But Emily I could ignore.
I took my omelette. Patience had told me that you could hold a shell egg comfortably in your hand, and I held my hand out, trying to imagine what an egg might have felt like sitting in my palm. Crack, you broke them and they flooded out. Crack. Had I broken Tom last night, or had he broken me? You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, my father had said to my mother too many times for me to count. But the omelette in front of me had been made without breaking any eggs. How could it be otherwise, when there were no eggs left to break? The only eggs I’d ever known were dried. What was this place, and where were we going?
‘Meet me on deck for sunset,’ Tom whispered as we left the dining room, and my cheeks flamed again.
I was due in the laundry after breakfast. Patience was already there, pulling sheets out of the big machine and tumbling them into the dryer. I stuffed the machine with more sheets and set it going.
‘When did you last see a real egg?’ I asked.
‘In my omelette this morning,’ she said shortly. She was busy over a pile of sheets and didn’t look at me. I fetched the basket from the chute – it was a plastic crate really, but we called it a basket – and started sorting the clothes. There was a long silence, but we often worked that way. I drifted away, thinking about Tom, the weight of his body on mine. Why had it taken me so long to go to him? Why had my parents kept me so enclosed, so safe? What else had they been keeping from me? They had kept me a child for so long. I smiled.
‘So, you are enjoying yourself now?’ Patience pulled out a dry sheet and flapped it straight, ready to fold for ironing. The smell of washing powder wafted over, so strong that it masked the human smells of the used clothes I was sorting. Her voice came from behind the sheet, as though she was playing ghosts.
‘You found a good thing, yes, and you are your own woman now?’
I felt my face go scarlet. I took the basket of dark clothes and pushed them into another machine, hiding my face behind the door.
‘You be sure you keep right. There’s a right way and a wrong way. You stay right and you’ll be right.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked from behind the door.
‘I mean it’s time to stop asking about eggs, Lalla. If you going to grow up now, you need to ask better questions.’
Lalla? Patience had always called me child until now.
She finished folding her sheet, and I couldn’t keep the machine door open for ever. I shut it and stood up, and realised that I was taller than she was. I had never noticed it before.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Like how to knit.’
‘How to knit?’
‘Or sew. How to sew would be a good question.’
‘But I don’t want to know how to knit. Or how to sew.’
‘Then you got no right to call yourself your mamma’s girl. You and me, we used to talk, Lalla, and I worried about you then, losing your mamma like that. But we here now.’
‘Where are we?’
‘Here. Like Michael says. Right here, exactly where we are. And this right here’s where you got to start living. Your mamma didn’t keep you in dresses by fretting over eggs.’
I sat on an upturned laundry basket and stared. She looked at me and I felt that she could see everything, from the redness between my breasts where Tom’s stubble had scratched me, to the wet patch on my thigh, to the sweet-tasting swelling on the inside of my lip where we’d kissed too hard.
‘Do you know where the ship’s going, Patience?’
‘What’re you asking me for? I’ve arrived where I’m going. If you listened more to Michael and less to what voices are in your head, you’d know that. I’m not clever. I never went to a museum with my mamma. But I know that we in a good place, and that you asking the wrong questions. You want to be a woman, you got to grow up. Now. Not in a while, but now.’ She paused, considering, then added, ‘And go see the doctor.’
Grow up? I grew up last night, I wanted to say, and there’s a pile of dust and a cracked skylight to prove it. As for the doctor, I hadn’t spoken to him since the night my mother died and had no intention of doing so now. Patience turned back to her sheets and I looked at her stiff and frightened back, and I imagined myself in a film, running towards Tom as molten lava exploded around us and bits of falling building rained down, and saying, We have to get out of here! Now! But I was still sore and the dust in my hair was making my scalp itch. The wetness between my legs was cold now, sticky and uncomfortable. Already the monster films seemed a world away, the preoccupation of a child with nothing more important to worry about. But the thought stayed with me. We have to get out of here, now.
‘I only asked about eggs,’ I said at last.
Out of here to where? There were no windows in the laundry, so it was easy to imagine worlds beyond its closed walls. I imagined a house surrounded by grass, flowers growing out of the ground, a chicken laying an egg. But even before the collapse, these things had belonged to picture books, not to London, and as Patience would not talk, my imaginings were colourless. I found my mind drifting to Tom and his hands and the top of the world, a dream of freedom I had touched for myself. We worked the rest of the day in silence. I didn’t bother with lunch and by the time I had taken the clean sheets to Leyton, who coordinated the making of the beds, I was exhausted.
The light was goldening through the windows. It was sunset time; I wanted to stand with Tom and see the fire on the water and pretend we were on top of the ship. Knitting, I thought. Sewing. Alice and her embroidery hoop. Rows upon rows of clothes in plastic bags, so many for each person, but none for my mother, who was dead. Twelve flat boxes with babies’ cots printed on them. A sprinkling of plaster dust. A crack. I pushed open the doors and stepped onto the deck, mindful that the golden light was already fading. There was a strange heaviness in the outside air, and it was hot; I found that I was sweating just walking along the deck.
Under the darkening sky, a group of people walked past me towards the dining room. The gong rang out and I moved with them. I had come to watch the sunset, but where was the sun?
‘Coming to dinner, Lalla? Hasn’t it turned hot?’ It was Mercy, a woman I’d noticed because she looked about the same age as my mother, although Mercy’s hair was fair rather than dark and I’d never seen her pink, round face frown. Mercy never disagreed with anyone. She was smiling now. ‘Or is there somewhere you would rather be?’
‘I missed the sunset,’ I said, too distracted to notice that I was being teased.
‘Too busy in the laundry?’
‘No. I was here, but …’ But the sun wasn’t.
Mercy patted my shoulder kindly, as though I’d turned up for breakfast at the wrong end of the day and was asking for a croissant. I could feel her hand damp through my dress and dodged away. ‘You need to go to where the sun is if you want to watch it set.’
‘But it should have set here. On this side.’
She looked at me strangely. ‘It’ll be this deck again,’ she said comfortingly. ‘Soon. Maybe even tomorrow.’
‘How do you know?’
She gazed at me with radiant confidence, tempered with just a little pity, and shook her head. Mercy, I wanted to say, Mercy, there are five packages hanging in a storeroom on the fourth deck with your name on them.
‘You do a lovely job in the laundry, Lalla. My clothes always feel like new.’ She looked almost shy as she offered her compliment, and whereas before I was sure she was approaching fifty, now she could have been forty, or thirty, or even younger. Too young to be my mother. I wondered how I could ever have seen anything in common between them.
‘What if they wear out before we arrive?’ I said suddenly. She looked startled, but I didn’t stop. I was hot and troubled, and the heavy air was hard to breathe.
‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘I’ve got more clothes in my cabin, more than I’ve ever had before.’
‘But they’ll wear out too.’
‘I’m
going to learn to sew,’ she said eagerly. I rolled my eyes in exasperation, but before I could speak she went on. ‘And if the knees of my trousers tear, I’ll ask Alice to embroider a square for me and she’ll sew it over the hole and the trousers will be even better than they are now.’
She looked at me. ‘Lalla,’ she said more gently as she pushed open the dining room doors, letting out a blessed draught of cooled air, ‘there’s no need to be angry. Michael has thought of these things. Just trust, and everything will work out.’
‘But,’ I began, but Mercy had already left me then and gone to her table. Finn pulled her chair out for her and I looked around me, my damp blouse cooling against my back. Five bags for Mercy. Eleven for me. Three for Finn. Ten for Tom. And I knew that Mercy was right. Of course my father had thought of these things. There were packages of clothes for everyone, the more packages the younger you were.
But why so many? Were there no clothes where we were going?
‘Where were you at sunset?’ Tom asked, bringing me a plate of quiche and peas. ‘I waited.’
‘How did you know where to go?’
‘Michael told me.’
Think, Lalla, think. Look around you. What can you see? What does it tell you?
We finished our quiche and peas and now I saw four hundred and ninety-eight people eating chocolate tart and cream. I knew their names, I knew most of their stories, but I could not see one single person of whom I could say, You. I trust you to tell me the truth. Even Tom didn’t seem to have any questions.
I pushed my chocolate tart away, and one of the children grabbed it. I wasn’t hungry anymore. I wanted to run up to the fourth deck and look again, to tear open one of the packages and check inside. I was sixteen. Maybe I would live to be sixty, or seventy. That meant one package every four or five years. And the sun. I had watched the sun rise that morning in the same place as it had set the night before. And I had been on the wrong deck to see the sunset; this had amused Mercy and annoyed Tom. We were clearly heading somewhere. But where? Where was this place to which we were travelling, that was so far away, yet made everyone so happy? Why would no one tell me? The behaviour of the sun was as real as the little golden chariot drawn by the little golden horse in the British Museum, even if it had been stolen.
Then I saw Helen. Gabriel sat next to her. Helen alone had not accepted my father’s offer to be a father to all the children; she had hidden away with Gabriel to show him all she had to show of his real father. I could not articulate why, but I felt that her determination had something in common with the questions I was framing so badly. Look, Lalla. Look carefully, because that’s how you learn.
‘I need to talk to Helen,’ I said.
‘Be careful, then,’ Tom replied, making little ravines in his chocolate tart and filling them with cream. As I waited for everyone on our table to finish, I saw Roger beckoning to Abigail, and Abigail exchanging words with Vikram. Perhaps it was just that I had a secret myself, but I was sure that they were looking over their shoulders. Tom was the last to finish; he begged the others to carry on to the meeting without waiting for him, and we were left at our table alone.
‘Why should I be careful of Helen?’ I asked.
‘Because Helen’s still got a lot to learn,’ Tom said. ‘She shouldn’t have been showing Gabriel those pictures of her husband.’
I couldn’t help laughing. ‘They were photographs of Gabriel’s father,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t she?’
‘You’ve got a lot to learn too.’
We heard my father’s voice coming from the ballroom. The goodnight meeting had started, and we were together in the empty dining room. He grinned and kissed me so quickly that only the taste of chocolate on my lips showed it had happened. There it was again – that wanting – and the soreness became an ache. We crept silently to my cabin, and this time he kissed me very, very slowly. I forgot about Helen, and the goodnight meeting happened without us.
‘My Tom,’ I whispered to him, and he was. My rebellion, my growth, my discovery. My proof that I was alive.
THIRTEEN
‘Time no longer’ Tom’s story Tom asks a question and ends the film
Tom and I proved that we were alive all over the ship. We found each other in our cabins, the sports hall, the laundry. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, I found myself thinking of him, and all the energy I had once put into wondering and remembering went into him. I was confident that we were going somewhere, even if no one would tell me where; when we got there, there would be other work to do, and so the time I spent helping Patience to make sure that everyone had clean clothes and clean bed linen seemed important, because it was limited. Some days I was so busy I didn’t see Tom at all, which was why we went to the goodnight meetings. Even without clocks or watches, we could be sure of seeing each other there. When my father announced at a goodnight meeting that we had heard the last testimony and that we could now set ourselves free from the past altogether, we were looking at each other, and later we could not even remember whose the last testimony had been. When my father called triumphantly, ‘There shall be time no longer,’ I cheered along although I had no idea what he meant. We read the same books; we laughed at poor Garth, sitting staring out to sea, and at Emily, for whom a clean white plate was the most important thing in the world, and at Finn, who seemed to say, Yes, Michael, Yes Michael, more than he said anything else. We tried to find a way of spending the nights together, but my father watched everyone return to their cabins after the goodnight meetings and then turned out the lights. Tom’s cabin lay in one direction and mine in the other, and the nights were far too dark for roaming.
More than anything, I wanted to go back to the fourth deck. But the ship kept us too busy. Tom was wiping the walls again now as well as teaching football, and a girl on another laundry shift sprained her wrist so the piles of washing were bigger. I stayed until they were done. I didn’t exactly mind. Not being with Tom was almost as seductive as being with Tom, because the fact that I loved him created a secret place that had nothing to do with my father, nothing to do with the ship. I didn’t bother with the research room or the galleries, or even the cinema, anymore. I lost interest in food. The menu card would say confit of duck, creamed potatoes, petits pois, raspberries and ice-cream. Or casseroled chicken, sweetcorn, peach melba. Or beef and dumplings, green beans, sticky toffee pudding and custard. But whatever the card said, it all tasted the same and left a dull, metallic aftertaste. I played with the food on my plate, imagining myself with Tom. When I wasn’t working or making snatched love or forming patterns with tinned sweetcorn and rehydrated potato, I lay in my cabin, staring at the scratches on the button or the shine on the apple, and listening to the sounds of busy people busy about the business of keeping the ship clean and comfortable. I knew it all so well by then that I could see what was going on with my ears. The heavy, regular stride was Gerhard Goltz, the cook, trekking to the stores. The lighter step that clipped alongside was Emily, come to help with her soft skin and bouncing curls. The doctor’s footsteps always slowed as he reached the infirmary stairs, then clanged as he took them two at a time. When I was mourning for my mother, footsteps had come in single sets. Now they came in rattling collections, as though the feet themselves were chattering along with their owners. There were fewer slow, contemplative strides and more quick ones, as though people had places they wanted to be, as though there were things to be anticipated, looked forward to, raced towards. Tom raced too, and sometimes, the footsteps I heard would be his, and his face would shine with delight when I opened the door to him.
I watched the sun, too, and sometimes it rose over the prow and sometimes it rose over the stern. Sometimes it rose in the place where it had set. People asked my father where the sunset would be and gathered where he said, and he was always right. Sometimes I asked, ‘Where are we? Where are we going?’ But no matter who I spoke to or when I spoke, the answer was always, ‘Right here, Lalla. We’re right here, right now.’ Once, Tom
asked me at breakfast whether I would watch the sunset with him that day, but I hated the thought of having to check with my father first so much that I said no and went to bed early. I sat on my bunk with the apple in my hands, its surface smooth and cold, and stroked it against my cheek pretending it was Tom’s hand.
The marks on my cabin wall became more and more important to me as time began to count for less and less. In the beginning, I had known time in other ways – hunger, tiredness, the rising and setting of the sun. Time just was, like death and the sun. And of course, in the beginning, I’d known time through the tenderness of my breasts, the aches in my belly, the dull passing of unnecessary blood. I don’t suppose my father had even thought of that.
But things were different now, and the marks were all I had. Even the bleeding had stopped. I knew this meant I needed to eat more – it had happened once before, in London, when my father was still refusing to use ship stocks at home. My mother had told him that I had to eat; more food came into the flat and the blood came back. But I had no mother to make me eat now. I worked hard, I went to my cabin, and from time to time I walked aimlessly, staring around at the people running about, living their cheerful lives with their white teeth set in their delighted smiles. I looked at my museum, and I waited for Tom, and the fact that I felt light-headed for much of the time felt right.
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