a gamble. H 12 was a risk. On the other hand, there was that funny business about her steward. And she had after all danced with him.
There was a tap at the door and he opened it, to his dismay, to Sandy. ‘Oh, hi there.’
‘You avoiding me, then?’
‘Why would I be doing that?’
‘Boris said he saw you go into the movies. You must’ve seen me there.’
‘Boris is a cunt.’
‘Good-looking, though.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘So d’you fancy a beer or something?’
Sandy tried to peer round him where, conscious of the open biscuit tin lying on the floor by his bunk, he was blocking the doorway.
‘Not tonight, thanks.’
‘Got a headache, have you?’
‘No, I’m busy.’
‘Oh, what you got to be busy about?’ Sandy moved across to get a better look into the room.
‘This and that.’
‘Oh, right. So see you then?’
‘See you, Sandy.’
THIRD DAY
Footloose: the bottom portion of the sail is called ‘the foot’. If it is not secured, it is known as ‘footloose’ and dances in the wind.
When Vi woke next morning bands of mist had settled around the ship. Standing in her white nightdress on the balcony, she could see nothing before her but an all-obscuring white.
She had dreamed about her mother. She tried to let her mind open up again. But it was almost always hopeless if you didn’t catch hold of a dream at once, before it evaporated. Brushing her teeth, she wondered, as she had wondered before, if dreams too closely grasped were dangerous. Maybe, like those people in legend who wandered into fairyland and never properly returned, dreams took you too far from what was called ‘the real world’ to continue to survive in it.
The guardians of oblivion relented a little and allowed a fragment of the dream to escape. Her mother was explaining something. She tried again to let her mind go free. Something about a family her mother had had, another set of children before she had Vi. And this other family, who appeared out of the blue, wanted to meet Vi. But try as she might she couldn’t recover any more.
Around the time of her mother’s death, Vi had often dreamed of her. Then the dreams petered out and she hardly dreamed about her mother at all until the marriage to Ted. How unfathomable it was, the trade between the daylight and the night mind. Was there something about Ted that allowed her mother to return from wherever she had settled? Would she have liked Ted? Or was it one of those coincidences which make up more of life than we want to admit because it is so tempting to endow them with a profounder meaning?
And of course it was not her mother at all whom she dreamed of, anyway, but a figure of her own creating.
Thoughts of her dead parent led inevitably to the living one: her father in his dreadful ‘Home’, which wasn’t a home at all. They had never really got on. For all her best intentions, she had never been able to break through that impenetrable-seeming barrier which he had thrown up against his wife’s death. They had never found a way to know each other better. Perhaps after her mother died neither of them wanted to be close.
Deciding she had had enough of queues, and with no desire for conversation, she rang room service and ordered toast and coffee. She was sitting on the balcony in the early morning sun when there was a knock at the cabin door and Renato came through and out on to the balcony carrying a breakfast tray.
‘Mrs Hetherington, you take some repose on your balcony. It is good.’
‘Thank you, Renato.’
‘I pour your coffee?’
‘Thank you, Renato. I can manage.’
Renato’s expression took on its sulky cast. Vi wondered again quite why it was so difficult to prevent people taking trouble for you when the only trouble you wanted from them was to be left uninterrupted in peace.
‘I bring you hot milk as well as cold, Mrs Hetherington. And fresh orange juice.’ The tone of reproach was applied judiciously.
‘Thank you, Renato, that’s very kind of you.’
‘You like orange?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘I bring you some tomorrow.’
‘Thank you,’ she said again. And more to please him than from any formed desire, ‘Or maybe grapefruit?’
Renato left the room, his back and shoulders registering disappointment that for the time being there were no opportunities for further gallantry.
This was something she could never explain to Ted. Ted had thrived on attentive service and she could never convince him that it was not principle, or perverseness, that made her shrink from it. Ted, who liked what he called his ‘creature comforts’, was glad to spend his money on hers. And all she wanted from him, and from his money, was freedom to be left to her thoughts. It had hurt him. She had hurt him. And she couldn’t even justify this by saying she was unaware of the fact that she was hurting him. She had been aware of it.
She heard Edwin saying, ‘Opposites may attract but they rarely bond.’ But Ted wasn’t even an opposite. He was other. Not of her kind. But he was kind. And she had puzzled and bewildered him. And now he was dead. And she was alive. And crossing the Atlantic to see Edwin.
Vi had never felt the desire to keep a journal but she had, for a time, kept notebooks where she wrote down observations, quotations, jottings of odd information and kept letters and cards. Drinking coffee now, she opened the oldest of these notebooks, a school exercise book with stiff green covers.
Meeting a past self was bound to be a jolt. Some of the entries were in ink, in a handwriting that she barely recognised. On one of the first pages there was a quotation: They say miracles are past…and then a blurred smudge of what looked like coffee. It was Shakespeare but, for the life of her, she couldn’t recall where it came from. A few pages on she encountered Edwin.
Vi had gone to Cambridge in the days when the entrance candidates sat a special examination. She attended a comprehensive school in Bromley, to which she and her father had moved after her mother’s death. The school had an indifferent record in sending students to university but Vi had been lucky in her English teacher, Miss Arnold, who, just down from university herself, was still ambitious for her pupils. It was Miss Arnold who had been responsible for Vi sitting the Cambridge entrance exam.
For all her teacher’s confidence, Vi was astonished when she was awarded a place at Newnham, then one of only three colleges where women could study for a Cambridge degree. It was Vi’s private conviction that her papers had been muddled with someone else’s. This suspicion was confirmed when, at their first meeting, Mrs Viney, the Director of Studies, who was Anglo Irish and claimed a distant connection to Goldsmith, asked Vi a question about Tristram Shandy, a book greatly disliked by Miss Arnold and which, as a result, Vi had never read.
When Vi looked scared, Mrs Viney said, ‘You wrote so well on the Shandean influence on European thought in your entrance exam, Victoria.’
Vi’s spirit never quite recovered from this, even when she learned that Mrs Viney was generally disappointed in her current students and frequently confused them with past students, with whom she had been just as disappointed once but who shone in memory with retrospective glory. The discouragement with