‘Let it all go!’ my father cried over the noise. ‘If it happened before the ship, then it didn’t happen at all. Life starts here!’ I joined in, hoping to keep the applause going for longer, and I saw Roger and Abigail exchanging looks, and glancing across to Vikram and Luke, and I knew then that this small group, who met secretly, were like me. They saw no threat in the last words of a grandfather to the child he had loved, or a photograph of a father who was dead. I would find them, and I would join them.
My father and Tom left the meeting together, and I looked the other way as they passed me. I stayed in the sticky air of the ballroom until everyone had gone. When the ballroom was empty, I rescued the abandoned photograph album. I took the letter, too, and I put them on my desk and lay staring at them through the long humid night, sweating where the sheets touched me. I did not sleep, and went to breakfast simply for the air-conditioning in the dining room.
The British Museum had been full of objects, and every single one of them had a story. I had five now. The button, the apple, the photograph album, the letter and the screws. When I looked at them, I was filled with a sense of what we had lost. Not just my mother, but our connection to things. To people. Without connections, there was no learning. Without learning, there was no journey of discovery. And without discovery, there was nothing but a full plate at dinner and a soft bed at night.
It wasn’t that I cared much about Helen’s Simon. I’d never known him. But he was part of a past that was part of our present. Helen’s trial and Tom’s confession had crystallised my thinking, although not in the way Tom had hoped.
I loved Tom and he wanted to marry me.
But I did not want to marry Tom. Not now. I wanted to be with him for ever, to love and fight for him, to give my body up to his and to take him into me. I wanted to fear for him, and need him, and ache when he was gone. I wanted him to stand with me on the deck rail and declare with me that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and that its journey across the sky is called a day, and that many days together make a lifetime. I wanted the people to hear us, and cheer, and take the ship as quickly as possible to our tropical island, or China, or even back to London, and start again.
FIFTEEN
The storm breaks the temptation of Tom Mandel the message of Alice’s tapestry
The weather broke; it rained for an entire night, fat drops slamming against the portholes like stones, and in the morning, the world was new. I stepped through the puddles on my way to the laundry, and in the clean, vibrant air, I realised that since I was the only one for whom it existed, time was on my side. Someone knew where we were going, even if I didn’t, and when we finally got there, Tom would begin to understand me, and the stores would give us a good start. He might even be glad, then, to have his grandfather’s letter back. And so I relaxed a little and began to enjoy myself once more. It was no challenge to get Tom to take his clothes off; the real excitement began to come from getting him to break my father’s unwritten rules by talking about the time before.
‘Do you remember the Nazareth Act, Tom?’ I would ask, pulling him into my cabin and pressing him against the wall with the full length of my body.
‘No.’
I untucked his shirt. ‘What about the Dove?’
‘Nope.’
‘Money,’ I’d say, undoing the buttons on his trousers one by one. ‘Do you remember money? Actual notes and coins you held in your hand?’
‘Nope.’
‘Did you ever go to a restaurant?’
‘A what?’
In my cabin he was on his guard, and I rarely won. The conversation usually ended with him grumbling, ‘Why do you keep all that useless junk?’
But in the safety of the fourth deck, just sometimes, I triumphed, and we would talk, and that was when I loved him most.
‘My mum would have loved all this,’ he said once. ‘The cookery and the crafts. The book group. You.’
‘Your mum would have liked me?’
‘Well. She’d have worried about your obsession with dust.’
I hit him then, and he grabbed my wrist and stared at me until I thought I’d melt. ‘Why won’t you marry me, Lalla?’ he asked.
‘Because I’m alive.’
‘What do you mean?’ He loosened his grip, but I didn’t take my wrist away.
‘I mean that nothing’s allowed to happen.’
‘Then make something happen,’ he said, and his green eyes sparkled through his fringe. ‘Marry me.’ I moved away from him and stood looking up at the whole, perfect skylight with its new full complement of shiny screws. Then he laughed. ‘Anyway, there’s so much happening. Take a look around. There’s the cooking, and the swimming. And all the books in the library to read. You could learn how to play football. Come on, I’ll show you.’
‘I don’t want to play football.’
‘Tennis, then. On deck, even, while the weather’s like this.’ The storm had given way to clear blue skies that felt as though they’d last for ever. ‘Michael’s got all the things.’
‘What’s tennis?’
‘We’ll find out. Or knit.’
‘I don’t want to knit. It all gets undone anyway.’
‘Learn Latin.’
‘What?’
‘There’s a Latin class starting. Charles is going to teach it and then he’s going to show us round the Roman Galleries of the British Museum on the screens and we’re going to recreate Pompeii in one of the empty rooms next to the sports hall. It’s all right,’ he said hurriedly as I felt my mouth fall open, ‘Michael says it’s all right. It’s not looking back because it was so long ago and none of us have ever been there. It’s honouring our heritage.’
‘The Heritage Restoration Act,’ I muttered, but he didn’t hear me, or chose to ignore me. One or the other.
He stood up and joined me under the skylight. ‘Shall I fetch the ladder?’ he said hopefully. But I didn’t feel like it. His enthusiasm had driven mine out of me.
‘What will it take?’ he asked me softly, one finger stroking the nape of my neck. ‘What will it take to bring you with me? With the rest of us?’
I looked up at him. ‘What will it take to bring you with me?’
‘You’ve got me, Lalla. Look, I’m here with you, aren’t I? I’ll get the ladder, we’ll make more dust if that’s what you want. Tell me what it is you need and I’ll find it. We’ve been happy, these last few days, haven’t we?’
‘I want to be somewhere. Do something.’
‘The ship is somewhere. And there’s loads to do.’
‘I know that. I know. But none of it’s important. Helen fed all those babies. Finn had the Thursday project. Patience helped loads of people.’
‘But you’re the reason any of us are here at all. You should be proud.’
I tried to think of another way to explain. ‘Look at the library here,’ I said. ‘If you did nothing but read, and lived for long enough, you could read it all.’
‘Of course. But who does nothing but read?’
‘That’s not the point. There’s nothing infinite here. There’s nothing that doesn’t have an end.’ I paused, then realised that, for once, I had said what I meant. ‘Everything on the ship,’ I said carefully, for Tom deserved that I should try, ‘everything, every single thing, contains its own ending. The cooking, the knitting, the clothes, the library. Pompeii. Whatever you look at, you’re also looking at its final point. Its end.’
I looked at him, waiting to see a flash of illumination on his face. But the only light there was, was pouring over him through the skylight. And I understood that, even if we went through that skylight and joined our bodies together and brought the stars down all around us and became one with each other again, I would still be alone.
‘Why can’t you be happy, Lalla? Why must you worry? Is it because of your mother?’
I shook my head. I missed her. I missed her every minute of every day. But that wasn’t a worry. It was a sadness, a misery, a visc
eral longing for a world in which she had not died. But not a worry. Why, then, was I worried? Food? I had seen the towering stores in the holds. Health? We had a doctor and dentist and more medicines than we’d ever need. Occupation? We hadn’t yet scratched the surface of the playthings my father had provided for us.
And then I realised. I was worried precisely because everyone was so happy. Everyone was so content. No one seemed to care when we were going to arrive, or be worried about what we would find there. No one was making plans. We were learning to play tennis, not learning to build houses. They didn’t even mind that they were no longer counting the days and the weeks and the months. It was a relief to them not to have to. And more and more, it became borne upon me that we simply could not go on. We needed to arrive. Who would listen to me? Not Helen; I had lost her in the ballroom. Not Tom, who was looking at me with adoring incomprehension. He had given me an apple, but even now I was not sure what that meant.
What were the secret group doing while I was trying to explain myself? Maybe they had a map, a compass, and were charting our location. Maybe they were creeping into the engine rooms and speeding up our progress. Once, I thought I heard a dog barking, and became convinced that they had a pet somewhere. But whatever they were doing, they were my allies.
‘Lalla,’ Tom said suddenly, his eyes alight, ‘if I could show you something that was growing and developing on the ship – if I could show you something that will be different tomorrow from what it is today, and different the day after that and after that – then do you think you might be happy?’
I expected him to fetch a ladder and a screwdriver. I could tell he wanted to by the way he kept touching me as he was talking – my hair, my face, my arms – as though he needed to be sure I was really there. But he stayed beside me, drowning in sunlight.
‘Something that hasn’t come from my father?’
He raised his eyebrows at me and I gave up.
‘Follow me,’ he said.
He went back down the stairs, and I followed him, dreaming of subversion and dissension and somebody other than me standing on a blue velvet bench and saying, ‘The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and this is called a day,’ and everybody cheering. They’d cheered me once before, when I’d made it possible for us to leave. If I could only make them see what was so clear to me, they’d cheer me again, for making it possible for us to get to land.
But I had to give Tom his chance. I loved him. Maybe there was a garden on board, a secret space of grass with an apple tree in the centre laden with fruit. A farm, a pig, a rolling field, a horse to ride, a house made of red bricks with a garden and a child’s swing moving to and fro in a gentle breeze.
A place where he and I could live and be together until we died.
We clattered down the stairs together. He pulled me through the ballroom and up to the gallery and the research room. I was all ready to tell him that these places didn’t count, that there was nothing new in them, only thousands of things we hadn’t looked at yet, but he didn’t stop. I was wondering how much further he was going to take me when he pushed open a door and said, ‘There, Lalla. What do you say to that?’
And, sitting on a chair in the middle of an otherwise empty room, with the sunlight streaming through the windows behind her, was an elderly lady surrounded by a sea of silk. I had not seen Alice’s embroidery since the early days, when she worked with her hoop on a single length of silk in the ballroom. Now the silk filled a room that was three times the size of my cabin. Here and there were patches of colour, but for the most part the silk was bare, except for a grey outline of the ship itself. The patches of colour were people. I was there, a little figure standing on the prow of the ship, reaching up my arms to the sky. I knew it was me because I was wearing the orange dress I’d been wearing the day we boarded, but I looked like a little girl still, with two plaits sticking out of my head. Helen was there, watching Gabriel swimming in the net. I would rather have been in the net with Gabriel, but this was Alice’s work, and I had no choice but to stand where Alice had stitched me. There was Roger, resting his hand on the forehead of a prone figure in the infirmary. The figure was wearing green and blue, and I realised it must be my mother. I looked up at Alice.
‘Do you mind seeing her there, Lalla?’ she said, and I shook my head. Finn was there with his grey beard, screen in hand before a group of listening people, and the engineers, clustered together, tools in hand. And there, in the centre, was my father. He was ten times the size of anyone else and he stood on the deck of the ship, his arms outstretched, outlined in gold, waiting to be filled in with millions of tiny stitches. More gold stitches outlined a rope coming from his right hand, and at the end of the rope was a circle. I wondered how long all this had taken, and how long there was left until the tapestry would be complete. But there was no doubt that there was time, time, time, stitched into it as securely as the lengths of coloured thread that made the picture. I looked at Tom; he met my eyes in challenge and I was the one who looked away.
‘Why is my father bigger than anyone else?’ I asked.
‘Because he is,’ Alice said, putting blue stitch after blue stitch into a section of the sea.
‘What’s he holding in his hand?’
‘If you can’t tell,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to watch and wait.’ She fastened off the blue and took a reel of silver. She held the end of the thread and drew it away from her body, setting the reel spinning between her fingers, then cut the thread and held the cut end in front of the eye of her needle. She made a few attempts to thread the needle, screwing up her eyes and holding it up to the light, before the thread finally went through and then she began to stitch again. With the blue thread she had made a solid block of colour; we watched as she made a silver upside-down V-shape on top of the blue.
‘Is that a wave?’ Tom asked.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s the ghost of a shark.’
‘Oh, there are still sharks,’ Alice said, looping the silver around her needle and pulling it taut. ‘There were sharks before there was almost anything else and there’ll be sharks long after we’ve gone.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘I just know.’
‘Why don’t they come after us when we’re in the net, then?’
Tom cut in. ‘Why do you think Michael thought of providing the net?’
I looked at him and this time I did not look away. ‘Do you think that there are still sharks?’
Tom shrugged. ‘I don’t think there aren’t. I don’t know if there are. All I’m saying is, whatever is the case, Michael thought of it.’
‘But if a shark came, the net wouldn’t stop it. They’re really fierce. They’ve got never-ending rows of teeth that never stop growing and they can detect one drop of human blood in a million parts of water.’
Alice and Tom laughed. ‘You’ve spent too long in the cinema,’ Tom said.
‘It can be the ghost of a shark if you like,’ Alice said, her eyes kind. ‘That’s the thing about work like this. You make of it what you will.’
‘But I don’t want to make of it what I will. I want to know what it really is.’
‘Then you will never be happy,’ she said quietly.
No one spoke after that. Alice stitched at her silver shapes. Tom stared out of the window at the original of the sea. I watched Alice’s fingers as she made one stitch, two stitches, three stitches, just as once upon a time I might have watched the second hand on a clock. Time passed here and could be measured. Eight, nine, ten. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, and another ghost shark was complete and she went on to the next.
‘Better than dust, isn’t it, Lalla?’ Tom said. I nodded. Maybe by the time Alice finished the sea, we would find a better way out onto the roof of the ship. Maybe by the time she finished the sky, Tom would understand me. Maybe, by the time she’d finished the ship, we’d have arrived and started building our home. There was a measuring stick here, and that was something I wan
ted. I felt content flood through me, and I moved closer to Tom.
Then I realised.
‘It’s the sun,’ I said. ‘That circle at the end of the rope in my father’s hand. It’s the sun.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Is that really what you think? That my father holds the sun on a rope?’
‘It’s what I see,’ said Alice. ‘I embroider what I see.’
I felt my content seeping away.
‘It’s not true, though.’ I looked from her old face to his young one, her pale to his golden. ‘You know it’s not true.’
Tom smiled. ‘Shall we meet up and watch the sunrise in the morning?’
‘But we never know where the sun is going to rise.’
Tom and Alice laughed. ‘Michael knows,’ they said, and I felt sick. I went to the porthole and tried to open it, but there was no fastening, no handle. I stood still and tried to breathe, long slow breaths. I wanted rest and tranquillity; for a brief second I had found it, and now here was something else. I seemed destined to a constant struggle.
‘What will you do when you’ve finished, Alice?’ Tom asked.
‘Oh, I’ll never finish this. Look at how long it’s taken me to get this far. If I’ve done before I die, I’ll be lucky. I’ll spend the rest of my days looking at it. And if I don’t, well, my days will have been filled with something good. And someone else will have to take it on. There’ll always be unfinished work, and there’ll always be someone left to finish it. That’s the way.’
But it wasn’t the way. It was the way for tomorrow, maybe, and for the day after, and the day after, and the day after that. But not for ever. Everything anyone said seemed to point to some kind of collective blindness, as though the whole community had taken sleeping pills from the infirmary and swallowed them together with our evening coffee.
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