‘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 her attention. I was convinced I should never get to know the other children on the ship. My imagination was stirred, too. I was afraid of the cold, the anonymity, of drowning.
Penny regarded the man briefly before nodding and turning her gaze back to the sea. They had spoken once or twice – at coffee – at least she thought so. He was young, younger than herself, still in his twenties, maybe. Tallish, with bones regular enough, a nice smile and ample dark curly hair, now made somewhat nonsensical by the wind. His eyes were kind.
The eyes, yes. Maybe he was the man she had encountered at the purser’s office, when she was spending the first few mornings going here and there about the ship, getting her bearings, discovering all its mahogany-panelled passages, its labyrinthine secrets; before this extraordinary movement had exerted prior claim over everything else. She could not be certain. For, in the days of the voyage so far, faces had only just begun to assemble themselves, names to enter her reckoning. One could easily get appearances confused. And she could certainly not remember his name.
So Penny endured a few more minutes. The seasickness receded a little.
‘I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get away. Are you scared?’
‘Of course.’ She swallowed. ‘Is it obvious?’
‘No. I was just trying to find someone else in the same boat.’ He pulled up the collar of his coat with his free hand and held the lapels closed under his chin. ‘So to speak.’
She laughed in spite of the joke and her stomach. The wind snatched a shower of fine icy spray from the summit of one of the ridges and hurled it into their faces, before the next inexorable heave of the decking could lift them. Her companion gripped the end of the mahogany rail. Penny noticed how tightly she herself had hold of an upright steel stanchion that appeared to support the deck above. It must in fact run down like a rib through the whole ship. Her knuckles were quite locked. The stanchion itself was freezing wet but the flange offered a good purchase, and because of its security she could sometimes, daringly, provoking the storm almost, lean out to learn better what was coming.
‘I never imagined …’ she began. ‘That it would be like this, I mean. And the noise. Listen. All that … grinding and groaning. It’s solid metal. How can it do that? I hate it. At least out here in the wind you can’t notice it so much.’
The great structure started its drop away again from under their feet. For a moment they were weightiest.
‘I wouldn’t pretend to have the answer. At all. Oh God.’ Then: ‘It’s just very, very … I don’t know what. In there,’ he gestured to the cabins, ‘it’s like a ship in one of those films.’ He shouted over the weather. ‘Too swashbuckling for me, I’m afraid! That’s why I’m staying out here as long as I can. The sight of what’s actually doing it to you makes you feel slightly less ill.’ His looks belied the assertion. ‘But I do agree. It is the noise that’s maybe the worst of it. It’s the absolute cream on the custard. Sorry!’
They shared a tight smile: another attempted joke and the tasteless mention of food.
‘Sorry. But if it were just the movement … Well, that’s what every sailor sings about, isn’t it? It’s as British as … I don’t know, Trafalgar Square. And being British we ought to be able to cope. That’s what they keep telling us. And if this were a little old battler – with the salt-caked smokestack, et cetera – you’d expect it. But this is huge, and up to date. The latest thing. And cinema liners don’t lurch, otherwise Fred and Ginger could never
