as she watched. She would never have thought so high a point as that strong, curved prow could be at risk. Surely this could not go on. Surely. The grown-up in her told the child not to be silly. But she remained unconvinced.
She passed a Lascar with a mop, a small figure, of brown imagined bones inside his maroon jacket. Dealing, presumably, with some mess, some distressed passenger’s sick, he seemed hardly to be holding on to anything. He stared at her with opaque eyes, then looked away. These outdoor folk, diminutive, cropping up like sad, solitary djinns, she had already found them unsettling. Should she speak? Technically they fell outside the ship’s account of itself, they did not exist. Yet everyone knew the terminology: Lascars. How was that? She found herself several yards past him in only two steps. And she worried about the life-jacket instructions. Would she get the ties the right way round? The diagram was confusing.
At the forward reach of A deck she came with surprise on the Sinhalese couple tucked away in a protected nook. She had seen them about, of course. But, like everyone else, had not yet found it possible to speak. They were standing with their backs to the steel, the woman wearing a coat over her blue sari. He, smiling, smaller than his wife, was neat in his Burberry jacket and fawn slacks. Penny stopped about a yard from them. She leaned on the rail and looked out at the same prospect, comforted a little that they seemed in no immediate hurry as regards lifeboats. Indeed, the man was about to raise a pair of binoculars to his eyes. On seeing her he stopped, took the strap off and volunteered them. She shook her head and smiled queasily. Now she had ceased her struggle along the deck, it might be that the nausea was about to return.
‘No, please. Have a look.’ He insisted, holding the glasses out.
She looked. The horizon, looming nonsense for half the time, did her stomach good; though to tell the truth there was little to focus on that was not frenzied water, or ragged grey cloud. She stood, resting her elbows on the rail, in those moments when she had not physically to cling to it. She surveyed the waves, broke off. It was quite dismal. She looked again, held on, and then again. Momentarily she caught sight of something far off in the whelm; which promptly disappeared. Maybe flotsam, the corner of a box, waterlogged, she thought. A tea-chest, possibly, like the ones her own belongings were packed in. A piece of wreckage, or something thrown overboard from a tanker. Nothing worth looking at, really, but even rubbish gave the eye a mark. Like a gravestone. She suspected no life-form could live in all that desolation; they were utterly abandoned.
‘My name is Piyadasa. Is it your first trip?’
‘Yes.’ She managed a weak smile.
‘It is very rough.’
‘Yes.’
‘Please carry on looking.’
Magnified, each wave was colder and more intimate. She found herself noticing the skid, of water over water, the detachment and reattachment of drops and strings, the innumerable facets of unnameable colours – unnameable because they were all the same colour, and yet clearly not. She thought less about the depth.
She handed the glasses back. ‘Thanks very much. Not feeling too good.’
‘You should drink tea.’ The lady smiled.
‘I don’t think I could drink anything, just at the moment.’
‘Perhaps without milk or sugar. Perhaps even gunpowder tea.’
‘Gunpowder tea?’ Penny felt her eyebrows rise.
‘Any kind of tea you like.’
‘Oh. Do you think so?’
‘Ask my husband. Even beef tea.’ Mrs Piyadasa laughed. ‘Why don’t you come along with us. We’re just going inside. They will bring you something. Come with us. My husband knows everything there is to know about tea. He grows it, and then he sells it.’
Her husband acknowledged his expertise with a wry expression.
Penny was on the point of demurring, as if she ought to be seen to deal with her fear and nausea alone.
‘This way.’
Thus she found herself back inside, kidnapped, as it were, by kindness. Yet the gunpowder tea, brought by a steward to where they sat in the main lounge, helped. As did the polite conversation. She took to the plump, smiling lady. ‘Yes, we live in Colombo. You must visit us there.’ Mrs Piyadasa seemed in no doubt that they would make it safely home. Penny was impressed.
‘She misses her children,’ said the husband.
‘Yes, I do.’ Mrs Piyadasa mimicked a sigh of grief and turned up her eyes. ‘Not seasick, but homesick. I have three boys, one girl.’
‘I miss mine,’ Penny said.
‘You have children?’
‘Two boys.’
Mrs Piyadasa took a small book of photographs from her handbag. They sat for some minutes, comparing ages and characteristics. Then there was a pause.
‘So you have never travelled abroad?’ Mrs Piyadasa adjusted her sari under her large cream cardigan.
‘I went to France with my parents before the war. Several times. We took the boat train; but it was nothing like this.’ Penny smiled.
‘Ah, before the war,’ Mr Piyadasa said. ‘The war changed everything.’
Penny nodded and found herself smiling again. Then she felt disconcerted. It was an obvious remark, the sort heard in all sorts of small talk. It was a conversation filler; and yet it struck her peculiarly now. She was an educated, articulate woman, but it had never quite occurred to her as it did now, the effect of the war. She had come to womanhood through the conflict, and at home the scars had always been patent, everywhere. Even now, more than a decade on – could it be so long? – London still had enough gaps in its blackened fabric, still had bomb-sites, was gritting its teeth, flexing its sooty muscles and struggling on. And out of town there was the accelerating attempt to put all that in the past, rebuild standards, families; she and Hugh and the boys growing up with a new town on their doorstep. And there was the rhetoric of course; of starting again, an end to poverty, the promise of the Commonwealth.
But now she felt the words shake her. If the ship did not sink she might be the guest of oriental strangers in a city she could not begin to imagine. What would their house be like? Would she be expected to take off her shoes? She would make some religious faux pas. But no, it was not that. It was that everything really was different, absolutely and completely different – because of the war. She had thought it was over and done with. She had not realised. No one had realised. She looked around at the few uncomfortable-looking occupants of the main lounge, the chairs heaving to ludicrous angles, the low tables that would now shed whatever was placed on them. No one had realised. And herself: she had never actually spoken before to anyone who was not white.
Mrs Piyadasa was saying something about shopping in Oxford Street. Penny pulled herself back from her reverie. The nausea returned, distinctly flavoured now with intellectual disorientation. She found herself craving air again. She got up and made her excuses, pulling a grim face and holding her midriff by way of explanation. The Piyadasas smiled and nodded as she struggled towards the exit. There was a need to be close to the terrible water, to see it and know its extent – in order to be ready for it, perhaps.
The young man came and stood a yard or so along from her. She had wedged herself in a half-plated nook which ended A deck’s forward reach, in order to look over the spray-tormented bow. It was the starboard reflection of the place she had met the Piyadasas; where now in fact rode opposite her, clutching the steel section of rail, a boy. She could not see me, of course, because her view was blocked by the stair housing dropping from above to the lower foredeck. And in any case we had not met, so I should have meant nothing to her. Nor had I learned yet to play with the young girl who cultivated