A World of Strangers (3 page)

We went back to the ship very content; I noticed that Rina sang softly to herself, like a child, when she felt at peace with the world. The launch was full, and I sat listening to the tired, giggling, or earnest voices, tense with the excitement of shopping, of our fellow passengers.

Once aboard, the Turgells and I retired to our cabins to sleep off the enervation of gin and sun. Before I lay down I saw for a moment in my porthole the round brilliant picture of the shore, a picture like those made up under glass on the tops of silver dressing-table utensils, out of butterfly
wings. Glittering blue sky, glittering green palms, glittering blue water. When I stretched on the bunk, the little shelf of books beneath the porthole rose to eye-level.
The Peoples of South Africa, The Problems of South Africa, Report on South Africa, Heart of Africa.
I began to read the titles, the authors, the publishers' imprints, rhythmically and compulsively. Suddenly, I felt the warm turquoise water swinging below me as I kept myself afloat. Sand like the dust of crystals was pouring through my fingers, hairy coco-nuts like some giant's sex, swung far above my head, under the beautiful scimitar fronds of a soaring palm. Sinbad, Sinbad, Sinbad the Sailor.

I woke just after five o'clock and went up on deck. We were moving slowly out of the harbour, that smooth, silent retreat from the land while the ship is borne, not of its own volition, but under tow. Every time we left a port of call there was this strange moment, a moment of silence when here and there a hand lifted along the rail in a half-wave to the unknown figures standing on the shore, like a drooping flag stirring once in a current of air. Then the engines began beating, the ship turned in the strong wash of her own power, and we were no longer merely slipping out of human grasp, away, away, but heading on out to sea and our next objective, toward, toward. It was the time when we turned from the rail, sought each other's company, pulled the chairs up round the small deck-tables, and summoned the bar steward. Stella arrived, freshly dressed and scented, carrying the Italian grammar which she studied assiduously an hour a day, then the consul, in shorts and white stockings which transformed his distinction into something vaguely naval. Soon Mamma followed, with her stiff, Queen Mary gait and her writing materials – she had always just written, or was about to write, letters. Rina, still in those dreadful green trousers that hung down slack where she hadn't enough behind to fill them, came up with Miss Everard, the tall, handsome spinster of fifty who wore a man's watch, and in the evening, magnificent gauze saris. She had been something called ‘household adviser' to some Indian prince who, despite Indian democracy and Nehru, seemed to have
lived in all the splendour of the old days of independent princely states. She was going to live with her brother in one of the British Protectorates in Africa, and she, too, was a passionate Italophile, scattering her speech with
cara mia's.
Carlo, the fat partner of the duo of Carlo and Nino, in charge of the little mosaic-decorated bar outside the dining-room, stood back to usher the two ladies before him out on to the deck, but Everard swept him along with them, shrieking at him in aggressively musical Italian over her shoulder. It seemed that all her talking, and she was a vast and enveloping talker, was done over her shoulder. In passing, as it were, she had always the final word. She sat down with us, made herself comfortable, talking away to Carlo all the time, and only interrupted herself to say to us in English, as if the suggestion were absurd: ‘I'm not intruding?' Before we could protest, she had ordered drinks for us, in Italian, with many gestures of stirring, of adding a soupçon of something, of putting in plenty of ice, and more terse interjections in English: ‘And you? Pink gin? An Americano? With or without bitters?'

Carlo, with his Hallowe'en pumpkin smile, his round amiable eyes, and those little feet in white pointed-toed shoes which supported him almost twenty-four hours a day on such missions, went off to his bar and came back with the specified variety of drinks, perfectly mixed, perfectly chilled, and accompanied by dishes of black and green olives. After the indifferent food, the heat, and the tepid, over-sweet drinks ashore, the sight and taste of his calm handiwork made one regard the big fat smiling man with almost sentimental relief – we were ‘home', cherished, attended, indulged. I remarked to the consul, perhaps not-so-un-consciously paraphrasing Stella, that I thought luxury was one of the most important things in life. But he merely smiled, lifting his eyebrows in polite agreement with something he felt he had not heard aright, but which was not important enough to bear a repetition. Of course, he had not lived in England since long before the war; he knew nothing of the world in which I had grown up, where every small service you could afford to buy yourself was given you
grudgingly, where, justly, no doubt, but drearily, nevertheless, you often had to retire with your host after dinner, not to the library for port and cigars, but to the kitchen for dish-washing.

The dense green coastline with the masts of coco-nut palms criss-crossed against the sky faded into distance and the radiance of a sunset that seemed to arise, like a halo, from, rather than be reflected in, the sea. But other coastlines, those of islands at all levels near and far in the distance, emerged before and sank away into light behind us, little coastlines with a pearly dip of beach, and the pinkish-mauve haze of pencilled boles, and the dark-green, almost blue, crowns of palm. Our table grew quite gay. The consul ordered another round of drinks and then I did. Rina went into competition with the consul, flipping olive pits into the water. Miss Everard began a long, animated discussion of the day ashore with me in French (she presumed I must speak
something)
to which I replied with equally obstinate animation in English. I absolutely refused to speak to Miss Everard in any language other than English; I had even managed to cultivate a questioning look in my eyes when she trotted out some old Latin tag.

The ship's first officer, a dapper Triestino, more like a Frenchman than Italian in appearance, strolled past and was invited to join us. He was an obvious admirer of Stella, and complimenting her graciously in Italian as he sat beside her, brought a happy blush to her bosom and neck, as if her body had never learned the cultivated decorum of her face. Even the consul's wife, coming bewilderedly and cautiously from the direction of her cabin, outrageously painted and in an ‘afternoon' frock, fitted in somehow, and after changing her mind twice about her choice of a drink, settled beside me.

‘He seems a lot better since we sailed,' she said to her husband, not noticing that she was interrupting. He shook two olive pits together in his hand and screwed up his face in her direction: ‘What is it you say?' ‘I said Flopsy's a lot better, dear.'

The consul said with rasping pity,' My wife's cat appeared
to have some difficulty in digesting his luncheon fish, or whatever-it-was.'

It was clear that he intended the subject to be closed, so far as the general company was concerned, and so she turned to me and said, confidentially, ‘It was not fish, it was mince. But not ordinary mince, some spice was in it.'

Was she Welsh, perhaps, I wondered? There was a stilted-ness, an absence of elision in her speech which somehow was not English. Stella had suggested that she was an early indiscretion of the consul's, from Turkey, or perhaps the Middle East; an indiscretion with which he found himself saddled, in honour bound, for the rest of his life. Certainly there was something Levantine if not Eastern in her appearance.

The consul grew positively gallant with Stella – the nearest he could ever get toward being flirtatious – and the eyes of old Montecelli, or whatever the first officer's name was, swam bright and bulging as a Pekinese's with smiling Mediterranean maleness. Everard (in English, astonishingly) told some really funny stories about her Indian prince and his household. Our laughter and our raised voices had the effect of isolating us rather enviably from the other passengers; they strolled past, or sat apart in their own little groups, like children who pretend not to know that there is a party in the next-door garden. How ridiculously much these trivial things matter in hotels and ships, how they reproduce in miniature the whole human situation, the haves and the have-nots, the chosen and the rejected, the prestige of the successful fight for the female, the singling out of their leader by the herd! All there, on the air-conditioned, safe, and sanitary liner, being worked out in the form of shuffle-board championships, the crossing-the-line ceremony, and the parties made up for the Captain's ball. Psychologists say that the activities of children at play are one long imaginative rehearsal for life; adults, too, never stop muttering the lines and reproducing the cues, even on holiday; even between performances. Though none of these people with whom I sat drinking were people whom I would choose as friends, I was surprised and a little inclined to sneer at myself to find
that I enjoyed the warm feeling of being one of the group, of belonging. Long after most of the other passengers had gone down to dress for dinner, we continued to sit on, drinking and laughing and talking noisy nonsense. When at last we rose we were agreed, with rather gin-borne accord and enthusiasm, that we should gather after dinner and make something of a party, so far as we were concerned, of the decorous dancing to the ship's band which took place on those nights on which there was no cinema show.

‘I think Hugh has an arrangement for bridge,' said the consul's wife, the only hesitant voice. On dance nights she always put on silver sandals, and then if she was asked to dance blushed a refusal, not liking to deprive other wives or single women of a partner. The consul did not attend dances with her.

But this time the consul, brown knees together, rising elegantly from his chair as Stella, Rina, and Everard rose, said, with a handsome narrowing of his deep eyes, ‘Oh I think we might postpone the bridge, just this once.'

Stella, dragging Rina down the corridor which separated our cabins, blew me a mocking kiss as she disappeared, laughing.

I sat at the other end of the dining-room, far away from the Turgells and Miss Everard and the consul's family. While I ate I saw Everard sweep in in green and gold, resplendent as the howdah with the foam-rubber cushions she had described earlier, but I did not catch a glimpse of any of the others. After dinner, in the lounge, the consul beckoned me over to a collection of chairs round two or three small tables he had had prepared for our party. He wore a black tie, but politely ignored my rather rumpled blue suit, too short over the behind, as all my suits seem to be. Mamma was absent, playing bridge, and the wife sat with the expectant face of a girl at her first party and the dreadful clothes of a provincial mayoress at a reception. The band was playing some jaunty old fox-trot from a Fred Astaire film I dimly remembered having been taken to see once with some cousins in the school holidays. One or two couples were hopping mildly
round as if they were climbing, counter to the slight tilt of the floor, first this way then that. Everard came in, signalled that she would be with us at once, hung over the backs of the chairs of a group of Italians, declaiming in high-pitched Italian, and then swept out again as if with a sudden recall to purpose. Like the other member of the weather couple, rain and shine, Rina swept in through the other door and made for us. She wore one of those chiffon dresses, vaguely flowered, vague in cut, vague in fit, which so many of my young female compatriots own, a dress about as becoming, though much less revealing of the lines of the body than a winding-sheet. Round her neck was a thin chain with some weakly blue stone pendent from it. Only the tips of her ears, unexpectedly showing under her brushed-back hair, and unexpectedly adorned with little gold gipsy rings, gave a hint of life.

‘I must apologize for mummy,' she said, rather breathless, pausing at the back of the consul's wife's chair a moment before she sat down beside me, dropping a limp beaded bag in her thin lap. ‘Fruit cup? How simply lovely.' She lifted the plastic stirrer out of my Pimm cup and licked it. ‘She won't be up, I'm afraid. She's gone to bed.' She shrugged her shoulders and her face, as if to say, well, that's that. ‘What's wrong with Stella?' I said, amazed.

‘Is your mother not well?' The consul's wife leaned forward.

‘I say! I am sorry!' said the consul.

‘Oh no,' said the girl, with the air of someone in charge of a familiar crisis.' She's all right. She's not ill. I've ordered a brandy for her. I'll dash down again directly and make her take a sedative. It's Africa,' she added, matter-of-fact. ‘First day back in Africa, ashore today.'

‘But I thought Stella enjoyed today,' I said. ‘She
did
enjoy it.' I remembered the gaiety with which she had scuttled off to dress for the evening, blowing me a kiss from the corridor.

‘Just Africa,' the child said wisely, almost bored. ‘It's all right. I'll give her a sedative and she'll calm down and it'll be out of her system.' I realized that this old-young girl, this child-parent had made this journey with her mother
many times since childhood. She was an old hand at – whatever it was that ailed her mother.

Rina danced with me, and then with the consul, and then excused herself, going serenely out to her charge and reappearing ten minutes later. ‘Reading,' she said. ‘I've given her her pill.' A little later, the girl disappeared again. This time she said to me on her return, ‘Asleep.' There was a Paul Jones in progress and I saw that she was eager to be in it; I led her to the floor, lost her, and went back to my drink. She was obviously enjoying herself; she preferred a dance that was more of a boisterous game than a tête-à-tête contact between a man and a woman.

The evening was not exactly a success. Stella's withdrawal was a betrayal of the mood in which the party had been spontaneously arranged; if the excuse had been one of the conventional ones of sickness, a headache, the commonplace jollity might have survived quite well in spite of her absence, but the uncomfortable oddity of her reason for absence seemed to show up the nature of the jollity for what it was – an alcohol-hearty camaraderie between rather incompatible strangers. Everard brought over two more officers and an amiable, fat Italian girl, and the party became very much her own. The consul excused himself early and went off unrepentant in the direction of the card-room. I was suddenly angry to find myself left with the wife, the frizz-haired, pathetic bore, with her plump silver shoes crossed at the ankle, patiently. Rather abruptly, I left too, going to my cabin by way of the deck.