Read the book: «Acts of Mutiny»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PART ONE Motion

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

PART TWO Cargo

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

PART THREE Foam

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

PART FOUR Trench

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE Motion

1

I HAVE A knot in my tongue. Left over right, tuck under. Right over left, tuck under. The rabbit comes up through the hole. Or does the dog go round the tree for his bone? My child-knots forgot their creatures. I produced only poor knobs of string, for all my father’s detailed instruction. His prim exemplars shone from my bedroom wall, white cord on a mahogany panel: bowline, reef, clove hitch, carrick bend, sheepshank, figure of eight, Turk’s head, eye splice …

This morning we buried him over at Sidcup. There was a reception at his sister’s, a gathering of family, and of family ghosts. I choked on sandwiches, lacked conversation. Then I drove alone from Bostall Heath down towards the river edge, past Lesnes Abbey Woods, past Bostall Lane Infants – which still stands. To my roots, downstream of the City, downriver of the new Thames Barrier. Water folk, Navy folk, my family have been here for generations. I was the one who broke away. Since quitting the Navy I have worked at the airport, on the other side of the capital, in Immigration.

The street is unchanged. These are turn-of-the-century terraces, smoke grey, built by the Royal Arsenal Co-op. Nothing can shift or clean them. On our side the row heaves into a small rise, about twelve feet proud of the pavement – as if on the lift of a frozen wave. The house itself looks as it used to, the gate jammed not quite open, always to be dodged around. There is the same crumbling pebble-wound at eye level in the flight of sixteen concrete steps up to our front door. My father called them ‘the ladders’.

I see myself with my albatross eye. Just this afternoon. I am poised to go in, but turn towards the weather, snow clouds heaping up over the Isle of Dogs. Because I have not been a dutiful son; for years I never visited, and all the differences are reproaches. To the right is the vast Thamesmead estate, where once the road petered out. There was a green foot-bridge over the railway line. I would watch my father bicycling away to his plot, a vegetable sack slung across his brawny shoulder, growing smaller against the duns and sedges. In the distance, the Plumstead marshes rotted off level towards Barking Reach.

Over the opposite roofs, Canary Wharf tower: a designer biro stabbed up through the earth’s crust, scribbling on those sagging grey-bellies. The first snowflakes are already coming dark on the flurry.

From here we would have smelt London’s soot fallout, or, according to the swirl of the wind, the West India Docks, the arsenal’s chemicals, the mud at Galleons Point. Here in the dark of each new moon my father had us turn over our silver money for luck. Now it is too late. Delaying at the door, I find excuses. If I drove straight back across the City I could avoid the blizzard – even pick up the tail end of my shift at the airport. Or I could wait for Carla at her flat and try to talk things through. After all we had only just begun, she and I.

But I ought really to go in.

Entering the hallway is like being swallowed. As if through the second door along Pinocchio might actually find his old man, the naval artificer, still working by his lamp at some Marconi chassis, waiting, with the smoke wisping up from the solder. I do half expect that special smell, of burning dust and Fluxite, mingled with the leftover flavour of kippers. But it is empty, of course, and icy cold.

The house has been modernised and remodernised. The back room no longer swims in its browns and greens. He is not, of course, at the table, his repair gutted on the spread newspaper, his sweet-tin of resistors and condensers tipped out all of a wire jumble.

We once squeezed in. We were pressed by furniture: lacquered, oak-stained, brown-draped. Even when I was a child it was out of date, like a workman’s Edwardiana, pickled. The two bucket chairs in leather, shiny with use; the heavy oak table and five mock-Chippendale chairs; the gloomy bureau; the rust-coloured dresser; the wireless table in the corner; the china cupboard – there was scarcely room for the fireplace. There was scarcely room even for the tea kettle on its hinged iron platform beside the grate. My grandfather the gunner, who lived with us, would swing it round into the flames, and then force his huge khaki-shirted frame slowly along the last side of the table and into his carver, beating upwind, braces strung tight and heaving at his waistband like the main-sheets of a square-rig.

The place is quite empty, and brims with its own incommunicable loss.

On the tight margin of floor in front of the hearth I can imagine my small self – stretched out by the french windows’ gloam. I lie reading my London’s River at Work and at War, lost in its illustrations, a romance of barges. The sails are tan, the river mud-green, the lines of the vessels wood on wood. And there are tramp steamers, painted iron with a fuss of tugs: grimed hulls, the ochres and rusts of their superstructure. Dark outpourings of smoke blot cranes and whole expanses of page. That was the river I knew; an oilscape of docks. Even the sun – I lived in sepia, my growing up here was an unbroken stream, brown as varnish, leading inevitably to the sea.

I swear the boy looks up. Is it me he is afraid of?

My scalp tingles. I remember another time back there on the doorstep with Erica my mother. We too are hesitating to go in, having hauled our suitcases to the top of ‘the ladders’. She grips my arm. We are coming home. I remember it well. Clear, in fact, as daylight. It is from my first voyage in a voyaging life. But – this is the astonishing thing – in forty years I swear that particular scene and that childhood sea-passage have never once entered my head. Of course, it is coming to me now, there was a whole year I did not live here at all. Had gone to the ends of the earth with … Mr Chaunteyman was his unusual name. And I am caught up suddenly in a romance of names: Penny Kendrick, Robert Kettle; and the Indian Ocean. Clear as you like.

2

It was January 1959. They met on the journey out. Before Port Said they pretended there was nothing between them. After Aden it was undeniable. Yet ‘nothing’ of it had been spoken. Penny was joining her husband in Adelaide. Robert was going up-country.

‘I’m starting with a team at the observatory, the tracking station,’ he had said. Every sentence in each other’s hearing took on an extra meaning, like a jewelled, coded gift.

Now they and the Madeleys stood together near the aft end of the boat deck, past the run of white lifeboats. The sun dropped without ceremony into the Indian Ocean just to the left of the ship’s wake, scorching it for a moment or two with orange flares. On cue, there rose a warm, slightly scented breeze from the sea.

‘I suppose we really ought to be getting ready for dinner, if you’ll excuse us, Penny, Mr Kettle,’ Mrs Madeley said. ‘Come along, Douglas, I think.’ She picked up two of the empty glasses with their fruited cocktail sticks, as if to include the pair of them in her command.

‘Calm as you like.’ Douglas addressed the sea but was following his wife with cautious, elderly steps.

Penny seemed to comply. ‘Yes. I must decide what to wear. So uncomplicated for the men, isn’t it. They can just rush down at the last minute and hurl themselves into a dress suit.’

Robert felt desperate with her; then hated himself for it. They strolled back as a foursome, past the housing for the smokestack, towards the stairs in the white steel wall of the bridge. To their right the shapes of five lifeboats were slow white moments running out.

Penny stopped to rummage in her bag. He waited beside her.

‘We’ll see you shortly, then? Perhaps a drink before?’ Mrs Madeley raised her voice from the companion-way door, which she held open. Strains of some light string trio crept up from below. Douglas, his long tropical shorts unflattering above brown knees and scout socks, had reached it now and was edging inside.

‘Probably see you in a minute,’ Robert called. He dreaded the next ritual Pimm’s. ‘Isn’t there a film tonight, Douglas?’ Penny’s words ‘so uncomplicated for the men’ mocked him. His feelings were jangled.

Yet Penny had managed to contrive them a moment; effortlessly, daringly – unless she was only checking her bag for her compact, or whatever, and actually did intend to follow the Madeleys away.

‘Not our sort of show, Mr Kettle,’ Douglas answered. ‘We like musical comedies. Can take any amount of them, can’t we, dear?’ They disappeared downwards. Penny straightened, and allowed her straw bag to hang from her shoulder again.

So at last Robert was alone with her; really alone for only the third time on the voyage.

‘In Adelaide?’ She continued the conversation several days old. He read her tone, as if the intervening time with its meals and games and the ship’s daily run had collapsed. ‘Did you mean an observatory in Adelaide? There would be one?’ she asked.

‘Oh no.’ His nerve wavered. They had missed each other. She had not known where he would be going. She had not allowed for it. ‘Well, yes, there is one in Adelaide. But I meant up in the salt lakes. Beyond the hills … North. The desert. The Flinders Range.’ Some anxiety made him forbear to trot out the government name of the town-cum-missile-base, although there was no real reason why he should not. There was no secret. Nothing to feel ashamed of. For a moment his sunburn from the Red Sea began to itch again, and to ache.

They waited for a moment in the deck tennis markings. Then she moved under the boats to lean on the rail; and he stood next to her.

‘When I mentioned the tracking station, I thought you’d know’

‘I don’t. Tracking what? And what lakes would they be? I don’t know anything … about the lie of the land.’ She shifted her hands on the rail, through which as always the churn and drive of the engines could be felt, a constant background.

‘I thought he might have told you. Your husband. You said he’d gone out to Adelaide “in the weapons interest”.’

‘To the research establishment at Salisbury, yes. But he doesn’t write to me about that sort of thing – they’re not quite supposed to, are they? Anyway, it isn’t really an interest we’ve managed to have in common.’

Robert laughed and caught her smile, the lipstick now star-glazed. How unfamiliar it was still, that here, close to the Equator, day just switched off, and then it was dark; without lingering or pause for reflection. What did he write to her, then, was what he wanted to ask. But dared not.

He looked up at the swinging, coruscating lightfield itself, and tried to-make himself consider it professionally. But it had such a personal quality – as if the huge stars were curving down to meet them and the dusted blackness was only something rushing the other way.

Besides, more intense even than the visual drama above was the knowledge that her hand on the rail was a mere inch from his own. But he would not look at that. Achernar, the southern tip of Eridanus, River of Heaven. Follow the jab down: Reticulum, the Net, just rising. If they could stay out here all night, they would see the Southern Cross. He had waited to see it last night. It reminded him that a difficult and salty continent lay somewhere down there, under the dark line of the horizon. Keeping still, they could hear the subdued crash of the bow wave, and feel the ship’s eastward movement. It was dodging sideways in order to call at Colombo, and then Singapore. It gave them some time.

Her voice: ‘I didn’t have the courage to ask you before, exactly what on earth we’re going to do when we get there. Because it makes a difference to what we do now, doesn’t it.’ She stated it flatly, not as a question.

So they were a fact. She had just given it form and lodged it in between sunset and dressing for dinner. He was amazed, full of joy; that people could do that, and it was them. And he was also afraid. Shouts and laughter reached them from just below. Late for their high tea, a party of children, myself the last amongst them, could be heard along the promenade deck. They funnelled inside somewhere, chattering. Robert felt for her hand, and held it, touching his fingertips cautiously round to her palm.

She returned the pressure. ‘You can change your mind. If you’re not sure.’

‘I never imagined. I’m sure, but I never imagined.’ He noticed how snatches of illumination leaked out from the decks below or crept between cracks in the fittings.

‘Liar, darling.’ She smiled again.

Ventilator cowlings, pipes, davits, and a spice wind from behind them: their astonishment continued, as the ship slipped on into the tropic dark. He felt they were bathed in a wordless beauty that did not belong in the world. Yet it was palpable; it was all around them.

For the first time in his life he felt at home. ‘You are braver than I am.’

From that moment the whole ship also acknowledged them as a fact. And although people said nothing quite directly – although they continued furious and put out – they no longer attempted, in the shape of Mrs Madeley, or Mary Garnery, or Paul Finch-Clark, or a general conspiracy that operated out of the Armorial’s paintwork, the furniture, or the tannoy, to keep them apart.

3

Flashes of memory are glittering, dangerous things. Lifted from the Falklands War, I was too ashamed to show my face. For some weeks I believed myself one of those poor souls who cracked on the way south and had to be flown home before hostilities even began. No shame in that – it happens. But to me it felt as though I had let everyone down, the family member at last who shirked when England expected.

It was only gradually my nightmares started to cohere. Subdy my coward’s badge was streaked through with fire. I had been there after all, trapped in the inferno of my burning destroyer; yet still unshakeably convinced I had ducked my duty.

Even as the true events bore themselves in, I could not relate to them. I watched news footage of my stricken vessel and remained disconnected. A carapace had shaped itself so closely around the horror that as it split open I was both naive and knowing at once. But that was a military disaster, and the eerie phenomena of battle stress are now well documented.

Memories have their species, though. Mine of Penny Kendrick and Robert Kettle is like a swarm of finches, if such could accompany so large a ship so far from land, roosting suddenly on the wires above the boat deck in order to catch their words, or sense their thoughts. Their love is birdlike, full of vibration and scribbled chattering. Or like the schools of flying fish that would skim and dart on the bow wave. Or like a current and its accompanying breath that presses imperceptibly now this way, now that upon the vessel’s direction, enveloping them both. This is a memory of what must have been. It is the most beautiful of all the memories, one of ornament, how it was between them.

And I would spend my time telling you of them only, bringing them to their consummation, had not voices of an altogether different nature begun to attend the passage. Consider the steely-eyed albatross, riding empty air above the mainmast head, looking down. This was – I saw it happen.

And there is the memory that comes back like a spit in the face, like a gob of poison. It was Hugh Kendrick’s visit long after we had arrived in Adelaide, with his terrible story of the lovers in the desert, and what I had done. That strikes at me with its own coil, clear, and of a piece – with detail like scales. How I felt like a salamander in the fire that night after the scare at the township dump. That memory refuses to leave me, yet I cannot make it fit.

You are cast adrift with me now, and must trust in my navigation.

Creatures of air see nothing beneath the surface. The ocean has layers. Deep down there are lanterns, great-swallowers, dragonfish, star-eaters who rise up near the surface only for the night sky, and then sink back nearly a mile at dawn. Beneath them in turn it is perpetually sunless. There the blanched light-emitters blitz and glow. Angler fish, gulper eels, black bristle-mouths, oarfish. No living mariner knows of these depths; though thirty thousand corpses reach them a year, and scarcely a news column of concern.

Consider the scars across the forehead of an old sperm whale. These tell of the giant squid. Consider the tentacles. Consider the hideous beak. This is a species that eludes us, lying in wait, unfathomably huge, maybe. It is rumoured to rise up once in a century to take a ship or two. It throws us into confusion.

But memory can play us false. No record of the Armorica exists. Not with the shipping company itself, nor with Lloyd’s, nor with the Maritime Museum at Greenwich; not even at the Admiralty. I have rung everywhere and anywhere that passenger liners might be registered or listed. It is the same polite response: that I must be mistaken. We have nothing here on file in that name, sir.

I have pulled rank, requested double-checks, paid for searches. I have been told to ‘hold the line’ and have patiently held. I have insisted: ‘But I was there. I once sailed in her.’ To no avail. And my family also deny knowledge. My aunt claims she is too upset to think about such things. Anyway, she has no recollection of all that. Why had I never bothered asking when my father was alive? It is almost as though I had killed him myself. Erica, my mother … is too ill. Moon-faced, full of drugs, she attended the hospital rather than the funeral. They may give her electro-shock. Under general anaesthetic, of course: what only the body undergoes, the nurse said, the mind need never know.

Memory is a dangerous subject. Let me warn you once more. Quite apart from this bereavement, I have been under pressure. There was a woman the other day – she was brought to an interview room. I found her badly disfigured, burnt, presumably. The eyes brown, the silver hair still showing traces of a youthful black, the skin a pale tan – what original was left of it. She was scarred massively at one time or another, but who knows by what. Perhaps an unfortunate household accident. And she might have been anything, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Algerian, Vietnamese. She was screaming in a quiet, tired way that was horrible. She could have been white, even. I lost my temper – I suffer from dark moods. I almost lost my job. The department has to be careful; we pride ourselves. She was referred and will be deported, of course.

She claimed … but how can you determine a torture victim? The doctor examined her. What are its precise badges? Terror? Depression? Incoherence, yes. Apathy, very often. She could give no precise account of what she had experienced. She was crazy, certainly; and articulately incoherent in her own version of English. There was an accent, but not a definitive one. She had seen God up there on the way. Courtesy of Qantas. She was the Holy Ghost and I was the recording angel.

Then she demanded asylum, claiming Commonwealth citizenship – for what that is worth – but could give no country of origin. I have seen a lot of claimants, fished out of passport queues, flushed out of cargo holds. I have seen forged documents exposed, and various scars upon the body, some genuine. The airport becomes its own island beach, where the world’s wretched are washed up. She could, as I say, have been anything. She called me ‘frozen-faced douanier’, and she is right, it is my official persona – policeman of boundaries. Perhaps it was Carla’s presence that made this particular encounter stay in my mind, just after the night of our intimacy. A woman’s body, that Terra Australis Incognita. Carla is a member of my department. We sometimes work together.

Could I have mistaken the name? Armorica? It is some slip, perhaps, where an idea loops back on itself and we find ourselves positive about an erroneous fragment. That is a commonplace of the witness-box, after all. No two people ever see quite the same incident. Details get confused. Could I have crossed one ship’s name with another? A burnt woman …

While I should have been writing reports, I have been researching passenger lists: for the relevant years from the relevant companies. No Ralph and Erica Lightfoot appear. No David Lafayette Chaunteyman. There are two Kendricks and one Kettle, but they are not Penny or Robert.

4

If you asked me to describe the night of my return to Abbey Wood with Erica, I could not. There may have been scenes, recriminations, blows. What I do know is that afterwards the name Armorica never crossed our lips. Not once. The voyage’s memorabilia were trashed from our luggage: the menus with their little seabed illustrations, the brochures of ports, the bus tickets, waiter’s bills and so on. Our Australian effects, my school notebooks – even Erica’s snaps were handed over to be destroyed. When we returned and my grandfather was ‘gone’, the house was brought ruthlessly up to date. A proper television went in, fitted carpet, a three-piece suite, all hire purchase. It was fumigated of its past. And the television stayed on all the time, sealing them into their marital capsule.

And this is my utter frustration now, of course: that for my father’s honour, my original voyage was so rubbed out. Within those walls it had absolutely never happened, though I can hardly think our self-censorship had the power to extinguish a whole ship from public record.

My father hated memory. He never spoke of his war. Out of the Navy for good by VJ, he went to work in the arsenal – like everyone else. It remained for some years a large employer. All the while some kind of suffering was palpable in him, but unarticulated. You could see it in his arrogance, his ironic grin, as if he were perpetually biting back the pain of an inventive old-world punishment. Hating religion by the same token, he shrugged off any approach of emotion with grim clowning. He used that peculiar baby-talk larded with back slang, which tends to lurk in the Navy. By these means he cemented what must have been our conspiracy, for it was always to him that I took my troubles, right from a toddler. I regarded him as my special protector; like a joking Jesus.

I try hard to imagine him in his own youth, cycling up to the grammar school at Shooter’s Hill; I rode there myself in my teens, on the same bike. Though he left at fourteen and was sent soon enough to HMS Ganges at Ipswich, the ‘stone frigate’ hell-hole, where his own dad had once been an instructor.

I went through sixth form and qualified for my commission because the war had changed everything. There was technology and free education. And he told me in a gruff voice how I had ‘bloody gone aft’, how he ‘wouldn’t know how to speak to me no more’ – Ganges being to Dartmouth what the beast is to beauty. Gone aft! Dad, no one ‘goes aft’. It was wilful and jealous, this adherence to Jack Tar, who never slings his mental hammock but in a wooden man-o’-war.

Once I was commissioned, the eddies of career kept me in the northern hemisphere. Not so unusual. It is not all ‘See the world’. So it was perhaps not until seventy-nine that I first found myself south of the Line. That would have been with Zebra, the best destroyer I served in. I was in my late twenties, keen, good at my job, making progress.

We waved our flag at Cape Town and sailed east for Sydney on a goodwill visit, bound for Hong Kong. Oceans are all different. To trace the famous old trade routes of the roaring forties holds an excitement, a freshness. I enjoyed my baptism in those last-discovered waters, the southern seas. We hurried along to Australia at a steep clipper-fast run, and made landfall.

But just as we approached Sydney harbour a flotilla of small craft blocked our route. We had to hold off: yachts, cabin cruisers – even a few old steamers. They were making their way out past the Heads which mark the harbour’s entrance. It seemed as though the whole population had taken to the water, skittering and skimming about like a vast shoal haunting a reef.

The few Sydney folk who had not got themselves afloat were up there waving right on the bluff, or drawn up to the very edges in their cars – we could just make them out and just hear, dimly on the breeze, the noise of their horns mingled with the hoots and blarings from the little fleet.

In the midst of them stood a great white passenger ship dressed over all, proceeding out to sea. Every few minutes a blast of sound would come from her funnel across the swell, and the small fry would reply at once hooting back; and then tack or dart all the more.

We lined the wires; it was a sight. I turned to speak to the man next to me, and found Tommy Hall-Patterson, our Principal Warfare Officer. He said it was the send-off for the liner Avalon on her last voyage. He was a distant, rather isolated man; but a hard-nosed sailor, one of the old school. Hated to see a damn good ship go to waste, he said. ‘She’s the last of the three white sisters, the Avalon, the Armorica, and the Hispania. There goes what it’s all been about, Ralphie. You see that glorious thing, beside which this old tub, though I love her dearly, is no more than a rocket-launching sardine can sharpened at one end …’ He paused. ‘Look at those bloody lines. Isn’t she a vision?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said.

‘And what are we having to do with her?’ he continued. ‘Sell her to the damn Chinks. She’s off to Taiwan to be broken up. With all her bloody glad rags on. Makes me livid.’ He nodded towards her, and added some half audible snippet of verse. ‘You know that?’ He repeated it: Kipling – about the great imperial steamers in their white and gold liveries. ‘When you see the like of her, what do you think?’ His angry eyes turned from the Avalon and seemed to bore into me. I hesitated, not knowing what sort of reply he was after.

But he carried on: ‘For three hundred years, the Royal Navy has kept the seas so that a creature like that could slip off Clydebank and go anywhere she wanted without fear of bloody molestation. But there’s no more cash, boy. We’re all washed up. Men have given their lives for a cause and what does it amount to. The Jap, the Yank, the Russian, the damn German and the heathen bloody Chinee; these shall inherit the earth, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.

‘And if anyone has the balls to say nay,’ I can hear his cultured, old-fashioned voice even now, ‘if anyone questions the damn carve-up, Ralphie, why then it’s all hell and four-minute warnings. Short and curlies, eh? No one can move a damn muscle, for the awful poise of the balance. If poor old Britannia dares draw the line again what a bloody flap there’d be. Before you know it an unstoppable escalation, some idiot politician presses the button, and the lot of us gone up for good. You and I, Ralph, will never see active service. Have you grasped that? Lucky, are we? By God, I’d give anything for a crack at someone about this.’ He indicated the Avalon. ‘But the bastard politicians will cut us, and cut us, and cut everything down to the bloody bone. No merchant fleet left and nothing to defend.’

His fist tightened on the wire before him. ‘But we never lost a war, did we? Battle or two maybe, but we never lost a war. Eh? No Vietnam. D’you see? No bloody Vietnam. Well, I’ll soon be hanging up my hat, boy. But what about you?’

I had no answer. After eyeing me meaningfully once again, he went about his business. He was a good man; the sort you would want next to you in a crisis. Though of course he did not see active service; while I, of course, did.

But later that day, when we were all in a bar in Sydney somewhere, he made a point of buttonholing me and buying me a Scotch. He insisted he had confused the names. Two sisters only: Avalon and Hispania. Why he should have made a mix-up like that he had no idea. Two sisters only.

‘What?’ I said.

‘That’s all right then. That’s all right.’ And I cudgelled my brain then for the other name he had let slip.

But now glimpses of the Armorica burst softly around me like the artillery of butterflies. The barrage of memory takes its own time, its own slow motion of opening.

5

It had not been calm all the way. In fact, the Armorica was late because of the Bay of Biscay. Only a few days out from Tilbury and the English Channel, a huge winter storm had forced her to turn head on to the waves, and stand far out into the Atlantic.

‘It claimed in the brochure this ship had stabilisers,’ Barry Parsons said to the steward that lunch-time, when the motion first went beyond a joke. Penny overheard him trying to help his green-faced wife out of the dining-room. All morning there had been wry smiles and comments about sea-legs. An ominous pewter sky bottomed wider and lower, beaten out by a dinting wind. The lounges were suddenly deserted; the clamorous gloom penetrated the cabins themselves. But Penny had always reckoned herself the kind of person who would, when put to the test, make a good sailor.

In her neat blouse, her light jacket cinched at the waist, her long skirt of brown serge, and her court shoes which turned out slightly when she walked, she presented herself for lunch; though at the back of her mind she did worry that a ship made entirely of steel – it was, wasn’t it? – should be able to creak and grind so.

The dining-room was large, brightly lit and expensively panelled. But, lying between the outermost cabins each side of D deck, it had no windows or portholes – and therefore no reassuring horizon. She shared a table with the Finch-Clarks, and now their little girl. Children were permitted at lunch. It was a table at the edge of the dining area, where carpet gave way to wood. About her, the slightly built Goan waiters coped with chops, game, fish, soup, and deployed their twin spoons to serve level vegetables on a treacherously sloping plate. The air was full, too, of the usual cuisine smells, made sharper and a touch greasier, she felt, by the worsening sea. Yet she began her meal in a spirit of bravery: with a portion of asparagus in butter, excellent as always. And then the lamb.

But now a tray full of upturned coffee-cups slid off its side-table and avalanched pieces of crockery past them. A bad wave. From around the dining-room there were shrieks and remarks from folk caught up in similar local calamities. Hardly a moment to recoup before there came another. Tests of character. Penny gripped on to her own table with one hand while maintaining her plate with the other. Gravy trickled over her fingers. She could see the Parsons couple. They had been unable to move. Half slumping, half standing a few yards away, they clutched at the door-frame, the handrail and each other. She could see white knuckles. Then all the debris came cruising along the floor as the ship tipped back through what now seemed an enormous angle.

And slowly – but not so slowly that it became acceptable – up again.

‘I’m afraid we can’t have the stabilisers out in this sort of a sea, sir. They’d break off.’

‘What!’ Barry Parsons’s fleshy presence boomed. ‘You’re joking, I take it.’ But its sound was as unconvincing as an echo.

‘Absolutely not, sir. They said yesterday we were likely to run into some heavy stuff. Just have to head up and ride it out. Besides, they only affect the roll, not the pitch, stabilisers.’ The steward gestured with his flattened hand. ‘The captain won’t want to get stuck in the Bay, see. I’m sure you’ll understand.’ He grinned. He was enjoying it, Penny thought. ‘ATM afraid it’s likely to get a touch worse than this, even. Which is a little unusual even for this time of year, sir, I admit.’ Definite relish.

Queenie Parsons just managed, ‘Worse?’ Then, ‘But this is a liner’ died to a whisper as she fought with incredulity, terror and her stomach. Hanging on, the Parsons couple appeared to Penny as ham dramatics conversing from across an unkind wooden stage. But she was hanging on to the table herself, surprised, yes, genuinely surprised that the captain could allow roughness to get to the point of breakages.

‘You’d think they’d know what to expect, wouldn’t you? And have special racks or whatever – for the things. You’d think they would.’ She made the remark to no one in particular, voicing her disquiet.

Paul Finch-Clark leaned in to the table and managed to make a quip about Battersea fairground. Something else smashed. Penny caught the words ‘… You realise it isn’t quite what it looked like from dry-ground level.’

Little Rosalind Finch-Clark gripped her chair at both sides, watching with wide eyes as her plate of half-eaten poached egg on toast moved now towards her father, now towards Penny.

‘When does it stop?’ Penny called out.

It was the steward who replied. ‘Not for a few days, I’m afraid, madam.’

‘A few days! Like this!’ She found her voice joined by several from the neighbouring tables. Then she glanced to where the Parsons couple had been standing. They were now nowhere to be seen. They had been slid out of the ship and sluiced away, so she could fancy.

A general lurching exodus from the dining-room was in progess, however, for the big sea continued. Every wave was a bad wave. Penny regarded her fellow travellers, trying herself to decide what to do. The ship’s creaks and groaning had increased, quite alarmingly. Surely that was not right. A noise overhead. She looked up in case signs of fracture should appear in the ceiling. She expected the lights to flicker. There was indeed an air of consternation. Sparks or water would burst through the walls.

Only the hardiest old birds of passage were still eating, managing their plates with a degree of superiority. One or two were still calling out to waiters as if a regime of bouncing, splintering glassware and cascading cutlery were just what their specialist, when reminding them to go south again this year for the winter, had ordered. An old woman in pearls summoned assistance from her seat two tables away. ‘Cabin, I think, steward.’

And of course the steward was propelled into action, partly by sycophancy – probably; but Penny would have liked to think, compassion – and partly by the momentary angle of the ship. ‘Directly, your ladyship.’ And, proud it seemed of his white uniform, and the braid in colours-of-the-line looped at his left shoulder, he rescued her theatrically past them all, one arm for the dowager and one for the ship.

The dowager nodded politely to Penny. ‘I went through the Suez Canal for the first time in thirty-seven, and since then I’ve done it eighteen times, this way and that, regular as clockwork. Not counting the war, you see – and the Arabs. Isn’t that so, steward?’

‘Certainly, your ladyship.’

And certainly she was remarkably good at the alternate steep climb and drop which they had settled into: ‘Just take it carefully, and keep your cabin. That’s my advice, if anyone wants it. Keep your cabin, keep your head, and thank God you won’t be stuck in Kensington all winter.’

Yes, the extremity of the movement could begin, Penny supposed, to be something they might at least accept, if not adjust to. If there were really no alternative, and if the ladyship, whoever she was, could do it. Think of England indeed. Indeed she tried.

Most of what was loose and fragile had now broken; most of what could be spilled, had spilled. Most of those diners who were still making up their minds about how to leave and where to go had found regular fixtures to help them – in the reciprocating cling and brace that was necessary. So when no one else mentioned that it sounded more and more as though the vessel were on the point of ripping in two, Penny clenched her teeth. Nevertheless, in that very act her thoughts turned first to the boys, at her mother’s school in Essex, and next to Hugh, already on the other side of the world. If she were to drown she would be of no use to any of them.

And the next thing after the thought of imminent death was the awareness of fear. Close upon that, nausea. And between the first consciousness of sickness and the worst feeling imaginable were about three suffocating minutes amid the smells of pheasant, liver, mayonnaise and chocolate.

D was one of the lower decks. Its floor and walls staggered by; its door heaved open. She managed to find a closet on that level; though, regrettably, she was not the first. Monstrous, her mouth like a burst porthole. Like an act of recall; but so painful, all the confused past springing through, still fully formed. And with that over she felt drained, but just about in command – and in the greatest need of air.

6

A good open-air walk ran along the whole length of both sides of A deck. It was the kind of broad, sideless corridor Penny was familiar with from popular ocean films in which five days of love culminated in New York. It ran along the whole length, that is, except for the steerage class – that old label for poorer travellers. On this level, she noted, the steerage was sealed off from the main part of the vessel, to port and starboard, behind impenetrable steel dividers in the bulkhead.

Coated and belted now, wind-whipped, with hands outstretched, she made her way towards the bow – along the scrubbed planking where in undreamable fair weather deck-chairs might be set. It was to press uphill for several seconds, march deceptively level for a moment, and then loom dangerously giant-strided. Wiser to stop and hang on to a frame or to the rail when the ship’s nose went down. Queenie Parsons’s last words kept running through her head, ‘But this is a liner!’

Truly, Penny had not imagined the white floating city which had so taken her breath against the drabness of Tilbury dock could be subject to anything like this. If they were not exactly storm-tossed – the ship was too grand and provident for that – yet it was obvious their assurance was being very seriously examined. Astride the huge ridges of complex and crazing black, the Armorica was undergoing, yes, something of an inquisition. The groaning and creaking, so audible in the dining-room and now mingled with the debate of sea and wind, were proof enough of that, if proof were wanted.

There, up ahead, the part of the bow she could see had gone in, and a wash of foam came over all the great steel winches and fittings, flushing and draining away as she watched. She would never have thought so high a point as that strong, curved prow could be at risk. Surely this could not go on. Surely. The grown-up in her told the child not to be silly. But she remained unconvinced.

She passed a Lascar with a mop, a small figure, of brown imagined bones inside his maroon jacket. Dealing, presumably, with some mess, some distressed passenger’s sick, he seemed hardly to be holding on to anything. He stared at her with opaque eyes, then looked away. These outdoor folk, diminutive, cropping up like sad, solitary djinns, she had already found them unsettling. Should she speak? Technically they fell outside the ship’s account of itself, they did not exist. Yet everyone knew the terminology: Lascars. How was that? She found herself several yards past him in only two steps. And she worried about the life-jacket instructions. Would she get the ties the right way round? The diagram was confusing.

At the forward reach of A deck she came with surprise on the Sinhalese couple tucked away in a protected nook. She had seen them about, of course. But, like everyone else, had not yet found it possible to speak. They were standing with their backs to the steel, the woman wearing a coat over her blue sari. He, smiling, smaller than his wife, was neat in his Burberry jacket and fawn slacks. Penny stopped about a yard from them. She leaned on the rail and looked out at the same prospect, comforted a little that they seemed in no immediate hurry as regards lifeboats. Indeed, the man was about to raise a pair of binoculars to his eyes. On seeing her he stopped, took the strap off and volunteered them. She shook her head and smiled queasily. Now she had ceased her struggle along the deck, it might be that the nausea was about to return.

‘No, please. Have a look.’ He insisted, holding the glasses out.

She looked. The horizon, looming nonsense for half the time, did her stomach good; though to tell the truth there was little to focus on that was not frenzied water, or ragged grey cloud. She stood, resting her elbows on the rail, in those moments when she had not physically to cling to it. She surveyed the waves, broke off. It was quite dismal. She looked again, held on, and then again. Momentarily she caught sight of something far off in the whelm; which promptly disappeared. Maybe flotsam, the corner of a box, waterlogged, she thought. A tea-chest, possibly, like the ones her own belongings were packed in. A piece of wreckage, or something thrown overboard from a tanker. Nothing worth looking at, really, but even rubbish gave the eye a mark. Like a gravestone. She suspected no life-form could live in all that desolation; they were utterly abandoned.

‘My name is Piyadasa. Is it your first trip?’

‘Yes.’ She managed a weak smile.

‘It is very rough.’

‘Yes.’

‘Please carry on looking.’

Magnified, each wave was colder and more intimate. She found herself noticing the skid, of water over water, the detachment and reattachment of drops and strings, the innumerable facets of unnameable colours – unnameable because they were all the same colour, and yet clearly not. She thought less about the depth.

She handed the glasses back. ‘Thanks very much. Not feeling too good.’

‘You should drink tea.’ The lady smiled.

‘I don’t think I could drink anything, just at the moment.’

‘Perhaps without milk or sugar. Perhaps even gunpowder tea.’

‘Gunpowder tea?’ Penny felt her eyebrows rise.

‘Any kind of tea you like.’

‘Oh. Do you think so?’

‘Ask my husband. Even beef tea.’ Mrs Piyadasa laughed. ‘Why don’t you come along with us. We’re just going inside. They will bring you something. Come with us. My husband knows everything there is to know about tea. He grows it, and then he sells it.’

Her husband acknowledged his expertise with a wry expression.

Penny was on the point of demurring, as if she ought to be seen to deal with her fear and nausea alone.

‘This way.’

Thus she found herself back inside, kidnapped, as it were, by kindness. Yet the gunpowder tea, brought by a steward to where they sat in the main lounge, helped. As did the polite conversation. She took to the plump, smiling lady. ‘Yes, we live in Colombo. You must visit us there.’ Mrs Piyadasa seemed in no doubt that they would make it safely home. Penny was impressed.

‘She misses her children,’ said the husband.

‘Yes, I do.’ Mrs Piyadasa mimicked a sigh of grief and turned up her eyes. ‘Not seasick, but homesick. I have three boys, one girl.’

‘I miss mine,’ Penny said.

‘You have children?’

‘Two boys.’

Mrs Piyadasa took a small book of photographs from her handbag. They sat for some minutes, comparing ages and characteristics. Then there was a pause.

‘So you have never travelled abroad?’ Mrs Piyadasa adjusted her sari under her large cream cardigan.

‘I went to France with my parents before the war. Several times. We took the boat train; but it was nothing like this.’ Penny smiled.

‘Ah, before the war,’ Mr Piyadasa said. ‘The war changed everything.’

Penny nodded and found herself smiling again. Then she felt disconcerted. It was an obvious remark, the sort heard in all sorts of small talk. It was a conversation filler; and yet it struck her peculiarly now. She was an educated, articulate woman, but it had never quite occurred to her as it did now, the effect of the war. She had come to womanhood through the conflict, and at home the scars had always been patent, everywhere. Even now, more than a decade on – could it be so long? – London still had enough gaps in its blackened fabric, still had bomb-sites, was gritting its teeth, flexing its sooty muscles and struggling on. And out of town there was the accelerating attempt to put all that in the past, rebuild standards, families; she and Hugh and the boys growing up with a new town on their doorstep. And there was the rhetoric of course; of starting again, an end to poverty, the promise of the Commonwealth.

But now she felt the words shake her. If the ship did not sink she might be the guest of oriental strangers in a city she could not begin to imagine. What would their house be like? Would she be expected to take off her shoes? She would make some religious faux pas. But no, it was not that. It was that everything really was different, absolutely and completely different – because of the war. She had thought it was over and done with. She had not realised. No one had realised. She looked around at the few uncomfortable-looking occupants of the main lounge, the chairs heaving to ludicrous angles, the low tables that would now shed whatever was placed on them. No one had realised. And herself: she had never actually spoken before to anyone who was not white.

Mrs Piyadasa was saying something about shopping in Oxford Street. Penny pulled herself back from her reverie. The nausea returned, distinctly flavoured now with intellectual disorientation. She found herself craving air again. She got up and made her excuses, pulling a grim face and holding her midriff by way of explanation. The Piyadasas smiled and nodded as she struggled towards the exit. There was a need to be close to the terrible water, to see it and know its extent – in order to be ready for it, perhaps.