by Ann Bridge
Amber, anxious as always to do the right thing, responded politely to all Mrs. Grant-Howard’s remarks. She was quite aware of her scrutiny; she recognised at once that particular expression as of one who runs his eye over a horse. But as the meal proceeded her attention became increasingly focussed on one thing—the effort to control her voice. Unreasonably, maddeningly, she found herself wanting to cry—wanting more and more violently to cry. She could not have said why—her loss of Arthur, her parting with her mother, with her horses, with Riddingcote; the plunge into the unknown, these polite strangers—all combined to weigh her down with a desperate sense of severance, of isolation. She held out somehow till the end of the meal released her; then she went off to her cabin, losing herself several times on the way in the white-walled electric-lighted passages which moved with a faint perceptible motion of their own—the strong throbbing forward thrust of the ship.
The Grant-Howards sat in the green sofa-ed saloon and took their coffee. “Well, what do you make of her?” Joanna asked of her husband. She was always more interested in Nugent’s point of view than in her own.
Nugent lit a cigar rather carefully before replying. Then he blew out a cloud of smoke and said “Nothing, so far,” and began to read The Times. After a moment or two, he lowered it again, exchanged one pair of spectacles for another, and observing “She has beautiful legs,” resumed his paper.
Joanna, however, was quite accustomed to talking to her husband through a newspaper and pursued her meditations more or less aloud. “Lady Julia’s even worse than you said, Nugent. Heavens, what a woman!” Nugent grunted. “The girl doesn’t seem a bit like her,” Joanna went on—“she’s out of date, somehow. I think she’s got an unfashionable mind.” Nugent continued to grunt, in a manner apparently satisfactory to his wife, who resumed, “I don’t imagine that she’ll be much bother—she doesn’t look at all the sort whom every man on board will run after. She isn’t”—she paused for a word—“she isn’t very noticeable.”
“Her legs are,” said Grant-Howard, making his final contribution to this rather one-sided conversation.
It is impossible to feel that a voyage has really begun while there is a call at another home port in prospect. There is a certain suspense; the possibility of last visitors; meanwhile the passage down the Channel seems merely like a trip on a penny steamer. The Kalwoona berthed at Southampton at 7.30 next morning, and sailed again at 5.30. In the interval the Grant-Howards did in fact receive a number of callers who dashed down to the dock in cars; parcels and letters for them came aboard; they walked ashore, and Nugent Grant-Howard dealt with some eleventh-hour details by telephoning to the Foreign Office. Amber went ashore with them, feeling rather lost and lonely—no one had come to see her, nor sent her a last letter. And Nugent’s telephoning suddenly put an idea into her head which, for weeks afterwards, she blushed to remember.
It came over her, like a sudden sickness, that she could not, simply could not leave England without once more hearing Arthur’s voice—and there was nothing to prevent her from ringing him up! Insidiously, this idea presented itself to her at the moment as a good one; what more simple and natural than to say goodbye, in a friendly way? It was 4.30, and he would almost certainly be in for tea, because the meet that day was close by. Making some excuse about buying a book, she left the others and slipped off. She found a telephone, advertised by a blue-and-white notice outside a small and rather grubby teashop, and hurriedly put her call through. There was not much time; she was at least ten minutes walk from the dock. She ordered a cup of tea, while she waited—ten minutes it would be, the exchange said—and sat sipping it nervously, gazing round with discomfort at the dirty tables, the fly-spotted walls, the blowzy and suspicious-looking woman who presided over the shop. In those minutes her courage began to ebb; her idea seemed less good, less natural; what would Arthur think? Would he realise how cool and casual and friendly her intention was? She began to stare with horror at the telephone-box into which she must soon go and cope with this situation of her own creating. Then the bell rang and she darted in. “Your Broadway call.” “Is that Broadway 379?” she asked, troubled at the wavering tone of her voice. But it was not—they had given her 375. The check filled her with desperation, banished her fears—she must get him! She banged on the receiver, and gave the number again; holding the line, she looked at her watch. Ten to five already! She would just do it, if they were quick. If only the Grant-Howards didn’t begin to worry about her. Should she give it up? Would Arthur understand? Oh, what had she better do? But if only she could hear his so familiar voice just once more it would be something to go on, would make it all more endurable, this journey. Distracted with irresolution and unhappiness, she stood in the stuffy box; perspiration sprang out on her skin, tears began to sting maddeningly behind her eyes. She looked at her watch again—two minutes to five. She would have to go! And then: “There you are! Hold on, Broadway!” rang in her ear.
It was a man’s voice at the other end, and for a moment she thought it was Arthur. But it was only Benson, his man. No, Captain Griffiths had not come in yet. He’d expected him half an hour ago; the agent was waiting to see him—something must have kept him. Would she leave a message? What name, please? Stammering that it didn’t matter, Amber replaced the receiver. No good—no good; and probably it would have been no good if she had got him! Feeling completely desolate, she paid the huge fee and left the shop. She missed her way twice, and it was twenty-past five when she ran up the gangway, pale, breathless and embarrassed, to find Nugent Grant-Howard waiting for her, watch in hand, at the top. She apologised. “It would really have been more inconvenient for you than for us if you had missed it,” he said—and the easy casualness of his words was soothing to Amber’s taut nerves. He looked her over and saw that she had no book. “Would you like tea in your cabin?” he said. “Oh, can one?” “Of course—I’ll have it sent down.” And as he watched her pretty well-dressed figure disappear along the deck—“Poor little wretch!” said Nugent to himself.
Chapter Three
THE Peninsular and Oriental Line is a unique institution. It is a sort of Blackwood’s Magazine in being; like it, a microcosm of that other unique institution, the British Empire. To travel by it is an education in itself. For it is quite possible for conscientious and high-minded people to spend half a lifetime in England, reading their newspapers and devoutly paying their income-tax, without, so to speak, meeting the British Empire at all. To such it is a geographical expression or a political abstraction, regarded as a rule with vague complacency, but it is not a thing to be reckoned with; it is on the periphery of their lives, an affair of background, making no claims on them that cannot be liquidated by regular payments to the Inland Revenue Department. But on a P. & O. boat the conscientious English citizen suddenly meets the British Empire face to face. There is a Kipling smack about the whole thing, from the crossed flags on the tins of duty-free and blessedly cheap cigarettes to the Sunday services in the saloon, with the Union Jack draped over the piano. The formerly remote institution now confronts this quiet person—as a living organism or as a vast machine, according to his cast of mind; in either case he is soon made aware of claims and duties with respect to it, which he must fulfil or forfeit his self-respect. A frightful sense of collective responsibility pervades the ship—frightful, that is, to the timid individualist. He is called upon to promote sports, or to take part in sports promoted by others, and he does so, unresisting; he “lends a hand,” he responds to heartiness, he sets an example—he who perhaps never darkened the doors of a place of worship at home parades for church in the saloon on Sundays; he learns at last that he is not his own man, as he had obscurely supposed, but an active servant of something rather bigger than himself.
The British Empire, however, like one’s fellow-passengers, is seldom much in evidence until after Gibraltar, if, as usually happens, it is rough in the Bay. It was rough in the Bay on this occasion, and first Mrs. Grant-Howard, then Dickie, the
n Grant-Howard himself vanished from the public ken, in common with most people. Amber, to her own great surprise, did not feel in the least ill; the steep rush of water, the sight of a heaving skyline only fifty yards away, the soaring plunges of the ship—up, over, down—filled her, in spite of her sick heart, with a curious exhilaration. She would stand for hours, wrapped in a coat and mackintosh, on the drier parts of the deck, watching the impassioned relations of ship and water, and come down with spray-damp hair and colour in her cheeks to eat a hearty meal in the thinly populated saloon, where she and an elderly Naval officer were now the sole guests at the Captain’s table. The Captain praised her; and indeed there is no sense of superiority so subtle and irresistible as that of the good sailor over the sea-sick. She even enjoyed her own staggering progress along the passages and up and downstairs, and helped Miss Carruthers, who kept on her feet but could not eat, in her ministrations to the stricken family and to Burbidge, who fulfilled Joanna’s worst anticipations.
But the Bay does not last very long, and about the entrance to the Straits passengers, bearing a strong resemblance to sick flies, began to crawl once more about the deck; by the time they were twenty-four hours into the Mediterranean the British Empire had already made itself felt. Even Amber was seized upon by the inexorable machine and learned that she had obligations towards such unwonted types of British subject as very immature youths going out to businesses in Malaya, and flirtatious girls with little vulgar shoes, speaking with a strange sub-American accent, which puzzled her greatly till she found out from the elderly Naval officer that they all came from Shanghai. She had never met anyone like them before, and in England would have gone to her grave without meeting them at all; but the moment you approach the East this terrific national solidarity makes itself felt, and grasped by the British Empire, held indeed firmly by the elbow by it, she was introduced to these people. With and for them she sat on various sub-committees which drew up rules for a variety of amusements: a deck tennis committee, a dance committee, a concert committee, a fancy dress committee. These bodies were the creation of Nugent Grant-Howard, who, on the first evening in the Mediterranean, as the principal British official on board, was forced by some obscure pressure into the position of Chairman of the Entertainments’ Committee. He stood up in the saloon, flanked by the Captain and the Purser, and made a short witty speech which dealt almost entirely with the formation of sub-committees for everything. He called so many of these into being that there was no business left for the main committee to transact, and he never in point of fact took any further part in the activities of entertainment till he made a final speech off Singapore. When his wife remonstrated with him about this—she also sat on several of the sub-committees—Nugent said that decentralisation was half the art of government, and went on reading China Print out of his tin boxes.
Amber had been surprised to hear him make such a funny speech. It had never occurred to her that it was in the official character to be amusing, and it cut across her incipient theory of Grant-Howard, as a learned, serious, important and rather intimidating person, of whom it was almost a moral obligation to be a little afraid. Like everyone else, she saw very little of him—he sat in a deckchair outside his cabin, wearing a pair of tinted glasses and surrounded by his tin boxes, reading, reading, all day long. People walked past him, doing their daily five miles round the deck; hurled quoits along the planking, threw rope-rings into buckets and practised the ukulele—Nugent remained unmoved, absorbed in the past and present history of China, as revealed in masses of pale-green Foreign Office papers. When Dickie accosted him, as he did at least twice a day, with “Whap are you boing, babby?” Nugent invariably replied, “Learning about China, Dickie. Don’t touch those papers. Where is Miss Carruthers?” At meals he exchanged a few rather caustic jocosities with the Captain, a stout dapper quizzical little man, who gave the impression of having at least two sweethearts in every port, and who amused Amber by his methods of conversation. Obviously, the necessity of talking to two total strangers at all meals for four weeks on end, year in and year out, calls for a special technique, and Captain Heron had developed it to perfection. He never involved himself in any topic which demanded the smallest mental effort; indeed he reserved his fire more completely than anyone Amber had ever seen, although he conscientiously talked all the time. He began each meal by an enquiry as to appetites; went on to discuss the food and recommend particular dishes with great knowledge and cogency, and ended by telling two or three funny stories. He never mentioned books, politics, religion, personal or international relations, or the passengers; his stories were generally about the Scotch or the Goanese. Very occasionally he was lured by the elderly Naval man who sat on Amber’s other side into telling some nautical tale, and then he was enthralling, for he told them very well; but he was at no time a bore, which considering the conversational material he employed was little short of a marvel.
Amber indeed, in spite of herself, began gradually to enjoy her voyage. She had not in the least foreseen the curious solace which the eye can purvey to the distracted human mind, and was startled by the first little thrill of excitement which took her at the sight of Cape St. Vincent—the yellow monastery with its tall pharos, perched so precariously on the bare headland, the cliffs silvered to the top with a plastering of salt from the high-flung Atlantic spray. She could not help being excited during the hot hours they spent ashore at Port Said, by lamplight and moonlight, to find herself actually in Africa, walking on sand, the shadows of palms reaching to her very feet, and polyglot greedy Levantines addressing her as Mrs. Asquith or Mrs. Cornwallis West. “For your vyfe!” said a Levantine to the elderly Naval officer, draping a string of sham turquoises round Amber’s neck as she sat drinking lemon-squash, and ogling them both horribly. “She’s not my wife,” said the N.O. curtly. “For not vyfe!” said the Levantine, unabashed, adding another string, and Amber laughed out, ringingly. Mrs. Grant-Howard, across the table, looked up in surprise—she had not heard Amber laugh like that during the whole voyage so far.
Then there was the delightful strangeness of putting on cotton frocks and white shoes in January, as they passed through the Canal and the heavenly heat began, and Amber realised why she was lucky to have a cabin on the port side, in the shade. And there were moments of overwhelming excitement. One morning in the Red Sea she came up on deck at sunrise and saw on the port beam a coast of high blue mountains, with what she took for white mist about their feet, and deeper blue of distant forests in the valleys. It was some moments before she realised that this was the coast of Arabia, a rainless and barren land, whose only mists are drifted sand and its only foliage the blue shadows of bare rocks. They passed close to Perim, the low and sun-baked island with its oil depot and coaling station, swept all day by the shadows of great yellow kites and dusky skuas. Sights like these left Amber with the feeling of having definitely acquired something of value—of having put a gold piece, as it were, in her pocket. And just because these gold pieces were so totally unrelated to Arthur, they took her mind off him, left the raw place of her pain untouched for hours at a time. There was nothing to remind her of her home circumstances; every hour and detail of this life on board ship was new and different. Grant-Howard dragooned his whole party into the correct tropical régime. They paraded at 6.45 every morning on deck and did physical jerks in bathing-gowns, before a swim in the sail-bath and an early breakfast. At this hour Nugent unbent. He forced Miss Carruthers to learn to dive, with a precarious takeoff from the bulging and unsteady sides of the bath; Amber, who could dive, was taught to open her eyes under water. “Yes, you can, perfectly well, if you choose, Miss Harrison. Go in and try again!” In the afternoons Amber lay in a chair, watching the shadow of the rails slide to and fro across the deck as the ship moved, and the majestic and orderly progress of immense white clouds across the sky from horizon to horizon. Then indeed she did sometimes think about Arthur, with a sullen gnawing pain; but if she caught sight of a group of flying-fish, the
skimming blue and silver creatures distracted her attention. Or she fell to wondering why none of the writers about tropic seas had ever mentioned that there were clouds in the Indian Ocean—that, indeed, the great feature of the Indian Ocean was this unending procession of clouds, like sheep moving all day long to a Cotswold fair. The thought of the Cotswolds hurt again, sharply, as she remembered their great green slopes crowned with woods, and runs there with Arthur or her father; but then she was never left for long, she was sure to be summoned to a committee, or to practise for a competition. The young men besieged her a good deal too—she was one of the prettiest and quite the best-dressed girl on board. Armour-plated in her feeling for Arthur, they meant nothing at all to her, which perhaps accounted for the ease with which she handled them. Her behaviour called forth Mrs. Grant-Howard’s commendation. “She’s no trouble at all,” Joanna said to her husband—“she’s frightfully good with all those creatures. Do you know, Nugent, I’m really beginning to think she’s rather nice, though she never says anything.”
“She’s too young to say anything. Most of the young can’t say,” said Nugent.
“Do you like her?” asked his wife.