then the rocking became more and more fierce, and although it was midday, the sky darkened with the deep clouds that mean a storm on land or sea. It started to rain, and I found I was weary. I had to sit in the cabin out of the rain and the rocking was no longer pleasant and it was very tiring to see the room going up and down.
Then it was not just tiring, but unbearably horrid. I felt sure I should be well if I could be up on the deck again, and I tried to hold to the memory of the pleasure of the prow cutting through the water. But it was no good. I hated the boat, and I hated the senseless rocking of the waves and I longed with all my heart to be back on the good solid earth.
I opened the cabin door and called for my maid who should have been in the cabin opposite mine. A sudden rush of nausea sent me to the basin in my room. I was sick alone and without help, and then a jerk and a dive of the ship sent me reeling into my bunk. Everything in the cabin swayed and rocked and the unsecured bags slid from side to side and crashed into one wall and then the other. I was miserably ill, too ill even to help myself. I clung to the side of the pitching bunk and wept aloud in fear and in sickness and for help. Then I was sick again and I dropped on to the pillows which bumped horridly up and down; then I slept.
When I woke the cabin was still shifting and heaving but someone had packed away all the bags so the cramped little room seemed less nightmarish. There was a pale smell of lilies and everything was clean. I looked around for my maid, but it was Celia sitting calmly in a heaving, pitching chair and smiling at me.
‘I am so glad you are better,’ she said. ‘Do you feel well enough to take something? Some soup, or just tea?’
I could not puzzle out where I was, or what was happening. I just shook my head, my stomach churning at the thought of food.
‘Well, sleep then,’ said this strange, authoritative Celia. ‘It is the best thing you can do, and we shall soon be safe and calm in port.’
I closed my eyes, too ill to care, and slept. I woke once more to be sick, and someone held a basin for me, and deftly washed my face and hands with warm water, dried me and laid me back on the turned pillow. I dreamed it was my mother, for I knew it was not my maid. Only in the night when I woke again did I realize it was Celia nursing me.
‘Have you been here all the time?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, as if nothing could be more natural. ‘Except when I was looking after Harry, of course.’
‘Is he ill, too?’ I asked wonderingly.
‘Rather worse than you, I am afraid,’ Celia said calmly. ‘But you will both be perfectly well when we reach France.’
‘Don’t you mind it, Celia?’
She smiled, and her gentle voice seemed to come from a long way away as I slid back into sleep.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I am stronger than I look.’
Next time I awoke the dreadful pitching and tossing had stopped. I felt light-headed and faint, but was no longer retching. I sat up and stretched my bare feet to the floor. I felt shaky, but better already, and tiptoed to the adjoining door to Harry’s cabin without holding the chair for support. The door opened without a sound and I stood silently in the doorway.
Celia was standing by Harry’s bunk with a bowl of soup in one hand, and her arm around Harry, around my Harry’s shoulders. I watched as he sipped at the soup like a sickly infant, and then Celia settled him back on the pillow.
‘Better?’ she asked, and her voice was infinitely tender. Harry clasped her hand.
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘you have been so kind, so sweet to me.’
Celia smiled and smoothed the hair from his forehead in an intimate, confident gesture.
‘Oh, how silly you are, Harry,’ she said. ‘I am your wife. Of course I care for you when you are ill. I promised to love you in sickness and in health. I have been happy to care for you, and for dear Beatrice, too.’
I watched in horror as Harry took Celia’s hand from his hair and held it gently to his lips. And she, the cold, shy Celia, bent and kissed him on the forehead. Then she drew the curtains around the bed. I stepped back, silent on my bare feet, and closed the door behind me. Celia’s confidence, Celia’s tenderness to Harry, amazed and alarmed me. I felt once more the knife thrust of jealousy, but also the fear of exclusion from the pale of the married state. For courage, for the reassurance of my beauty, I turned to the small mirror nailed on the wooden wall of the cabin. I was white and sickly looking, and my skin was like wax.
Any ideas I had of striding into Harry’s cabin and raging at him or even of slinking into his bunk beside him were instantly dismissed. If he was feeling at all as I did, he would welcome neither a quarrel nor a passionate reconciliation.
I dressed, a puzzled frown still on my face. For the first time now we were unlike ourselves in illness, and unlike ourselves off our land. It struck me how little I shared with Harry. Away from Wideacre, away from my obsession, and too tired to be lovers, we were strangers. If I had gone into his cabin for anything other than a scene of passion, I should not have known what to say. It would never occur to me to order soup for him, or to feed him as if he was some disgusting, overgrown baby, or to draw his curtains so he could sleep. I had never nursed any invalid; I had never even played with dolls in my childhood, and I had neither instinct nor interest in the kind of lovemaking that consists of gentle caresses and kindly courtesies.
Celia blooming with a sense of her importance and Harry expansive and grateful for her nursing were an odd couple indeed, but I could not see there was any way to check their new relationship.
Nor did I, once I was up on deck watching a beautifully steady horizon, think it necessary to spoil Celia’s moment of glory. If she liked to nurse Harry and me when we were hideous with seasickness, it was not a job I envied. And if Harry kissed her hand in gratitude, and thought of her drudgery kindly, well that did me no harm either. As the wind whipped my cheeks into a rosy colour, and my loose hair into curls, my hopes rose too. Here was France, and a long easy holiday with no eyes to watch us, no ears to listen to us, and only naive, silly, slavish Celia to deceive.
Harry and Celia joined me on deck, and I even forgave their interlaced arms – especially when I saw that my strong and healthy lover was leaning on Celia for support. He was pale and listless and smiled at me only when I assured him that we would be disembarked in under an hour. But I was no longer anxious. As soon as Harry was well and his appetite restored – for his dinner and for everything else – he would be mine for the taking.
We dined and slept that night in Cherbourg, and in the morning Harry was perfectly well. I did not complain, but I could not eat my breakfast for a renewed bout of seasickness. The dizziness had gone, but as soon as I lifted my head from the pillow I felt sick and extremely unlike myself. The others breakfasted on coffee and rolls, while I strolled outside in the fresh air of the garden of the inn, and watched them loading up our post-chaise. I somehow dreaded the long road to Paris cooped up inside a swaying carriage, and could scarcely raise a smile in response to Harry when he handed me up the steps.
My seasickness stayed with me, far from the sight of the sea, far from the smell of the boat. Damn it, it stayed with me every morning along the road to Paris, every sunlit Parisian morning when Harry hammered on the door and called to me to come riding in the bois, every morning of our journey south.
I lifted my head from retching into the window box one morning and admitted miserably to myself the fact I had been
