Acts of Mutiny (10 page)

There had been a ballroom evening the previous night. Russell Coote had offered to dance with her. It was the first time the sea had settled down enough for social functions even to be thought of. Russell’s immediate gesture, and the execution, were displays of an old-world gallantry she had never come across. He danced out of duty; his wife expected of him that he should ask a woman travelling alone to partner him and to join them at their table. He expected it of himself.

The two wives had shared him all evening. It was utterly chaste, the sort of manners one always thought of as English but, to be strictly honest, never found in England. At any rate not these days, she could hear her mother saying. Not since the war. Only in older men, Penny, for all one tries.

Her mother always romanticised the past. Here were manners from the new world. One would have said simply ‘public school’, except that was virtually synonymous with first class anyway, and not everyone had offered to dance with her. Besides, that phrase in a man meant all sorts of English things, like mud and dogs and father and teas and tears, and the smell of certain rooms and days, special words rooting back into a coterie that was home. There could be nothing like that anywhere else. Russell certainly lacked any such connection. He was perhaps in his late thirties. His family owned a grain-exporting concern in Victoria, he had said; they lived in the suburbs of Melbourne.

‘Let’s go and sit down.’ Clodagh steered Penny towards the view. ‘Russell can bring your coffee over.’

The accent was detectable, the intonation somewhat languid and cultured. Never having met any Australians, never having heard Australian speech – beyond a few newsreel fragments and one or two well-known radio voices – Penny still found herself perplexed by these faintly altered vowels. Penny almost ‘Pinny’, though not quite.

Her mother, owning the little prep school, had always laid great stress on the maintenance of vowels. She was a righteous, bitter woman. Nevertheless, Penny found it hard to believe that her future life would be among these people. She realised that this subject of accent, though it should have been appropriately trivial, was quite out of the question for polite small talk. She wanted to ask Clodagh Coote how she could make those sounds; but it would have been as unthinkable as commenting upon her name.

Yes, it seemed a very trivial matter – she knew it was – but it preoccupied her, and distanced her both from her own folk and from the Cootes. As if they belonged, Russell and Clodagh, in an unexpected and partly botanical oil painting.

She placed her bag and other materials beside the lounger-chair, and hoisted herself in via the sloping footstool.

‘Well, we shan’t see any more of that, thank goodness.’ Clodagh waved dismissively at the sea as if it still contained the imprint of forty-foot waves. ‘Penny, I can’t tell you how bad I am at motion. I was completely wretched, wasn’t I, Russell?’

‘Oh, absolutely wretched, Penny.’ Russell placed her coffee on the small, fixed table in front of them and slid into a chair himself. ‘Clodagh wasn’t cut out to be a sailor, I’m afraid. She’ll be very glad to get it all over. She’s longing to find herself back at home and on dry land.’

And churches, Penny thought. Until the young man had mentioned them, she had been unable to put her finger on what precisely it was she would miss. Home, England, was churches; quiet, grey guardians of the past, set like kindly and unalterable waymarks in a network of villages and towns. Why, you could virtually navigate in some parts of England by the spires and church towers. It was almost magical.

A girl of about ten came into the lounge and stood beside Clodagh’s chair. She was neat and perhaps a touch overdressed for the warm morning, in a check woollen dress with a collar. Her hair was dark, unlike Clodagh’s, and secured in two careful plaits.

‘Mummy, I told Mitchell he had to take me with him, but he just went off with the others.’

Clodagh put her glass down and turned to her daughter. ‘Which other children, dear?’

‘It’s those two boys from the deck beneath ours and another one. They’re all going to play ping-pong and they said they didn’t need me.’

‘I’m sure there’s something else you could do?’ She adjusted the girl’s collar.

Russell said, ‘Go and tell him, Finlay, that he’s got to let you play and that’s all there is to it. Go along, now.’

‘But they don’t want me around. They say I don’t know how to hit the ball.’

‘Tell Mitchell he’s supposed to be looking after you. He knows that.’

Finlay left uncertainly. Clodagh leaned back in her chair with a faint gesture of exhaustion. ‘It’s really wonderful for children, a voyage. There’s so much for them to do, and see. It’s very educational.’

Penny, still mildly disoriented by the names she had just heard, replied, ‘Oh, yes,’ and thought of Peter and Christopher.

An older man, another Australian – some sort of businessman, she believed – sat down beside Russell and drew his attention. She found herself watching, for a moment, the slight tip and fall of her coffee in the cup on the table.

Clodagh said, ‘They are a constant anxiety. One just doesn’t realise how much, until they come along. I quite envy someone in your position. But then of course they do have their compensations, I suppose.’

‘In my position?’ Penny said. Then she realised. ‘But I do have children. Two boys.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Penny. I had no idea. You didn’t seem … Oh, that’s lovely. Are they already in Adelaide … with your husband, then?’

‘No. They’re in England. Peter’s the older one, he’s about Finlay’s age; and Christopher is six. They’re with my mother.’ Penny felt exposed, though she had no reason to be. ‘Hugh, my husband, wanted me to join him out there as soon as I could, after it was settled that the move was for good. At least for the foreseeable … The boys can come out later, when the school term’s finished, probably. When everything’s settled and there’s a home for them to go to. They’ll fly out. They’ll like that. I’m with the furniture, you see.’ She smiled. ‘That’s why I’m going by sea. Apart from the experience itself, of course. Hugh thought I’d enjoy it. It would relax me … And the firm were paying. So why not, we thought?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Clodagh. There was a pause. ‘Why not, indeed, Penny. So pleasant last night, wasn’t it? We were so pleased to have your company. Russell’s quite a good dancer, isn’t he; though I shouldn’t say so.’

‘Certainly. Yes, he is.’

‘I do like to dance.’ Clodagh sipped her drink and gazed out through the panoramic glass at the drench of Mediterranean light. ‘But I find it tires me.’

Seasickness, homesickness – are they not just labels for what no two people experience in quite the same way, as the stomach rises to the heart? What to do about tears? Looking firmly ahead at the view through the window, she felt in her bag beside the chair for a handkerchief, then pretended to be dabbing her brow and cheeks. And then she swallowed nearly everything back down again behind her coffee cup. Why had she been so uncharacteristically weepy the last two days? It seemed more than the situation called for. And, of course, she was relieved, actually, to be getting away from her mother at last.

‘Excuse me one moment.’ She pretended she needed to check their position.

In this saloon, in a special glass-topped desk, set in the exact centre of the windows’ curve, a new white chart was clipped each morning. Penny allowed her eye to roam over it. Yes, she would not cry now. Coloured pins recorded their progress. She could recognise, in large type, Greece, and the thin, eaten slab of Crete. Jerusalem surprised her. She had never taken much notice of geography. The Holy Land, for example, had not been represented to her at school as a country in relation to others, but as a place in itself, a sort of first draft for the Home Counties.

She leaned forward to get a better view. She was surprised to see their route pointed at a corner of it. But there next to it of course was the Suez Canal, and that would imply Egypt. And of course in the Bible they were always swerving down into Egypt, for one reason or another – famine, the sword, tax, or tax avoidance, that sort of thing. The thought was in bad taste, she knew; but it had come to mind. Like the moment at which Robert Kettle had said ‘lavatory’, and people had changed the subject.

Repressing a smile: ‘I’m so ignorant about where countries are.’ Then another thought struck her. ‘I suppose you really only find out by going there, don’t you?’ She said it out loud, now quite composed as she resumed her seat.

‘I suppose you do,’ said Clodagh. ‘The Canal is vile. Take my word for it. Russell and I shan’t be going ashore at Port Said.’ She looked across at her husband, and then turned back. ‘I wonder have you seen that extraordinary woman? My dear, so frail she can hardly walk. I mean the woman who appeared in the dining-room the other evening. I’ve seen her on one or two other occasions as well. I mean the woman who’s excessively thin.’

‘No. I’m afraid I haven’t,’ Penny said.

‘I couldn’t quite believe it at first when I saw her. Really no more than a skeleton in a dress. I didn’t know what to imagine. She looked … I don’t know … like someone who’d just come out of a POW camp.’

The conversation lapsed. Penny worked at her coffee, adding a little more sugar, and sipping, with the saucer under the cup in case the gentle swell should catch her out and ruin her skirt. She sensed from the corner of her eye Clodagh tucking the stray wisps of her ash-toned hair back behind her ears. Penny said, ‘I’d like to know what to expect.’

She turned round involuntarily to look behind her, and found herself staring at Robert Kettle who was standing at the bar. They both looked away immediately. Penny realised with a start that she had completely forgotten having danced once with him last night.

Much later the same morning, Penny was sitting in a different chair, reading – with her book in the lap of her slick, grey worsted skirt and her pince-nez on her nose – when Finlay Coote came in.

‘Have you seen either my mummy or my daddy?’

‘They left to do some shopping, Finlay. I think they’ve gone to buy a film for their camera, and maybe Mummy would look for some new sunglasses. Or have you tried the cabin?’

‘There’s a giant squid. We’ve seen a giant squid. I want them to come and see. Over the side. What have you got on your nose?’

‘They’re my glasses, Finlay. They belonged to my great-aunt.’ It suddenly occurred to Penny that the Cootes’ declaration of a little desultory shopping might have been merely a cover. They had exchanged looks. A form of words to screen the fact that they were taking advantage of the children’s daylight absence from their four-berth cabin. She pictured with horror little Finlay opening her parents’ cabin door to find Russell’s half-clothed body working at Clodagh’s flare of floral print across one of the bunks. Incomprehensible. The girl would be terrified. And it would all be Penny’s fault.

Shocked at the violence of her own imagination, she spoke stupidly to the child. ‘I wear them to scare people away and make me look like an old woman. My boys say I look like a granny. Do you want to try them?’

‘You don’t scare me,’ said the girl, trying the glasses on her nose, torn between the fascination of looking through them, and the urgency of her story. ‘Which deck’s the shop on again, please, Penny?’ She tried out the familiarity of a name.

Penny put the pince-nez on the arm of her chair. She could not but tell her. So Finlay slipped off after her parents. In any case they would be very foolish not to lock the cabin door; and, when she came to think of it, Clodagh was so ethereal and Russell so proper that the couple’s relations had probably been suspended entirely for the duration – that film and sunglasses were devices in no way rhetorical. If indeed their children had not been immaculately conceived in the first place.

The news of the squid had stirred the occupants of the observation lounge. They were hastily finishing their coffee and tea, their Scotch, their old crosswords, and were fading off towards the decks in hope of viewing the monster. Penny found herself on the starboard part of A deck, where she had first encountered Robert. Nothing out of the ordinary. Except the sea had completely changed colour. It was a rich, nearly opaque green, tinged with pink, underslung with sienna. She looked towards the stern. The pink could be seen tapering to a bright streak behind them in the blue-black – where the wake severed it.

There was no question, now, but that the ship was moving past a cable of coloured water thicker than any creature’s limb. Yet she could reconstruct how the children, standing on the white bars and looking down over the rail as they liked to do at the sheer of the bow wave, might have caught sight of the change and mistaken it for a long tentacle. And then from their desire of miracles created the squid. After all, they had already seen dolphins, and come in yesterday with a shark alert.

But what was happening? How
should
the sea acquire this strange submerged patina? It was nothing to her; and yet she was frightened for a moment. She adjusted the straw bag over her shoulder on its long strap. The sun glittered off the water into her face. Further aft along the rail she saw Mrs Madeley, and moved to join her.

‘Apparently, so Douglas says, we’re entering the outfall of the Nile,’ Mrs Madeley explained. Penny stared out ahead, but could see no land yet.

‘This far out?’ she said.

‘Apparently. So Douglas tells me. He knows about these things.’