by Ursula Bloom
Chapter 7
I
The ship was under way again.
Ann was left with an impression vivid and lasting of the sun slipping behind the Citta Veccian hills; of clover fields ripely red, and small square houses, chimneyless and almost windowless; of the cedars in the gardens at San Antonio, leaning over the breadfruit and the oranges. But keenest of all was the impression of a new world and a new self, as she had slid down into that crystal clear water, as though into baptism.
It had been altogether wrong, she knew, but she had loved every moment of it. Afterwards she had been desperately ashamed. But now, with the island lying behind them, and Gozo a thin shadow along the horizon, she felt different about it.
Either everything in her life had been wrong, and this was the attitude she should have adopted all along; or everything in her life had been right, and she had now gone completely mad, and would have to pay for her folly. She was on the borderline hesitating between the two ideas.
She felt herself to be a traitor to Cuthbert, and to her father and to all the ethics of her childhood. She wanted to get a grasp of her real feelings. Only to get a real grasp on a pleasure cruise is difficult; there is too much diversion, too much dissipation, too much amusement.
As she went down to dine she met Miss Bright. ‘You are the very person I wanted to see,’ said Miss Bright.
Ann groaned inwardly. Really in so large a ship it was remarkable how you continually ran up against the people you wanted to avoid. And stranger still that in so short a trip there were already so many people whom you were wanting to avoid!
‘I went to the central part of the island,’ said Miss Bright, ‘and it was all so strange, though I must confess a little disappointing.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Mentally Ann told herself, ‘No crypts, and no skeletons! That must have spoilt it!’
‘We saw people who live in caves, wild, savage sort of people, but unfortunately no open coffins. They must be a very healthy race, I think,’ she sighed regretfully.
Ann had little patience with a woman who could scour an island looking for funerals, and less with the monk who had offered his escort.
‘He did his best,’ said Miss Bright, ‘and in the end he asked me for a small donation for his convent. It is funny but I always thought that they had nuns in convents. I do hope that there was nothing promiscuous about him.’
‘I don’t suppose so.’
‘Well, I gave him a little contribution and I trust it has been put to a good use. You never can be too sure, and we certainly never saw the things he said we were going to see.’
The companion-ways were full of people going down to dine. And now she would have to listen to the boastings of the Spinkses, and the complaints of the Duncans that Ethel had not had so good a time as they had anticipated, or that she had not been the centre of attraction in the island. It was odd how the table boasted, the Spinkses on financial matters, the Duncans on matters matrimonial. If the Frenchman had ever volunteered any conversation at all, Ann felt that his bragging would have been on matters digestible!
Each had seen the island from a different point of view. The Spinkses had gone from one hotel to another, and they had seen the silver gates in St. John’s Cathedral and thought that one day they would have better silver gates to their own house. The Duncans had gone from lounge to lounge, and had finally met a woman who had taken them into the club in Strada Reale, where they had met some delightful men. ‘Such dear Naval boys,’ purred Mrs. Duncan soothingly. The Frenchman had discovered the confectioner’s in Strada Lucia, and had come back with huge boxes of chocolates made in Turin, wrapped in silver foil, with curious mottoes in Italian included. The Frenchman, fortunately for him, understood Italian, and had a peculiar mind to which the mottoes appealed. He had spent a busy evening in his cabin, unwrapping a whole two pounds of chocolates in the hope that he would find something even more curious than the last.
Fergus had met a friend from the Leper hospital, and he had gone up there and they had discussed a new sort of leprosy which had recently occurred in Greece. Ann had seen the red fields of clover and the darkness of trees, and the lovely butterfly of the new self skimming between the two! She had baptised the new self in a clear sea, and now she wanted to be alone.
She wanted to think.
II
Ann curled into a chaise-longue in a corner of the deck. She could hear the band playing. She could watch from the distance, and somehow to-night she did not want to be part of the picture. She just wanted to look on. Through it all there pounded the great heart-beats of the ship’s dynamos. She had discovered that when you sat there, almost in the centre, and the ship was moving at a certain speed, you could hear her pulse beating like that, almost like a human heart.
She could hear the slither of feet on the deck, and the tune that the band played, plaintive and yearning, and the ship pulsing. She watched the people passing. Most of them she knew by sight now, and some of them to speak to. They all interested her. The A. P. passed with his peroxide blonde, and to-night she wore blue, an unsophisticated blue, and very little underneath it. Even Ann could see that. The A. P. had eyed it hopefully. So far the lady had been stingy, he had confided to his friends, but he had high hopes. He thought things looked distinctly promising, and she really had very little on.
The beret and blazer brigade had changed into reach-me-down dinner suits, which had been highly recommended by a large London drapery establishment which makes a speciality of that sort of thing. Unfortunately the young gentlemen had not obtained that excellent cut and finish which the drapery establishment had boasted about; and be it said for the drapery establishment, it was entirely the fault of the young gentlemen. They were funny figures, and they wore funny underclothing, which did not fit too well. Each was fostering some romance. Even Ann recognized that in the quickened steps and the heightened colour. The Jewess of the barber’s shop was leaning on the taffrail with an entirely new swain. She was an old habitué of cruising. She knew that by the end of the voyage she would have worked all the workable part of the ship. Her cruise would end at Tilbury. For many girls who were unsophisticated and inexperienced, the cruise would not end at Tilbury.
Fragments of the conversation drifted across to Ann. ‘I never accept presents,’ she was saying and he was protesting.
‘But from me? It’s different from me?’
‘Well, perhaps from you …’
On and on steamed the ship with her great heart throbbing and the sea deeply blue lying calm on either side. Malta had drifted into a hyacinth haze of nothingness. Little scraps of conversation kept being blown to Ann.
Two old ladies. ‘Yes, I love these foreign places but they play my corn up so.’
‘I’ve got a wonderful cure for corns. It was recommended to me years ago, and I always travel with it. I wouldn’t be without it for the world. You just paint the place!’
‘Well, to be sure now!’
‘If you care to come down to my cabin, I …’ They went on along the deck, their voices died away. Malta in its dim blueness, the star-spangled night … and corns! She smiled a little to herself.
Two girls. ‘Oh, but do you think he means it? He sent me a chit across. I’d love to think he was in earnest, it would be too marvellous to go back engaged, but you know what they say about sailors …’
‘Oh, but that’s just their fun. I expect he means marriage.’
‘Oh, he said such things. He said it was simply hell that I’d got Betty in my cabin. Do you think that looks like marriage?’
Modern young things! Gay young people, bright young people. Kaleidoscopic snatches from other lives. Two deck hands passing by, and standing to talk for a moment under the awning.
‘It was that there choppy bit off Portugal got her. Told me she was a good sailor, she did, and then brings it all up on me nice clean deck. Just as we’d a-finished scrubbing down too … a fair mess …’
‘Well, her ’usband has tried to bor
row me number ones for the fancy dress.’
‘Don’t you lend ’em to ’im. I had enough of that last cruise. Borrowed me best whites and never brings ’em back, until I goes after ’em, and then I finds ’em a-smothered in green paint ’cos he’d got orf and was dancing with a young woman dressed as a Christmas tree. I didn’t ’arf swear.’
They passed on and for a moment there was silence, and Ann heard someone coming across the deck, and felt a hand on her shoulder. ‘Come and have a drink in the café?’ It was Fergus.
‘I don’t drink.’
‘Well, a soft one. Coffee or lemon squash?’
‘Very well.’
III
The café was in light mood; it had gay chairs of vermilion-painted wicker-work. People were grouped about in twos and threes, but the majority were dancing. In the corners there was a good deal of coquetry. Fergus took a seat well in the open, his white mess-jacket gleaming against the red of the chair.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘I suppose you did all the proper Maltese things? St. John’s? Mnaidra? Tarxien Temples and St. Paul’s Cave?’
She shook her head. ‘None of them.’
‘You didn’t go touring then?’
‘No.’
She had seen the car-loads as conscientiously arranged by Mr. Thomas Cook, who had a most flourishing office on board, doing a great trade. For the moderate sum of one pound ten and sixpence, so the schedule said, Mr. Thomas Cook was willing to show you pagan temples, the voice of the oracle, skeletons of primitive people, catacombs, village maidens as goatherds, ‘geep’ in their natural surroundings, and the actual islet where St. Paul was purported to have got himself wrecked some nineteen hundred years ago. Truly a mixed bag! It was a well-worded schedule, for while pagan temples and St. Paul appealed to old ladies, ‘geep’ and goats certainly appealed to old gentlemen with zoological turns of mind, and the village maidens as goatherds set all the young men’s pulses throbbing with desire. Thus nobody should have been disappointed.
‘I didn’t go on any trips,’ she said.
‘I went to the Leper hospital.’
‘But surely they don’t have leprosy in Malta?’
‘My dear, in all these places it has a certain sway. You saw the fair side of the treacherous little island, Judas trees and purple clover, palms in the Barracca.’
‘I bathed.’
He nodded. ‘You never saw the real Malta, fighting its dirt and disease, with its hopeless, helpless ignorance. Its conflict with a priesthood that holds it with a rule of iron, It always gives me a strange feeling to go from Malta to Venice; one is the antithesis of the other; Venice so cool, so dustless, so polished.’
‘I expect I shall love it.’
But he was still thinking in a bitter mood of the island he had left. ‘Malta is barren, it is full of death. In Venice there is no death.’
‘You mean people don’t die?’
‘No, I mean death is quite separate. It has no part of the Venetian outlook. I have never seen a trained nurse in the Square. I have never seen a funeral. There are no corpses in Venice, for they are carried away to a separate island. We never see those tombstones expressing their glorious lies for all the world to read.’
‘You’re very bitter.’
‘The truth is always bitter. There are more lies written on tombstones than anywhere else in the world. “In affectionate memory of”, “In loving memory of”, “Gone but not forgotten”, over some grave where the weeds are rank.’
‘I never thought of it that way,’ and suddenly he was disturbed by the pain in her eyes.
‘I’m a pig to talk like this. I get fits, moods of it. You see, cruising has a penalty of its own. I get to look on life just as a patchwork quilt. I meet people, hundreds of people, different temperaments, all little matterless pieces of patchwork flung over me. That’s all.’
A man in a paper cap chassé-ed into the café, his hands dug deeply into his trouser pockets. Three women, obviously lady friends of his, clad in a good deal of cheap lace, burst into loud and uncultured laughter. Ann wondered what had induced her to buy that lace dinner frock at Barker’s. She had thought that it would be so useful, and now, since she had visited Fifinelle’s, she knew that it could only be damning. And by the bye, lace frocks reminded her that she had told Fifinelle to refund the deposit money care of Bunt’s, the agents in Venice. Not that she expected to see a farthing of it again, but she was still nursing a faint hope for the best.
‘There’s a bad piece of patchwork,’ said Fergus, and he indicated the hilarious ladies and the dancing gentleman in the paper hat. ‘Sometimes I wonder where these people get the money for cruising. One feels that they ought not to have it. It is all wrong that they should be allowed to behave as they do. To-day I saw an amazing sight. I saw a lady passenger kissing her cabin steward.’
‘Heavens!’
‘Sea-fever they call it. He wasn’t enthusiastic. I don’t think he could help it, poor chap, but she was all for it. It puts everybody in a most uncomfortable position.’
‘Very,’ Ann agreed.
The band had changed its tune to ‘A life on the ocean wave’ again. The dancing gentleman drew his dinner jacket together with a jerk, and produced from his pocket a marvellous pair of slightly soiled white kid gloves; ‘Now then,’ said he, and seizing one of the ladies violently about the waist chassé-ed out of the café.
‘It’s eleven.’ Fergus’s eye wandered to the clock set high up over the door. ‘There’s a buffet supper in the lounge, not that we stand an earthly chance of getting anywhere near it, but we can try if you are feeling that way disposed, and it might be amusing to watch …’
IV
The stewards had experienced no small difficulty in keeping the passengers off the buffet supper before eleven. It had been displayed with all the pride and glowing content of an ingenious chef, who had worked miracles in marzipan roses. Some of the less nervous passengers, having first enquired if it were free, had pressed close to the tables with their trails of smilax and marzipan roses, only to be wafted back by the stewards.
But now, the moment that six bells sounded ‒ they had been long enough at sea to understand the intricacies of bells, though hardly as yet of twenty-four hour time, which was most confusing ‒ they lurched like a tidal wave of humanity towards the exquisite display. It seemed for a moment that the tables would be rushed, and would be broken under the urge of all these pressing people, then they seemed to ease the strain.
Ultimately they drew back from the sorry spectacle of crushed smilax, greening the white cloths; of crumbs and soiled plates and glasses, of jelly smears and froth of cream, and nothing else! Just nothing at all.
‘They’ve snaffled the whole show,’ said Fergus. ‘I thought as much.’
Ann laughed.
‘I should think the chef is heartbroken having his marzipan roses treated like that,’ she said.
‘They say that we kill a chef every cruise. Half his heart is buried at sea, and half is taken back to his home town,’ said Fergus.
And now suddenly Ann beheld Oliver dancing in a Paul Jones with a dreadful-looking young woman who had a Spanish complex and wore a poppy-red gown, and a shawl she had bought in Gibraltar. Oliver was laughing. He was light-hearted, and nothing worried him too much. He had had such an upbringing that none of these people came amiss. Why should they? Dear Grandma and Auntie Miggs and good old Uncle Alfred had all been much like this; only they had called complexes notions, and temperaments tempers! That was the subtle difference of the years.
He was frolicking with the girl who thought she looked Spanish, and laughing about her shawl. Everything was going splendidly. Fergus saw Ann’s glance.
‘Rather a nice sort of chap,’ he said; ‘somebody said his wife died the other day, but that can’t be true or he wouldn’t be dancing.’
She lowered her eyes.
Then she was not the only one to think such conduct peculiar. ‘I am afraid it is true,’ she said.
Fergus quickly recovered himself. ‘Oh well, he probably knows what he is doing. I never believe in interfering with other people’s affairs. Do you?’
All the same when she went down to her cabin it rankled.
All the while the great heart of the ship beat on, as they steamed northwards for the city of romance.
V
Some time at sea …
Ann did not know how long, for when at sea the hours seemed to gain a strange matterless magic of their own. They were not the same as when you were on shore; they did not have the same meaning as when the clock chimed the time. It all went in the mystery of bells. Beef tea; the excitement of the tote; siesta; deck quoits and tennis; sunbathing and swimming.
For some the day at sea entailed cocktails in cabins, and rather noisy parties, but Ann had yet to taste her first cocktail. It is true that one of the blazer brigade who slept on her deck had greeted her with the twanging of a banjo, which they had bought cheaply in Mercanti in Valletta, and coming through the pale gold and white door curtain, had called, ‘Say, honey, what about a little sing-song?’ Then seeing her face he had changed the twanging to ‘Ain’t it grand to be blooming well dead?’ Otherwise nothing had happened. She lolled on deck and she watched people, and sometimes Oliver came and talked to her, and sometimes Fergus.
‘Have you seen the man who is wedded to his bowler?’ asked Oliver. ‘A bowler is a positive disease with some people; he wears it on deck, and if anything ever looked out of place in this world it is to be in the Mediterranean wearing a little city suit and a little bowler ’at.’
‘I haven’t seen him.’
‘It is amazing what the North is responsible for. When I come on a trip like this, I feel a devout gratitude to the Almighty that I was not born in Manchester.’
He noticed her quietness. ‘Why don’t you talk? Have I offended you? We were such good friends at Cala Mistra?’
‘It’s Lilia.’
‘But we talked all that out, and we decided that my attitude was the proper one.’
‘Only ‒’