by Rachel Rhys
‘I’ll write to you,’ Lily promises. ‘I’m keeping a diary so I’ll remember every detail.’ But already her parents are halfway down the gangplank, swept along by the tide of visitors coming behind them.
Audrey, who has been standing discreetly to one side, tucks her arm through Lily’s.
‘You’ll see them soon enough. Two years will go like that.’ She snaps her large fingers in front of her face. Her hands are coarse and pinkly raw. Lily is well aware how hard the lives of chambermaids can be.
Mrs Collins nods. ‘She’s right, you know. Now, hurry up, you two, if you want to get a space at the front.’
Passengers who have said their goodbyes are already arranging themselves along the length of the ship’s railing. Lily’s eye is caught by a flash of scarlet and she notices the woman they saw earlier on the dock. She is pressing herself against the railing with arms straight out on either side, steadying her. Lily is astonished to see she is wearing black-lensed sunglasses. Though she has seen them in magazines, it’s the first time she’s seen someone actually wearing them, and to her they appear alien, like a fly’s eyes. The woman is scouring the crowd gathered on the dock, as if searching for someone. The rugged, moustachioed man she was with earlier is nowhere to be seen.
‘Over here.’ Audrey pulls Lily towards a gap in the crowd.
Again Lily is reminded of the sheer scale of the ship as she peers down at the quayside where the families and friends of the departing passengers are gathered in their sombre-coloured Sunday best, their pale, anxious faces turned up towards the deck. Lily scans them now, looking for her mother’s soft brown eyes. Oh, there. There is her family. The three of them, craning their necks, looking for her. Lily shakes off Audrey’s arm and waves her hand to get their attention. Her heart constricts at how small they appear, no bigger than her fingernail.
When he sees her Frank puts a finger in each corner of his mouth and whistles. Lily watches her mother give him a mock-slap. The sweet familiarity of the gesture brings a lump to her throat and she has to look away. Her eyes fall on a man she has not seen before, a few feet away from her family. He is wearing a cream jacket, which makes him stand out in that sober crowd. Also, unlike most, he is bare-headed, and his blond hair catches the weak sun as if he has been gold-leafed. Even from the deck she can see the perfect proportions of him, the wide shoulders and narrow waist. He steps out from the crowd until he is at the very edge of the quayside, where the wooden boards fall sharply away. Now he is closer she can see that his skin is burnished like his hair, his cheekbones smooth and sculpted. He is shouting something, his hands cupped around his mouth, face tilted upwards. Lily leans forward, straining to catch it.
‘Stay! Please, stay!’
He is staring at a point to her left, and she follows his gaze until she finds the woman in the red dress. Still alone, she stands at the railing gazing down, impassive, at the golden young man, as if she cannot see his anguished expression or hear his heartfelt entreaty. Then, abruptly, she whirls around and begins pushing through the crowd behind her. For a second, she catches Lily’s eye and Lily is sure she sees one of the woman’s perfectly arched dark brows lift a fraction above the dark glasses, but then she is gone, heading back towards the entrance to the cabins and the upper decks.
Lily turns back to her family. Her father stands still, his face lifted towards her. From this distance she can’t tell if he’s still crying, and she is grateful for this. She tries not to notice how shrunken her mother looks and instead drinks in the trio on the dock as if trying to commit them to memory. She fishes around in her handbag for her neatly folded handkerchief, but the tears she feels she ought to be shedding don’t come. Instead there is a treacherous flare of excitement. She is going, she thinks. She is really going.
The gangplank has been taken up, and now there comes a sudden, startling noise like a thousand bagpipes blaring at once. And then the ship is moving, the figures on the quay frozen into position like a painting in a gallery from which she is slowly backing away. She hardly dares believe that she is actually leaving it behind – her family, of course, and her home, but also the things she doesn’t like to think of: Mags, Robert, that room with its peeling wallpaper and the green, blood-stained carpet. ‘Are you running away from anything, dear?’ that lady at Australia House had asked. Lily had said no, but she wasn’t fooling anyone.
But now all that is past. Today a new life begins. For the first time in eighteen months hope bursts like a firecracker inside Lily’s narrow chest. Still, she carries on waving her arm until Tilbury Dock is just a black smudge in the distance.
2
PREPARING FOR DINNER that first evening, Lily feels as if she has somehow stumbled out of her own life and into someone else’s. Where is her little room in the Bayswater boarding house? Where are the stockings draped and drying over the open wardrobe door and the narrow bed in which she’d lie awake, listening to her neighbour coughing through the paper-thin wall? What has happened to the bus ride to Piccadilly Circus and the nine-hour shifts in the Lyons Corner House on the corner of Coventry Street and Rupert Street? How peculiar that a life can swing so completely around in only eight weeks.
She hadn’t had any notion of escape when she picked up the newspaper that Sunday afternoon. It was just lying there on the padded train seat opposite, discarded by a previous passenger. Lily doesn’t normally pick up things other people have left behind. She cannot bear the idea of being thought not able to afford her own. But the carriage was empty, apart from an elderly lady who had nodded off with her face almost buried in her vast bosom. Besides, Lily was restless. She’d made the journey from Reading to Paddington so many times she sometimes found herself lying awake, going through the stations like a litany: Reading, Maidenhead Bridge, Slough, West Drayton, Southall, Paddington. At night, their familiarity soothed her but during the day she felt as if she might burst with the sameness of it all.
The front page of the paper was full of Herr Hitler’s latest provocations in Europe but Lily resolutely refused to believe the worst. The country had got to the very brink last year and stepped away again. Nevertheless, she flicked through those pages quickly, as if lingering might tempt its own bad luck.
On page four, her attention was caught by a headline. NEW GOVERNMENT SCHEME FOR MIGRATION TO AUSTRALIA, it read. Lily felt something stir, a tendril of excitement unfurling. Australia. The very word brought to mind unimaginable worlds. Cobalt-blue skies and emerald leaves against which exotic flowers bloomed. Lily has never been further than the south coast of England but she has seen newsreels of Australia in the cinema, and her uncle, who was a sailor in his teens, used to tell her stories of beaches and sharks, and spiders bigger than a human hand.
She read on. The government was subsidizing a scheme for young men and women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to travel to Australia with an assisted passage. Young women with domestic skills were particularly welcome. The large houses around Sydney and Melbourne needed staff, and British employees carried a particular cachet.
Lily has sworn she will never go back to domestic service, not after what happened with Robert. But as a means to an end? Could she? Would she?
And now here she is. When Lily and Audrey made their way back to their cabin earlier, with Lily’s thoughts still full of that last image of her family on the docks growing smaller and smaller until they were black specks of dust, they’d been introduced briefly to the other five young women travelling under the scheme: two sisters from Birmingham and three others whose names Lily immediately forgot. Afterwards Mrs Collins showed them around the boat with a proprietorial air. The corridors and narrow staircase of F Deck hummed with the excited chatter of other passengers engaged in the same pursuit.
First the bathrooms. Though the cabins have their own washing facilities, there are bathrooms and toilets just along the corridor. Mrs Collins advised them to tip the bathroom steward at the beginning of the trip, as well as halfway through. There could be queues at busy times o
f day, she told them, so it was useful to have someone looking out for you. They’d agreed, all except Ida, who muttered that she wouldn’t be tipping anyone before knowing they were up to the job.
‘I’ve been around a bit longer than the rest of you. I know more about how the world works. There’s no point tipping at the start, you have to make people work for their rewards.’
Later, Audrey had whispered to Lily that Ida couldn’t help being bitter. She had had a fiancé who died of influenza, Audrey said. But Lily thought that a poor excuse for a lifetime of being miserable and spraying misery into the air like scent. They are only twenty years out from the Great War. Everyone has lost someone.
Next, a trip to the Purser’s Office to store their money and valuables. Lily was relieved to hand over the fourteen pounds she has saved. It has to last her the whole voyage, as well as start her out on her new life when she arrives in Australia. Awareness of all that money had been weighing her down and now the purser has taken possession of it, painstakingly recording the amount next to her name in a large ledger, she feels immeasurably lighter. The Purser’s Office is up on the first-class deck, and Lily had enjoyed peering into the dining room, which looked more like something you’d find in a luxurious hotel, and the sumptuous lounge, with its potted palm trees and velvet curtains.
Back in tourist class, they passed the swimming pool – much smaller than the one on the upper-class deck, but no doubt they’d be grateful for it once the weather got hotter. Then they looked in on the dining room, which was dotted with round tables set for six and topped with starched white tablecloths. There were lists of table seatings, and Lily searched for her name anxiously, relieved to discover she would be at the same sitting as Audrey, if not the same table. Ida, to her own great annoyance, was on the earlier sitting.
Finally to the tourist-class lounge for tea, which was served with sandwiches and scones and cake. ‘I shall be the size of an elephant by the time we dock,’ Mrs Collins sighed, helping herself to another slice of cake. By then they had learned that she had been widowed some years before and that she had made this journey twice already, visiting her married daughter in Sydney. It was a way to have her passage paid, she told them. And she enjoyed the company.
The lounge was less formal than the dining room, with comfortable sofas in a dusky pink that reminded Lily of the curtains at home in her parents’ parlour, where no one ever went. Neat desks were tucked into the alcoves, where passengers could write their letters home, and at one end a grand piano gleamed under the light reflecting off the crystal chandelier above. Windows ran the length of the room, through which the south coast of England was still just about visible, the dark obelisk of Eddystone lighthouse receding into the distance. Lily thought then about her parents, and wondered if they’d got back to Reading already. She imagined them letting themselves into the little house on Hatherley Road and how quiet it would feel, the hallway stiff with undisturbed air, and the thought made her momentarily morose.
But now it’s nearly dinnertime and Lily’s spirits are once again on the rise as she hurries along the passage to the bathroom. Mindful of Mrs Collins’s advice, she offers five shillings to the bathroom attendant, informing him that she will be taking her bath before dinner each day and asking him to reserve her a bathroom. He is a young man, younger even than Frank, she guesses, and he smiles at her shyly.
‘Of course, miss.’
For the first time in her life Lily feels like a person of substance, a person with choices. In her bath, she hums to herself, then stops when she remembers the attendant just outside the door. The water feels strange on her skin. Prickly. Mrs Collins has explained that they use treated sea water for the baths, and Lily is glad of the basin of heated fresh water that rests on a wooden board laid across the foot of the bath with which she is to rinse herself at the end. Once out of the bath, she looks down at her body, her pale limbs and the little swell of her belly. She thinks of Robert, and immediately covers herself up with her towel.
Back in the cabin a layer of anticipation and expectation coats the neatly made-up bunks and the few jars of cream and bottles of scent on the dressing table. It is tucked into the folds of the dresses on the hangers in the narrow wardrobe and the underthings in the modest chest of drawers. Audrey and Lily dress with care, Lily steering Audrey away from wearing her one evening gown. ‘This is just dinner,’ she advises. ‘Save that one for when there’s a ball.’
It feels good to be talking like this with another woman again. Since Mags, she has felt the lack of female intimacy keenly.
Lily decides on her midnight-blue silk with the white trim. It’s an old dress which used to belong to the lady of the house, back in the days when she was a parlourmaid. But it’s very good quality, and Lily has altered it so that it fits her perfectly.
‘Oh, that looks so nice on you,’ Audrey tells her. ‘It brings out the colour of your eyes. Such an unusual shade they are. What would you call it? Toffee? Amber? If I had eyes like that, I should spend the whole day gazing at myself in the mirror.’
‘It’s just the light in here,’ says Ida. ‘Making everything look different. I expect it has had the same effect on my own.’
But Ida’s black eyes seem not to reflect any light at all.
Ida is not pleased at being in the first sitting for dinner. ‘Why have you two been put together and not me? I shall go and have words with the steward, see if I can swap with someone at one of your tables.’
Lily resolves to make allies of her fellow diners tonight and impress upon them that, if asked to give up their place, they must refuse at all costs.
Dinner is a four-course affair – soup, halibut, cold cuts of meat, strawberry mousse or fruit – but Lily is hardly able to concentrate on the choices on offer for curiosity about the others at her table. To her left sits a fragile-looking woman in her mid thirties who is travelling with her teenage daughter.
‘I’m Clara Mills, and this is Peggy.’ As she introduces herself, in a voice so small it’s as if the effort of speaking has in itself depleted her, Clara’s tiny hands flutter around her slender throat like paper caught in a rotating fan.
‘We are travelling quite alone. I haven’t slept in weeks for worrying. We’re on our way to Sydney to meet up with Peggy’s father, who has been setting himself up in business. We haven’t seen him for over two years.’
‘What kind of business?’
‘Oh. He’s a bookkeeper by trade.’
‘Well, everyone needs accountants, don’t they?’
‘Yes. Except that isn’t quite –’
‘Papa has opened a sweet shop.’
Peggy has that doughy, unformed look peculiar to certain teenagers, as if she hasn’t quite been finished off. She announces her father’s new business endeavour with an air of triumph that takes Lily by surprise.
A deep pink stain blooms on Clara’s chest.
‘Yes,’ she says faintly. ‘It is rather a departure.’
The couple to Lily’s right were down on the seating plan as Edward and Helena Fletcher. Engaged in conversation with the Millses, Lily got only a fleeting glimpse of them as they sat down, five minutes after the eight o’clock sitting began, but now the man turns to bring her into the conversation.
‘We were just arguing about what we’re going to miss most about home … Miss Shepherd, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but please call me Lily.’
‘Helena here thinks frosty mornings – you know, when your feet crunch on the pavement as you walk and you leave satisfying footprints behind – but I’m rather leaning towards jam-sponge pudding with custard.’
As Edward Fletcher speaks, Lily studies him covertly. He looks to be slightly older than her, but certainly no more than thirty. Though his complexion is chalky white and his cheeks hollow, he has a pleasant face, with widely spaced green eyes and a full, well-defined mouth that seems, even in repose, to be turning up at the corners as if at some private joke. She can see that some effort has been
made to grease back his dark curls, but they are already escaping, springing back into life around his ears. He has narrow shoulders, and his wrists, where they extend from his lounge jacket and starched shirt sleeves, are long and graceful, their little nubs of bone as white and smooth as pebbles.
‘Really, Edward, you’re such a child,’ says the woman sitting on the far side of him.
Lily is surprised to find Helena Fletcher so much older than her husband. She can see that she might once have been a beauty but now her skin is grey-tinged and there are violet shadows under her eyes. Her straight brown hair has been carelessly pinned up, as if done without access to a mirror.
‘How about you, Lily?’ Edward asks. ‘What are you most sad to leave behind?’
‘I shall miss my family, of course. And after that …’ Lily’s voice tails off. What will she miss? The cold mornings, where her breath clouded in the air above her bed, and the walls ran wet with condensation? The bus journeys home after a late shift when her feet ached from standing up all day and there was always one man with a pint too many inside him who imagined that, because she was out so late on her own, she must be looking for company?
‘Well, mostly my family, I suppose,’ she concludes lamely.
‘Shall we have wine?’ Edward asks, turning to Helena but not waiting for her reply. ‘Yes, I think we should, to celebrate getting off all right. And leaving all tiresome things behind.’
He calls the waiter over and orders a bottle, making sure it is added to his bill. Lily is relieved they won’t be expected to share the extra cost.
‘What brings you on this voyage, Lily?’ asks Clara Mills in her small, breathy voice.
‘Yes, do tell us,’ says Edward. ‘Have you a pining sweetheart waiting for you at the other end?’
Lily searches his face for any signs that he is making fun of her, but his smile is open and gentle. For a moment she wonders about reinventing herself, making up a more interesting, more impressive story. But then she tilts her chin upwards. Domestic service was good enough for her mother and her grandmother. She ought not to feel ashamed. She explains about the assisted-passage scheme and the process that has led her here. The forms she sent off to the Church of England Advisory Council of Empire Settlement, the interview at Australia House on the Strand, with its grand entrance hall with the marble floor and pillars running the length of the walls. She leaves out the moment her interviewer, a kindly woman in her sixties, leaned towards her: ‘Forgive me, my dear, but is there something you are running away from?’ Instead she tells them about her yearning to travel and the uncle with his tales of adventure and giant spiders. She likes the version of herself she sees reflected back in their eyes. Spirited, independent.