East of the Sun Page 8

  Later, hearing him josh in the same overfamiliar way with Marlene and Suzanne on deck—they’d shrieked with laughter at him and made him laugh back—she thought if she was a proper writer she might have tried to get to know him better, too. Maybe flirted with him a bit, gained his confidence, and got him to tell her about any bad behavior on the ship. But she was hopeless, far too shy. The same thing applied to Frank, the ship’s junior doctor, who she could tell was a bit of a ladies’ man. It was clear Tor and most of the other women on the ship were already in love with him. She’d watched him yesterday walking down the deck, a slightly bandy, cocky-young-male-in-his-prime walk. And observed female heads stiffening as he passed by.

  He didn’t flirt openly—it was, Tor had already explained to them, forbidden for him to do so. “He’s not allowed to start conversations with us, but can reply if we talk to him,” she’d reported. But he didn’t have to flirt, for even Viva, who mistrusted him, had to admit he had a wonderful smile.

  She put another piece of paper into her typewriter and moaned softly with frustration. Having got off to such a flying start with “The Fishing Fleet,” now definitely renamed “What Price a Husband?,” she was finding the damned thing almost impossible to finish. Each time she read it it seemed a little more stupid and brittle, even mean-spirited, considering she hadn’t actually had the gumption to talk to the women she was writing about. Not yet anyway. She’d imagined herself sauntering casually up to one or two of the young women she’d seen dancing and playing deck quoits, women like Marlene and Suzanne with their flashing smiles, or one or two of the nannies or even Miss Snow. She might have walked around the deck with them and engaged them in interesting conversations, but now it seemed an absolute cheek buttonholing complete strangers and asking them intimate questions about their lives.

  So far, apart from the evening bishis with Rose and Tor, she’d spoken to no one, apart from Miss Snow. The other young female passengers were perfectly polite to her, said their good evenings when they passed in the dining room and so forth, but she was a chaperone after all, so they, for the most part, excluded her from further intimacies. Sitting in the writing room, or on deck, she’d heard snatches of their conversations.

  I told Mummy to turn him out to grass; I’ll hunt him next winter…Oh, of course she’s a pukka Able Smith…Such a good little man…Christopher’s suit, literally half the price…Of course we know them: we shot there last winter…We went as circus people to their party.

  Their confident voices and endless changes of clothes made her angry with herself at times. Why mind being rejected by people she didn’t want to be friends with anyway? It was absurd, illogical.

  But there they were, the old insecurities that reared up, particularly when her work was not going well, and which made her feel not the confident free-spirited bohemian who had stepped onto the boat, but more of an outsider, one of life’s gooseberries. It was possible that she’d been one all her life, what with her isolated childhood, her parents constantly on the move; and possibly, too, that she’d talked herself into this idea of herself as a person who craved solitude, her lamp in the darkness, her books, her writing. You didn’t always choose.

  She shook herself out of these gloomy thoughts. She liked Rose and Tor more and more. They were very silly and young, of course, but their evening bishis were fun. Last night Tor had wound up the gramophone and handed out the crème de menthe and taught her the Charleston.

  It was impossible not to like Rose, so blond and wholesomely charming, so ready to laugh and be kind, so entirely unaware of how good-looking she was. She was someone who expected to be happy, who probably usually was. Viva had listened to her yesterday confiding to a group of enchanted older people about her upcoming wedding. Yes, I’m very excited. It will be such fun. We’re having the reception at the Bombay Yacht Club…Oh good! I’ve heard it’s lovely…not absolutely sure about the dress, but I’ve brought Mummy’s veil.

  At Tilbury, she’d observed her from a distance saying good-bye to a collection of relatives and well-wishers who clearly adored her. Viva had felt a familiar pang watching them: a whole family in action, an interconnected organism like a colony of ants helping to move her from one life to another. They’d straightened her hat, squeezed her hand; her father, a gaunt, beautifully dressed older man, had watched her with an expression of quiet anguish on his face.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Viva,” Miss Snow looked down at her, “I forgot to tell you, but I just bumped into your young man in the corridor looking very pale and loitering. He wants to know if you are going up for the first or second sitting for lunch today.”

  Dammit! Dammit! Dammit! thought Viva. She’d imagined when she’d taken on the job that once on the ship, the Great Sulky, as she now unkindly thought of him, would pal up with people of his own age, leaving her time to write. But not a bit of it: all he seemed to want to do was to gloom around the decks on his own, smoke cigarettes, and sit and eat with her. If he’d made even the most minimal effort with her, she might have forgiven him, but he was almost impossible to talk to. It wasn’t, as she’d argued with herself a number of times, as if she was bursting to play gin rummy, or flap paper frogs with a rolled-up newspaper along the deck, or sit in the games room with a piece of paper with Mary Queen of Scots stuck on her forehead, but these japes were part and parcel of shipboard life and his total lack of enthusiasm for any of them was really starting to affect her. It was almost as if both of them had become walled up in his shyness, if that is what it was.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That you’d have a confab with him after you’d finished whatever it is you’re doing.”

  It was clear that Miss Snow found their relationship odd. She had asked Viva, more than once, why his parents hadn’t chosen an older man for his chaperone, or an older woman at least, and seemed certain that Viva would have been having “an awfully jolly time on this ship” without him. “But never mind, my dear,” she’d annoyed her by saying a few days ago, “we’ll be there in just under two weeks, and India is teeming with men looking for young women like you.” As if her writing was just a brave front for far deeper ambitions.

  But Miss Snow, to be fair, had her own problems—a new school in a new district, fear of loneliness there, not enough money, and guilt about an elderly mother left in a Dorset boardinghouse for gentlefolk.

  The first-class dining room was humming with conversation when she entered it later that night. Such an elegant room with its richly painted murals, sumptuous chandeliers, and mirrored walls. For a girl who’d been living on tinned sardines and baked beans heated up on a Primus hidden under the bed, it was like a dream to sit here and see the uniformed waiters buzzing around with silver platters, the sideboards heaped with exotic fruits and fine wines, the occasional glimpses of the scurrying, steaming world of the kitchen behind the swing doors.

  So what a bore to look up and see in the corner of the room that Guy Glover was waiting for her, looking pale and put upon. He looked up as she approached and gave her a wan wave.

  Now that the weather was so much warmer—102 degrees, according to one of the passengers, a Colonel Price, who had buttonholed Viva that morning with the latest reports from his pocket thermometer—the other passengers had changed into summer clothes: lighter dresses for the women, dinner jackets for the men. But Guy, still wearing his long black coat, stuck out like a pallbearer at a wedding party.

  Three waiters leaped into life as she sat down at their table. Guy didn’t stand up.

  He hadn’t shaved very well, she noticed. He’d left a piece of gosling fluff on his chin and a cut, which he’d covered with a bit of cotton wool.

  The waiter handed her a menu. She heard a burst of laughter coming from a nearby table. “The Young,” as the older people on board called anybody under thirty, had begun to eat at each other’s tables. Rose and Tor were sitting with two other women, whose names she didn’t know, and a young civil servant nam
ed Nigel. She saw Rose’s blond hair fall forward as she laughed. A young naval officer was pouring wine into Tor’s glass. Tor, who had confessed to her that she was longing to be “seized,” was batting her eyelashes at him.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” Viva said.

  “I hadn’t noticed.” He met her eye briefly and unwillingly and then looked away.

  “Have you ordered?”

  “Not yet.”

  She picked up her menu with a heavy sense of duty.

  “So, what would you like?”

  Oh my God, if only I knew.

  “Sole Véronique is the dish of the day. I think it’s very good.” She hadn’t a clue really, it was something to say. “There’s a steak Rossini. Lobster thermidor.” The food was famously good on the Kaisar, something to do with the wood-fired ovens, she’d been told. “Oh good,” she said, “pommes dauphinoise is on, too.”

  “I can actually read by myself.” Sarcasm had been added to his own limited menu lately.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  At first she really had tried with him: admittedly aunty-ish stuff about whether he was looking forward to going home. “Not really.” And what kind of sports he’d played at school. “None.” But you had to start somewhere. She’d admired the murals on the dining room walls, the beautiful chandeliers, wondered at the songs the pianist played, but now she had just about reached the end of her patience.

  “Water?”

  “Yes, please, and,” he gave her a look of barely concealed truculence, “a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. Waiter!”

  She’d offended him on the first night by asking him whether his parents allowed him to drink and he had not forgiven her. “You do realize, don’t you, that I am eighteen years old?” he’d said. Mrs. Bannister had said he was sixteen and he certainly didn’t look any older, but she let this pass. “Not eight. I can’t imagine why my parents thought I needed a chaperone.”

  “So what about food?” she said. “Are you ready to order?”

  “Not yet.” He disappeared behind his menu.

  She buttered a roll; passed the bread; listened to the distant laughter of other diners and the strains of the pianist playing “Clair de Lune.”

  This, she thought, is how I imagine it must feel to be really unhappily married. An endless landscape of slowed-down meals you don’t want to have together, a place where talk is an exhausting chore, a form of mental housework.

  “Well, I’m going to have a tournedos Rossini,” she said. “Medium rare.”

  When it came, she listened to their knives and forks on the plates; watched the waiter take their plates away; looked at the old married couple at the next table who had also eaten in silence.

  “It’s Saturday night,” she told him. “They’ve got a band up in the ballroom. They’re supposed to be rather good. Do you feel like going?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” He sighed heavily and pursed his lips in a self-conscious way.

  “So, is there anything else you’d like to do then?” Oh, she honestly felt like striking him sometimes.

  “Just say the word,” she added.

  “You Great Sulky,” she said under her breath.

  The pudding trolley arrived bearing lemon meringue pies and fruit jellies, an apple soufflé, ice creams, and the Indian julebis, which she found a little sickly.

  “More wine, sir?” The wine waiter’s smile was a beam. “We have some very nice Beaumes de Venise to go with the crème anglaise. Madam?”

  “Just the lemon meringue for me, thank you.” She drained her wineglass. “I think we’ve had enough.”

  “I’ll have a bottle of Beaumes de Venise,” the Great Sulky told the waiter. When he lowered his head and looked at her like that, he reminded her of a young bull about to charge.

  “Who is going to pay for this?” she asked him in an angry whisper after the wine waiter had scuttled off.

  “My parents,” he said prissily. “Do stop fussing.”

  As she watched the Young, chattering and laughing and starting to move upstairs, she felt what a luxury it would be to box him soundly around the ears. The room was half empty now and he was scowling at her again with that look of barely concealed contempt.

  “Will both your parents be in Bombay when we get there?” She asked the question quite deliberately, knowing where it might lead.

  “I don’t know.” He squinted at somebody beyond her head, in a way that suggested they were far more interesting than she was. And she felt a sudden desire to make him feel something, anything—hurt, embarrassment, a sense that she existed, too.

  “My parents won’t be there,” she said.

  “Why not?” It was the first question he’d ever asked her.

  “My parents and my sister died in India when I was ten. That’s why I came back to England. One of the reasons I’m going back now is to pick up their things. They left some trunks there.”

  He gazed at her, so blankly at first that she thought he hadn’t heard. When he stood up his chair fell on the floor.

  “Were they assassinated?” The expression on his face was one of genuine, even exaggerated horror. “Did Indians kill them?” His face was contorted with disgust.

  She felt a spurt of shame move from her stomach to her chest. She simply couldn’t believe she’d blurted it out to him of all people, but now it was too late—he seemed gripped, horribly so, by her story.

  “No.” She held her hands up as if to tamp him down.

  “Were they shot?”

  The elderly couple at the next table were staring at them.

  “No,” she said.

  “So why?”

  “They just died,” she whispered. She felt a wave of heat go over her. “I don’t really want to talk about it. It was a car crash. I don’t know where.” She hated it when people asked for details.

  “I don’t know what to say. Tell me what I should say.” His voice had risen and she wished she’d kept her mouth shut—she seemed to have unhinged him and wanted the silent boy back. He rushed off.

  When she went on deck to look for him, the air felt thick and warm and the moon lay in a basket of cloud.

  “Guy,” she called out, but the rush of bow-water and faint echoes of music from the ballroom muffled her voice. Other passengers appeared through lit windows like a series of still lifes: some women playing cards, a white-haired old man extracting a cigar cutter from a waistcoat pocket, a group toasting each other and laughing. In a dark corner near the funnel, a couple were embracing, dark and oblivious like shadows.

  “Guy?” She was near the lifeboats now, a warm wind rushing through her hair. “Guy, where are you?”

  Half of her was inclined to let him stew in his own juices, but she was starting to feel more and more worried about him. His almost hysterical reaction to her story, the wearing of that dreadful overcoat, even now with the glass regularly hitting 100 degrees, the bright insincerity of his smile at times as though he were center stage at the Old Vic—what if he was barking mad rather than simply churlish and self-engrossed?

  After a fruitless search down empty corridors and on the landing of A deck, she found him at last, hiding in a lifeboat, stretched out in his long dark coat. He was smoking a cigarette.

  “Look,” she said, “lots of people have parents who died in India, so don’t worry about it too much. I also don’t really give a damn whether you’re interested in me or not.”

  The moon had gone behind a cloud but she could still see the wet of his cheeks and the desperate intensity of his eyes. He was drunk, she was sure of it, and in pain.

  “Why is life so awful?” he said.

  “It’s not all awful,” she said. “Things change, improve. I really shouldn’t have said it. I don’t know why I did.”

  “They’re gone now, gone for good.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your whole family.” Moonlight washed his face in a greenish glow. “Gone for good,” he repeated. “Forever.”

  She was almost ce
rtain he was thinking about himself again.

  “No,” she said. “No, I don’t believe that. Not really. Do you?”

  He sat up and stared at her.

  “Look, forget about me for a moment,” she said, realizing that this might be her only chance. “I want to ask you about yourself. You probably think I’m a hundred years old, but I’m not, and I do remember what it’s like to be torn out of one place and put in another, that it’s—” Her voice was stumbling but it was the best she could do.

  “No, that’s not it,” he interrupted. “Not at all. Look, sorry…I’m going to bed.”

  As he hauled himself out of the lifeboat, the cotton wool fell off his shaving cut. It was bleeding again. She watched him walk away with his stiff, high-shouldered gait. He disappeared through a lit doorway.

  “I’ve betrayed you,” she said out loud.

  “I’m so sorry,” a voice said from behind a pile of deck chairs. “I feel I’m eavesdropping but I’m not.” A shadow stood up: it was Rose in a gauzy white dress, her blond hair burnished by the moonlight.

  “I came out here to think,” she said. “The others were so noisy.”

  “Did you hear all that?” said Viva.

  Rose looked embarrassed.

  “Not all of it. I used to argue with my brother all the time—isn’t it absolutely de rigueur?”

  “I don’t know if I can stand him.” Viva was shaking. “He’s so contemptuous.”

  A waiter had followed Rose in case she wanted anything, just as men would probably always do.

  “Coffee, madam? A nice liqueur? A cocktail? Emmeline Pitout will be singing her songs in the music room soon.”

  “I tell you what.” Rose was smiling at her. “Let’s go mad and have a brandy. I think the worst thing about him not being your brother is you can’t give him a fourpenny one. It would be so satisfying.”