Voyage of Innocence. Elizabeth Edmondson

of her time in a book like War and Peace, a novelist with a brooding mind and a sense of the power of history, writing about Hitler and the Czechoslovakia that wasn’t worth a war, and Stalin and weak, unworthy Chamberlain, and an island people who clutched at any straw of peace, but who would fight like terriers when war came knocking uninvited at the door?

       SIX

      The Gloriana hummed and throbbed as it ploughed its way through the storm. On the bridge, the duty officers were relaxed, quiet in the dog hours, used to the sea and her wild ways.

      In their cabins, passengers slept soundly or tossed and turned, or clutched stomachs agonized by spasms of seasickness. In the great kitchens, the first staff were coming on duty, the bakers ready to bake the bread and rolls and brioches for breakfast.

      ‘Half as much as usual,’ the head baker said. ‘Most of this lot won’t be eating anything for the next day or so.’

      ‘They’ll make up for it when the sea calms down and they get their appetites back.’

      Perdita was awake, relaxed but wide awake. She was still prone to sudden bursts of heat, a relic of her days of fever, the doctors had told her, and they always woke her. Soon, she would drop off to sleep again, and those last two or three hours of sleep were the best she had. In her mind, her fingers played Bach, the intricate patterns soothing her brain in time to the sound of the ship’s engines.

      On D-deck, Marcus Sebert came to and eased himself groggily out of his bunk. The floor came up to meet him, and he passed out, contentedly, on the linoleum floor of his cabin.

      The chill roused him an hour later, and he staggered to his feet, imagining for a moment he was in the studio at the BBC; why was everything sliding up and down, had war broken out and the Germans bombed Broadcasting House, had there been an earthquake?

      This wasn’t the BBC, he wasn’t at work, he was at sea, on a goddamned liner. Was he staggering, or was it the damned boat? It didn’t matter. His eyes fell on one of the bottles of champagne he had brought with him. Champagne was good for seasickness, not that he was prone to seasickness, but you couldn’t be too careful. He eased the cork out of the bottle, and cursed as the wine frothed over him, spattering his shirt. A glass? He looked around his untidy cabin, then decided, as he slid across the floor, that a glass was unnecessary. He carefully climbed back into his berth, dribbling the wine into his mouth from the bottle.

      Let the wind roar and the waves lash against the boat. ‘And we jolly sailor boys were up and up aloft,’ he sang to himself. Jolly sailor boys, jolly good idea. He could go and find one right now, ‘Below, below, below. Bugger the landlubbers!’

      Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps he’d just have another drink and wait for the storm to blow itself out. How many days to Lisbon? Another two, three? That wasn’t a problem, he’d stayed drunk for a week at a time before now. Alcohol and sleep, the cure for all life’s little difficulties. Blot it out, sink into oblivion, no need to worry about anything in the world.

      One deck up, Joel Ibbotson sat glumly looking into the bowl the steward had thoughtfully provided and wishing he were back in the tranquil surroundings of his Oxford college.

      ‘There’s running hot and cold in the basin, sir. I’ll be back to see if there’s anything you need.’

      ‘I suppose these liners don’t generally sink?’

      The steward was shocked. ‘They do not.’

      ‘Titanic did.’

      ‘That was in the past, sir. And she hit an iceberg.’

      ‘Any icebergs out there now?’

      ‘Hardly, sir.’

      ‘Pity,’ said Joel, his face growing rapidly paler. ‘A great pity. I just want the ship to sink to the bottom of the sea as quickly as possible, so we can get it all over with.’

      ‘I see you like your little joke, sir.’

       SEVEN

      Lally lay in her bunk, wishing she’d never set foot on the Gloriana, that Harry had never been posted to India, that she’d never been born.

      Peter offered advice, before being shooed away by Miss Tyrell. ‘Look at the horizon, and then you won’t feel sick any more.’

      There was no horizon to look at.

      None of her transatlantic voyages, stormy though some of them had been, had prepared her for the Bay of Biscay in this kind of weather.

      Pigeon was kindly, but brisk, she’d seen it all before.

      ‘Have you ever been seasick, Pigeon?’ Lally asked, reluctantly sipping from a glass of ginger water that the stewardess had brought her.

      ‘It’s not my place to be seasick. If you can keep a little of this down, you’ll feel much better.’

      Liar, Lally said to herself, as nausea swept over her. A few minutes later, she began to think that Pigeon might be right.

      ‘You try and get some sleep now, madam,’ Pigeon said. ‘Don’t worry about the little boy, Miss Tyrell is looking after him.’

      Thank God for Monica, thank God for Miss Tyrell. It would be much worse to lie there, helpless, if she knew that Peter was running free about the ship. Miss Tyrell would keep an eye on him, and she didn’t seem so authoritarian as to drive him to rebellious folly.

      Lally didn’t sleep, but she dropped into a drowsy state, eyes closed, trying not to anticipate any of the sudden lurches that were even worse than the steady heaving and rolling of the ship.

      Claudia was never seasick, Miss Tyrell had told her. She’d had Claudia from a month old, wild as a monkey, that girl, determined to do things her way even before she could utter a word. Never wanted a vest on, like catching an eel with your bare hands, trying to pull a vest over her head. Headstrong then, and headstrong to this day, from all she heard. Yet at bottom there wasn’t much wrong with her that a few shocks and a bit of growing up wouldn’t put right. Independent-minded, that was Lady Claudia.

      Lally wasn’t so sure; to her Claudia’s political views smacked of more than mere wildness and a determination to hold contrary views. And independent-minded? Miss Tyrell wouldn’t say that if she’d seen Claudia hanging on Petrus’s every word.

      ‘Ah, that John Petrus, now, there’s a wily fellow.’

      Surely Miss Tyrell hadn’t been nanny to him as well.

      ‘No, and I’m thankful for it. But when you’re a nanny in London, you get to know the other nannies, and their charges. Mr Petrus and Lady Geraldine, she’s the eldest of the Vere sisters, they’re much of an age. We use to wheel the prams together in the park, and then the children went to the same parties. Mind you, Mr Petrus wasn’t the same background as the Veres. His father was very rich, some kind of a financier. He had a good nanny, though, in Nanny Fortan. We were old friends.’

      Lally wondered where Peter was.

      ‘Upstairs, drawing, a Miss Richardson, as nice a young lady as you could hope to meet, although I don’t care for the way she dresses, is keeping an eye on him. He likes her, and she won’t let him get into any mischief. I said I wanted to see how you were, and she at once offered to stay with him.’

      ‘Drawing? With the boat doing these wild plunges?’

      ‘He’s seeing which way the crayons go. Abstract art, Miss Richardson said. It’s making them laugh. I like to hear youngsters laugh. You didn’t hear Mr Petrus, who we were speaking of just now, you didn’t often hear him laughing. Hé was a serious, self-centred child. Ready smile, and a lot of charm,