by Ruth Ware
“So that job,” he said, the beginnings of anger in his voice. “The one I turned down. Are you saying I was wrong?”
“I never asked you to do that,” I said. My voice was shaking. “I never asked you. So don’t you put that on me.” I hoisted my bag up onto my shoulder and turned to the door.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t try to stop me. I walked out of the flat reeling like I was half-drunk. It was only when I got on the tube that the reality of what had just happened hit me.
- CHAPTER 5 -
I love ports. I love the smell of tar and sea air, and the scream of the gulls. Maybe it’s years of taking the ferry to France for summer holidays, but a harbor gives me a feeling of freedom in a way that an airport never does. Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say . . . I don’t know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe.
I had spent the train journey avoiding thoughts of Judah and trying to distract myself with research on the trip ahead. Richard Bullmer was only a few years older than me, but his CV was enough to make me feel hopelessly inadequate—a list of businesses and directorships that made my eyes water, each a stepping-stone to an even higher level of money and influence.
When I brought up Wikipedia on my phone, it showed a bronzed, handsome man with very black hair, arm in arm with a stunningly beautiful blonde in her late twenties. Richard Bullmer with his wife, the heiress Anne Lyngstad, at their wedding in Stavanger, read the caption.
Given his title, I’d assumed that his wealth had been handed to him on a plate, but it looked, from Wikipedia at least, as if I’d been unfair. The early part of the picture was cushy enough—prep school, Eton and Balliol. However, in his first year at university his father had died—his mother seemed already to be out of the picture, it wasn’t entirely clear—and the family estate had been swallowed up in death duty and debts, leaving him, at nineteen years of age, homeless and alone.
Under those circumstances, the fact that he got through Oxford with a degree would have been achievement enough, but he had also created a dot-com start-up in his third year. Its stock market flotation in 2003 was the first in his string of successes, culminating with this boutique ten-cabin cruise liner conceived as a super-luxury retreat for hopping the Scandinavian coastline.
Available for the wedding of your dreams, a dazzling corporate event to woo your clients with the “wow” factor, or simply for an exclusive holiday you and your family will never forget, I read from the press pack as the train hurtled north, before turning to a floor plan of the cabin deck. There were four large suites in the nose of the boat—the prow, I supposed you’d call it, and a separate section with six smaller cabins arranged in a horseshoe shape at the back. Each cabin was numbered, odd and even on either side of a central corridor, with cabin 1 right in the tip of the prow, and cabins 9 and 10 adjoining each other in the curved stern of the boat. I guessed I’d be in one of the smaller cabins—presumably the suites were reserved for VIPs. There were no measurements on the floor plan and I frowned, remembering some of the cross-channel ferries I’d been on, the claustrophobic, windowless little rooms. The thought of spending five days in one of those wasn’t a comfortable one, but surely on a boat like this, we’d be talking something considerably more spacious?
I turned the page again, hoping to find a photo of one of the cabins to reassure myself, but instead I was confronted with a shot of a dazzling array of Scandinavian delicacies spread out on a white cloth. The chef on the Aurora had trained at Noma and elBulli, apparently. I yawned and pressed my hands into my eyes, feeling the grit of tiredness and the weight of everything from last night pressing down on me once again.
Judah’s face as I’d left him, stitched up with the blow from the night before, came into my head and I flinched. I wasn’t even sure what had happened. Had Judah and I broken up? Had I dumped him? Every time I tried to reconstruct the conversation, my exhausted brain took over, adding in stuff I hadn’t said, the responses I wished I’d made, making Judah more clueless and more insulting, to justify my own position, or alternatively more unconditionally loving, to try to convince myself this was all going to be okay. I hadn’t asked him to turn down the job. So why was I suddenly expected to be grateful for it?
I dozed off for about thirty painful minutes in the car from the station to the port, and when the car driver’s cheerful announcement broke into my sleep it was like a splash of cold water to the face. I stumbled out of the car into the searing sunshine and the salt-sting of the breeze, feeling bleary and dazed.
The driver had dropped me off almost at the end of the gangway, but as I looked across the steel bridge to the boat, I couldn’t quite believe we were in the right place. The pictures from the brochure were familiar—huge glass windows reflecting the sun without a single fingerprint or speck of salt water, and gleaming white paint so fresh that it could have been finished that morning. But what had been missing from the brochure photos was a sense of scale. The Aurora was so small—more like a large yacht than a small cruise liner. Boutique had been the phrase in the press pack—and now I saw what they meant. I’d seen bigger boats hopping around the Greek islands. It seemed impossible that everything mentioned in the brochure—library, sunroom, spa, sauna, cocktail lounge, and all the other things apparently indispensable to the Aurora’s pampered passengers—could fit into this miniature vessel. Its size, along with the perfection of its paintwork, gave it a curiously toylike quality, and as I stepped onto the narrow steel gangway I had a sudden disorienting image of the Aurora as a ship imprisoned in a bottle—tiny, perfect, isolated, and unreal—and of myself, shrinking down to match it with every step I took towards the boat. It was a strange feeling, as if I were looking down the wrong end of a telescope, and it gave me a dizzying sensation almost like vertigo.
The gangway shifted beneath my feet, the oily, inky waters of the harbor swirling and sucking beneath, and I had a momentary illusion that I was falling, the steel beneath my feet giving way. I shut my eyes and gripped the cold metal rail.
Then I heard a woman’s voice from up ahead.
“It’s a wonderful smell, isn’t it!”
I blinked. A stewardess was standing in the entrance to the ship. She was bright, almost white blond, with tanned walnut-brown skin, and beaming as if I were her rich, long-lost relative from Australia. I took a breath, trying to steady myself, and then made my way across the rest of the gangway and onto the Aurora Borealis.
“Welcome, Miss Blacklock,” the stewardess said as I entered. Her accent was slightly clipped in a way I couldn’t place, and her words somehow managed to convey the impression that encountering me was a life experience on a par winning the lottery. “I am so very pleased to welcome you on board. Can one of our porters take your case?”
I looked around me, trying to work out how she knew who I was. My bag was gone before I could protest.
“Can I offer you a glass of champagne?”
“Um,” I said, distinguishing myself with witty repartee. The stewardess took that for yes and I found myself accepting the dewy flute she put into my hand. “Uh, thanks.”
The interior of the Aurora was gobsmacking. The boat might be small, but they had crammed in enough bling for a vessel ten times the size. The gangway doors opened up onto the landing of a long, curving staircase and literally every surface that could be French polished, encased in marble, or draped with raw silk had been so. The whole flight was illuminated by an eye-watering chandelier, suffusing the place with tiny splashes of light that reminded me of nothing so much as the sun glinting off the sea on a summer’s day. It was slightly nauseating—not in a social-conscience sort of way, although if you thought about it too hard, that too. But more the disorientation—the way the crystals acted like a prism on every drop of light, dazzling you, throwing you off-balance with a sensation like peering into a child’s kaleidoscope. The effect, combined with lack of sleep, was not completely pl
easant.
The stewardess must have seen me gawping, because she gave a proud smile.
“The Great Stairway is really something, isn’t it?” she said. “That one chandelier has more than two thousand Swarovski crystals.”
“Gosh,” I said faintly. My head throbbed and I tried to remember if I’d packed the ibuprofen. It was hard not to blink.
“We are very proud of the Aurora,” the stewardess continued warmly. “My name is Camilla Lidman and I am in charge of hospitality on the vessel. My office is on the lower deck, and if there is anything I can do to make your stay with us more enjoyable please do not hesitate to ask. My colleague Josef”—she indicated a smiling blond man to her right—“will show you to your cabin and give you a tour of the facilities. Dinner is at eight, but we would invite you to join us at seven p.m. in the Lindgren Lounge for a presentation on the boat’s facilities and the wonders you can expect to enjoy on this cruise of the famous Norwegian fjords and the Swedish archipelago islands. Ah! Mr. Lederer.”
A tall dark man in his forties was coming up the gangway behind us, followed by a porter struggling with a huge suitcase.
“Please be careful,” he said, wincing visibly as the porter bumped the trolley over a joint in the gangway. “That case has some very delicate equipment in it.”
“Mr. Lederer,” Camilla Lidman said, with the exact same amount of near-delirious enthusiasm she had injected into her welcome to me. I had to hand it to her; I was impressed at her acting skills, though in the case of Mr. Lederer it probably took less effort since he was kind of easy on the eye. “Let me welcome you aboard the Aurora. Can I offer you a glass of champagne? And Mrs. Lederer?”
“Mrs. Lederer won’t be coming,” Mr. Lederer said. He ran a hand through his hair and glanced up at the Swarovski chandelier with an air of slight bemusement.
“Oh, I am so sorry.” Camilla Lidman’s flawless brow puckered in a frown of concern. “I hope nothing is wrong.”
“Well, she’s in fine health,” Mr. Lederer said. “In fact, she’s fucking my best friend.” He smiled and took the champagne.
Camilla blinked and then said smoothly, almost without pause, “Josef, please do take Miss Blacklock to her cabin.”
Josef gave a little half bow and extended a hand towards the downward sweep of the staircase.
“This way, please?” he said.
I nodded dumbly and allowed myself to be ushered away, still clutching my glass of champagne. Over my shoulder I could hear Camilla telling Mr. Lederer about her office on the lower deck.
“You are in cabin nine, the Linnaeus Suite,” Josef told me as I followed him down into the beige dimness of a thickly carpeted, windowless corridor. “All the cabins are named after notable Scandinavian scientists.”
“Who gets the Nobel?” I cracked nervously. The corridor was giving me a strange, stifled feeling, a heavy weight of claustrophobia on the back of my neck. It wasn’t just the size but the soporifically low lamps and lack of natural light.
Josef answered seriously.
“On this particular voyage, the Nobel Suite will be occupied by Lord and Lady Bullmer. Lord Bullmer is director of the Northern Lights Company, which owns the vessel. There are ten cabins,” he told me as we descended a set of stairs. “Four forward and six aft, all on the middle deck. Each cabin consists of a suite of up to three rooms, with its own bathroom, featuring full-sized bath and separate shower, full-sized double bed, and private veranda. The Nobel Suite has a private hot tub.”
Veranda? Somehow the idea of having a veranda on a cruise ship seemed completely wrong, but I supposed, thinking about it, it wasn’t any weirder than having any other open-deck area. Hot tub—well, least said about that the better.
“Every cabin has a named steward to assist you, day or night. Your stewards will be myself and my colleague Karla, who you will be meeting later this evening. We will be delighted to help you in any way we can during your stay on the Aurora.”
“So this is the middle deck, right?” I asked. Josef nodded.
“Yes, this deck is solely passenger suites. Upstairs you will find the dining room, spa, lounge, library, sundeck, and other public areas. All are named after Scandinavian writers—the Lindgren Lounge, the Jansson Dining Room, and so on.”
“Jansson?”
“Tove,” he supplied.
“Oh, of course. Moomins,” I said stupidly. God my head was aching.
We had reached a paneled wooden door with a discreet plaque reading 9. LINNAEUS. Josef threw open the door and stood back to allow me to step inside.
The place was, by no stretch of exaggeration, about seven or eight times nicer than my flat at home, and not a great deal smaller, either. Mirrored wardrobes stretched away to my right, and in the center, flanked by a sofa to one side and a dressing table to the other, was a huge double bed, the white linen expanse invitingly smooth and crisp.
But the thing that made the biggest impression on me was not the space—which was impressive—but the light. Coming out of the narrow, artificially lit corridor, the light streaming in from the huge veranda doors opposite was blinding. Sheer white curtains waved in the breeze and I saw that the sliding door was open. I felt an instant sense of relief, as if a tightness in my chest had lifted.
“The doors can be latched back,” Josef explained from behind me, “but the catch will automatically disengage in the event of adverse weather conditions.”
“Oh, great,” I said vaguely, but all I could think of was how much I wanted Josef to go, so I could flop down on the bed and sink into oblivion.
Instead, I stood awkwardly, suppressing my yawns, while Josef told me unnecessarily about the functions of the bathroom (yes, I had used one before, thank you), the fridge and minibar (all complimentary—unfortunately for my liver), and explained that the ice would be refreshed twice a day and I could ring for him or Karla at any time.
At last my drooping yawns were no longer ignorable, and he gave a little half bow and excused himself, leaving me to take in the cabin.
There’s no point in pretending I wasn’t impressed. I was. Mainly by the bed, which was practically shrieking an invitation to throw myself down and sleep for maybe thirty to forty hours.
I looked at the pristine white duvet and the gold and white scatter cushions, and longing washed through me like a physical substance in my veins, sending prickles from the nape of my neck to the tips of my fingers and toes. I needed sleep. I was beginning to crave it, like a drug addict, counting the hours until my next fix. The thirty uncomfortable minutes in the taxi had only made it worse. But I couldn’t sleep now. If I did, I might not wake up, and I could not afford to miss dinner.
I might be able to skip some of the functions later in the week, but I absolutely had to go to tonight’s dinner and presentation. It was the first night on board—everyone would be making contacts and networking furiously. If I missed that, it would be a huge black mark against me, and I would never catch up.
Forcing down a yawn, I went out to the balcony, hoping the fresh air would help me wake from the creeping fog of exhaustion that seemed to encroach every time I stopped moving or talking.
The veranda was as delightful as one would imagine a private balcony on a luxury cruise ship to be. The barrier was made of glass so that sitting inside the suite you could almost imagine there was nothing between you and the ocean at all, and there were two deck chairs and a tiny table so that one could sit there on an evening and enjoy the midnight sun or northern lights, depending on which cruise one had booked.
I spent a long, long time watching the little ships toiling in and out of Hull harbor and feeling the salty wind in my hair, and then suddenly something about the feel of the ship changed. For a minute I couldn’t think what it was—and then I realized. The engine, which had been purring discreetly for the last half hour or so, had gone up a notch, and something about th
e boat had shifted. With a grinding roar, we began to inch round, away from the quayside, to point out towards the sea.
As I stood and watched, the boat edged out of the harbor, past the green and red lights showing the mouth of the safe passage, and I felt the change in its movement as we left the shelter of the harbor wall and entered the North Sea, the smooth lapping waves giving way to the great, rolling swells of the deep ocean.
Slowly, the shoreline slipped away, and the buildings of Hull dwindled into ridges on the horizon, and then into a dark line that could have been anywhere. As I watched it disappear, I thought of Judah, and everything I’d left undone. My phone was heavy in my pocket, and I took it out, hoping for something from him before we left the range of the UK transmitters. Good-bye. Good luck. Bon voyage.
But there was nothing. The signal dipped by one bar, and then another, and the phone in my hand was silent. As the coast of England disappeared from view, the only noise was the crashing of the waves.
From: Judah Lewis
To: Laura Blacklock
Sent: Tuesday, 22 September
Subject: Are you ok?
Hey honey, I haven’t heard from you since your e-mail on Sunday. Not sure if our messages are crossing. Did you get my reply, or the text I sent you yesterday?
Getting kind of worried, and hoping you don’t think I’m off somewhere being an asshole and nursing my wounds. I’m not. I love you, I miss you, and I’m thinking about you.
Don’t worry about what happened back home—and the tooth is okay. I think it’ll re-root like the doc said. I’m self-medicating with vodka anyway.
Let me know how the cruise is going—or if you’re busy, just drop me a line to say you’re okay.
Love you, J