it professionally. But it had such a personal quality – as if the huge stars were curving down to meet them and the dusted blackness was only something rushing the other way.
Besides, more intense even than the visual drama above was the knowledge that her hand on the rail was a mere inch from his own. But he would not look at that. Achernar, the southern tip of Eridanus, River of Heaven. Follow the jab down: Reticulum, the Net, just rising. If they could stay out here all night, they would see the Southern Cross. He had waited to see it last night. It reminded him that a difficult and salty continent lay somewhere down there, under the dark line of the horizon. Keeping still, they could hear the subdued crash of the bow wave, and feel the ship’s eastward movement. It was dodging sideways in order to call at Colombo, and then Singapore. It gave them some time.
Her voice: ‘I didn’t have the courage to ask you before, exactly what on earth we’re going to do when we get there. Because it makes a difference to what we do now, doesn’t it.’ She stated it flatly, not as a question.
So they were a fact. She had just given it form and lodged it in between sunset and dressing for dinner. He was amazed, full of joy; that people could do that, and it was them. And he was also afraid. Shouts and laughter reached them from just below. Late for their high tea, a party of children, myself the last amongst them, could be heard along the promenade deck. They funnelled inside somewhere, chattering. Robert felt for her hand, and held it, touching his fingertips cautiously round to her palm.
She returned the pressure. ‘You can change your mind. If you’re not sure.’
‘I never imagined. I’m sure, but I never imagined.’ He noticed how snatches of illumination leaked out from the decks below or crept between cracks in the fittings.
‘Liar, darling.’ She smiled again.
Ventilator cowlings, pipes, davits, and a spice wind from behind them: their astonishment continued, as the ship slipped on into the tropic dark. He felt they were bathed in a wordless beauty that did not belong in the world. Yet it was palpable; it was all around them.
For the first time in his life he felt at home. ‘You are braver than I am.’
From that moment the whole ship also acknowledged them as a fact. And although people said nothing quite directly – although they continued furious and put out – they no longer attempted, in the shape of Mrs Madeley, or Mary Garnery, or Paul Finch-Clark, or a general conspiracy that operated out of the Armorial’s paintwork, the furniture, or the tannoy, to keep them apart.
Flashes of memory are glittering, dangerous things. Lifted from the Falklands War, I was too ashamed to show my face. For some weeks I believed myself one of those poor souls who cracked on the way south and had to be flown home before hostilities even began. No shame in that – it happens. But to me it felt as though I had let everyone down, the family member at last who shirked when England expected.
It was only gradually my nightmares started to cohere. Subdy my coward’s badge was streaked through with fire. I had been there after all, trapped in the inferno of my burning destroyer; yet still unshakeably convinced I had ducked my duty.
Even as the true events bore themselves in, I could not relate to them. I watched news footage of my stricken vessel and remained disconnected. A carapace had shaped itself so closely around the horror that as it split open I was both naive and knowing at once. But that was a military disaster, and the eerie phenomena of battle stress are now well documented.
Memories have their species, though. Mine of Penny Kendrick and Robert Kettle is like a swarm of finches, if such could accompany so large a ship so far from land, roosting suddenly on the wires above the boat deck in order to catch their words, or sense their thoughts. Their love is birdlike, full of vibration and scribbled chattering. Or like the schools of flying fish that would skim and dart on the bow wave. Or like a current and its accompanying breath that presses imperceptibly now this way, now that upon the vessel’s direction, enveloping them both. This is a memory of what must have been. It is the most beautiful of all the memories, one of ornament, how it was between them.
And I would spend my time telling you of them only, bringing them to their consummation, had not voices of an altogether different nature begun to attend the passage. Consider the steely-eyed albatross, riding empty air above the mainmast head, looking down. This was – I saw it happen.
And there is the memory that comes back like a spit in the face, like a gob of poison. It was Hugh Kendrick’s visit long after we had arrived in Adelaide, with his terrible story of the lovers in the desert, and what I had done. That strikes at me with its own coil, clear, and of a piece – with detail like scales. How I felt like a salamander in the fire that night after the scare at the township dump. That memory refuses to leave me, yet I cannot make it fit.
You are cast adrift with me now, and must trust in my navigation.
Creatures of air see nothing beneath the surface. The ocean has layers. Deep down there are lanterns, great-swallowers, dragonfish, star-eaters who rise up near the surface only for the night sky, and then sink back nearly a mile at dawn. Beneath them in turn it is perpetually sunless. There the blanched light-emitters blitz and glow. Angler fish, gulper eels, black bristle-mouths, oarfish. No living mariner knows of these depths; though thirty thousand corpses reach them a year, and scarcely a news column of concern.
Consider the scars across the forehead of an old sperm whale. These tell of the giant squid. Consider the tentacles. Consider the hideous beak. This is a species that eludes us, lying in wait, unfathomably huge, maybe. It is rumoured to rise up once in a century to take a ship or two. It throws us into confusion.
But memory can play us false. No record of the Armorica exists. Not with the shipping company itself, nor with Lloyd’s, nor with the Maritime Museum at Greenwich; not even at the Admiralty. I have rung everywhere and anywhere that passenger liners might be registered or listed. It is the same polite response: that I must be mistaken. We have nothing here on file in that name, sir.
I have pulled rank, requested double-checks, paid for searches. I have been told to ‘hold the line’ and have patiently held. I have insisted: ‘But I was there. I once sailed in her.’ To no avail. And my family also deny knowledge. My aunt claims she is too upset to think about such things. Anyway, she has no recollection of all that. Why had I never bothered asking when my father was alive? It is almost as though I had killed him myself. Erica, my mother … is too ill. Moon-faced, full of drugs, she attended the hospital rather than the funeral. They may give her electro-shock. Under general anaesthetic, of course: what only the body undergoes, the nurse said, the mind need never know.
Memory is a dangerous subject. Let me warn you once more. Quite apart from this bereavement, I have been under pressure. There was a woman the other day – she was brought to an interview room. I found her badly disfigured, burnt, presumably. The eyes brown, the silver hair still showing traces of a youthful black, the skin a pale tan – what original was left of it. She was scarred massively at one time or another, but who knows by what. Perhaps an unfortunate household accident. And she might have been anything, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Algerian, Vietnamese. She was screaming in a quiet, tired way that was horrible. She could have been white, even. I lost my temper – I suffer from dark moods. I almost lost my job. The department has to be careful; we pride ourselves. She was referred and will be deported, of course.
She claimed … but how can you determine a torture victim? The doctor examined her. What are its precise badges? Terror? Depression? Incoherence, yes. Apathy,
