Voyage of Innocence. Elizabeth Edmondson

It must be interesting, working on board. She asked the steward.

      ‘I love it, madam. Wouldn’t consider any other job. I’ve always worked the lines, every since I was a nipper and took my first voyage as a page. My dad’s in the business, too, he’s on the Liverpool-New York run, White Star. He’s in the engine room, he never did stewarding. He wanted me to sign on with White Star, but I said, No, it’s the old Peninsular and Orient Line for me, Dad. I prefer the East, you see, I always had a yen for the East.’

      He deftly collected the coffee pot and her empty plate, swaying with a dancer’s ease as the ship began another of its wallowing rolls. ‘Course, it’ll all change if there’s war. They used the liners for troop carriers in the last war. My dad served in a mine sweeper, four years, and never a scratch. Then the first day he was back on the liners, a bolt worked loose and broke his toe. Isn’t that typical of life?’ He went on his nimble way, and Vee, getting up, discovered that she was a good deal less steady on her feet than when she had come into the dining room. Presumably the blow was getting stronger. She would go to the library, she decided. Find a book, something to while away the hours and take her mind off Hugh, and the man with the bony face, and everything else – the many many things that haunted her waking and sleeping hours and which she longed to drive out of her head, if only for a few merciful moments.

      Vee walked along endless corridors, down steep flights of stairs, past linen rooms, the sweet smell of fresh linen wafting out. She met no one on her way, bar a hurrying steward. It was eerie, the emptiness of the ship. She reached the corridor where her cabin was and walked past the row of shut doors, counting them off, fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one. She stopped abruptly outside number sixty-two, a few yards from her own cabin, number sixty-seven.

      The door to sixty-seven was slightly ajar, and someone was in there.

      The corridor stretched away, deserted, no cleaners to be seen. Who was in her cabin?

      Vee, her nerves tingling, made herself walk silently to the door. Then, with sudden vigour, she pulled the door wide open. ‘What …?’ she began.

      Pigeon looked round, surprise on her face. ‘I’m just tidying away your things from last night,’ she said, shutting a cupboard door with a neat click. ‘I can’t linger, I’ve got that many of my ladies poorly.’

      ‘Thank you,’ Vee said, her back to the door.

      ‘I’ve left the passenger list on the table, madam,’ the stewardess said. ‘I expect you’ll want to look through and see if you’ve friends on board. My ladies are always surprised, it never fails, there are always people they know on board, and didn’t expect to see. “Oh, look,” they say, “I had no idea that the so-and-sos were going out to Egypt.” It always makes me laugh, how amazed they are.’

      She whisked out of the cabin, and Vee sat down in the armchair, her heart still thudding. She was irked by the fright Pigeon had given her, irked by feeling so jumpy, constantly looking over her shoulder and starting at shadows. She should have guessed at once that it would be the stewardess in her cabin, about her duties.

      She took her cigarette case from her handbag. She was smoking too many cigarettes in an attempt to soothe her nerves. She took one out, lit it, then picked up the typewritten list. There was Perdita Richardson’s name. An unusual girl. Might prove a bore, but she didn’t think so. How old was she? Probably seventeen or eighteen, if she’d left school, but no more.

      Vee closed her eyes, overcome with a sudden terrible longing to be seventeen again. At seventeen, she’d been uneasy, perpetually hurt by her mother’s dislike of her, but still full of hope, with life a white and shining canvas, a tablet of possibilities. A daubed and messy canvas now; what part of her life had she not made a mess of, whom of her family and friends had she not in some way hurt or distressed or betrayed, or even, God help her, destroyed?

      She wondered for a moment if she were going mad, for this bizarre image to float into her mind, but decided, regretfully almost, that there was no escape that way. She turned her attention back to the list.

      The name jumped out at her, as though it had been printed in bright red letters.

      Messenger, Mrs Henry, and beneath that, Messenger, Peter.

      For a moment, pure joy flooded through her. Lally was on the boat. Lally, her incomparable friend. And she’d brought Peter. Had Harry relented? Had the boy had a relapse, was he not well enough to go back to school? She must find Lally immediately, what was the number of her cabin?

      Then reality struck, and her sense of pleasure and excitement evaporated.

      Lally, her friend. Yes, that was exactly what Lally was, but she, Vee, was no friend of Lally’s. Not after what she had done, what she was planning to do. If Lally knew, or even suspected … How could she ever face Lally again?

      Lally didn’t know, surely she couldn’t have kept so calm and serene, if she’d had the least idea.

      No, Lally didn’t know, and for Vee, it must remain one of those grim secrets that couldn’t be told. Even though at times she felt that to confess to Lally, to tell her friend what she had done, would be such a relief.

      But, even if Lally didn’t know – and Vee had tried desperately to be discreet, flaunting instead her other liaisons before a scandalized world – then how could it be kept a secret from her in Delhi?

      Had Klaus known that Lally was going out to India on the Gloriana? It was so obvious, so natural, after all, that she would go out to join her husband. She would have gone with him when he was first posted to Delhi, if Peter hadn’t still been ill.

      No, Klaus hadn’t known. He’d told Vee that Lally was staying in England until the boy was safely settled back at school, that she would wait until after Christmas before going out to India.

      Lally herself, in the one, unsatisfactory conversation they’d had – a hurried phone call, with Vee pretending she was in a rush, would telephone her back – had said nothing about sailing to India. Vee hadn’t telephoned again, of course, what could she possibly say to Lally, one of her closest friends, whom she had so utterly betrayed?

      What could she say to her now, face to face?

      Her eyes skittered on down the list.

      Joel Ibbotson.

      So it had been Joel she’d seen on deck. Joel, for heaven’s sake! What could he be doing on board the Gloriana? Had the watching man been on the lookout for Joel? Impossible, the very idea of Joel getting mixed up with that lot brought a smile to her lips. She’d be fascinated to find out why Joel, wrapped up in mathematics and college life, should be going to India. When had she last seen him? Berlin, 1936. And of course, Yorkshire last year, for the funeral. Another blink, another memory to be refused admittance to her mind. Keep to the present, keep to the here and now.

      Another name leaped out at her: M. Q. Sebert, Esq.

      Marcus, on board? How odd, had the BBC come to its collective senses and sacked him?

      It was a ghost ship, that day. Peter was everywhere, exploring, questioning, bothering the staff, who took it in patient good humour, with so few passengers about, they had time to listen to his endless questions. Only the cabin stewards and stewardesses and the doctor and nursing sister who staffed the tiny hospital were kept busy as the dark grey of sky and sea turned imperceptibly to twilight and night.

      Vee spent most of the day in the library, alone and undisturbed, reading War and Peace, grateful for the chance to spend some hours in a different world entirely, her own problems shut out by the far away and long ago world of Napoleon and Imperial Russia. History, however complicated, seemed to make sense in a way that the contemporary world – at least, her contemporary world – didn’t.

      A waiter brought her coffee, she went to the cafe for a light lunch, taking Tolstoy with her, then back to the library, soft lights lit over the desks, the potted plants somehow fixed in position, how did they keep upright with the incessant roll of the ship? It was only a momentary thought, then she was once again in Moscow, in the thick