know, Eastbourne in the blackout springs to mind,’ Penny said. ‘I think I’ll concentrate on a good night’s sleep. Picking up the pieces almost. I just hope my violin’s safe; hasn’t broken loose, or been crushed by some huge thing that has. I wish there was some way I could look.’
‘Oh? Do you play?’
‘Less than I’d like to, what with my young family. It was possibly going to be a career, but I’ve had to give up all that. Probably wouldn’t have come off. Still …’
Robert made himself turn away. He went off through the double doors to get a Scotch, and resolved to resume his schedule of work, swell or no swell, Joe or no Joe. And anyway, Joe was up now, and going about his business.
In the main lounge there was a large decorative mural showing what had been explained as an Armorican scene. A party of lords and ladies in medieval costume looked at the sea from the rocky coast of Brittany. A sailing cog ploughed the distance. The painted waves, with their tender, painted crests, looked all too easy. It was a naive offering.
Allowing himself to be swept towards the other end, he braced himself against a pillar, and then sat down on the piano stool. He opened the keyboard, rested his fingers idly on the keys, but did not press them down. From a nearby table, three older ladies, heavy with pearls and in severe grey perms almost identically decayed, dared him to play. Duly annoyed, he moved off again.
She was a mermaid, of course, and he would probably make a fool of himself, as he had done some years before. The signs were the same. It was the close, tempting fit of mutual attraction within a cluster of people all getting to know one another. And surely, surely there was some indefinable link between them, in the air. But it went together with the absolute impossibility of their clashing circumstances. The more he discovered about her, the more he was drawn to think of her. The more he learned about her world, the less it offered any firm ground where they could meet.
Yet here they were, in the same bewitched boat. Why should it be that when there were plenty of ordinary, nice, pretty women about the towns and cities of England, he must eschew them? He supposed there must be some cause; but did not wish to discover in detail what grubby quirk it might turn out to be. Probably to do with a nasty-minded God, and better left untouched. He would study. He must just take care not to ruin everything, the whole future. Four weeks or so of the high seas, then Adelaide and up to Woomera, a corner of untillable soil named after the aboriginal word for a spear-thrower, because the military used it to launch guided missiles into the very centre. To see how well they worked; how well the tactical armaments of the deterrent might deter. There he would attend the tracking station, looking up at the stars with radio equipment, tracking … who knew what exactly? And on this basis he would build a new life for himself, a better life than the grubby, rainy, pompous, clapped-out little island of his birth could offer.
Scotch in hand, he stood outdoors from the bar on the promenade deck with his back to its cold steel wall, looking out as he had grown so accustomed to. The interminable ridges stretched off into the north, grown oily, now, under a darkening afternoon sky. Penny Kendrick swam in them, holding her beautiful violin in front of her breasts and slinking her hips to the deep like a wild sonata. Sharks swam with her, nuzzling her side, rasping her lovely belly with their sandpaper skin. ‘Damn!’ he said aloud. ‘Damn!’
The Med had an altogether different feel to the Atlantic; it flattened as it warmed. One day, morning was open like a dish, a glazed Greek wine bowl, and as shallow. Though this was midwinter, Penny had the strong sense that not so very far away – maybe just out of view on either side – coastal people were sitting out, drinking coffee, eating olives.
Past Crete the light hardened and clarified. The sun became an active agent. It was as if the cord in a slatted blind above them had been pulled. She found herself unprepared, having cast her predictions of the voyage according to the south coast of England – not her own childhood, but seaside holidays in Devon with Hugh after the war, and with the boys, when they came along. She had expected blue: the air was white, the sea very dark, and reflective as broken glass.
Clutching her straw bag, in which she had placed, on top of a thin layer of odds and ends already there, her compact, her great aunt’s pince-nez, a French edition of de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, her journal, her cigarettes, and her pen, she made her way to the forward saloon, the observation lounge.
High nautical windows set tightly together in a continuous strip wrapped right round from port to starboard. Sitting close to them, where the chairs were laid out together, Penny could look down over the nursery and the enclosed play-deck area for little ones, on to the whole of the bright foredeck beneath her.
Once the storm had passed its height two or three days before, and she had learned that they might not all die but could endure sitting down to consider the next hour as well as the next wave, she had found the prospect far brighter here. More recently she had come to read, or write, or simply to watch the nose dipping and rising, gently enough now, as it stitched through sky to horizon, and back, and back again. It was quite hypnotic. Pure light poured in from the sky, and whelmed up from the water surfaces. It was like being inside the faceted eye of some fabulous ocean-going insect, homing to Arabia.
There was an Australian couple who had decided to take her under their wing: Clodagh and Russell Coote. ‘Penny. How are you this morning?’ Standing at the bar, drinks in hand, they were looking for where they should place themselves. ‘Let me get you something,’ Russell asked.
‘Coffee would be lovely,’ said Penny. ‘Russell, thank you. Are you sure it’s not my turn?’
‘Nonsense.’ Russell nodded to the barman. The Cootes were both tall and fine-featured. Clodagh tended to fragility. She wore a belted dress, white, with a print of large flowers – the sort of casual success which cheap fashions tried to imitate, achieving only cheapness. Penny was slightly in awe of them both, and wished to resist the feeling, but was unable to find any means of doing so. She was intrigued by them. The power of other people: her reading of de Beauvoir had amazed her, stirring up forbidden political emotions. She had not yet quite perceived herself as a dutiful daughter. With the assured couples around her, she thought constantly of everything she was leaving behind.
There had been a ballroom evening the previous night. Russell Coote had offered to dance with her. It was the first time the sea had settled down enough for social functions even to be thought of. Russell’s immediate gesture, and the execution, were displays of an old-world gallantry she had never come across. He danced out of duty; his wife expected of him that he should ask a woman travelling alone to partner him and to join them at their table. He expected it of himself.
The two wives had shared him all evening. It was utterly chaste, the sort of manners one always thought of as English but, to be strictly honest, never found in England. At any rate not these days, she could hear her mother saying. Not since the war. Only in older men, Penny, for all one tries.
Her mother always romanticised the past. Here were manners from the new world. One would have said simply ‘public school’, except that was virtually synonymous with first class anyway, and not everyone had offered to dance with her. Besides, that phrase in a man meant all sorts of English things, like mud and dogs and father and teas and tears, and the smell of certain rooms and days, special words rooting back into a coterie that was home. There could be nothing like that anywhere else. Russell certainly lacked any such connection. He was perhaps in his late thirties. His family owned a grain-exporting concern in Victoria, he had said; they lived in the suburbs of Melbourne.
‘Let’s go and sit down.’ Clodagh steered Penny towards the view. ‘Russell can bring your coffee over.’
The accent was detectable, the intonation somewhat languid and cultured. Never having met any Australians, never having heard Australian speech – beyond a few newsreel fragments and one or two well-known radio voices – Penny still found herself perplexed by these faintly