the decor. The pool room was the icing on this heavily sugared cake, a sweep of blue lined with multicoloured mosaics.
Once there, the girls perched on two of the white and gilt chairs by the side of the pool. Maisie got out her cigarettes and Laura found herself imitating the way that Maisie was sitting, with her legs crossed and her hand holding the cigarette out to one side, but it was a poor pretence of nonchalance. She asked Maisie questions about what she was going to do back in London, and learned how she had tried to start a career in the New York shows over the last few years, but things had not gone according to plan. After a while they lapsed into silence, and Laura found her gaze arrested by a woman who was swimming determined laps, up and down, up and down. Eventually she stopped and got out, a tall, straight figure in a belted white swimming costume, who removed her cap to show a bob of almost white blonde hair.
‘Who’s she?’ said Maisie. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen her before. Is she in the movies?’ Laura didn’t know. ‘Or is she some society girl?’
It seemed more than likely. The woman walked to the side of the pool, her chin lifted, her shoulders back. ‘Hughie,’ she called to a tall man, who was reading a newspaper at the bar with a friend. ‘I’m off to the hairdresser. See you for cocktails later.’
‘At the bar upstairs?’
‘Absolutely not. Come to my suite. The Landers will be along too.’
Ebslutly naut … Her voice was struck glass, ringing with a brittle tone, and as she walked past them again, her towel trailing slightly on the ground, her gaze hovered about a foot above their heads. Laura could swear she knew they were in the wrong place. She felt that it was time to go back, but Maisie started talking to her again, this time about London, and despite herself Laura started to ask her questions about the city they were steaming towards, which she had never seen.
‘Is this yours?’ It was one of the men to whom the blonde woman had spoken, a man with a young face but thinning hair, and Laura automatically shook her head and avoided his eyes. But Maisie was leaning forward, looking at the silver cigarette lighter he was holding.
‘No, it’s not mine,’ she said, smiling up at him.
‘I say, I haven’t seen you around before.’
‘Haven’t you?’
Laura flushed. The man’s voice had sounded mocking to her and it seemed clear that he knew they were not in the right class, but Maisie was oblivious as she introduced them.
‘Are you having a good voyage, Miss May?’ The man sat down next to them, unbidden, and Laura noticed him raise his eyebrows at his friend by the bar, who drained his drink and walked over to them. The conversation between Maisie and the first man seemed to be moving along quite easily. They were even laughing by the time the other man sat down. ‘And we have drinks and you don’t,’ he was saying. ‘Martinis?’
‘I’ll have a whisky sour,’ Maisie said.
‘I’m fine. I don’t need a thing,’ Laura said, in a voice that was too quiet perhaps to be heard, as the man seemed to take no notice and ordered them all drinks, which came quickly. In Laura’s mouth, the spirits were bitterly strong, but she drank anyway, because it seemed to be expected of her.
‘You’re a quiet one, aren’t you?’ the other man said, leaning towards her, and Laura smiled, but it was a tight little smile.
Maisie and the first man, Hughie, were by now discussing various shows in New York, and he was talking about which of the actresses he had seen had the best shape, as he put it. He looked very obviously at Maisie’s breasts as he spoke, and Maisie arched her back. ‘I’ll tell you who does better martinis than you’ll get at the bar,’ he said and his friend laughed. ‘Mine are the best on the boat.’
Maisie immediately said something with a double entendre that Laura did not understand, but from the roar of the men, Laura could see it went down well. Before she quite realised it was happening, Maisie was getting up and the men were putting down their drinks, and they were all walking together from the pool room. Laura fell into step with Maisie and told her she was going to go back, and Maisie told her not to be a spoilsport. She turned away from her as she did so, and towards the men, and Laura felt hot with embarrassment and uncertainty. The suite turned out to be even more oppressively ostentatious than the public rooms – all gilt and glass and satin curtains, and even a baby grand piano at the edge of the room. Maisie sat down immediately on one of the blue velvet sofas, and crossed her legs so that her dress rode up to her knees.
Maisie asked them about the woman they had seen at the swimming pool. ‘Amy?’ Hughie said, as if they obviously knew who she was. ‘She’ll be at the hairdressers for the next couple of hours.’ It was that statement, as though he had been let off by Amy for a little amusement, and his amusement was going to be these girls from tourist class, that made Laura flush up with embarrassment again. She replied monosyllabically to everything that was said to her, until the second man gave up on her and lay down on the floor, smoking a cigar.
Meanwhile, Hughie was talking to Maisie about shapes again and how he had once known a dancer with ‘curves like watermelons’. ‘Are you saying mine aren’t?’ Maisie said, and the man leant over and cupped his hands around her breasts and pretended to judge. ‘That’s just your brassiere, isn’t it?’ he said at last, and she laughed in a high, yelping voice.
At this, Laura got up. ‘I must go,’ she said, ‘my friend’s waiting for me,’ but the man on the rug seemed to have fallen asleep, while Hughie was now engaged in a struggle with Maisie. Just as he managed to release Maisie’s breasts from her dress, immediately putting his head down to lick one rosy nipple, Laura turned the handle of the door and went out into the corridor.
Out of the room, she realised that she was unsure where to go. She started walking to her left, but the corridor split in two. Seeing a steward coming towards her with a large tray, she stepped to the right, but after a while she realised she was walking down a passage she had not seen before. She saw an elderly gentleman walking towards her, and finally summoned the courage to ask where the pool room was. Once there she managed to retrace her steps back through the engine room and into tourist class again. The smell, the low ceiling and the dingy felt carpet in her cabin seemed more lowering than before. Florence was asleep in the spare bed, her face squashed into a flat pillow, and Laura sat down heavily. After a while, she watched Florence wake up, yawning.
Although she had thought that she was dying to tell Florence about the experience she had just had, and about the way Maisie had behaved, once she was awake Laura realised she didn’t want to talk about it. She was no longer sure that she had behaved in the right way, leaving Maisie there. Part of her wondered if Maisie was all right, and the other part of her was full of hot anger. In her confusion, she said nothing about it.
‘The other side of the boat … you wouldn’t believe …’ was all she said in a blank voice, ‘more gilt than you can imagine.’
Florence sat up and stretched. ‘Why aren’t you travelling on that side anyway – your family must have quite a bit of dough?’ Laura realised that she was looking again at the pile of dresses on the trunk.
‘We’re okay now. Not rich like those women in first class. But it was only last year we got our money. And we have been struggling.’ Laura felt as though she were trying to excuse herself, to explain away the clothes, the earrings and the fur coat hanging on the back of the door. It was true, they had struggled. It wasn’t the kind of poverty that Florence would be used to, of course – being hungry or cold – it was nice people’s poverty. It meant
