cut us, and cut everything down to the bloody bone. No merchant fleet left and nothing to defend.’
His fist tightened on the wire before him. ‘But we never lost a war, did we? Battle or two maybe, but we never lost a war. Eh? No Vietnam. D’you see? No bloody Vietnam. Well, I’ll soon be hanging up my hat, boy. But what about you?’
I had no answer. After eyeing me meaningfully once again, he went about his business. He was a good man; the sort you would want next to you in a crisis. Though of course he did not see active service; while I, of course, did.
But later that day, when we were all in a bar in Sydney somewhere, he made a point of buttonholing me and buying me a Scotch. He insisted he had confused the names. Two sisters only: Avalon and Hispania. Why he should have made a mix-up like that he had no idea. Two sisters only.
‘What?’ I said.
‘That’s all right then. That’s all right.’ And I cudgelled my brain then for the other name he had let slip.
But now glimpses of the Armorica burst softly around me like the artillery of butterflies. The barrage of memory takes its own time, its own slow motion of opening.
It had not been calm all the way. In fact, the Armorica was late because of the Bay of Biscay. Only a few days out from Tilbury and the English Channel, a huge winter storm had forced her to turn head on to the waves, and stand far out into the Atlantic.
‘It claimed in the brochure this ship had stabilisers,’ Barry Parsons said to the steward that lunch-time, when the motion first went beyond a joke. Penny overheard him trying to help his green-faced wife out of the dining-room. All morning there had been wry smiles and comments about sea-legs. An ominous pewter sky bottomed wider and lower, beaten out by a dinting wind. The lounges were suddenly deserted; the clamorous gloom penetrated the cabins themselves. But Penny had always reckoned herself the kind of person who would, when put to the test, make a good sailor.
In her neat blouse, her light jacket cinched at the waist, her long skirt of brown serge, and her court shoes which turned out slightly when she walked, she presented herself for lunch; though at the back of her mind she did worry that a ship made entirely of steel – it was, wasn’t it? – should be able to creak and grind so.
The dining-room was large, brightly lit and expensively panelled. But, lying between the outermost cabins each side of D deck, it had no windows or portholes – and therefore no reassuring horizon. She shared a table with the Finch-Clarks, and now their little girl. Children were permitted at lunch. It was a table at the edge of the dining area, where carpet gave way to wood. About her, the slightly built Goan waiters coped with chops, game, fish, soup, and deployed their twin spoons to serve level vegetables on a treacherously sloping plate. The air was full, too, of the usual cuisine smells, made sharper and a touch greasier, she felt, by the worsening sea. Yet she began her meal in a spirit of bravery: with a portion of asparagus in butter, excellent as always. And then the lamb.
But now a tray full of upturned coffee-cups slid off its side-table and avalanched pieces of crockery past them. A bad wave. From around the dining-room there were shrieks and remarks from folk caught up in similar local calamities. Hardly a moment to recoup before there came another. Tests of character. Penny gripped on to her own table with one hand while maintaining her plate with the other. Gravy trickled over her fingers. She could see the Parsons couple. They had been unable to move. Half slumping, half standing a few yards away, they clutched at the door-frame, the handrail and each other. She could see white knuckles. Then all the debris came cruising along the floor as the ship tipped back through what now seemed an enormous angle.
And slowly – but not so slowly that it became acceptable – up again.
‘I’m afraid we can’t have the stabilisers out in this sort of a sea, sir. They’d break off.’
‘What!’ Barry Parsons’s fleshy presence boomed. ‘You’re joking, I take it.’ But its sound was as unconvincing as an echo.
‘Absolutely not, sir. They said yesterday we were likely to run into some heavy stuff. Just have to head up and ride it out. Besides, they only affect the roll, not the pitch, stabilisers.’ The steward gestured with his flattened hand. ‘The captain won’t want to get stuck in the Bay, see. I’m sure you’ll understand.’ He grinned. He was enjoying it, Penny thought. ‘ATM afraid it’s likely to get a touch worse than this, even. Which is a little unusual even for this time of year, sir, I admit.’ Definite relish.
Queenie Parsons just managed, ‘Worse?’ Then, ‘But this is a liner’ died to a whisper as she fought with incredulity, terror and her stomach. Hanging on, the Parsons couple appeared to Penny as ham dramatics conversing from across an unkind wooden stage. But she was hanging on to the table herself, surprised, yes, genuinely surprised that the captain could allow roughness to get to the point of breakages.
‘You’d think they’d know what to expect, wouldn’t you? And have special racks or whatever – for the things. You’d think they would.’ She made the remark to no one in particular, voicing her disquiet.
Paul Finch-Clark leaned in to the table and managed to make a quip about Battersea fairground. Something else smashed. Penny caught the words ‘… You realise it isn’t quite what it looked like from dry-ground level.’
Little Rosalind Finch-Clark gripped her chair at both sides, watching with wide eyes as her plate of half-eaten poached egg on toast moved now towards her father, now towards Penny.
‘When does it stop?’ Penny called out.
It was the steward who replied. ‘Not for a few days, I’m afraid, madam.’
‘A few days! Like this!’ She found her voice joined by several from the neighbouring tables. Then she glanced to where the Parsons couple had been standing. They were now nowhere to be seen. They had been slid out of the ship and sluiced away, so she could fancy.
A general lurching exodus from the dining-room was in progess, however, for the big sea continued. Every wave was a bad wave. Penny regarded her fellow travellers, trying herself to decide what to do. The ship’s creaks and groaning had increased, quite alarmingly. Surely that was not right. A noise overhead. She looked up in case signs of fracture should appear in the ceiling. She expected the lights to flicker. There was indeed an air of consternation. Sparks or water would burst through the walls.
Only the hardiest old birds of passage were still eating, managing their plates with a degree of superiority. One or two were still calling out to waiters as if a regime of bouncing, splintering glassware and cascading cutlery were just what their specialist, when reminding them to go south again this year for the winter, had ordered. An old woman in pearls summoned assistance from her seat two tables away. ‘Cabin, I think, steward.’
And of course the steward was propelled into action, partly by sycophancy – probably; but Penny would have liked to think, compassion – and partly by the momentary angle of the ship. ‘Directly, your ladyship.’ And, proud it seemed of his white uniform, and the braid in colours-of-the-line looped at his left shoulder, he rescued her theatrically past them all, one arm for the dowager and one for the ship.
The dowager nodded politely to Penny. ‘I went through the Suez Canal for the first time in thirty-seven, and since then I’ve done it eighteen times, this way and that, regular as clockwork. Not counting
