Acts of Mutiny (18 page)

Penny wondered at the freedom: to find adventure so natural, so effortless. To play life, take such distances in one’s stride. It made her feel parochial. ‘Why were there Americans in the Gold Coast?’

‘Because they were looking for oil, darling. Everyone’s looking for oil. And that put Lucas into the way of following a hunch. Lucas always has such a nose for business. He can smell out a deal. Some you win, some you lose. We don’t mind. Hopped into Nigeria. Hopped into shipping. Shipping what? Never mind. Shipping anything. Don’t ask me how he does it. Hopped across to Kenya, never mind Mau Mau either. Everyone panicking and losing their nerve. They never frightened me. Fell in with a really good crowd in Nairobi. Those were good times, Penny. And if they don’t like us, let them get on with it. That’s what I say. Like children, isn’t it? You do everything for them. Don’t know if I like the look of Alphonso much. Maybe I’ll just get a shampoo and set after all. I mean, would you let a man with sideboards like that near you with the scissors?’

Penny laughed. ‘Have you ever been to Australia?’

‘Passed it, darling. Never actually stopped. Somewhere on the right, I believe. Passed it on the way to Hong Kong. Five years in the beautiful East. Now there’s the life.’

‘I’m not sure what to expect. You make it sound so easy.’

‘What’s his name … Hugh, didn’t you say? Pity you couldn’t travel together. We go everywhere in harness. Lucas says he doesn’t want to let me out of his sight. Can’t think why, darling, can you?’ And Cheryl drew wide her bright red lips and made a knowing chuckle in her throat. ‘He likes watching me, you see. Now young Bobby likes watching you.’

‘Oh, ridiculous!’ Penny could not but laugh in turn. ‘You’re extraordinary.’

‘Oh, I know that, Penny, dearest. I know that all right. I know when to get in, and when to get out. The Houdini thing. Escapology, do they call it? That’s the name of my game. A great crowd pleaser. Take my advice.’

Penny determined to take up her journal once more. Everything was all right after all – positively forging ahead. She chose the open-air route back to her cabin, breathing the good cheer of bright skies. The sea was a dusty blue. Robert Kettle had disappeared, and she could address the aberration of her last entry with spirit, with equanimity. She did not, after all,
have
to show the diary to Hugh. She did not have to be
available
, in every way, just because he was her husband. Perhaps she just needed privacy.

She unlocked her cabin, walked firmly in, and, standing beside the lower bunk, took firm grasp of the bedding. Cheryl was outrageous. She lived in a made-up world. She ought to have been in one of those silent films that ran too fast. But you couldn’t help liking her. Poor thing. Marriage was something quite different now, since the war. It had to be. Surely Cheryl and Lucas were dilettantes, too hectic and frothy, like children still. She and Hugh were soul mates, of course. People always said as much. Or they could perhaps become so, in the new world. Now Mary Garnery, on the other hand, knew exactly …

Just as she was about to brace her back into the weight of the mattress, however, she noticed the bump which raised the blanket at the unused bed’s centre. It was a small bump. She backed away for a moment. She regarded it with distrust. Her mind flicked the pages of an extreme tropical bestiary. Who knew what might have come on board?

She caught up last night’s high-heeled shoe. Very gingerly she advanced to the bed again, and poked at the bump. Lightly. Cautiously. There was no movement. No. It was all right, perhaps. There was no horrible, smothered awakening. She tapped the place with more assertion. ‘Well?’ she said, out loud. The bump did not stir. ‘Perhaps just somebody’s sock, or a pair of knickers.’ It was about the size. Too large for a stocking; too small for any other garment. Yet I would have noticed, she said to herself. Is the steward getting slack, or odd, stuffing my things in here? In the very centre?

She allowed her guard to relax a degree or two and waited, listening, watching. No. It showed no signs of life at all. So she stepped to the bed once more, seized the sheet’s turnover in both her hands and, ready on tiptoe to make emergency exit, flung the covers back.

It was nothing. It was a brown paper bag, twisted and creased as if with much use. She picked up the shoe and hit it again with the heel. The paper tore. The colour of a bruise was inside. She picked up the other shoe and, leaning over boldly, employed both heels to rip at the hole.

What she found made her feel sick. It was a vile rubbery shape with hands and feet, knobbled over with warts, spines. She continued to stare, uncomprehending, until she remembered everything, and the tears welled up and she was given over at last convulsively to sobbing.

She had lost the baby and there had been no one to tell, and it was as if it had never happened. Only a couple of months or so old anyway – kept that a secret. A surprise for Hugh when she got out there. A surprise for herself. She had put it out of her mind. They had not wanted any more children. They had decided. She had hardly acknowledged she was pregnant – all that excitement, the packing up, leaving, the anxiety. So much to attend to. Parting from the boys. Dealing with Mother.

And then that moment in the storm, when something shifted inside and it was lost. It was lost. And she just carried on. As if nothing had happened. As if it was all over and forgotten there and then and someone else had had the pain – all that awfulness in the toilet. Clearing up the spots on the floor afterwards, leaving no trace. Someone else.

But it was her. She didn’t forget. She knew all along. It was hers.

Someone knocked and came in, his hands full of cleaning implements. ‘I’m sorry, madam. I thought the cabin was empty.’ The steward’s eyes flicked from her distraught expression to the toad on the opened bed.

Penny hid her face in her hands. Then she hurried past him through the door and fled along the corridor.

So far we were the only people on board ship who knew someone had been killed. Finlay stood on one side of him and I on the other, holding my Winchester repeater popgun loosely on my finger by the trigger guard. It almost smoked.

He was stripped to the waist. He lay collapsed across one of the special deck-chair loungers, flung right back, so that his head cricked over its end rail. His face was in stark shadow from the overhang of the deck above, but below his neck, across the skin of his throat, his arms and his stomach, under the wisps that grew there, shone out a bright, unbasted pink. One of his arms hung down touching the deck at the wrist’s bend. The other lay across his chest, as if clamping the huge book to it. But I could see no sign of a wound.

‘Is this him?’ Finlay said.

I nodded. As soon as it happened I had run back to fetch her.

‘Well?’ she said, trying to sound unimpressed. But her looks gave her away.

I scanned up and down the walkway. There was only the departing back of one of those old men in blue shorts and socks, staggering on round the deck. What Mr Chaunteyman referred to sneeringly as the last constitutionals, I did not know why. And beyond him, some people were scattered, sitting out, sunbathing with drinks, or reading, absorbed in themselves. In the other direction one of the Lascars was painting the metalwork white.

‘Do you think we should do something?’ I said, weakly. Only I knew the truth.

‘You’re sure he’s dead? Are you sure?’ Finlay held away, with gathering horror.

I held away too. I looked down and all along the smouldering body. There was no sign of movement. It seemed quite defunct. Then the book and the hand that rested on it slipped down and hit the chair frame with a soft thump. A real dead man’s jolt. That and the sheer oddness of the vast stripe across his surface fused my guilt.

‘Yes.’ I stared at the deck, thin greyish planks with the tarry black between them.

‘We’ve got to tell someone, I suppose.’

‘Yes. I suppose we have.’ Then I noticed the cherry stone I had fired. I had been stalking imaginary cowboys, seen some, blasted; reloaded, seen more and fired my popgun indiscriminately round a bulkhead frame. The cherry stone lay on the deck, not far from my sandalled foot.

You could get the cherries out of empty glasses. I had a supply in my pocket. But I was not dimly credulous. Even to my child’s grasp it seemed extremely far-fetched that a person might be wiped out by something so puny. Yet here lay the slain proof. I struggled to make sense of it all. I had heard at school of the fragile pressure points in the bones of the skull. If you pressed on your temples you could kill yourself. Or that place just under the ear – true. Supposing, by the most hideous kind of accident, I had got one of his pressure points. It could happen. It would be the worst kind of luck but it could happen. I trod cautiously beside the stone, stooped to retrieve it, and then slipped it into my pocket.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she was saying. ‘We’ve got to tell someone. We’ve got to hurry, Pom. In films they always scream and go running and shrieking. Why do you keep wearing that dill hat?’

I put my hand up to touch the fez.

She seemed to be on the brink of tears. ‘Why don’t you do something? You’re so useless.’

Once more I looked ahead and astern. The grown-ups in the distance were calm and preoccupied.

‘You
do something. Why should I do everything?’

‘Why should
I
? Why should
I
? You found him.’ Her face changed. ‘What do you think he died of? Do you think it’s a murder?’ She inched closer. ‘Wait. Look. I know who it is. He came ashore with us at Port Said.’

But now I had pocketed the stone and no one could pin anything on me. ‘What’s his name, then, if you know him so well?’

‘I don’t know his name. Why should I know his name? I bet he died of some disease. My mummy said. Port Said. That stinky place. I bet he died of the poo of Port Said.’

‘That’s a rhyme. Maybe his poo was poisoned.’ And I ventured on, looking for the giggle of her acceptance. ‘Maybe they stuffed poison up his …’

But she stamped her foot. ‘Don’t be disgusting. You’re just a dirty Pommy bastard and I’m telling.’ And she was about to rage more and hold my preoccupations over me, when I saw behind her a shape that looked familiar coming along the deck in our direction.

‘There’s Penny.’

Finlay turned and ran to her, and was almost instantly at her side, explaining everything, tugging her hand, pointing back at where I stood next to the dead man. ‘And that’s just how we found him,’ she said as they came up, pointing again. ‘It’s terrible, isn’t it? It’s that Port Said man. They put them overboard, don’t they? Wrapped in a flag.’

Penny looked, and then drew in her breath as her body seemed to jump. She made a small noise. I could see her eyes looked different – swollen and strange, her face, even with the fierce sun behind it, puffy, darkened here and there with blotches.

At that moment Robert awoke, blinked and groaned as he tried to sit up.

Penny burst out laughing, full of relief. He was ridiculous. She wanted to embrace him. But his surface screamed:
No!
The skin is so excellent an organ, so responsive, tough, and yet fragile; so beautiful. She wanted on the instant to tend to him with cold creams and healing unguents, soothe him with her touch.

‘Now, Penny, which is the most emotional of the animals?’ Michael Canning had teased her last night in the lounge. The others had joined in, suggesting various behaviours: screeches, grunts, tail-waggings, chest-beatings, crocodile tears. They had made quite a party of it – but the riddle was insoluble. ‘Everyone give up?’

When, with his schoolboy grin of triumph, Michael Canning offered his bizarre answer, Penny had gone straight off to the library in disbelief, to look it up. She sifted through navigational memoirs and natural histories until she found it. It is the octopus; which, frustrated of a voice by water and heritage, wears its feelings on its eight sleeves and flushes the bulb of its head with chromatic waves. The octopus is the most candid of creatures.

Now Robert, similarly naked, wore his feelings on his skin. Cut off at the neck by the shadow of the overhanging deck, his body flagged up his heart. There is no simple code-book. It was after all an enormous self-induced blush to be in her presence; yet it forbade her to respond. With his bluish-white stripe across the lobster pink he was all valentine. But Penny was reminded of the boy, Pom or whatever his name was, with his predilection for blood, making those gruesome enquiries of her about punishment. Did he
ask
his mother to dress him like that? Odd child, but boys will be boys. It struck her suddenly that Robert had been chastised. One might almost say his skin showed the first flogging of the voyage.

At the frog racing, Penny could not stop thinking about Robert’s body. She lost eight shillings. How he lay there sprawled out. For a terrible moment she had thought he really was dead. Then the poor man moved and, in waking up, made that heartrending groan. She was mortified now by the laugh that escaped her. She realised as soon as it happened he was in a bad way after all. People had begun to cluster round. Someone got hold of the quartermaster from the dance space. He had come, clutching one of the frog ropes.

Robert brushed the attention away. ‘No. It’s nothing. I’m quite all right. Just a touch of the sun. Nothing to make a fuss about. Please.’ He made to walk. Then collapsed.