by Rachel Rhys
Inches away, Lily senses Eliza relax, as if she has been holding her breath, and step forward towards Edward.
‘Just think,’ she tells him, her voice dripping amused scorn. ‘A whole new start. Perhaps you and my husband might set up home together in Sydney. You make such a handsome couple.’
It is too much for Max. ‘Take that hat off,’ he says furiously, lunging towards Edward. ‘It belongs to my wife. You’re not fit to wear it. You look ridiculous.’
Afterwards, Lily will wonder whether her mind has blocked out what happened next, or whether she genuinely did not catch the moment when Edward, seeing Max’s hands coming towards his head, raised his own arms to protect himself, forgetting he still held the knife, so that the steel blade took the full force of Max’s forward momentum, ending up buried in his chest up to the hilt.
She will remember only Cleo Morgan screaming and turning to see the actress’s face sprayed with crimson drops, as if she had measles; Max’s mouth rounding into a perfect ‘O’ of surprise. She will remember Edward himself, standing so perfectly still, and she will think suddenly, wildly, ‘He has been turned to a pillar of salt.’
After that, everything speeds up, as if a projector is playing a film on the wrong setting. Max falls to the ground with a horrible cracking sound that will echo in Lily’s head through the remaining years of her life. The blade is sticking straight up out from his ribcage, as if it has taken root and is growing there, and there’s a neat red ring around it, spreading at a steady, leisurely pace. And now Eliza, with a sound that is not quite human, is on her knees beside him, pulling at the handle of the knife with both hands, trying to wrench it free. Something jolts into life in Lily.
‘Don’t!’ she shouts, but it is too late. The knife is out and now blood is arcing into the air, graceful and delicate as a firework. Eliza tries to cover the wound with her hand.
‘I love you!’ she cries to her husband. ‘I love only you.’
And Max’s face still frozen in that look of surprise, as if stumbling across an old flame he has not seen for many years. Bubbles form in the corner of his mouth, turning to a pink froth like the Pink Lady cocktails they drank up in the first-class lounge in what is already seeming like a different lifetime.
The blood is pumping everywhere, despite Eliza’s attempts to stop it, just as it had when Mags was on the abortionist’s table. Eliza is covered in it, her silver dress made purple and sodden; blood drying on her forehead where she has wiped her hand across her face.
Ian snatches one of the white cloths off a nearby table and uses it to try to staunch the blood, but it is soon soaked through.
‘Is he breathing?’ Helena asks, her voice cracking. She is standing next to Edward, both of them seemingly frozen like statues.
Then, from Ian, a slight, barely perceptible shake of the head, followed by a ghastly scream, like a fox fighting in the night, as Eliza slumps over her lifeless husband. Her shoulder blades jut from the skin of her bent back like broken-off wings.
By the time the captain arrives on the scene someone has covered Max in a clean white tablecloth, and Eliza has been led away. Meanwhile, Edward has started shivering so violently it’s as if his whole body is convulsing.
‘Help him!’ urges the paralysed Helena to the crowd of horrified onlookers, but nobody moves.
In the end it is Lily who snatches up the nearest thing she can find – the fur stole that Helena has brought to return to Eliza – and wraps it around Edward’s shaking shoulders. She is still struggling to make sense of any of it. Max cannot be dead. Edward cannot be a murderer. Instead it must be the rest of the world that has somehow fallen out of kilter, slipping into make-believe. The fault will be found to lie elsewhere.
The captain doesn’t know what to do with Edward. There have been onboard deaths before, of course. Killings, even. But nothing like this. No one like Edward.
‘We will need to take her … him … into custody now.’ He addresses himself to Lily, as if Edward himself could not possibly understand.
His words unlock Helena and she springs to her brother’s side.
‘No. Please,’ she begs. ‘It was a mistake. He didn’t know what he was doing.’ She grabs hold of Edward’s arm, tugging on his sleeve. ‘Tell him. Explain it was an accident.’
Edward rouses himself from whatever trance he has been in, his eyes focusing as if for the first time on the chaos he has wrought.
‘I’m sorry, Hels,’ he says, in a voice so soft Lily does not dare breathe out for fear of missing it. ‘I tried. I really tried.’
His gaze turns to Lily, and she thinks that if it were possible to die from sadness, he surely would.
‘Lily. Please. Forgive me. I have wronged you.’
But now the captain seems to have made up his mind how to proceed, and two stewards are despatched to Edward’s side. The dumbstruck crowd parts to let them through, and when they arrive they stand stiffly at either of his shoulders with their arms by their sides, as if not wanting to touch him.
‘Take him to my office,’ the captain commands.
As they start to lead him away Helena moves as if to accompany them, but the captain uses his arm as a barrier to detain her.
‘I’m afraid you must stay here, Miss Fletcher.’ He turns to the watching passengers. ‘I am deeply sorry that you have all had to witness such a distressing scene, particularly the ladies. May I suggest you all repair to the lounge, where the stewards will be able to bring you drinks while you wait for the purser to gather your statements.’
The stewards who are accompanying Edward steer him in the direction of the upper deck. As they pass the prone figure of Max, the cloth covering his face already polka-dotted with blood, Edward seems to sway and Lily takes an involuntary step towards him. Please, she urges the stewards silently, please don’t let him fall, but Edward rights himself and they continue on their way.
When they are out of sight the air on deck seems unbearably dense. Lily sees a movement in the corner of her eye and turns to find that Helena has slid to the ground. Instantly, Ian is crouching beside her, his arm around her shoulders, whispering in her ear.
‘Help me lift her up,’ he says to Lily. ‘We must get her away from here.’
Supporting Helena between them, they start to head towards the cabins, but the purser intercepts them. As key witnesses they are forbidden to leave the scene, he says. Though, in the circumstances, he will allow them to sit separately from the rest of the passengers.
Lily tries to think through what these circumstances are to which the purser is referring, but they seem too preposterous for her logical mind to process. They are ushered into the library, where Helena is deposited in one of the leather armchairs. Lily takes the other, while Ian stands close to Helena’s chair, as if bound to her by an invisible tether.
At first no one speaks, although after her ears readjust to the silence Lily can make out the other noises of the ship – the rumbling of the engine, the low buzz of conversation from the lounge. She hears a thudding sound, loud and insistent, which she only belatedly identifies as her own heart slamming against her ribcage.
‘I owe you both an explanation,’ says Helena at last. She has curled up on the chair with her feet under her, as if trying to make herself once more a small child, exempt from dealing with tragedy.
‘There’s no need,’ says Ian. ‘Whatever it is can wait until after this business – this awful business – is over.’
It will never be over, Lily thinks. But she does not say it.
‘I want to tell you. There’s nothing to hide any more. And if I don’t speak, I feel I shall go mad.
‘Edward did not have tuberculosis. And he was not in a sanatorium. At least, not that kind of sanatorium.
‘He was always different from other boys, even as a child. Delicate. Dreamy. So sensitive to slights I seemed to spend my childhood trying to protect him. As a small boy, Edward loved to dress up in my clothes and Father would beat him terribly for it.
Our father has a very short temper and Edward was always terrified of him.
‘There were things that happened while Edward was growing up that made me concerned about him. He had very few friends, but occasionally he’d bring a boy home from school for the holidays and I could see that the friendship was not quite normal.’
‘Not normal?’ asks Ian.
‘Too intense. Too close.’
A vivid pink stain spreads over Helena’s pale face and Lily feels a sinking sense of dread.
‘When he started at Cambridge I thought that might be the making of him. I thought perhaps he’d meet a nice girl at one of the other colleges. He always got on so much better with women. But instead he made friends with a group of men who were all actors and artists and dressed flamboyantly. My father forbade Edward to have anything to do with them, threatened to cut him off, but he didn’t stop. And then, halfway through his third year, there was a terrible scandal.’
She stops abruptly and swallows.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I have never talked about this. It is too painful.’
‘Then don’t,’ says Lily. Whatever Helena is about to say, she knows she does not want to hear it, knows she will not be the same person after she does.
‘Poor Lily,’ says Helena. ‘I’m so terribly sorry, but it will all come out now and it’s better for you that you should hear it from me.
‘There was a boy, the son of a well-known politician. Edward spoke of him often and brought him to the house during those Christmas holidays, and I could see straight away that it was not a healthy friendship, that once again there was something overly intense about it.’
She takes a deep breath.
‘They were discovered. In a hotel room in Cambridge.’ Another deep breath. ‘Edward was dressed as a woman.’
A metallic taste now in Lily’s mouth, and she feels as if she might be sick. Robert once told her about a boy at his school who liked to wear women’s clothes, taking any chance to be cast in a female role in the school play. Robert had told it to Lily as a funny story, to shock her. He’d used a specific word when talking about him, and Lily can still picture the expression of disgust on his face as he said it. Deviant.
‘There was an awful scandal, though the other boy’s father managed to keep it out of the papers. My family moved to a different area of the country where no one knew us, and our father had Edward committed to a mental institution. It was that or jail. He has been there off and on for the last five years, undergoing awful, painful treatments. Insulin injections that brought on seizures followed by awful dead sleeps, and just recently experimental electroshocks to his brain that left him with headaches that lasted days. Finally, my mother stepped in and persuaded Father that it would be better to send him away, somewhere no one knew about what had happened. They decided on Australia.’
‘And you were sent as his nursemaid?’ says Ian. He sounds bitter.
‘Or jailer,’ Helena replies. ‘I didn’t mind. After the scandal we moved from Herefordshire and tried to start again on the south coast where no one knew us, but eventually rumours reached even there and Henry, my fiancé, broke off our engagement. He said he was very sorry, but he couldn’t marry into such a family. He was sure I understood. At least news hadn’t reached the school where I worked, but then one of the parents heard, and the head teacher felt my presence was bringing the school into disrepute, and after that I didn’t much care about leaving England. I had nothing left.’
‘You must have thought me such a fool,’ Lily bursts out. ‘You could see how I felt about Edward. Was it a joke to the two of you?’
‘No!’ Helena looks aghast. ‘Lily. You mustn’t think that. Edward liked you so much. Loved you, even. He wanted so badly to be normal, to make our father proud. I think he convinced himself it could work with you. And I was so desperate to believe him.’
Lily remembers now how Helena had insisted that her parents would not disapprove of a match between Edward and her. Of course. If Lily was the only thing standing between the Fletchers and more scandal, no wonder she would be accepted with open arms. She remembers also her silk scarf and how she’d imagined him keeping it because it smelled of her. Now it occurs to her he probably kept it to wear himself, when he was alone in his cabin. How silly she has been.
‘But Max?’ Ian says, and Lily remembers with a sickening jolt the body lying on the deck outside.
‘The Campbells are libertines,’ says Helena bitterly. ‘They played with all of us as if we were toys whose only function was to keep them entertained during the voyage. Max wanted you, of course, Lily, but if he couldn’t have you, he’d settle for Edward. And, like a fool, Edward fashioned that into a love story.’
Now it all slots into place. All those times Lily had thought Edward was staring at Eliza it was actually her husband he couldn’t tear his eyes away from. When he’d seemed to affect Eliza’s mannerisms and style of speech it wasn’t in homage to her but in the hope that emulating Max’s wife might bring him closer to him. And the times he’d kissed Lily had been nothing but a knee-jerk reaction against his own shame at whatever he’d just done with Max.
‘I told him. I kept telling him,’ Helena goes on. ‘Oh, my God, what will happen to him now?’
She buries her head in her hands, shoulders shaking as she sobs. Lily expects Ian to comfort her, but instead he is chewing on his bottom lip, as if deep in thought.
‘Is this why you’ve been pushing me away?’ he asks now. ‘Because you thought I’d be disgusted, like your idiot fiancé Henry?’
Helena nods, her head still bent.
‘I knew it would come out eventually, and I couldn’t have borne another rejection.’
‘Do you really think that little of me? For goodness’ sake, woman, I love you. Don’t you know that?’
And now, finally, Helena looks up, her grey eyes wide open to him, and despite her misery, Lily sees in her expression a faint spark of hope as Ian sinks to his knees on the floor next to her and gathers her into his arms, kissing her face over and over again.
The moment is so exquisitely, painfully tender that Lily has to look away.
32
4 September 1939
HOW LILY MANAGES to sleep that terrible last night, she has no idea. But sleep she does. She is woken by Audrey shaking her arm, and still half asleep lurches to a sitting position.
The events of the previous evening come back to her one after the other, as if she is being repeatedly struck. Her and Max in the lifeboat. Edward raising the tarpaulin. No hard feelings, old chap. The woman in green walking towards her and her suddenly realizing who it was. The knife. Max. Oh, Max. Eliza’s screams. Then the library, and Helena’s shocking revelations, followed by the purser, with all his endless questions. And, finally, back to the cabin.
How is it possible for one night to change absolutely everything?
‘What time is it?’ she asks Audrey.
‘Six a.m. We’re arriving in Sydney. Everyone is up on deck, watching. But if you’re too tired, after everything that happened –’
‘No.’ Lily has already swung her legs over the side of the bunk. ‘I want to see.’
Now she is awake she cannot bear the idea of lying in her bed, reliving last night on a never-ending film reel.
‘Ida is already up there,’ says Audrey. ‘She didn’t want me to wake you.’
‘I expect she can’t wait to gloat, now all her warnings have come true.’ Lily is shocked at her own bitterness.
‘Honest, Lily, she didn’t seem to be crowing at all.’
Up on deck it is that strange hour just before dawn where the world seems suspended between night and day, between dreams and reality. All along the railing are little knots of passengers, either standing or settled into deckchairs, watching the land that’s just visible through the grainy grey pre-dawn haze. As she and Audrey and Audrey’s friend Annie take up a position along the rail, Lily is conscious of the stares of the other passengers, the whispers th
at follow her: She was there. She’s mixed up in it all.
The rising sun casts a yellow glow over the surface of the sea and burns away the haze, revealing the shoreline. An Aussie standing nearby starts to point out the individual beaches as they pass – Clovelly, Coogee, Bronte, Tamarama. He sounds each name out as proudly as if he has made them himself. They pass Bondi Beach, close enough to see the surf thundering on to the sand.
This is my new home, Lily tells herself. But the words mean nothing.
Up ahead an imposing headland made from looming cliffs juts into the sea, topped by a lighthouse, gaily painted in red-and-white stripes like a bathing hut. The sun lights it up like a flaming torch.
‘The South Head,’ says the knowledgeable Aussie. ‘And that one in the distance is the North Head. Welcome to Sydney, folks!’
The ship swings past South Head, keeping close to the land. A mile away, North Head marks the other gatepost into Sydney Harbour. In spite of herself and the horrors of last night, Lily can’t help feeling awed by the sheer scale of the scenery, all the small bays and inlets with their pockets of golden sand, the houses nestling between the trees, their tiled roofs sparkling where they catch the newly risen sun.
‘Can you believe it?’ says Audrey. ‘Can you believe we’re here?’
The Aussie is now recounting the names of these new, smaller beaches. Watson’s Bay, Parsley Bay, Nielsen Park. Already, through the plethora of yachts and dinghies and fishing boats that dot the surface of the sea, Lily can make out the bobbing heads of early morning swimmers. Though it is only just September, still early spring in Australia, the temperature is already such that Lily is quite warm enough in just a thin cardigan.
A small tug comes alongside the ship.
‘The Captain Cook,’ explains their Aussie guide. ‘It escorts all the big liners into the docks.’
Lily gazes, transfixed, at the magnificent Harbour Bridge, still less than a decade old, spanning out across the water up ahead.
Suddenly, Lily thinks of Eliza. In all the nightmare of Edward and Helena she has been able to push thoughts of Max, lying dead on the floor, to the furthest corner of her mind. But now they come flooding back, one after the other. His voice sounds in her ear. ‘Lovely Lily,’ he says, in that drawling, amused baritone. She remembers that scream as Eliza bent over him, and how she’d said, ‘I love only you.’