that were fresh and scented and glossy with newness. It meant that when there was a leak from the bathroom into the living room, there wasn’t the money to make it better, and the ceiling and wallpaper stayed stained and a piece had to be cut out of the carpet, so that you didn’t invite girls home. It was about saying no to invitations that you longed for – to the theatre, to parties – because you couldn’t return them. It was about not going to college, but taking a secretarial course and then a little job at a real estate office, where you ate your lunch out of a paper bag every day. It was about your father being out of work and coming home smelling of drink late at night, every night. And it had gone on, day after day, year after year, the little miseries of nice people’s poverty.
Until suddenly, last year, with the death of her English grandfather whom she had never met, there was a lurch into a kind of wealth: shopping trips into Boston, the planned vacation in Europe, so many plans, so much chatter, which should have drowned out those years of humiliation. All that is behind you now, Laura reminded herself. Across miles of water now. This is where you are now, with this new friend.
At that thought, Laura smiled at Florence, and asked her if she wanted to stay in her cabin for the rest of the journey. Florence responded in a characteristically matter-of-fact way, and went to her old room to get her things – which turned out to be just a big old carpet bag, and when she came back in she said she was going to shower. Putting the bag down on the floor, she stripped carelessly. Laura and her sister had always observed a careful propriety with one another, and Florence’s beautifully modelled back and buttocks and legs and, as she turned, the slopes of her breasts and stomach flashed into Laura’s sight and stayed there even after Florence had gone into the shower room.
That evening they went up to the deck again after dinner and found a place behind a glass screen, where the wind was less bitter and they could sit for hours. Laura told Florence about the article that had made such an impression on her, and Florence immediately responded by agreeing that this was what things were like in Russia for men and women. ‘A friend of mine made a trip there last year,’ she said. ‘She told me all about it.’ The way Florence described her friend’s experiences, everyone was able to participate in the happy-ever-after of equality. ‘Everything that’s so demeaning about relationships between men and women in America – gone.’ Laura tried to grasp what this would mean, but Florence had already moved off onto other themes – dignity, fair wages, work.
Work. Florence asked Laura if she had ever worked. The memory of those months in the real estate office flooded back into Laura’s mind. Of course she had been told many times how lucky she was to find a job, any job, that summer of 1937. It had been a humid, languid August to start with, and in Stairbridge almost everyone she had known from school was off on vacation, out on airy hills or beaches. Only Laura, it seemed to her, was condemned to this miserable office, where the summer days fell away pointlessly, unfulfilled, behind the windowpanes. She typed invoices and contracts line after line, page after page, rattle, rattle, rattle and bang, until she felt like a vase fretted all over with fine cracks, as though she would shatter at a touch. ‘I hated it,’ she said, a little shamefaced. ‘I don’t think I’m any good at working. It was so – repetitive.’
‘That’s the whole point.’
‘What is?’
‘There’s so much …’ and for a moment Florence seemed to hesitate, as if everything she wanted to tell Laura was too large to contemplate – and then she plunged in. She told Laura about the alienation of labour, and how capitalism reduced the worker to being an instrument rather than a person, and made work an endless sequence of repetitive actions. She told her that in a communist society every man and woman would be able to engage in meaningful work that really did spring from their personality. The alienation of labour. For some reason this abstract idea suddenly sprang into life for Laura, as she remembered those summer days and the sense, new to her and one she would never forget, that she was looking down at herself from far above, that she was not part of the life mapped out for her.
She made Florence talk more and more, as the swell rose and fell beneath them, and even when Joe stopped to speak to them, she shrugged him off. As Florence spoke, a gull momentarily landed on the railing like a white emissary from the future and the pared moon was suddenly naked as the clouds left it behind. Or was that just how Laura remembered the scene afterwards? Because she replayed the conversation in her mind for weeks and years to come, remembering over and over how she listened to Florence’s words and how freighted with meaning they seemed. The promise of the new world that was mapped out for her that night seemed almost like a personal promise that Florence was making to her, that the petty humiliations of the life she had left behind would never return. More, that the bitter failures and pointless successes of ordinary middle-class life were unimportant, and there was a place ahead of them where women and men could find nobler and more vivid activities.
They went to their cabin late. But that night the sea was calmer, or maybe it was just that the girls were used to the motion. They slept deeply and woke more refreshed. There was an impatience in the air when they went up to the deck after breakfast, Laura thought, as if everyone was eager to get to the end of the voyage. But Laura did not want it to end. She watched Florence as she walked fast, as if with some purpose, around the deck. Bareheaded, her hair’s natural curl tended, in the damp wind that blew constantly, to frizz around her temples and the nape of her neck. But the way black and brown and auburn seemed to mingle in the curls of her hair, the way the wind blowing at her eyes made them water and sparkle – something of the sea itself, some deliquescent light, ran over her and through her. In years to come, when events had irrevocably parted them, it would always be this Florence, this girl blown by the salty wind, who came back into Laura’s mind.
Suddenly Laura saw Maisie and Lily talking to Joe, and felt a shyness rise up in her. But Joe called her over. They were all talking about what time the boat was likely to get into Southampton the following day, about how the bad weather at the start of the journey had held them back.
‘You rushed off yesterday,’ Maisie said in an aside to her.
‘Well …’
‘We had a wild time,’ Maisie said confidently, and Joe said, ‘So I heard.’ Laura found Maisie’s face hard to read. Was it all pleasure, or was there knowledge of how Laura had judged her? Laura could not be sure, but at least there was no anger there, and so Laura was able to stay talking. As they stood there together, Laura saw how intimate Joe seemed with Lily, touching her hand as he lit her cigarette and teasing her about how she seemed unable to throw off what she would call seasickness but he would call a plain old hangover. As she noticed how Lily shook her head at him in a mixture of laughter and annoyance, Laura wondered if there was something more than friendship now between the two of them.
But when Joe turned to Laura and started to ask her about whether she was going back into first class, his energy moved easily away from Lily and towards her, and she realised that there was no particular intimacy between him and Lily. He was just one of those people who wanted to create a flirtatious warmth with everyone he met. It was unusual in a man, Laura thought as she answered him, to see this constant attentiveness to every person. No wonder he had collected this little group around him in the few days on the boat.
And so she stood quite happily, chatting with the others, until she saw Florence again, now in conversation with a steward on the other side of the deck, and moved away to join her. The steward was, to Laura’s mind, a rather unprepossessing man, a short dark boy with a bad squint. Florence and he had spoken briefly to one another before, Laura had noticed, and now with a transparent pretence of asking for coffee, Florence was talking to him again. As Laura walked up to them, she heard the words ‘conditions’, ‘hours’ and ‘wages’ and knew that Florence was becoming exercised about some injustice that the boy was telling her about. She should have been pleased, she knew, that this was what Florence was doing, but instead she felt irritated that Florence’s attention
