by James Barlow
‘I can’t stand heights,’ another said conversationally, but not to Miss Wearne. ‘You know, Harry used to take me . . . ’
A pointless anecdote followed, and the woman addressed said, as if proving her own common sense, ‘Anyway, there’s no light up there. I like to have a read in bed.’
Someone knocked at the door and came in without pause. A man in shirt sleeves and braces – a square face, glasses, stubble and breath touched with stale alcohol.
‘Hello, hello, hello!’ he cried. ‘No one topless! What a pity! Hey, are you girls coming to see the ship sail? The lights of beautiful Melbourne and the delicious aroma of the Yarra River?’
They made noises of disgust with their mouths. ‘Another hour, more likely,’ one suggested.
‘No,’ claimed Harry. ‘The gangways are up and Captain Vafiadis is up there with his pocket compass.’
They laughed obligingly.
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me?’ asked Harry.
‘What?’ they asked dully. ‘Oh, her.’ And they condescended to identify themselves: Ada, Muriel and Iris.
‘My name’s Irene Wearne.’
‘All alone, are you?’
‘How are you, Irene?’ Harry inquired, to pass the time, Miss Wearne could see, or to acquire obligations.
She didn’t want to admit weakness to such vulgar people, but was very far in exhaustion and a bit dizzy, and not at all enjoying herself.
‘I’m not very well,’ she admitted.
It meant nothing to them, was a pivot to manoeuvre their own humour one.
‘You look a bit crook,’ said Harry frankly.
‘What y’come for then,’ asked Muriel with cruel indifference, ‘if you’re sick?’
‘I won a competition,’ Miss Wearne told her. At this moment she despised The Australian Woman and Wife more than any other journal in the world. The cheap fraud! Just to promote sales!
‘Y’getting a free trip, are you.’ Muriel persisted, implying ‘We’ve paid for ours.’
She had sandy hair and a heavy nose and on her fingers were three ostentatious rings.
‘Wait until you’re out on the Bight!’ sneered Ada. ‘You’ll have something to worry about.’
Another man came in the cabin after the briefest tap on the door. He was heavy, thick-necked had a brick-red face, and the heartiness of Sydney’s vast suburbia. Miss Wearne knew he would be a regular at the greyhound racing, would be able to play cards, would go to the ship’s bingo and wouldn’t be sick often or until ten or twelve cans of beer had gone down anyway. She had nothing in common with such people and was frightened of their acid tongues.
‘I might have known,’ bellowed this man, as if he had surprised them in an orgy and was only disappointed that they’d been unkind enough to start without him.’ ‘At it again. Hurry up and fix your zips and all them things. The great ship is sailing soon.’
He said this like the other man, in a tone of deep bitterness, a contempt of the Areopagus, as if the ship had failed him many times.
Muriel asked, ‘Y’coming, Ada?’ and Ada answered her, ‘Course I’m coming. What’s on afterwards?’ she inquired, as if she had an appetite which the ship must satisfy: there must never be a dull moment: they’d paid . . .
A steward brought Miss Wearne’s second case. Muriel informed Miss Wearne malevolently, ‘You’ll have a job finding room for that lot,’ and out they all went.
The steward followed them and left the door open, and so Miss Wearne overheard what they were saying.
‘A bloody old fusspot,’ Ada was complaining.
‘We’re lumbered, Muriel agreed. ‘Never mind. As long as she’s not got religion! It’s all experience, isn’t it, Harry, love?’
Miss Wearne was a little hot in the face at this analysis, but not wounded. She expected such gross people to despise her to fail to understand anything outside the experiences of their own flesh. But her spirit was low at the prospect of spending week after week in contact with the. She was too tired and agitated to sleep at once but dropped off before they returned, clutching with one hand at the wooden rim of the upper bunk, her last waking thought being an anxiety about how to get down the ladder in the morning . . .
In the morning the steward brought her a cup of tea, and he helped her down. The three women stirred in protest. ‘What d’you wake us up for?’ Iris complained, but in vain, for Miss Wearne had chosen to go to first breakfast.
The Areopagus was pitching a little, but Miss Wearne felt as normal as she was ever likely to. The stewards conducted her to a tale where she found the English lady and her family. All of them were oddly self-conscious and made no attempt to talk to Miss Wearne. The mother snapped at her children whenever they were at all restive. They’ve got something on their minds, decided Miss Wearne, catching the father staring, lost, his thoughts perhaps thousands of miles away.
She liked the dining room. It was large, but not overwhelming, and there were tall columns in the Ionic style and a small semi-circular balcony for the orchestra. Miss Wearne had no great appetite, and when the steward – a cheerful young man who appeared not to have shaved today – came to take their orders she asked for stewed fruit.
She was facing astern and just happened to see him using his fingers to transfer prunes and apricots from a bowl to a plate. He placed it before her with a smile, but Miss Wearne, feeling a little queasy, refused it. ‘No. I don’t like that kind of fruit. Can I have bacon and tomato?’
Now she watched the steward with misgiving, and sure enough, to speed things up, he looked cautiously around to see where the officer was and surreptitiously transferred a tomato and sausage from the debris of an earlier breakfast.
‘This is cold,’ Miss Wearne told him. ‘Go and get something hot from the kitchen.’
The boy smiled, aware that he’d been witnessed, and he disappeared into the galley. The Englishwoman was frowning disapproval at Miss Wearne’s apparent fussiness. Her turn may come, thought Miss Wearne charitably.
It was a cold, dull day which passed very slowly for Miss Wearne. She did not wish to go into either of the bars. Bars, for her generation of Australians, were exclusively for men. She did not swim or dance or play bingo. It was lonely in a strange sort of way, for she walked about in crowds, drank hot soup at eleven, lunched with people who said nothing beyond ‘Hello; isn’t it cold?’, slept a little in the afternoon, sat in lounges, chose a library book, dined, bought some stamps, read the ship’s newspaper, and followed the crowd to lifeboat drill. But in the whole day she spoke only about two hundred words and most of these to the dining room steward.
What Miss Wearne wished and waited for were sunny days and calm sea, when she could sit in a deck chair and watch other people stroll by, talk to someone, and reserve her energies for the foreign ports. But several days passed in which it was too stormy and cold to sit on deck, and in the lounges no one spoke to her. She had to keep on the move and she found it desperately tiresome. There was no peace even in the cabin. The women seemed to be there whenever Miss Wearne would have liked to be quiet or to rest. All the time there seemed to be noise, the scratching of the key and the monotonous bonhomie of Harry: ‘Hello, hello, hello. And how are we tonight?’ It’s was no use Miss Wearne disliked them and they were going to spoil her trip.
She came back to the cabin from dinner the day before they were due in Fremantle, and found the three women and Harry and a steward standing around helplessly. The women were very hot and bothered. ‘It’s ruined my sandals and my yellow frock,’ complained Muriel. Harry said, ‘It’s not good enough. We’ve had a bellyful this trip already.’ The steward picked up the telephone in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘I talk to the purser.’
Don’t waste your time,’ advised Harry. ‘He’s no bloody good.’
Ada grumbled, ‘We mi
ght all be ill. Dirty people, these dagoes.’
An officer entered the cabin, looked around and wrung his hands. ‘What is the trouble?’ he asked, and they all poured out their grievances – ‘Look at my yellow dress. Just look at it’ – and finally identified the complaint. ‘There’s a leek somewhere. It’s flooded the bathroom as well, and ruined my brown bag.’
Nobody took the smallest notice of Miss Wearne. The steward was now shouting over the telephone, so angry that he thumped the cheap dressing tables; boxes flew off.
Miss Wearne blew her nose and immediately understood that it was not just water which flooded the cabin, moving to and fro in a black stream as the Areopagus pitched. It was urine. She obtained a faint satisfaction at their discomfort and the inability of the steward and officer to get anybody to take any notice.
The officer went out and returned in five minutes with a plumber who took not the slightest notice of the passengers because he could speak no English.
‘I’m afraid it is necessary to transfer you,’ the officer said apologetically, ad Miss Wearne’s heart leaped in pleasure.
‘What about me?’ she asked.
The officer now considered her.
‘You sleep in here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Everything will be arranged. The stewards will come and take your cases. A better cabin,’ he forecast recklessly.
Miss Wearne decided it was time to assert herself. ‘Who with?’
‘Yes, with your friends.’
‘They’re not my friends,’ said Miss Wearne frankly, hot in the face.
The three women accepted the position, the insult, without dispute, for they were just as anxious to be rid of Miss Wearne as she was to get away from them.
‘We cannot offer a variety of cabins –’
Ada said, ‘Why not? The ship’s half empty now.’
‘Ah, but many cabins are booked from Fremantle,’ qualified the officer.
They didn’t believe him and he knew it.
‘I will see what can be done,’ he assured them.
In his absence the women ignored Miss Wearne. She packed her two cases almost gleefully. In ten minutes a boy came and asked, ‘Which one for A-One-oh-one?’
‘It must be me,’ Miss Wearne told him decisively.
The boy carried her cases, and a hundred feet forward kicked on a door.
A girl opened it. She was about sixteen, but rather tall for her age. Her face was heart-shaped and dignified. She had long black hair tied behind her neck. There was no one else. It was a cabin for two. The girl had been writing a letter.
She greeted in a quiet American accent, ‘Oh, hello. Come on in.’
Miss Wearne stumbled into her own cases. The boy grinned and suggested, ‘Okay, now,’ and left.
‘Did you have trouble with your previous cabin?’ the girl asked.
She had an educated sort of voice, but Miss Wearne noticed her hands, agitated in shyness. She liked the girl at once.
‘It was flooded,’ Miss Wearne told her.
‘Anything damaged?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Where shall I put your cases?’ asked the girl, lifting one of them.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I guess you’d prefer the lower bunk?’
‘That’s very thoughtful of you,’ said Miss Wearne frankly. The whole trip suddenly seemed easier. She would, she decided, make no demands on such a nice person.
‘I’ve been using it,’ the girl said, ‘but I’ll change the sheets.’
‘I’m Irene Wearne,’ Miss Wearne said. ‘I won a competition in a magazine.’
‘Imagine!’ the girl said, in pleasure: ‘I’ve never met anyone who – I didn’t think it really happened . . . My name,’ she told Miss Wearne, ‘is Debbie. Debbie Vertigan.’
Chapter Seven
It had been a busy morning, with two men landing themselves in the hospital. Idiots, Dempsey assessed unfairly. What next? I wonder.
One man had dived into the swimming pool when the ship was pitching and had not timed it correctly. He’d knocked himself unconscious. (But what were the blasted crew doing filling the thing anyway, Dempsey wondered.) The other man was a crew member who’d had both legs broken during lifeboat drill. The boat had dropped quickly – a pleasant surprise for anyone, Dempsey decided cynically, for the damn things were corroded into the davits – and the handle or whatever they called it had spun violently, breaking both legs on the fellow . . .
For the moment there was nothing to do but wait for lunch. Dempsey was already impatient for it.
He picked up a passenger list. It might be pleasant to have company. On the other hand, it might not; he had encountered some colossal bores aboard the Opalescent. He was entitled to invite passengers to eat with him. They never refused, as they presumed it was an honour of some kind, or that the food might be more interesting.
There did not seem to be on the list anyone with whom he was acquainted. He wasn’t too keen on the travelling doctors and felt that he had done his duty by them for a week or two. There were several hundred names of people who’d embarked at Sydney. Debbie Vertigan, he read, disembarking San Francisco. The name was unusual and Dempsey recalled that someone had mentioned it. After a while he recollected that a patient with another surname had said idly, ‘Going on the Areopagus? Wish I was coming with you! You’ll probably see a niece of mine. She’s a very nice girl . . .
‘A very nice girl’ was exactly what Dempsey felt like lunching with. He sent a steward to her cabin with an invitation. At the back of his mind a pleasant prospect of eating with an attractive, highly articulate college type girl or stenographer lingered for the next hour.
He was a little disconcerted when the chief steward conducted her to his table, for she turned out to be a girl of sixteen, and nervous at that. She had the attitude of someone who was carrying out a duty which was alarming.
‘Have a drink?’ he suggested.
‘I feel a bit sick,’ she told him uncompromisingly.
‘It’s purely nerves,’ Dempsey asserted. ‘This blasted ship couldn’t sink anyway. Have a gin? One small gin and you’ll sing!’
‘I don’t drink,’ Miss Vertigan told him with finality.
‘I’m going to,’ Dempsey told her. ‘I’ve worked like a dog this morning. I deserve a drink. What about a lemonade or Coke?’
‘Oh, all right,’ she agreed.
‘Well, thank God we got that settled!’ Dempsey declared in his forthright manner. ‘Do sit down. And cheer up. This is supposed to be enjoyable.’
She smiled carefully and sat down.
‘I never met your father. I just happened to talk to your uncle.’
‘That’d be difficult,’ the girl said. ‘All my uncles are dead.’
‘That’s a bit much isn’t it! A massacre of uncles! Then who was it I met?’
‘Perhaps you’ve made a mistake.’
‘No, no, I met somebody. And he said, ‘My niece is going on that trip.’ ‘
The girl shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m not even an Australian.’ Dempsey thought: She’s shy, that’s what it is. All these people, and I have a loud voice which embarrasses her.
‘What do you do?’ he inquired in a softer voice.
‘Do? I went to grammar school in Canberra. My father’s in politics.’
‘Why didn’t your parents come on the Areopagus?’
‘Urgency. You know.’ She smiled the careful smile again. ‘They let me finish the term and I wanted to see Singapore and Hong Kong. I have a friend in Hong Kong.
‘Oh,’ he said, unaccountably disappointed: she wasn’t so helpless.
‘A pen friend,’ the girl continued. ‘One of my hobbies.’
&
nbsp; ‘You’re going to see what this person is like?’
‘Yes – and the city.’
‘You’ll be disenchanted. People who write to pen friends are idiots. Oh, sorry! What I meant was that they’re usually lonely people, and that means something wrong with their nasty little personalities.’
‘They write charming letters –’
‘You have a point there,’ Dempsey admitted. ‘What I meant was that the average pen friend isn’t as pretty as you are . . . ’
She blushed and moved about uncomfortably.
‘What are you going to have now?’
‘I’m not hungry,’ she told him.
‘What, already?’ Dempsey questioned callously. He was ravenously hungry. ‘I’ll get you something. It’s not really imaginary, seasickness, although some people do think themselves into it. It’s to do with your ears. Where are you? Which cabin?’
‘Right down on A Deck, A-One-oh-one. But it doesn’t matter. I’m fine. I’ll try the lamb,’ she said, to prove it.
‘How are you getting on?’
‘With what?’
‘Aboard the ship.’
‘Oh, fine,’ she defined doubtfully, and he felt sorry for her, suspecting the truth: lonely in a chair in a vast lounge, pretending to read a book’ too young to go into the bars; not fitting in with the muscular extroverts around the pool.
‘I’m learning Greek dancing,’ she informed him.
‘My God, how heroic! Meeting many people?’
‘They all gamble,’ she said like a complaint.
‘Why not?‘ Dempsey countered. ‘They’ve got to pass the time.’ But she didn’t agree. He could see that she wasn’t quite happy.
‘Vulgar boys?’ he queried frankly.
‘Some of them.’
‘Come to a bit of a party?’ he invited, and half hoped she’d refuse.
She questioned, ‘Who with?’
‘Second officers, mostly. Maybe Tomazos, the first. A nurse or two, the purser’s ladies. They’ll drink rather a lot, but it’s cheerful.