by Rachel Rhys
While many of the women, like Lily, have been wearing bathing costumes around the pool area, knitted garments that sag when wet, they would not dream of parading around the ship in them, and there is something intensely shocking about Eliza’s tiny waist and the swell of her bosom, accentuated by the minimal halter, and her creamy bare thighs.
A chair is found and Eliza sits down, removing her hat, which would have struggled to fit into the confined space. Lily is aware of a lull in the chatter around them as the other passengers listen for what she will say, already rehearsing their own dinnertime conversations for later. Did you see? Did you hear?
Lily sees Maria Katz come to the edge of the pool area and peer in, as if looking for someone. When she sees Lily and Eliza, she waves but does not come over.
‘Max is being impossible,’ says Eliza, lighting the cigarette she has just taken from Edward. ‘He is so bad-tempered – probably because he spends his life being either half-cut or hungover. Do you know, he’s hardly said a word to me since we got back from Cairo. As if this filthy heat wasn’t bad enough, I’ve also got to put up with a husband who acts more like a spoilt child than a grown man.’
‘I think the weather is making everyone more irritable,’ says Helena.
‘This is nothing,’ says Ian, laughing. ‘Just try midday in January in Western Australia and see how you like that!’
Eliza pushes her sunglasses down her nose and peers at Ian over the top.
‘What a treat,’ she says. ‘A native!’
Ian laughs good-naturedly and then flicks his eyes automatically towards Helena, which is when Lily has a most interesting revelation. Ian is utterly unaffected by Eliza. So far on the voyage, people have either been dazzled or appalled or fascinated by her, so Ian’s indifference is something new. As if to test out her theory, she glances at Edward, who seems to have shut himself off since Eliza arrived, setting out a game of solitaire and snapping the cards down with particular force.
Eliza seems baffled by Ian’s lack of interest, and fires questions at him, which he answers in the affable tone he uses with everyone. Even when Ian’s two young Australian colleagues approach, eager to be introduced to her, it seems not to make up for Ian’s own absence of regard. Eliza’s eyes follow him as he turns repeatedly in Helena’s direction. Finally, she pushes her chair back, so vehemently it clatters backwards on to the deck.
‘I just cannot abide this heat a moment longer. Lily, I’m dying to see your cabin. I’ve never seen it before. Will you show me?’
Lily is taken aback. Imagining Eliza in the cramped cabin she shares with Ida and Audrey is like picturing an exotically plumed parrot in a pigeon loft. Still, Eliza is standing, waiting, and everyone else is watching. Lily gets slowly to her feet.
‘I can’t think you’ll find much to interest you,’ she says, grabbing hold of her cotton dress from the back of a chair and slipping it on over the top of her still-damp swimming costume.
‘Nonsense. I just want to see where you live, so I can picture you when I’m stuck up there’ – she raises her eyes to the upper deck – ‘dying of boredom.’
As she and Lily move off she draws Lily’s arm through hers. She has put the enormous hat back on, and the edge of the brim scratches Lily’s face whenever Eliza turns her head, though she does not seem to notice.
‘You don’t mind me dragging you away, do you?’ Eliza asks. ‘I’m just not in the mood for company.’
They make their way along the row of deckchairs, all pulled well into the shade. Maria is sitting back in one, gazing off into the distance, a book, forgotten, over her knees. Lily stops, conscious of having neglected her friend.
‘Are you all right, Maria?’
‘Oh yes. I’m fine.’ Maria smiles, but her gaze flits restlessly to Eliza and back.
‘We are just –’
‘We are going for a tête-à-tête,’ Eliza breaks in, turning her eyes, behind those black-lensed sunglasses, towards Maria. ‘We have so much to discuss. I hope you’ll excuse us.’
And she leads Lily away before she can protest.
‘I rescued you,’ says Eliza. ‘You owe me.’
Now, Lily does stop.
‘Maria is my friend. I didn’t need to be rescued from her.’
She has never been so outspoken to Eliza, and she feels her own heart quickening, but still she goes on. ‘I don’t care if she’s Jewish.’
To her surprise, Eliza laughs.
‘I don’t care if she’s Jewish either. She could be Hindu or Buddhist or Muslim or a devil worshipper, for all I care. I can even forgive her being so plain. It’s her worthiness I can’t stand, that air of intellectual superiority.’
‘She’s not like that.’
She has spoken loudly, and Lily notices the woman in the chair nearest to them raise her eyebrows to her companion.
Eliza scrunches up her face. Contrite.
‘I’m sorry, Lily. I have no right to tell you who you should and shouldn’t be friends with. Forgive me?’
Lily’s anger dissolves in the heat.
‘Of course. I overreacted.’
‘No, you didn’t. You’re quite right. I get so possessive with people I like. I can’t bear for them to have any friends apart from me. Max is forever telling me off.’
They open the door that leads down to the lower decks. The air in the narrow staircase is thick like tar. As they approach the door to her cabin, embarrassment prickles on Lily’s skin. She wonders if Eliza will look at her differently once she has seen, close up, how Lily lives.
But Eliza doesn’t seem put off, despite the sour smell that lurks in the turgid air, and the underthings drying over the end of Audrey’s bunk.
‘It’s perfectly sweet,’ she says, and flings herself down on the smooth counterpane of the empty bottom bunk.
‘Sit down and talk to me, Lily. We never seem to have time to chat. I was hoping Cairo would have given us more opportunity, but things just seemed to get in the way, didn’t they?’
Lily nods and sits down on the spot Eliza is patting.
‘Tell me more about yourself, Lily. What do you want to do with your life?’
Lily hesitates.
‘I suppose I’ll stay in Australia a couple of years – if you go home any sooner you have to pay back your passage.’
‘And then what? Back to England?’
Lily nods.
‘I imagine I’ll get married at some point. Have a family.’
It sounds so predictable, her life plan. So tame.
‘How about you, Eliza?’ she asks, longing for the focus to be somewhere other than her. ‘Shouldn’t you and Max like to have children?’
Eliza picks at a woven strap above her head that forms the base of the top bunk.
‘I can’t have children.’
Fire rushes to Lily’s face.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry I asked. How clumsy of me.’
‘Don’t be silly, Lily. You weren’t to know. Anyway, who says I want to have children?’
‘Do you?’
Eliza is quiet. Pick. Pick. Pick. She takes a deep breath in.
‘I had a child, actually. We. We had a child.’
Lily freezes. Eliza and Max, parents? It does not seem possible.
‘A little girl. Olivia. Oh, she was quite the most ugly baby, Lily. Completely bald, with such a chubby face. Max used to call her Oliver because he said she looked like Oliver Hardy – you know, from Laurel and Hardy? But I adored her, of course. Couldn’t get enough of her, as it happens. Didn’t even mind that she’d torn me up so badly being born – the big, fat thing – that I would never be able to have more children. She was enough.’
Eliza is speaking in a low, flat voice, completely unlike the way she usually sounds. It’s as if someone has taken her normal voice and squeezed all the theatre out of it. Lily finds it almost unbearably touching and takes Eliza’s hand, the first time she has ever made a spontaneous move towards her.
‘You don’t have to ta
lk about her, if it’s too painful.’
‘Don’t be a ninny, Lily. It was three years ago now. I have come to terms with it. Besides, I like talking about her. Max won’t even have her name mentioned.’
‘So what happened?’
Lily’s voice is soft as ocean spray, and she wonders for a moment if she even uttered the words out loud. But then Eliza speaks:
‘I used to bring Olivia with me everywhere. I loved her so. We had nannies, of course, but I wanted her just with me. She was so happy, you see. Never cried. Always smiling. We had a party, in our house in Mayfair. Olivia was with me, as always. I put her down on the floor. Just for a moment. Just while I went and fetched a drink for someone.
‘She ate something. Something she shouldn’t have. She was such a greedy little thing, always putting things in her mouth. She died two days later.’
‘Oh!’ Lily’s hand is over her mouth. She does not know if she has ever heard anything so sad. ‘But what did she eat?’ she wants to know.
Eliza gazes at Lily, her astonishing eyes almost purple in the dim light of the cabin.
‘Do you know what cocaine is, Lily?’
Lily shakes her head, already sure she does not really want to find out.
‘It’s a drug, Lily. Max has been taking it for years.’
‘But is it legal?’
Eliza laughs out loud.
‘If we only did things that were legal, life would not be worth living. Anyway, Max left a little bowl of cocaine on a coffee table. He always has to be so generous to his friends. It looks like little crystals of white powder. Olivia must have thought it was sugar.’
‘But that’s terrible. Poor Max, he must have felt so awful.’
Eliza snaps her head back, banging it on the upper bunk.
‘Good. I hope he feels terrible for the rest of his life.’
‘Don’t say that, Eliza. Please. It was a mistake. A terrible mistake.’
Eliza glares at Lily, as if she might slap her. Then she looks away.
‘You know, sometimes I hate him so much I want to kill him.’
Lily cannot believe she has heard right. And yet, at the same time, she knows she has.
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Don’t I?’
But now Eliza is sitting up, gathering herself. Painting on a smile.
‘You’re right. Of course I don’t.’
Her voice is different. Hardened.
‘And now you, Lily. I’ve told you my innermost secret. Now yours. Who have you lost? And don’t tell me about your dear old grandmother. I know you have a story. You wouldn’t be here on this ship if you didn’t. Who have you lost who properly broke your heart?’
Lily feels her heart pounding in her chest. She has never spoken of this. To anyone. And yet Eliza has been so open with her, so honest. It’s almost as if she owes her this confidence.
‘I had a friend,’ she begins. ‘Her name was Mags.’
Eliza sits up and leans fractionally towards her, as if listening with her entire body.
‘She died eighteen months ago.’
‘A close friend, obviously. How did she die, Lily?’
Lily sways. The cabin feels so hot suddenly, the air so close it is like cotton wool, stuffing up her nostrils, pressing on her eyeballs. She closes her eyes, but that is worse, because now she sees that room again, with the mint-green carpet. The blood dripping down the wall. Mags screaming: Am I going to die, Lil?
‘Lily, you know you can tell me anything. You know you can trust me.’
Lily nods. Presses her lips together. Begins.
‘There was a man called Robert …’
But now there comes a blast of breeze as the cabin door bursts open. And here is Ida, her pointy face only made sallower from exposure to the sun, her heavy black dress marked under the arms by bleached rings of salt. She sees Lily first, sitting on the bed, her swimming costume making damp patches on her dress, her face heavy with the weight of her untold story.
‘Lily?’
Only now does she see Eliza, sitting there in her shorts, with her legs and shoulders bare, all that soft skin on show.
‘What’s this?’
Ida’s eyes look as black as her dress in the dull, heat-soaked cabin air. Eliza stares at her as if she were something nasty the wind has just blown in.
Lily gets to her feet and makes the introductions, but Ida looks as if there is something stuck in her throat. So much flesh, you can see her thinking as she looks over at Eliza.
‘You’re wearing your wet bathing suit under your clothes? You’ll catch a chill.’
Ida does not seem to notice the heat that coats their skin like treacle.
‘A chill?’ Eliza laughs. Her old, brittle laugh. ‘Now that would be a novelty.’
When Lily and Eliza make their excuses and leave the cabin, they gulp in the air in the narrow, stagnant corridor as if it were mountain-fresh.
16
14 August 1939
LILY SPENDS THE night up on the deck. The ship is due to arrive at its next port of call, Aden, at 5 a.m., with passengers allowed just two hours ashore, and she does not want to risk being late. She and the others who have the same idea sleep fully clothed in the camp beds so they will be ready when the ship docks. Helena lies next to Lily. Lily did look around for Maria before settling down for the night, remembering guiltily how Eliza had bundled her away from her earlier in the day, but she was nowhere to be seen. It’s not altogether surprising. Most of the passengers have no appetite for such an early, short stopover in this hostile climate.
Unable to sleep in the sticky night heat, Lily goes over the conversation with Eliza. ‘I had a child, actually. We. We had a child.’ Now, finally, Eliza begins to make sense, the sharp edges of her. Pointed enough to hurt. Thin enough to snap. What would it do to a person to lose a child? What would it do to a marriage? Lily knows very little of babies but she has imagined, in her lowest moments, how it might feel to have someone depend upon you utterly and love you unconditionally. How it might give meaning and structure to a life that sometimes seemed lacking in both.
Robert had talked sometimes of the children they might have. And because Lily was young and in love, and because her mother had always told her she was as good as anyone, she’d allowed herself not to think about what his parents might say. His family.
‘Come on, Lil,’ he would say, his lips on her neck, his body pressed up against her as hers was pressed in turn against the outside wall at the side of the house. The fingers of one hand kneading at her breast, the other working its way up under her skirt. ‘We’ll make the most beautiful babies.’ The heat where their bodies connected, everything in her liquefying until she felt she must dissolve completely into the burning centre of him.
But always something had stopped her, some last vestige of sense. Her mother’s voice in her ear. Where’s the ring, Lilian? The knowledge that a blade of grass tied around her finger wasn’t enough. But oh, how persuasive he was, with his words, and his tongue, and his hands. All of it pushing, probing, wanting. More, more, more. How different to that kiss with Edward in Cairo. The heartbreaking softness of it.
Shortly after 4 a.m. the ship pulls in to anchor. It is still dark and the buildings on the shore are indistinct black shapes against the inky sky.
By five, the light is grey and grainy, but still there is an oppressive atmosphere and everything on shore appears blurry as if seen through a grey filter. Lily can just about make out arid mountains crouching in the distance like brooding giants. They are to be taken to the dock by launch and, as they gather by the gangway, the passengers glance nervously upwards at the dense sky. There is an unpleasant, swollen feeling about the day that reminds Lily of summer storms at home when the heat builds until it must explode.
‘Will we be needing umbrellas?’ one of the women asks. The steward on duty laughs. ‘You’ll be lucky. Don’t think it’s rained here in years.’
Helena and Lily are joined by Edward
and Ian Jones. It is astonishing how quickly and easily the Australian has slotted into their group; it is as if he had always been there. Lily is glad of his cheerful, uncomplicated company. He seems to have a positive effect on Edward also and there is no sign of his bad humour of yesterday.
Despite the earliness of the hour, as soon as the launch lands they are swamped by hawkers, and the little shops along the shoreline are all open.
‘Of course they’re open, this is how they make their living,’ says Ian. ‘Either from the boats that pass through or from the soldiers on the British army base.’
Lily already knew there was a military base nearby. She got talking on deck one day to a young woman who was on her way to join her husband and become a military wife. Imagine coming to live here, she thinks, in this desolate place. But when the next launch pulls up and she sees the woman fly out of it as soon as it docks and hurl herself into the arms of a uniformed officer whose smile looks as if it might burst clear from his face, she changes her mind. Maybe love will be enough to overcome even this parched, grey place.
Aden has a reputation as the cheapest spot to buy merchandise such as cameras and lighters, and Edward is intent on buying a new watch, as his has stopped working after he accidentally wore it in the pool. Lily sticks by his side as he drifts from shop to shop. Everywhere they go they are followed by little Arab children with trays of trinkets.
Helena and Ian have gone on ahead, he with his hand constantly on her arm, half steering, half protecting.
‘They seem so happy together,’ says Lily, unable to help herself.
Edward looks up sharply.
‘It certainly makes a change to see Helena smiling again. I thought for a while there she had lost the knack of it!’
He is joking, but there is a grain of hardness in his voice.
‘What is it?’ Lily asks. ‘Surely you must like Ian?’