Tom got up from his table, and the people around us began to clap and to cheer, a sound that started small but that spread over the whole dining room like spilt water. Was this what it all came to in the end? Floating aimlessly, waiting for certain death, saved by love?
I had thought he was my rebellion.
He smiled at me, and I tried to smile back, and after all it was quite easy to whisper, ‘I’m sorry.’
He held my hands in his, and went down on one knee in front of me. ‘Lalla,’ he said, ‘you know I love you. Will you marry me?’
And the room went silent, and every person in it held their breath in a joyful pause. My tears stopped. I looked around and saw the floodtide of happiness that my next word would bring forth. All the people who had cared about me, who had been angry or frustrated with me, who had argued over and over again that they were happy and that I could be too, were gazing at me with approval. I felt loved. I felt enfolded and included. We were all going to die. Where was the harm in enjoying ourselves first? What harm? I felt utterly drained.
‘A wedding!’ Gerhard shouted, his deep voice booming in triumph over the general delight. ‘A feast.’ And the people shouted and laughed, and I stood in the middle, a little tiny dot, sheltered by Tom as I stood inside the circle of his arms without saying a word.
And as I stood being shaken to bits by all the people who came rushing towards us, hugging and kissing our cheeks and kissing each other and waltzing around in each other’s arms, I saw my father look at Roger, and Roger look at my father, and something hit me from the inside, and I knew that my happy ending had been as carefully orchestrated as the existence of the ship itself.
TWENTY-TWO
Preparations for the wedding Ballet Shoes and the Art Trials my mother’s last chance
I meant to ask more questions before the wedding. I meant to stop everything, and ask how they dared to dictate the course of my life in this way. I meant to demand the full history of Neil Bailey, whoever he was. But for the first time since my mother’s death, I felt loved. And it was not just Tom who loved me. Everywhere I went, people smiled at me. I started going to book group again, just to feel the warmth of people celebrating the engagement. My father offered to release me from laundry duty while we planned the wedding, but I refused. I liked going into people’s cabins and have them say lovely things about Tom, and about me, and offer their congratulations. And I liked it when Patience, having smothered me with kisses, held me at arm’s length and said, ‘Child, you are so beautiful when you smile.’ Just as the first time we went up through the skylight on the fourth deck, time had condensed into a single moment, so being with Tom, thinking with Tom, spending time with Tom, stopped other thoughts from growing and developing. The sun rose and set unencumbered by my concerns; if I didn’t accept Alice’s tapestry, I was at least happy to watch with everyone else and admire the way the universe had shifted to accommodate us.
In any case, the tapestry was no longer an issue. Alice put it aside to embroider a wedding veil. Gerhard disappeared into the stores for hours on end and came back with menus which he pored over with my father. I went with my father to the fourth deck, and I tried on the dress he had chosen for me. ‘You saved us at the start, Lalla,’ he said to me, ‘and now you are saving us again.’ Saviour. It had quite a ring to it, and I stopped wondering why everyone seemed to love me so much. He offered to take me to his cabin and answer my questions, but every day, I decided that tomorrow would do, until at last it seemed too late to bother. Maybe Neil Bailey had just missed the boat. And the dress was so beautiful.
I learned to be happy. I thought of my early days on the ship as a troubled night that had given way to dawn, and the dawn was so bright that I could not see the darkness beyond. I had Tom and I had the ship. I had my father and I had myself. I was a new person, a happy person, and to be that person I had to let go of anger and doubt and enjoy each moment as it came. I stopped feeling that the weight of the world was on my shoulders and my shoulders alone. The children were a creative lot, and would surely think of something if the time ever came that they’d need to. I did the laundry and joined the knitting circle and danced about the ship as the others did. I put my red shoes in my museum and asked for deck shoes. I ate and ate, and got fatter every day, and if I could not quite give up making the marks, at least I made them on a different part of the wall, for I was in a different place now, and it was better.
And then one day, thirty or so marks later (although I could not be sure; I did not always remember to make them), I came back from swimming too tired to walk up to the sports hall and find Tom. We shared a cabin now, and I went to it, and as I sat on our bunk, I thought that I might like to read again. I picked up my portal and found that my library was still frozen on Ballet Shoes. Petrova, the only one who hated ballet, stuck at a station, forever longing to travel on a moving staircase.
I had always loved Ballet Shoes. My mother read it to me, from a paper copy that had been hers. Later I read it myself, from the screen. The world of the Fossil girls had always been impossibly exotic. They descended into the depths of the city as though it was the most normal thing in the world. The Tube, where tunnels and corners could hide anything, where a power cut would plunge you into pitch dark, where a cry for help would echo for so long that there was no way of telling where it came from. Once the gangs had been smoked out, the petrol dealers moved in, and the sealed entrances swarmed with muttering people who carried the petrol smell with them. I loved the way that smell sent my mind circling above me and set me slightly dizzy where I stood, and I would pretend to have forgotten something, or seen something, so that I could go back and smell it again. The filthy, incoherent people did not frighten me then. They seemed to belong to a different world, and held no more threat than if they were already dead.
‘How can they still be selling petrol if it’s all gone?’ I asked my mother.
‘This is the end of it,’ she told me. ‘The bits left. The last drops in the bottom of tankers, of storage tanks. They scoop it up and sell it to kids.’
We had a Tube map at home, and I followed the familiar names – Russell Square, Regent’s Park, Oxford Circus – to the outmost edges. Amersham. Uxbridge, where Emily’s husband had gone to work. Here be dragons, my father said when I asked him what was there, which made my mother laugh, although I never understood why. And, safely on the ship, sitting in my cabin with my frozen portal in my hand, I finally realised that I had read Ballet Shoes for the last time.
The British Museum was all about last times. Every object in there had been used for the last time. Did the person who used the iron plough know that it was the last time he would prepare his fields with it? Did the person who wore the silver buckle know, when they took it off, that they would never put it on again?
You change. You move on, and life where you are becomes the only life that is, until it changes, and the next new reality becomes the only one. For the Fossil sisters, going to dancing school was so normal that they could complain about it. For me, school had been as impossible as eggs, as tantalising as oranges. And travelling daily by Tube – three girls and an old lady, unarmed, with no guard – was an idea from another world. The frozen page contained the illustration of the girls asleep on the Tube. No matter how many times I stared at it, they were never attacked. Not once. No petrol dealers approached them, and in the picture they all wore shoes and socks and coats. They looked so clean.
And the illustration itself had been drawn by hand, not digitally generated. Painting and drawing had still been legal when Ballet Shoes was first written, but I could not remember it. It was just another thing that belonged to another time. The Optimum Resourcing Act as I knew it simply stated that what resources there were, were needed for important things, like eating. I didn’t remember the act coming in – like the Seasonal Food Act, it predated the collapse – but I did remember The Art Trials that started just before we sailed.
‘If this man was working today,’ t
he screen bulletin said, ‘his working methods would have destroyed acres of rainforest. If this man were alive today, the oil in the paints he wasted could have been used for fuel. The canvas he ruined would have made blankets, clothes, tents. It is criminal waste, and has been a factor in the shortages we experience today.’ They were talking about an artist called Van Gogh, who had been dead for hundreds of years. I was fifteen; even I could see that this was a way of placing responsibility for the shortages in the past, where no one could do anything about it.
‘Why now?’ my father asked, staring at the screen, where bright yellow flowers were overlaid with the words recounting Van Gogh’s crimes. ‘Why outlaw dead artists now?’
‘Because the Optimum Resourcing Act got rid of all the living ones.’ My mother shrugged. ‘We’re the dinosaurs, thinking that it matters.’
‘But of course it matters!’
‘Why?’ My mother threw down the word like a challenge, and I remembered that there had been bread on the table at lunch, actual bread, soft, with a crust that crunched as I bit into it, not dried biscuits. Had my father been trying to persuade my mother onto the ship with luxuries? At the time, I’d just been pleased to see the bread. ‘Why does it matter?’
‘Anna,’ my father said, looking at my mother as though she was a stranger, ‘why are you asking that?’
‘Because I want to know the answer.’ My mother’s cheeks were pink, and her eyes were brighter than usual. ‘It matters, you say. It matters to have paints in many different colours and brushes, and canvas, for the sole purpose of putting down a picture that could easily be created on the screen?’
‘But it couldn’t,’ my father said, his tone at once hesitant and exasperated. ‘You know that. No screen can match the image I might create with my hands if I had the chance. Anna, what is this about?’
‘I’m just saying. You have – what – fifty metres of canvas at the dock?’
‘Five hundred and three.’
‘Whatever. And outside our window are at least that many people with nowhere to live. You could distribute that canvas, Michael. They’d have something to sleep under.’
‘But our people will need it. There’ll be another Van Gogh on the ship. Another Titian, another Michaelangelo. Another Leonardo da Vinci. You should be grateful to these Art Trials, not picking fights with me.’
‘Grateful to them?’
‘The hoarders will lose their nerve now they know that the Optimum Resourcing Act will never be rescinded. We’ll be able to get clay, oils, pigments, remember?’
‘I remember,’ my mother said, but my father was riding the wave of his enthusiasm and didn’t react to the dryness in her voice.
‘They’ll give me the stuff for nothing if I time it right.’ He paused and looked at her. ‘It means I’ll be away for a while,’ he said gently, and stepped towards her. She moved away, towards the window, and shrugged his hand off when he placed it on her shoulder. ‘I’ll be back for Lalla’s birthday,’ he said. ‘Don’t be like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘So cold. At least say that you’ll miss me.’
‘But I won’t,’ my mother said, staring out of the window with her back to him. ‘Not in the slightest. Why don’t you leave Lalla some paper and pens, so that she can draw a picture for you while you’re away? You’ve got a lovely fat blank book there. Leather bound. That would do.’
I started up, ready to protest that I could not draw a picture, hardly ever got to hold a pen, but neither of them was looking at me. They threw me into the debate as a way of challenging each other’s ideas. If they were the knives cutting through the difficulties of the world in which we were living, then I was the whetstone upon which they sharpened themselves. No wonder I had remained a child so long.
My father opened the door to leave. ‘I need that book for the manifest.’
‘But Lalla needs it to express herself creatively. That’s just as important, isn’t it, Michael? After all, a human being deprived of the means of self-expression is nothing better than a slave to the undignified mechanics of physical survival. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what we said.’
‘I’m thinking of the ship.’
‘And I’m thinking of the people we’re leaving behind.’
‘Anna, please.’
‘Please what? Please just accept what you say without question? Please stop expecting you to live what you preach? Please just let you take a vision we used to share and change it until I don’t recognise it anymore? Please what, Michael?’ And there she stopped, as though she had been walking a tightrope and had just looked down.
My father’s face clouded over. His eyebrows drew together, and I saw a glimpse of something dark in his eyes as he drew a deep breath.
‘You’ll never let us leave, will you?’ he said. He stood over her as she sat on the sofa, her legs curled beneath her, her dress pooling over the balding velvet. Her face was tilted upwards; she was looking directly at him. Their eyes were locked together. The waters were pressing relentlessly at the dam. Her eyes fell, and the dam held. Right up until the day she died.
TWENTY-THREE
The thing about museums I am married Van Gogh and Lalla Paul
I shouldn’t have tried to read Ballet Shoes again. It sent me up to the fourth deck, to my neglected museum, to fetch my red shoes on the morning of my wedding. If I hadn’t thought about Posy’s ballet shoes, the ones her mother left her, such sentimentality would never have occurred to me. But my mother had given me those shoes and no one would see them under the long white dress my father had chosen for me.
And the thing about museums is that they set you to thinking.
There was a button, scratched and worn. There was a wax and plaster apple, broken by my desperate teeth. The screws from a skylight, from back in the days when I had thought freedom was important. Now, nothing was forbidden. Tom and I did whatever we liked, and it wasn’t the same. A photograph album and a letter, whose stories I had almost forgotten. A lump of pastry, turning greyer and greyer. And my shoes. My red shoes.
I shut the door on my museum and walked slowly down the infirmary stairs. I let myself into my old cabin, which stood empty now, to add the final scratch to my tally of the days and to change my shoes. There were ninety marks in the original section, sixty in the new, but I was getting married now and it was time to stop. Tom was right.
I went on to the ballroom where my father was waiting with his people. The dress was made of heavy, smooth satin. The shoes my father had given me had high heels, but my red shoes were low, and the skirt puddled around my feet. I gathered it up so that I wouldn’t trip, but the fabric simply slipped through my arms like so much water and I gave up. I moved more slowly these days anyway; there seemed to be more of me. Had my body expanded as my brain surrendered? Once I’d have asked. Now I simply accepted that the dress only just met around my waist.
Tom was there, waiting for me outside the ballroom door. He took my arm and we walked through the ballroom together. There was music, and the people smiled on either side of us. My father stood on the podium, behind his desk. The manifest sat open and the trumpets finished as we came before him.
‘We have won,’ he said, and even then it seemed a strange opening for a wedding speech. ‘Every battle that humanity has ever fought, every cause that any man or woman ever felt was worth fighting for, or dying for, we have won. There is not a man or woman in history who struggled for a cause that has not triumphed here, on the ship. There is not a dream that has not been realised here, on the ship. Tom and Lalla stand before us as the expression of what we have achieved.’
I looked at Tom. But he was looking at my father, and they were as radiant and proud as each other.
‘We know what wealth means now. We know that wealth is living for and in each other. That every stroke of paint on a canvas, stitch of a tapestry, kick of a football, is an investment in our lives. We know that every meal shared, every activity enjoyed, is an investment in
humanity itself. We are everything man was ever intended to be. We are creatures of love, of togetherness, of creativity.
‘So, Tom and Lalla, take the legacy of the millennia that have brought us here, and live. Live! Love each other. Till the end of all our days.’
I barely heard the people cheering. At that moment, as though my father had called it into being with his words, I felt a movement inside me, a bubble in my stomach that could have been hunger. I looked at my father, who was preparing his pen to write in the manifest. I looked at Tom, who was grinning around the room, nodding at the people as they shouted our names. I saw Patience holding out her arms in blessing; I saw Finn wiping away tears and Gabriel calling my name while Helen made a pretence of wanting him to quieten down. And then I saw Roger. He was looking at me, and I felt another bubble burst inside me and a soft fluttering, as though I had swallowed a butterfly. And suddenly I knew.
Where had my father been standing, the moment that he made the decision to buy the ship and offer five hundred good people the chance of a perfect death? In my imagination, he was on the top of a mountain, looking down on a mighty city, or sitting on a golden throne in a room filled with oil paintings and marble statues. But he was probably doing nothing more than walking down a road. Certainly, when I realised what was happening to me, my body just carried on, while my mind wrapped itself around the revelation and stared at it. My father put the pen in my hand and I signed the manifest for the second time. I passed the pen to Tom, and then my father joined our hands and we were married.
The people bore us off to the dining room, where Gerhard had prepared a feast. Emily stood smiling and crying beside a vast arrangement of artificial flowers. They were everywhere, and when my father told me that I should throw the bouquet I was holding, it was Emily who caught it. She looked so young. So full of hope. And I realised that this would be neither the last wedding, nor the last birth.
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