Читать книгу: «A Quiet Life», страница 2

Water
To London, January 1939

Although Laura had said, time and again, that there was no need for Mother to come on board, in fact, when the moment came, she was glad that she was not embarking alone. They knew the steamer would be half empty, but half empty was quite crowded enough. Holding her smaller suitcase and pulling her muskrat coat around her, Laura had to push through a throng of middle-aged women just to get onto the pier on the Hudson River. She stumbled on an uneven step as they walked up to the tourist class entrance, and as she righted herself she realised how breathless she felt. Still, Mother being there made her determined not to show her uncertainty, or even at this last moment the whole plan might collapse, and she might be ordered home to wait out Ellen’s recovery. So once on board she tried to walk with more confidence, as if she knew where they were going, up to the information desk where a steward rattled out the directions to her cabin so quickly that she had to ask him to repeat them.

‘Take the elevator down one floor, along the corridor to the right, through the double doors …’ As he was talking, Laura couldn’t help noticing the sign above the desk: ‘The company’s regulations prohibit passengers from passing from one class to another. Passengers are therefore kindly requested to refrain from applying for this privilege and to keep within the confines of the class in which booked.’ The steward noticed the direction of her gaze. ‘We do tours, you know,’ he said.

‘Tours?’

‘Every day, you can visit the first-class deck. Or if you go to the movie, you’ll go into their side.’

‘Do they visit us?’

He laughed as if she had made some kind of joke, and then turned to the impatient elderly couple behind them.

The smell of old cigarette smoke hit her when she opened the door to her cabin and, putting her toilet case on the bed, Laura stood irresolutely beside it.

‘Look, your trunk is already here,’ Mother said, gesturing to the shiny brown box which they had given to a porter at the pier together with her cabin number. Mother always pointed out the obvious, was always fussily one step behind. But Laura was suddenly reluctant for her to leave. It would be so final, to be left here with these things that didn’t look like her things at all. They were all brand new, that was why, bought in the splurge of shopping that had followed the sudden decision that the girls must go to London. Only Laura’s name, written in her carefully neat lettering on the tag, told her the brown trunk was hers. The other bed – that would have been Ellen’s – was a rebuke, but at least it looked as though no one else had booked it. Laura had quailed at the thought of sleeping with a stranger.

Mother was once again going through things that she had told her before, about how there would be a female steward who would look out for her, how she mustn’t be afraid to let the steward know if anyone bothered her, and how Aunt Dee’s maid would be at Waterloo to meet her. The thought of the maid brought Laura’s anxiety up more sharply than ever. She was almost ready to interrupt the stream of admonitions about telegrams and underwear, food and gratitude, and say that she had changed her mind. Indeed, she had just turned to Mother, about to speak, when they heard the shout along the corridor, ‘All ashore that’s going ashore,’ and Laura’s face reverted to the still expression her mother hated. Contained, as Laura thought. Sulky, as her mother had described it only that morning. Laura opened the door to the corridor.

They walked together up to the point where the corridor split in two. All of a sudden Mother put her arms around her. They never embraced, and Laura stepped back without thinking. The abruptness of her move was tempered by the press of people converging at that very point; it was not a place to stand, not in the middle of the friends and family who were returning to the pier and the passengers making their way up to the deck. And so the two of them were carried forward in separate streams of movement. Laura thought to herself, I’ll make it better, I’ll wave. She saw herself in her mind’s eye on deck, blowing kisses, borne backwards.

And she was leaning on the rail, looking for that grey fur hat in the crowd, when a woman beside her stepped right onto her foot. ‘Sorry,’ the woman said without turning, and Laura found herself looking at the curve of a cheek and curls of hatless hair rather than out to the pier. ‘Why is leaving so—’ the woman said, her last word lost in the scream of a whistle that rent the air. Her gesture was not lost, however. She seemed to sum up and then to dismiss the jagged Manhattan skyline as she brought her hands together and flung them apart. The view was full of sunshine and watery reflections, but Laura could not make out where Mother was standing, and she narrowed her eyes at the knots of people, pulling her coat tight around her neck. Then the wind was sharp in her face as the ship began to move, and she took a deep breath. The voyage had begun.

The woman next to her was wearing only a cloth coat, open over her dress, and a drab knitted scarf, yet she didn’t seem cold. Laura turned to look at her again, but she couldn’t have been more surprised when the woman turned too, and said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘How about getting a drink?’

Of course Laura had imagined meeting people on board; no young woman could step onto a ship that year and not think of Elinor and her doomed onboard romance in Till My Heart Is Still, which Laura had read in a creased paperback lent to her by a school friend, but she had not imagined such a quick advance into acquaintanceship with a woman who did not seem quite her kind. A part of Laura wanted to go on standing on deck, taking the measure of her solitude and the start of her journey, but the woman’s nonchalance was appealing. So Laura found herself following her into a low-ceilinged, airless lounge on the floor below. As soon as she saw the people – mainly men – at the tables, she paused at the door, but the woman walked forward without hesitation, putting her purse and a book she was holding on a table and sitting down in one of the worn, tapestry-covered chairs.

When the waiter came up to them, the woman ordered a beer immediately. Laura was slower. She could not pretend that ordering alcohol would be natural for her, and she was thirsty and tired. ‘A cup of coffee, please. And a glass of water.’

‘Funnily enough, I was here yesterday – not on the boat, on the pier – welcoming those boys home—’

‘You mean—’

‘The boys they brought back from Spain. Heroes, one and all.’

‘They were brave, weren’t they?’ Laura’s comment was uncertain. She came from a home that was so lacking interest in politics that her father rarely even took a daily newspaper. He voted Republican, she was pretty sure, but she had never felt able to ask him about his views, or why, whenever he mentioned Roosevelt’s name, he sounded so disparaging. As for her mother, an Englishwoman who was proud to understand little about America, she often shook her head about what the world was coming to, or expressed grave misgivings about one leader or another, but she had never – in Laura’s memory – stated any positive political view. Growing up in a home so insulated from the world had left Laura ignorant, but also curious, so she responded in a vague but friendly manner to the woman’s statement about the heroism of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The woman continued to talk about one of the boys who had come home, and his experiences at the hands of the Fascists in Spain. ‘No,’ Laura said at the right moment, ‘How – how terrible.’ But she could tell that her responses were limp.

‘There are lots of them still over there, you know – desperate to get home. I’ve been helping to raise the money. Shall I tell you something else? Such a strange coincidence, I’ve been thinking and thinking about it. The last person I know who sailed this way on this actual ship was a stowaway. This guy wanted to get to Spain, he didn’t have a cent, so he crept in behind a wealthy family, just as if he were one of the entourage, and then kept walking once he was on board.’

‘Really?’ Again, Laura’s expression was encouraging, although she was unsure of the right thing to say. ‘Where did he sleep?’

‘He said there was a steward involved – sympathetic to the cause, I guess, who slipped him food too.’

‘It’s hardly believable,’ said Laura, whose imagination was suddenly stirred by the thought of a lonely man attempting invisibility on a crowded ship. She leant forward to ask more, but just then they were interrupted.

‘It’s true enough, though,’ came another voice. Laura turned. At the table next to them was a young man sitting alone. Although he wasn’t unattractive, with a mobile face and dark hair falling over his forehead, both women frowned as they realised that he had been listening to their conversation.

‘How do you know?’

‘I remember seeing a report about them. They were arrested when they landed in Le Havre, though, poor boys. Didn’t have the papers, didn’t have any money.’

‘The man I’m talking about, he wasn’t arrested. He got to Spain and fought and was wounded and now he’s in southern France somewhere. Can’t get home, but he’s written to his mother to tell her he’s safe. That’s how I know all about it.’

‘That’s a great story – do you know his name?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘Hey, don’t be suspicious.’ The man rose and stepped over to their table. ‘Mind if I join you?’

‘We’re happy as we are.’

‘Well, you won’t mind if I perch here,’ he said, sitting down anyway and tapping his cigarette in the empty ashtray. ‘I’ll be honest with you – I’m a journalist. Name’s Joe Segal. I like stories like that. Wouldn’t hurt the man to have the story told now.’

‘What if the line came back at him for the stolen passage?’

‘The French Line’s got more on its hands than chasing a stowaway from years back.’

‘Last year—’

‘Tell me more about the story without the name. I can tell you’re sympathetic. Wouldn’t you like to inspire others to do what he did?’

‘It’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it?’ The woman shook her head. ‘To be honest, I don’t know a lot more. Just what I said: he stowed away, a steward helped him, brought him food – some of the best food he ever ate, you know, stuff that the people in the top suites hadn’t bothered to touch – caviar, you name it. He had to hunker down in some equipment room most of the time, and then when he got to Le Havre the steward tipped him off to come out only when the staff were getting off, so everyone assumed he was from the engine room. He looked pretty grubby, you can imagine, by then. Apparently the staff here is so huge that he got away without anyone really knowing him. This steward just walked alongside him – and then someone met him at Perpignan station, and you know, there were loads of boys going over then. It’s not impossible …’

The journalist smiled, and Laura saw how the story tickled him. ‘The idea of a Red holed up in this ship – have you seen the first-class decks?’

‘I’ve heard about them,’ Laura said. Although in the rather down-at-heel tourist-class lounge it seemed unlikely, in fact the ship that they were travelling on was a byword for glamour. At this, the man seemed to notice Laura for the first time, turning his attention to her. He told her that he had seen someone he thought was Gloria Swanson getting onto the ship on the first-class side, and although Laura just raised her eyebrows at the thought, this, too, stirred her imagination. She thought of the lonely star, drinking martinis in her suite, perhaps, or taking a shower and feeling the warm water fall onto her ageing body, and the whole boat seemed to contain the extraordinary multiplicity of adult life and desire in a way that made her feel how right she was to have come, to have insisted to Mother that even now, even without her sister, a trip to London would be safe.

‘If you walk through the engine room, you come out on the first-class deck and no one’s going to stop you if you want to go have a look at those palatial surroundings …’ the man was saying.

‘Is that so? Will no one mind?’

‘They say girls do it all the time – though the stewards might not be so pleased about the boys drifting over.’

Laura had finished her coffee by this time, and just then the boat dipped alarmingly in the swell. She felt, to her horror, a heat rise through her stomach. ‘I’m going to lie down,’ she said.

‘You’re not feeling ill already, are you?’ The woman was looking at her with what seemed like real concern.

Laura shook her head. At not quite twenty, she still had all the awkwardness of adolescence. Although she didn’t want to be rude to these strangers with their interesting stories, equally she had no idea how to talk to them. She got up. To her surprise, the woman stood too, saying that she was going to go to her cabin.

‘I’m Florence Bell,’ she said, as they walked down the corridor. ‘You?’

‘Laura. Laura Leverett.’

‘I didn’t want to ask just then in front of him – seemed like he might be thinking of getting fresh – thought it would be better if he thought we knew each other.’

This statement, innocuous as it was, seemed to turn the woman suddenly from a stranger into an ally, so as Laura got to her cabin she turned to Florence. ‘Will you knock for me when you go up for dinner?’ The way the words came out, there was something needy about the request, and Laura braced herself for a dismissal, but Florence’s assent was so matter-of-fact it reassured her.

Alone in her cabin, Laura still felt self-conscious, almost as though she were being watched. She even found herself, as she put her purse on the bed and took off her coat, composing the first few lines of a letter to Ellen. In her mind, she presented the cabin as having a certain charm – ‘blue as the sea should be! With quite enough room to swing a cat!’ – although in reality it was small and ugly. The fact that all the furniture was bolted down and the room carpeted in a springy felt only added to its claustrophobic feel, and here, she noticed, the reverberations of the engine seemed exaggerated, thrumming through the soles of her feet. Looking for the lavatory, she opened a door in the side of the room. It revealed a tiny toilet and shower stall, which smelt reassuringly of disinfectant. She stripped and got under the shower. For a while it puzzled her that her lavender soap would not lather, until she realised that the water was salt.

After her shower she dressed, but then lay down, and the exhaustion engendered by all the strange new impressions pushed her into a half-sleep, so that when the rap on the door came and she heard the clear voice of her new acquaintance calling through it, she had to ask her to wait while she rebelted her dress. ‘I fell asleep,’ she said apologetically, opening the door, ‘can you wait a second?’

She was looking for her lipstick, clipping on her earrings. ‘Are you the only one in this cabin?’ asked Florence, stepping inside. ‘The boat isn’t even half full, is it?’

‘Actually we booked this whole room.’ Laura explained how she and her sister had been intending to travel together, but how Ellen’s sudden appendicitis had put paid to that plan. ‘Mother was going to call the whole thing off, but I managed to convince her I’d behave myself for three days on a ship …’ Laura paused, suddenly conscious that her mother’s protectiveness might sound ridiculous to this independent woman. ‘She still sees me as a child,’ she said weakly.

But Florence, who was looking at the magazine Laura had left on the bed, hardly seemed to have heard her. It was a magazine about Hollywood stars, and Florence flicked through it for a few seconds while Laura lipsticked her mouth and slid her feet into her patent shoes, and then she dropped it on the floor. ‘Come on, I’m hungry as a horse. Haven’t eaten all day.’

They were early, so that only a few of the tables were taken, but rather than pausing for the waiter to show them where to sit, Florence walked directly to the table she wanted, in the middle of the room.

‘Funny how your magazine puts that actress on the cover and doesn’t say a word about her politics,’ she said suddenly as they were sitting down and shaking out their napkins.

‘Her politics?’

‘She is committed, you know – signed a petition a few months ago for aid for Spain. I guess the studio doesn’t want anyone seeing her as a Red, but even so, they could mention it.’

‘Did you see her last film?’ Laura asked. Here, she would be on familiar ground, since she had seen it and had decided views on it, but Florence shook her head and started telling Laura about some other actors who supported aid for Spain.

When the waiter came up with the menus, Florence took them from him with a quick nod, hardly interrupting their conversation, and even when she knocked a fork to the floor as she opened it, she seemed unflustered. Watching her read the menu, Laura realised that she was one of the first women she had ever met who appeared to have no physical uncertainty. Her dress was shabby, her hair unwaved and her eyebrows unplucked, but her gestures were expansive and her voice determined. Laura had been brought up into the certain knowledge that a woman’s body and voice were always potential sources of shame, that only by intense scrutiny and control could one become acceptable. Hairy shins, stained skirt, smudged lipstick – anything could mark out one’s failure. Laura thought she was doing all right this evening, in her wool crepe dress with the bow at the neck and the navy belt, with her pearl earclips and her unladdered stockings. These had all been bought for this voyage, and allowed Laura to take her seat in the restaurant feeling reasonably confident that she would fit in. Florence, however, seemed to be unaware of such concerns. Planting her elbows on the table, even though one sleeve was actually torn at the wrist, as the restaurant filled up and the waiter hovered to take their order, she went on talking to Laura as if they were alone and no one was watching them.

As she talked, Laura realised again that Florence was not the sort of girl she usually mixed with – not one of us, as Laura’s mother would put it. She had been working since she was fourteen; first, she explained, in her uncle’s glove-making business, and latterly in the offices of a large shipping company. But all the time her real work had been ‘organising’, as she called it. Organising. That could mean almost anything. But in Florence’s stories – she had told two or three stories by the time they had eaten their soup and their tough little chops – it was all about battles, of the powerless against the powerful. She told a story about how she had tried to insist on better conditions in her own uncle’s factory, which had led to her banishment from that side of the family. ‘But Father stuck by me. He is a Party member himself.’ Laura said nothing at that, too incredulous to speak.

Indeed, at first Laura’s role seemed to be only that of the listener. But after a while she began to ask questions, all of them positive, and at one point led Florence back to the story about the stowaway which had so flared in her imagination. After dinner both women felt too keyed up to go back to their rooms, and Laura agreed quickly when Florence suggested that they go up to the deck.

Out there, under the night sky, the wind came shockingly against the girls’ faces. They struggled over to the railings, where they stood looking down into the foam-patterned ocean. ‘You’re going all the way to France, then?’ Laura said, assuming that Florence would be trying to get as near to Spain as possible.

‘No – just England.’ There was a pause, and then she continued. ‘I was really keen on my last job, it was just office work, but I was organising the girls, the typists, the kind of thing that a lot of boys in the Party don’t really understand, but it’s – important, frankly. To get them to understand. But I got into real trouble—’ Then she stopped and looked at Laura. ‘Hell, I don’t know why I’m even thinking of telling you this.’

Laura was entranced. Was she going to be given a confidence already? Girls at school had rarely invited her into their circles of intimacy. Although she was trustworthy – as she saw it – there was something that put girls off giving her the linked arms and whispered secrets that they gave to others. Perhaps because she never shared confidences herself, being too scared that if she once let others scent the dismal smell of failure that hung around her own family, no one would like her, or perhaps because, as one girl once said to her, ‘You’re such a good girl, Laura, you wouldn’t understand.’ But here was this warmly energetic stranger, ready to entrust Laura with her inner life.

Laura had had an unaccustomed glass of wine over dinner, and it had made her movements more open than usual. She put out her hand and touched Florence’s, where it lay on the rail. It was an untypically expansive gesture from her, but Florence was not to know that.

And so Florence launched into another story, about how she had been onto such a good thing with the girls in the shipping company, and how they had taken their demands for job security and paid holiday to their boss, and how he had pretended to give in, and then sacked Florence and some of the others and taken back his promise. She had been so humiliated, she said, after all the girls had put their faith in her, and one night, fired up by fury after visiting one of the girls who had been sacked and who hadn’t eaten that day as she was so worried about how to pay her rent, she, Florence, had broken into the office and destroyed a whole lot of invoicing files. ‘It felt good,’ she said, obviously remembering with some pleasure and then catching herself up, ‘but – ugh, it was the wrong thing to do.’

In Laura’s mind, the action unfolded like a comic strip: the dastardly boss, the daring night raid. But Florence was now describing something much more real and complicated. ‘He obviously suspected me, and the police came to question me. Luckily I was out when they called – I moved to a friend’s apartment, but then I had to move again, and when I told someone in the Party, they called me in to discipline me. Very unhelpful for the revolution, they said. And when I went for other jobs the last few months I didn’t get anything, I felt people knew about it – it was all horrible. Well, this girl I met a couple of years ago, this English girl, has been writing me and encouraging me to come over to Europe. She was in Spain but she’s back in London now, working in a printers. I just thought that it was time to make a fresh start. My uncle, the one who cut me off ages ago, gave Father the money for my ticket. I think everyone thought I’d gone too far in New York.’ Her voice, which had been so strong and certain, seemed thin now, blown back in the wind.

‘It sounds like you did the right thing.’

‘No, no, the Party told me – I mustn’t make things personal like that. We have to organise for collective action, not go off on our own.’

Despite the darkness that surrounded them, Laura was intensely aware of Florence’s physical presence as she spoke, of her little sigh as she leaned backwards, her hands gripping the rail, and the scent of her – sweat, wine, laundry soap – which seemed so warm even in the chilly night air. She shivered.

‘I’m cold too,’ Florence said. ‘Let’s go down.’

‘Are you tired?’

Laura was disappointed at the thought of the evening already coming to an end, but Florence said immediately, ‘We can get a drink in that bar again.’

In her flat shoes, Florence was sure-footed on the iron stairs that led from the deck to the lower floor, but Laura clung tight to the rails. Florence said over her shoulder as they went down, ‘So why are you going to London – family, did you say?’

‘Yes, my mother’s sister – my mother is English.’

‘You sound English yourself.’

‘Do I? That’s only because of Mother.’

‘You remind me of an English actress I once saw in a movie—’

‘Who?’ She was desperate to know how she might be seen by others. Was there someone she was like? How did she strike people? But to her disappointment they were already at the door of the bar and Florence did not reply. There were not many tables free in the lounge now, but Joe waved to them from a table to their left, where he was sitting with two women. It would have been too pointed to ignore him and so, after a quick look at Laura, Florence walked forwards and Joe pulled chairs up to the table.

Introductions were swift; the two new women were called Maisie and Lily, and Laura commented immediately on their English accents. These two women were clearly sisters, with tightly marcelled auburn hair and wide-apart eyes and small mouths, which gave them a look of almost doll-like innocence. That look was belied by their conversation. One of them was telling a tale about a casting manager for a big New York show where they had been working, who thought he was owed favours by every woman in the chorus.

‘But he could never do the job,’ Maisie said with a mocking tone. ‘What he really liked was being told off for being a naughty boy …’

‘Isn’t that the English vice?’

‘Oh, American men are quite as bad,’ Lily said. Laura and Florence fell silent during the conversation, and quite soon Laura got up to say good night, and again to her pleasure Florence got up too and they went down the corridor together.

‘Wait a minute,’ Florence said at the door of her room, and Laura stood uncertainly as she went in and came out again. ‘I thought you might like to read this – yesterday’s now, but anyway.’ It was a copy of the Daily Worker, which Florence obviously thought more suitable reading for Laura than the Hollywood magazine she had seen in her cabin. Laura thought she might feel criticised, but as she walked down the corridor to her room, she realised that what she actually felt was – what was it? – noticed, singled out, even if found wanting.

And that was why, after carefully wiping the make-up off her face with cold cream, the way that she had learned to do from magazines, Laura lay down in the hard, narrow bed and, despite the discomfort of the swell of the boat, she started reading the newspaper that Florence had given her. Most of the headlines, about delegates and conferences, policies and speeches, were too alien to hold her attention, but on an inside page she found a column about women’s lives, by one Sally Barker, which mentioned the importance of men taking a role in domestic work if their wives were to take their place in the revolution. The writer talked about how too many women were trapped at home in America, while in Russia women were able to take their place next to their menfolk in the factories. ‘There we see no selfish husbands who expect servants rather than companions, and no nagging wives who realise life has passed them by. We see women who proudly go out and put their shoulder to the wheel, and men who are not ashamed to rock the cradle.’ Laura read it idly, but after she had put the newspaper down and turned out her light, its words kept drifting through her mind.

And as she slept, the words of the article seemed to thicken and take shape in her dreams, so that Sally Barker took on the form of one of her old teachers from school. She was sitting, in her dream, with Laura in her own living room at home and they were watching her mother sewing a skirt, but then gradually she realised that her mother was stitching the skirt onto Laura’s own body, and she felt ashamed in case her teacher could see the little stains on the skirt where her blood was seeping. It was a surreal, nonsensical dream, she thought when she woke in the small hours, her heart pounding, but she could still feel her panic. As she woke properly, she realised that it was physical discomfort that had woken her, and she struggled out of the bed and staggered to the bathroom to retch over the toilet. As she lay back down again, the ship’s swell seemed greater than ever, and the room horribly claustrophobic in the darkness, and she lay uneasily until she heard the sounds of people coming and going in the corridor and thought it might be time for breakfast.

In the restaurant there was no sign of Florence or the journalist, and so she sat self-consciously on her own. When the waiter put the toast and coffee in front of her, to her horror she realised that she was feeling ill again, and she had to rush out of the restaurant to the nearest bathroom. As she washed her hands and mouth in the little basin, she saw how tired and pinched her face looked in the mirror, and rather than return to the restaurant she went out onto the deck.

‘Feeling okay?’ a voice said to her from a deckchair, and Laura turned to see Joe sitting there.

‘Not my best,’ she muttered.

‘Sit here and eat this,’ he said, offering her a bag of saltines with a casual gesture. Her instinct was to refuse, but then she realised she longed for one. ‘You’ll feel better soon. The weather’s calming, it was a bit of a rough night, wasn’t it? This ship has the worst vibrations of any I’ve ever known.’

‘Have you done this journey before?’

‘Just once. And once from Southampton to France, and down to Morocco and Egypt.’

Laura asked nothing about his travels, but someone as determined to talk as Joe was not to be put off by a lack of direct questions. He told Laura about the boat he’d taken to north Africa, about the film playing that afternoon in the ship’s cinema, which he had seen the previous week in New York, and he called the steward over for hot coffee. In such loquacious company Laura could relax a little, knowing that nothing was expected of her.