by Rachel Rhys
As she speaks Edward’s eyes stay focused solely on her face, as if studying her for a test.
‘You make me feel ashamed, Lily,’ he says at last, smiling his sweet, sad smile. ‘I’ve achieved nothing in my life. A few years of studying for a career I never even really wanted, and then just lying in bed like a baby.’
‘You were ill!’
He puts his head in his hands, so that his long fingers rake through his unruly dark hair. When he looks up again his expression is full of misery.
‘What a waste, Lily. What a waste my life has been.’
What would have happened then if they hadn’t been interrupted by a shout from further down the boat? Would Lily have leaned forward, as she wanted to, as she needed to, and taken his hand in hers and made him see himself through her eyes? Would the image Ida has implanted in her mind of Edward burying his nose in her discarded silk scarf have made her so bold?
‘What on earth are you doing all the way down here? Are you hiding?’
Eliza is here again, wearing her shorts and a blue short-sleeved blouse that brings out the navy in her eyes. She is trailing something over her arm: the peach silk dress that Lily tried on in her cabin.
‘Here I am come to do you a good turn and you have me marching up and down the whole length of the ship. If I expire from heat exhaustion, I shall hold the two of you entirely to blame.’
Eliza tosses the dress to Lily and then flings herself into a chair and sweeps her heavy black hair off her shoulders with her hands, holding it up over her head so that such breeze as there is can get to her neck. She is wearing blue sandals with a high heel and kicks them off theatrically, sending one skidding over to the railing.
‘I thought you might want to borrow it for the gala evening tonight. It looked so divine on you.’
‘Thank you. I was actually thinking of giving the dance a miss.’
‘Nonsense. What the hell else is there to do on this endless, beastly voyage? I won’t hear of it. You must come. Edward. Tell her.’
‘You must come,’ he parrots, laughing.
‘You two have no idea what it’s like up there.’ Eliza gestures to the first-class deck. ‘It’s like a living death. You know those tombs in the pyramid we went to? That’s what it’s like. Being buried under a thousand tons of old dust and rock.’
Since the conversation with Eliza about her daughter Lily finds herself viewing her in a different light, prepared to consider her carelessness a result of having nothing more to lose rather than a lack of consideration for anyone else. Still, she wonders what it was that George had been about to reveal about the Campbells. If the scandal the elderly woman told her about in the Pompeii gift shop was nothing to do with the death of the Campbells’ child, what could it relate to? Lily does not even like to think. She has the inbuilt aversion to gossip that only someone who has been on the receiving end can understand, which is what prevents her talking to Edward and Helena about it. Perhaps it’s nothing, she decides. Just an old woman who wanted to feel important for a few minutes.
Eliza is again furious with Max. She’d been wanting to get off at Aden. Had been desperate for it, in fact, but when the steward had come in that morning to get them up as instructed, Max had sent the man away and then promptly gone back to sleep.
‘I wouldn’t mind, except he didn’t bother to wake me up before he fell back into his drunken stupor, so I slept all the way through it and only woke up when everyone was coming back on board. And now I feel like I’ve been trapped on this boat with these ghastly people for ever. And we’re not stopping again until Ceylon. I shall be crazed with cabin fever by then. Tell me everything that happened. Every last detail.’
Edward and Lily exchange glances. George Price looms up in Lily’s mind, standing over the boy, his arm bent back, fist clenched, and she snaps her eyes closed, blinking the image away.
‘You didn’t miss much,’ says Edward.
Lily thanks Eliza for the dress and agrees, reluctantly, that she will make an appearance at the dance. She knows she can’t avoid George for ever, so she might as well get the first meeting over with.
‘Will you be staying on the upper deck?’ she asks Eliza.
‘What, so the old women can make disapproving noises at me while the young ones flirt outrageously with my husband? No chance.’
Down in her cabin, Lily drapes the dress on a clothes hanger hooked over the top-bunk railing. Even in such prosaic surroundings the dress exudes a glamour that lifts her spirits, despite herself. She does not like the idea of being beholden to Eliza or of accepting her charity, but she is only twenty-five years old, too young not to be affected by lovely things. She will wear the dress, just for a night, and just as the ship itself is not real life so the Lily who slips the peach silk over her head and dances under the stars on the surface of the Indian Ocean will also be an illusion.
When Ida comes in and sees the dress she is silent. Her eyes travel from the flimsy, floaty hem to the slender straps, hardly wider than silk thread.
‘I’ll wager you didn’t buy that from those Arabs.’
‘No, Mrs Campbell lent it to me.’
A noise. Could be a laugh or a snort. Impossible to tell with Ida. She steps forward and grabs hold of the dress, rubbing the silk between her thumb and one bony middle finger, and it’s all Lily can do to hold back from knocking her hand away.
‘It’s a lovely dress, all right. Must have cost a pretty penny. What does she want in return, Lily?’
‘It’s not like that, Ida. She just wants to be generous. She doesn’t want anything from me.’
Ida glances at her and Lily is surprised to see something akin to sadness in her companion’s sallow face.
‘Nobody gives you something for nothing, Lily, you mark my words.’
Later that evening, Ida’s ominous response is forgotten as Lily enters the dining hall, everything about her feeling slightly altered by the dress she has on, from the way she walks, with a swishing looseness around the hips, to the way she holds herself completely upright, allowing the silk to fall low in the back as it is meant to. At the risk of appearing old-fashioned, she has on white gloves, freshly laundered, which end halfway up her arm and contrast startlingly with her skin, made tawny by the sun.
‘Oh my word. What have you done with our Lily?’ asks Helena as she approaches. Clara Mills declares it a ‘complete transformation’, which makes Lily wonder how bad she must have looked before. Edward gets to his feet and makes a deep mock-bow. ‘You look like a princess,’ he explains. ‘I feel I should prostrate myself on the floor at your feet.’
Only George, already seated when she arrives, says nothing, beyond a curt ‘Good evening’. She cannot help glancing at his lips, wine-stained now, like two fat, purple leeches, and the nerves that surround her heart shudder.
All through dinner Edward is attentive. He has bought wine and refills her glass the instant it empties.
‘I love your hair like that,’ he tells her, and she doesn’t confess that it took her and Audrey half an hour to make it so, twisting and pinning and then untwisting and unpinning until they were both heartily fed up.
Afterwards they head out on to the deck. Ian has come to find them and volunteers to go to the bar ‘before it gets mobbed’, and Helena accompanies him to help with the carrying of drinks. Edward and Lily drift towards the railing and gaze out to sea in silence because the scene needs no commentary, not the moon, bright as a new sixpence in the inky sky, nor its reflection – a spill of silver paint across the glassy surface of the sea. They are so close Lily can feel the fibres of his tailcoat brushing against her bare shoulder.
He turns his face to her and she sees, or thinks she sees, that he is full of longing but also regret.
‘I wish,’ he says, and then stops, whatever it is he wishes wafting away on the gentlest of breezes.
I wish that I could unlock you like a safe, Lily thinks. Find out what’s hidden away inside you.
A hand presses
large and hot and heavy on her shoulder.
‘Well, if it isn’t the lovely Miss Shepherd.’
Lily spins around to face Max, and he looks her up and down as if she were a statue in a gallery.
‘If that’s what wearing my wife’s dresses does for you, I shall insist she hands over the lot immediately.’
‘Really, darling,’ says Eliza, coming up behind him. ‘I think the captain might have something to say about me parading around naked. Anyway, you’re embarrassing the girl.’
‘Lily? Are you embarrassed?’
Lily shakes her head, although she is embarrassed, not just because of what Max has said but also by the way he says it. As if it is only the two of them here and the others matter no more than that rail or that chair.
Helena and Ian return from the bar with drinks and Max has to stop Ian turning right round to buy two more for the Campbells.
‘I insist on going myself. I’m afraid my wife has very expensive tastes.’
‘I can only drink champagne,’ says Eliza, who is wearing a dress that so nearly resembles her skin tone as to make her appear, as she had originally joked, almost naked. ‘It’s a medical issue.’
As soon as Max is out of earshot she says, ‘I apologize in advance for my husband. He’s already had a couple of large Scotches and I’m sure he’ll take advantage of his trip to the bar to have a couple more. And he is the most boring drunk.’
By the time Max reappears, clutching a bottle of champagne in one hand and several flutes threaded through the fingers of the other, the band has started playing and a few keen couples are already moving around the dancefloor.
Ian Jones, who never seems at his most relaxed around the Campbells, ushers Helena towards the music.
‘But I’m in the middle of my drink,’ she protests, holding up her beer.
‘Here. I’ll help you.’ He downs the glass in one.
The others stay by the railing, watching Helena and Ian take their places on the dancefloor.
‘Don’t you just love a shipboard romance?’ says Eliza and, as so often, Lily cannot tell if she is serious or making fun. ‘The really marvellous thing about them – shipboard romances, I mean – is that they don’t count. You can do what you want on a boat, behave as badly as you like, and when you get to wherever you’re going it’s as if it never happened. When the ship sails away your sins go with it.’
Lily, standing stiffly beside Edward, is sure that her cheeks are burning and is glad they are in the unlit part of the boat so no one can see her. She glances at Max, who is scowling at his wife. Why was she talking about behaving badly? Was it some sort of message between the two of them?
Edward seems as uncomfortable as she is. She can see how his hand grips more tightly around his glass so that the knuckles protrude through the skin. He will ask me to dance, she thinks. And the thought soothes her. But when Edward does ask someone to dance, it is Eliza, not her.
‘Now that I know you’ll forget all about my terrible dancing as soon as we step off the ship, as if it never happened, I finally have the courage to ask you,’ he jokes.
And then there are only Lily and Max left standing at the railing. Lily wonders if Max will feel obliged to ask her to dance. But he shows no inclination, pouring himself a brimming glass of champagne and trying to top up Lily’s. Lily is not used to champagne and already feels the effects of the small amount she has had. She puts her fingers over her glass and some of the champagne splashes on to them.
‘Sorry,’ he says.
Lily turns to look out at the water, holding her face up to catch the slight breeze. She’s conscious of Max’s eyes on her, his unabashed stare.
‘Tell me about yourself, Lily Shepherd.’
His voice is low and slow and he curls her name around his tongue like cigarette smoke.
‘There isn’t much to tell,’ she says. ‘I was a waitress. I’m going into domestic service. I have a brother, two parents. My life is very ordinary.’
‘But what about you? What are your dreams? Your hopes? Are you wanting to meet a husband in Australia? Have lots of Aussie children?’
Lily feels the blood rush to her face.
‘I have no intention of getting married out there. I’m only staying for two years, so I don’t have to pay back my passage, then I’ll be returning to England. That’s where my family is. This is just a little adventure before I settle down. What about you, Max? Have you and Eliza any plans to stay in Australia?’
She is trying to deflect the conversation away from her. It feels too exposed here on the deck, where it is just the two of them.
Max swigs from his glass.
‘Oh, I expect we’ll stay a few months. And then Eliza will get bored. My wife bores easily, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.’
He pauses, looking over the water, so that the moon stripes his face silver.
‘Has she talked to you about Olivia?’
‘Your daughter? Yes. Yes, she told me. I’m so dreadfully sorry.’
‘She blames me, you know.’
‘I’m sure she—’
‘I bet she didn’t tell you she’d left her there for half an hour.’
‘Where? I don’t understand.’
‘On the floor. Eliza put Olivia down on the floor because she was grizzling, and instantly forgot about her.
‘What you have to understand, Lily, is that Olivia was like a dolly to Eliza. We had nannies – one for the day and one for the evening – but Eliza insisted on carrying her around as if she were a new bag or fur wrap. She even had dresses made up for Olivia to match her own. She started quite a craze, with all her friends following suit, taking their own babies out for lunch. Sometimes it was like feeding time at the zoo. ’Course, the nannies would step in when things got too raucous. Take them off their hands.’
‘But she loved her.’
Lily is remembering Eliza’s expression as she’d talked about her daughter. The way her features had softened, as if made from sand that the wind was blowing around.
‘Oh, yes. Of course she loved her. More than anything she’d ever loved in her life. But with Eliza there are always limitations. It’s to do with her background, her family.’
‘Her mother, you mean?’
Max looks surprised.
‘Oh, she told you. That is unusual.’
The band starts playing a new song, with a lazy saxophone melody that dissolves into the balmy night air. Lily waits for the others to join them, but no one arrives. When she glances towards the dancefloor she sees the dark heads of Edward and Eliza pressed together like two magnets, and she quickly turns her back to them.
‘So what happened? At the party?’
‘Olivia had been out of sorts all day. I think she was teething. I told Eliza to give her to the nanny to look after, but she’d had a little dress made, in pale green silk to match her own, and she wanted to show her off. So she sent the nanny to her room and brought Olivia downstairs. But Olivia wouldn’t settle. She’d got to the age where she didn’t want to be carried around like a little lapdog. She was starting to pull herself up on things – you know, getting ready to walk. So she was fidgeting and fussing and Eliza got bored and put her down in a side room, intending to go and fetch the nanny. Only she got distracted. By the time she remembered it was all too late.’
Lily does not know what to say. It’s all so awful. And she can picture it so easily.
‘And of course she blames me,’ Max goes on, ‘for what happened to Olivia. Because I left that stuff out. She never did like me taking it. You might have noticed, Eliza doesn’t need anything to get her high, and she made no secret that she thought it a sign of weakness that I did. She hasn’t let me make love to her since.’
‘And you? Do you blame her?’ The champagne and a desire to avoid the subject of the Campbells’ love-making, or lack of it, makes Lily bold, the bubbles sending her thoughts fizzing unchecked to the surface. Max sighs. A forlorn wisp of a sound that drifts off on the breeze.
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‘I loved my daughter beyond life itself. And I love my wife. But something has been broken.’
There’s a disturbance further down the deck, where the lights from the bar and the dancefloor do not reach. Lily can just make out two shadowy figures, a man and a woman, emerging from under the tarpaulin of a lifeboat. The man is carrying something that he drops on to a nearby deckchair. A blanket. The woman is straightening her skirt. As they pass Max and Lily they stare straight ahead as if they haven’t seen them, and all of them are quiet, listening to the click click click of the woman’s heels on the floor.
‘How about it, Lily?’ says Max softly after they have gone. ‘How about we take a turn in that lifeboat, you and me, and make each other happy for a little while? We don’t have to do anything. Just lie there and hold each other. I’m so damn tired.’
His eyes, in the moonlight, are no longer chips of blue but a faded grey in his broad, defeated face.
‘I should so like to rest for a bit with you, Lily. Not because you’re so lovely, although of course you are, but because you’re kind. Couldn’t we just go somewhere and be kind to each other?’
He looks so worn out and desolate that Lily, swaying in her champagne haze, allows herself to imagine how it would be if she gave in, how Max’s strong, thick arms would feel around her. He’s so similar to Robert in that way, tall and broad, with that illusion of solidity so you imagine you might be able to lean there for ever and be supported. Then he takes another swig from his glass and she realizes how drunk he is, and how drunk she is also, and she steps away just as the music changes once again, into something fast and jazzy, and Helena and Ian arrive, breathless and laughing.