For good. Don’t you think?’
‘I’ve no regrets. Honestly. A grasping, petty and superstitious land infested with churches. But then I consider myself a scientist – for whom God can’t strictly be said to exist.’
‘I see. And not a very poetical description, either.’
‘I probably shouldn’t be saying this. Probably socially quite beyond the pale; I can never tell. They pull everything out of shape.’
‘What?’
‘Churches. I mean the map, even. Wherever you go. That’s the one good thing about the view here; not a steeple in sight.’
‘My. You do have a chip.’ She felt herself put about. His words provoked a longing for railway lines, green fields, and, indeed, the needle spire of Chelmsford cathedral which had always been visible from her bedroom window at Galleywood.
‘I’m sorry,’ once more excusing himself, ‘I’ll shut up. Bad taste to call religion into disrepute, I know. Digging myself deeper. I shouldn’t have forced my opinions on you. You’re probably a devout something or other and I’ve offended you for ever. Probably the weather.’
Just after the lowest point of the downward plunge, one could sense the very moment when gravity came back through the soles of the shoes.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about the weather. I wonder if people can ever get used to this.’
Then she laughed again. ‘I don’t mind hearing someone’s opinions.’
Peering past her, he considered the swell ahead. He pointed. ‘Here comes something!’
An irregularity in the pattern: ridges too close together; big ones, brimming, high and innocent. The ship went down in front of them as usual, and then rose significantly higher; higher, and poised. An exceptional wave began its course almost casually along the length of the water-line under them. It passed where they stood and became a huge fulcrum somewhere about the neighbourhood of the dining-room. Then the dive. The bows went right under. A rush of tide and foam sluiced off the fore-deck and drained around the tubes, bollards and hatches not so very far beyond them.
‘God,’ she muttered audibly in the moment of slack that followed – as sometimes they did when the ship seemed not to know what it would do next.
‘The seventh wave. Isn’t there something about the seventh wave? You see, I had a hunch England wouldn’t make it easy to get out. At least this much of a fight convinces me I’ve taken the right route!’
Yes, it was nice to talk to someone. She had not talked to someone, a personable young man, in fact, in her own right since … ‘I’m going out to Adelaide,’ she said firmly.
‘Oh, really? Me too.’
He was nice to talk to … Since her marriage. She had no idea. How nice it was to be spoken to as herself. Then, helplessly, from her clutch on the stanchion: ‘I’m joining my husband, you see.’
‘Ah, yes. And leaving your mother.’
‘I suppose I should be getting back to my cabin.’ She touched the place on her cheek where the wind felt almost like a bruise. The cold. And not just her cheek. Really, it got through coats and layers. It limited the time you